The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don’t think any of us are ready.

As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google’s Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don’t know anymore.

These new features are part of the iOS 27 developer beta right now, so bear in mind that Apple may continue making tweaks to them before they’re released to the general public. There are three, or maybe two and a half, new AI editing features in this update. The new Clean Up tool counts as half, because it existed before but was so bad it didn’t really count. That’s the tool that lets you take photobombers out of the background of your photos, and it got a major upgrade this year. There’s also Extend, which lets you expand the edges of your photo using AI to paint in some plausible-looking filler. And there’s Spatial Reframing, which mimics the effect of moving the camera around the scene to let you recompose an existing photo. It’s the most ambitious and maybe the most problematic of the three.

But first things first: Clean Up. It’s actually good now. Instead of only using on-device models to remove objects and fill in details, it can now use more powerful models in the cloud. This is what Google has been doing for years now, and it’s why the company’s Magic Editor tools were miles better than the version Apple introduced last year. That totally on-device Clean Up wasn’t very good at painting in convincing details to replace what it removed. It left weird artifacts and was generally more trouble than it was worth. Clean Up 2.0? It does the job.

Using AI to remove stuff from photos is the generative editing tool that I’m the least queasy about using. I’ll use it to remove a booger from my kid’s nose or take a stranger out of the background. This new version in iOS does all of that without a problem, and I think it’s going to be popular with iPhone owners. 

Stepping up to the next level of complexity and what-is-a-photo-ness, there’s Extend. Think of it as cropping, but in reverse. It lets you expand the edges of your frame, which you might want to do if your composition was too tight on your subject and you want to give it a little more breathing room, for example. Extend lets you do this, but only to a point. It seems to avoid making edits to people, and will sometimes tell you a photo can only be extended in a particular direction. It will only add a little bit of padding, too, which minimizes the kind of shenanigans it can be used for. I appreciate that. Like Clean Up, it does its job convincingly. It seems predisposed to looking for symmetry, which usually works. It added part of a rally car that was out of frame in my original image, adding a side mirror to match the one already in the photo. 

It doesn’t seem as eager to make stuff up to put into your photos as, say, Samsung’s early efforts. But I did catch it adding a potted plant on a side table; it looks reasonably convincing, but I know that it’s not a real plant. I’d feel weird about that if I were to put that photo on Instagram.

Extend works with your photo in a two-dimensional space; Spatial Reframing adds a third dimension. It builds on an existing feature that makes your photos look 3D-ish, allowing you to reframe a photo as if you had physically moved the camera and changed your perspective of the scene. You can’t go too far with it — only about as far as you could have moved your arm when originally taking the photo. But the idea is that you can fix your framing if you didn’t quite nail it when you took your shot.

Look, this appeals to my Type A nature. Sometimes I’ll love everything about a photo I took, except wouldn’t it be better if I had just stepped to the left to avoid framing something distracting in front of my subject? You can’t always catch that stuff in real time. These are the minor adjustments that Spatial Reframing is designed for.

Seems reasonable, except that there’s room to introduce existential chaos, even with minor adjustments. I tried changing the framing of a photo I took at a tech talk with Apple executives following the WWDC keynote. Since I was sitting off to the side, one of the execs onstage was mostly obscured in the original shot. I changed the framing and the AI kind of made up a guy sitting next to Craig Federighi.

Predicting what should come next in a two-dimensional space seems like an easier problem than in three dimensions. The results from Spatial Reframing compared to Extend reflect that. They’re weirder. The farther you are from a subject, the less latitude you have to “re-compose,” and the more realistic the AI-generated stuff is. But you end up with an image that’s only subtly different from the actual photo you took, and at that point, what are we doing? 

In photos with a subject that’s closer to the camera, things get strange. The effect of “re-composing” is more dramatic, and the AI has to work harder to fill in the gaps. You can change the perspective in a selfie, but that means the AI has more detail it needs to fill in on your face, which gets a little uncanny valley pretty quick. Even within its limited adjustment range, it can make faces look a bit skewed and “off.” It’s more prone to inventing things that weren’t there. Sure, it sounds nice being able to rescue a photo from a composition that wasn’t quite right. In practice, I don’t think I like it.

It’s a small comfort that images edited with these AI tools get Synth ID labels signaling that they have been modified with AI. Instagram picked up on this info when I uploaded a couple of images, but only surfaces that information if you tap on the “AI Info” menu for that image. Labels aren’t exactly an airtight solution right now, and I think the bigger danger is the quickly eroding notion that we can usually trust a photo that someone takes and posts from their phone. Apple is certainly not the most audacious player here. But even introducing a little bit of doubt about the provenance of a houseplant on a side table, or whether someone was indeed standing exactly where they appear to have taken a photo from, can add up to a lot of trouble over time.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple has been on its back foot, AI-wise, for the past few years. But in a strange way, playing from behind might not be such a bad move.

