Every September, Apple makes a large announcement about its latest product releases. This year was no different. Along with new Apple Watches and AirPods, they unveiled:
- The brand-new iPhone 18 Pro—including the foldable Duo.
- Apple iOS 27—including the introduction of Siri AI.
- Upgraded features in Apple Intelligence.
Let’s look at what this means for email marketing.
What’s happening?
The Duo offers the largest screen seen yet on an iPhone, and iOS 27 has been built to adapt layouts as the device folds, unfolds, or rotates. It also supports the side-by-side “Split View” of two apps.
iOS 27 also introduced Siri AI, which enables natural-language questions. According to Apple, “…you can automate daily tasks with a simple description, and all of the required steps are assembled on your behalf.” For example, it could help you find an old email from a specific sender about a defined topic.
The Apple Intelligence upgrades mean Mail can now proactively surface suggestions drawn from message content, with a system orchestrator that can pull information from Mail (and other apps) to complete actions elsewhere in iOS. It can, for example, retrieve a flight confirmation number for use in the Phone app.
What you should know
The Duo’s larger unfolded display gives image-heavy and multi-column email campaigns more room to breathe—which could support stronger engagement. But there’s a catch: Most interactions will likely still happen on the compact outer display, so emails need to render just as cleanly there, too.
Siri’s enhanced searchability should be positive—many email subscribers save their messages for future reference—but it will put more pressure on email design. Subject lines, sender names, and structured content (dates, order numbers, confirmation codes) must now be completely unambiguous.
This is especially true for transactional and confirmation emails, which could become useful sources of structured data that Apple Intelligence can find and act on. However, for promotional emails going forward, marketers should expect traditional engagement metrics (opens, clicks, etc.) to underrepresent actual message usefulness as Apple’s role as an intermediary between brands and recipients deepens.
What’s the release’s impact on email?
In the US, iPhone’s market share is ~ 60 percent. Businesses sending at enterprise scale simply can’t afford to ignore these new developments. Here’s why:
- While Duo adoption will likely start small, it will skew toward premium buyers. Designing email content specifically for this high-value segment will deliver substantially higher returns from email.
- Transactional and confirmation emails already generate phenomenal revenue per message, which will increase further as the valuable data they contain is harnessed.
- While click rates may decline as Siri takes on more of the heavy lifting, the increased relevance of the curated clicks means their value increases (as discussed in this recent post).
There are a few caveats:
- Samsung introduced foldables in 2019. Five years later, global shipments—of all foldable devices—were still only 1.5 percent. We could see the same low adoption for the Duo.
- Siri AI is opt-in, launching in beta, initially in English only. For now, it’s unavailable in the European Union and China.
But the direction is clear: These new features don’t change what makes a good email—they substantially raise the cost of sending bad ones. How marketers respond will determine whether Siri AI and Apple Intelligence surface their messages favorably—or route around them entirely.