Apple's iOS 27 Shortcuts Update: What It Means for Industrial Automation Folks

That last point matters. In a factory, you can't have your robot cell phoning home to some server every time it needs to make a decision. Latency kills. I've seen lines go down because someone's "cloud-connected" vision system couldn't reach its API. Not pretty.

The consumer beta is available now for developers, according to ZDNet's download guide. I'm not rushing to install it on my phone (I'm still on iOS 25, if I'm being honest), but I might poke around with it on an old iPad.

What I'm really watching is whether this interface philosophy migrates to industrial tools. When I was at Kuka, we spent enormous effort on our programming environments. KUKA.Sim, the offline programming tools, all of it. And they were good, for professional integrators. But the barrier to entry remained high. You needed training. You needed to think like the machine.

If Apple can get my 68-year-old neighbour to automate her grocery list and calendar syncing (she showed me last week, actually), then surely someone can figure out how to let a maintenance tech adjust a pick-and-place routine without calling in a systems integrator.

I called my old colleague Frank at Siemens last week, just to chat. He's still in the industrial software division. I asked him if they're looking at this kind of natural language interface for TIA Portal. He laughed and said something about committees and safety certifications. Fair enough. Industrial is different. But it won't be different forever.

The gap between consumer and industrial interfaces has been, I don't know, maybe 10 to 15 years historically. Smartphones came out, then a decade later we got decent HMI touchscreens on the factory floor. Cloud storage went mainstream, then eventually we got edge computing in automation. The pattern holds.

So no, iOS 27 isn't going to change how you program your Fanuc cell tomorrow. But the underlying expectation, that software should understand what you mean rather than forcing you to speak its language, that's coming to our world eventually. It's too early to say exactly how or when. But I'd rather be paying attention now than surprised later.

Anyway. Back to my semi-retirement. I've got a lawnmower that needs fixing, and that's still very much a manual job.

James Chen · 25 Jun · 5 min