At WWDC on Monday, Apple appears to be getting ready to reintroduce us to the new Siri. Again. As a reminder, we met the new Siri in 2024 when Apple “launched” Apple Intelligence. Siri came with a new glowing border, different voice options, and the ability to punt questions to ChatGPT. The whole “Intelligence” bit of the Siri redesign was coming soon, Apple promised. It didn’t. In fact, its promotion around Apple Intelligence was so misleading that the company is settling a class-action lawsuit and has to pay iPhone owners for the features it never shipped. The funny thing is, by fumbling the ball so badly, Apple might have just fallen backward into an advantageous position. 

Let’s be clear; if such a thing as a race to an AI assistant exists, Apple is losing badly. Gemini is already doing things like ordering Ubers and DoorDashing teriyaki. It can look at your calendar and figure out when you should leave for the airport. Gemini won the race, fair and square. 

But there’s also a growing distrust of AI, particularly from young people, and the better Gemini gets, the creepier it is. It has to be if it’s going to deliver on the promise of a truly helpful assistant. But wanting your AI assistant to anticipate your next move and actually watching it happen? Those are very different things. I willingly gave Gemini permission to access my Google Photos and Gmail, but it always makes my skin crawl hearing Gemini say my son’s name out loud. I test out a lot of this stuff as it becomes available — hazard of the job — but the public reaction when these kinds of features start trickling down to the mainstream will be very telling.

New New Siri will be built on top of Gemini in some fashion. Apple is no doubt paying handsomely for the privilege, but there’s a potential upside to being one step removed in this way. You know what company doesn’t have its name attached to a big, unpopular data center project? Apple. Google isn’t winning friends and influencing people by rushing to start massive construction projects in backyards across the country. Apple gets to keep its hands clean, even if its payments to Google are presumably being funneled toward the great data center buildout.

Then there’s the Copilot of it all; the AI-buttons-everywhere factor. Siri’s attempts to summarize messages are amusing and often annoying, but at least Siri isn’t all up in every one of my work documents begging to summarize it for me. On the other hand, you can’t open a Google app without coming face-to-face with a Gemini sparkle these days, and it risks getting real old, real fast.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Apple would love to put Siri to work writing my emails, perfecting my photos into “memories,” and talking me through the next steps to rehabilitate the dying plants in my yard. It’s just that Siri can’t really do any of that yet. When we meet this new Gemini-enhanced Siri, it’ll be telling to see where and how aggressively it surfaces. According to Bloomberg’s reporting, it sure sounds like we’re going to see it in a lot of places: the Dynamic Island, Photos, maybe even its own dedicated Siri app for the first time. That’s a very different Siri from the timer-setting voice assistant we currently know, mostly hiding behind the scenes. 

I suspect Apple is also going to play up the thing it already loves playing up: privacy. You can bet we’ll hear more about Private Cloud Compute, which supposedly keeps your data as secure as if it had never left your device. The updated Siri may also come with the option to automatically delete chats after a certain period of time, rather than holding onto that data by default. Promising a more private, secure AI experience might appeal to people who are squeamish about handing over even more personal info to Google. But it doesn’t do much for someone who’s just sick of having AI in their face all day in every piece of software. 

An advantage, especially the kind you stumble on, can disappear as quickly as it arrived.

Apple could easily cast its slow AI rollout as the more responsible move. Google execs used to constantly talk about being “bold and responsible” with AI, but lately they’re too busy firing off new Gemini features and basking in the foothills of the singularity to dwell on that much. Passing off the delays as taking the time to do things right isn’t a bad bet, but the time for false starts is over. Siri’s going to have to pull it off for real this time; when a second chance like this comes around, you can’t count on it coming back.

Never underestimate the power that a cheap tablet holds over a kid under six.

The Skylight Buddy is a device with one job: to be a cute little guy that helps your kid track routines and chores. It’s $139.99, which includes a basic set of features. For $39 per year, you can add a “Buddy Plus” subscription to get more out of it, and Skylight will knock $20 off the price of the hardware if you do. But to my surprise, even with just the basic features enabled, the Buddy actually worked.

Skylight recommends the Buddy for kids aged four up to 10. An adult has to set it up, naturally, which you do inside of the Skylight app. From there, you make a profile for your kid and assign it to the Buddy, which is strictly one-kid-per-device. That might be a non-starter for bigger families, but in my household of one kiddo it worked fine. In the app you can set up recurring or one-off tasks and group them into routines for the morning, afternoon, and evening. They appear on the Buddy’s screen as big cards with emoji labels, so it’s a viable option for a kid like mine who isn’t reading yet. 

Skylight Buddy

Skylight’s kid-centric device guides little ones through daily routines with an easy interface and adorable design. Advanced features require a subscription, but the core functionality is free and surprisingly effective.

