Apple is planning a major upgrade to the native photo editing capabilities of iPhone, iPad and Mac, relying heavily on artificial intelligence technology to narrow the competitive gap with Android devices. According to people familiar with the matter, Apple is developing a new tool suite driven by Apple’s intelligent platform for iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 systems launched this fall.
This series of functions will use end-side artificial intelligence models to support users to expand the picture, optimize the picture quality, and recompose the picture. People familiar with the matter said that such AI processing operations usually only take a few seconds to complete.
In the field of AI image editing, Apple is currently in a catching-up stage. Google has launched advanced AI photo retouching functions on Pixel series devices for many years, including tools such as magic removal, photo deblurring, and generative image enlargement. Samsung Electronics, which runs on Android, is also vigorously deploying AI image editing capabilities in its Galaxy smartphone series.
Currently, the editing functions of Apple’s Photos app are mainly divided into four major sections: adjustments, filters, cropping, and clearing. Among them, only the clear function is an AI-driven tool that allows users to remove unnecessary objects in the screen.
In the upcoming new version of the system, Apple will add an ‘Apple Smart Tools’ section to the editing interface, integrating four major functions: image expansion, image quality enhancement, composition re-adjustment, and object removal.
Screen expansion: can automatically generate an extended screen beyond the boundaries of the original image. For example, after taking a close-up shot of a landmark building, use this tool to complete the surrounding environment; users can manually slide the edge of the screen to customize the expanded range and area.
Image quality enhancement: Automatically optimize photo color, light and overall image quality performance through AI.
Composition re-adjustment: Mainly adapted to space photos (the 3D image format created by Apple for the Vision Pro headset), supporting the adjustment of the picture perspective after the shooting is completed. Taking a car photo as an example, you can fine-tune the front view to a side view.
However, the development of these new features has not been smooth sailing. Multiple internal testers revealed that the screen expansion and composition re-adjustment tools are currently running with insufficient stability. In the future, Apple may postpone the launch or streamline related functions based on the optimization progress of the underlying AI model.
Apple’s first AI photo retouching tool has already been criticized. Since its launch, a large number of users have reported that the ‘object clearing’ effect is unstable, often causing screen defects, image distortion, or distortion of the filled content.
This year, Apple's entire system update focuses on two core directions: first, optimizing Siri voice assistant and improving Apple's smart ecological layout; second, polishing the bottom layer of the system to improve operating performance. This optimization will effectively extend device life, reduce system vulnerabilities, and make up for the stability issues left behind by last year’s large-scale visual revision.
At the same time, Apple is also developing a number of AI supporting upgrades: launching an independent Siri application and creating a new interactive interface similar to a chatbot; opening access to third-party voice assistants in the App Store; upgrading Siri command logic to support the continuous execution of multiple operations within a single request.