Apple Drops the Waitlist for Siri AI — Mostly

If you’ve been holding off on updating to iOS 27 — or even simply turning on Siri AI — there’s some good news. Apple has all but killed off the waitlist to get on board with its new voice assistant, which means most users should be able to see it activate as soon as they flip the switch.

Reports that Apple would be gating access to the new Siri AI with a waitlist began in June before the first iOS 27 developer beta showed up — and they turned out to be remarkably prescient. Early adopters who jumped into those early iOS 27 releases found themselves waiting anywhere from three days to two weeks or more before they were actually able to try the more intelligent voice assistant.

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It also didn’t look like it would get much better as we moved closer to the public release of iOS 27. But we also shouldn’t have been all that surprised, considering that Apple did the same thing two years ago when it first rolled out Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1, and then again for Image Playground in iOS 18.2.

These waitlists were presumably put into place so Apple could scale its server capacity, and it’s not hard to see why that’s a good idea. In fact, lots of folks who thoroughly enjoyed Siri AI over the summer when it was still only available on a smaller number of devices using the iOS 27 betas — myself included — found that it became progressively slower, and sometimes even “dumber” in the weeks after iOS 27 was released to the public.

Server load can have a big impact on AI tools, and despite Apple’s promises of on-device processing, a great deal of what Siri AI does still hooks into Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC) infrastructure. The busier those servers are, the longer it will take to process your requests, and there may even be times when those are handed off to less capable AI models, resulting in poorer responses.

Nevertheless, it appears that Apple has decided it has enough server capacity to open the floodgates. That might simply be a result of a critical mass of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users already running iOS 27, but either way, most folks who want to join the world Siri AI will be shown right in.

Apple quietly updated its “How to Get Siri AI” support document today, noting that “Siri AI will begin to download automatically” after turning it on in iOS 27 — although it still reserves the right to turn on the waitlist “during times of high demand.”

That’s a change from the original version that was published on September 14, which flatly said that turning on Siri AI “will add you to a waitlist, and wait times can vary,” with Siri AI not even downloading until “your wait is complete.”