Score: 6

Pros	Cons
Basic functions available without subscription Well-considered, kid-centric design Adorable	A few appealing features require a subscription Ability to change routines is somewhat limited $140 feels steep for basic features

Where to Buy:

• $139.99 at Skylight

The Buddy has a few other features available without a subscription, like the ability to use it as a night light and set a wake-up alarm. But a $39-per-year “Buddy Plus” subscription is required for extra features like reminders, the ability for kids to earn rewards for completing tasks, or setting visual timers for individual tasks. Buddy Plus features are included “for a limited time” if you already have the Calendar Plus subscription associated with its other products. We don’t, and we already have a white noise machine and a night / wake-up light, so that reduced the Buddy more or less to a daily checklist on a gussied-up Android tablet.

“Surely my child won’t care about checking things off a screen without a built-in reward system,” I thought. I figured I’d try the basic feature set and upgrade to Plus when that proved ineffective. As it turns out, the basic features were all I needed, so I never ended up testing the extras.

My kid loves checking things off “his screen.” There’s not much to it; I set up basic morning and evening routines with tasks like “eat breakfast” and “brush teeth.” He eagerly taps on the corresponding card when he’s done with each step, and when every task is finished at the end of the day there’s an onscreen celebration with a shower of emoji. The emoji changes, so it’s become kind of an event to see which emoji it’ll be each day: “MOM IT’S WAFFLES,” etc. 

That’s basically it! I couldn’t believe the con I was running. Like, really? You’ll clean up your toys when a tablet tells you to, but not when I do? Without dangling the carrots of extra screentime or an ice cream outing? Once again: Do not underestimate the power of a screen. 

The Buddy is adorable, which definitely helps. My review unit came with a green silicone case, which is an extra $20. It helps with the cute factor. But I think the Buddy is most appealing because it’s a screen that’s clearly for him and nobody else. As I was setting it up on the counter in our kitchen, I realized it wasn’t angled upward like an Echo Show, which would make it more comfortable for a taller person to use. It faces straight ahead, basically at eye level for a four-year-old. Clever.

I wish the app was as user-friendly. Setting up tasks as part of a routine is easy enough, but once you have a task set for a certain day, you can’t move it to another day. We generally do a bath every other night, but you know, some days call for an off-cycle bath. I’d like to be able to move the task forward a day and have the recurrences line up after that; instead I need to make it a daily part of the routine and remember to mark it as “skip” on non-bath nights. 

I’m also unable to reorder the individual tasks within a routine — you can do this with a Skylight Calendar, which I don’t have. Skylight’s VP of product, Anubhav Sarkar, tells me that this functionality will come to the app this month, but until then I’m stuck with the tasks lining up in the order that I created them. It’s a real pain to add an extra one-off step to the day’s routines. 

There’s also no way to display a calendar view on the Buddy, even though you can add calendar events in the app. The Buddy seems more intended as a complement to other Skylight calendars in the house, which, again, we don’t have. But if you do, this probably won’t be a concern. Personally, I was hoping I could outsource delivering the bad news that there’s school today to a screen, but no luck.

Look, it sounds silly using a $140 screen to do the job of a $5 sticker chart, or whatever low-cost crafty visual aid you might be able to cook up. But there’s something pretty powerful about a kid being able to use their own device, and the hands-off-ness it affords a parent. For a while, we tried to implement a “pizza chart” system where our son earned little cardboard slices of pizza for each task he completed in his daily routines. At the end of the day, the pizza slices could be cashed in for screentime. It was pretty labor-intensive on our part to constantly hound him about the pizza he was or wasn’t earning, and only lasted a couple of weeks. Maybe it’s just that my kid is a little bigger now, but even the free version of the Buddy that we’ve been using has been more successful than our attempts at turning fake pizza into episodes of Paw Patrol.

I’d recommend the Buddy a little more freely if the app was just a bit more flexible. Being able to move tasks around without having to reconstruct a routine every time would go a long way. Even so, it’s been a useful addition in our house. We still hit snags in the morning and evening routines that no screen can solve, but I think it has genuinely helped give my kid a better sense of structure. It seems like a pretty easy addition if you have young kids and already orchestrate your household’s activities with the help of Skylight calendars. And lord knows I’ve spent more money on short-lived gadgets to try and smooth out parenting pain points. If you suspect that it’s going to help relieve some stress in your house, then you could definitely do worse than this cute $140 checklist.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Correction, June 11th: A previous version of this article stated that the Buddy costs $139.99 plus an optional subscription; when purchased with a subscription, the device cost is $119.99. A screenshot in a previous version of the article also misidentified Skylight’s Calendar Plus subscription features as Buddy Plus features; this image has been replaced with a screenshot of the Buddy Plus options.