iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

1 hour ago (apple.com)

I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.

Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.

The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.

The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.

  • Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.

    I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.

  • How is the keyboard broken? Maybe I'm so used to whatever it is that I'm blind to it.

    • They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.

      I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...

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    • The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".

    • Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.

    • Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.

    • 1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.

      2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.

    • macOS has the prior keycombo for 'home' and 'end' occupied for other uses.

         command + up/down arrow
      

      I don't know how to read to the bottom of a webpage and jump immediately to the top of page.

      Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.

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    • I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.

      Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.

      There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .

    • It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.

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    • try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").

  • I had issues with the Siri Beta. I would ask it to open the garage door, and often it just... failed.

    Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.

  • I too feel the keyboard is broken but I haven't identified exactly what is broken about it.

  • If the iOS keyboard is broken in terms of auto correct suggestions, try resetting its dictionary. I found it was much improved after that.

  • re keyboard: i don't get how the keyboard on the iphone can be so broken. meanwhile the small keyboard on the ipad works like a charm.

    or am i the only one experiencing it like this?

    • I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.

Was just looking over the Safari 27 release notes¹, which is part of macOS 27, and noticed this:

Web Driver

New Features

- Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server. (176038457)

Related (From July 1st)

Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers

https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-ser...

So that's interesting. On the other hand, looks like WebXR support for Safari will never come.

---

¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

  • This MCP server for Safari is pretty neat. I think I'm going to start automatting some tasks for our corporate websites.

I love Siri's suggestions for categories in my shopping list. At the moment it puts "Dishwasher Rinse Aid" in the "Beverages" category.

  • Well, the kids were eating Tide Pods not too long ago, seems like Siri's not that inaccurate after all.

Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS! Every single time issues are found after a new macOS version, give it a little bit of time before jumping right away on your work machine :)

My iPad 2021 10.2" was flawless but some weeks ago it was updated to iOS26 by mistake and it became so slow on basic stuff (like showing the keyboard). Made me terrified of doing any upgrades

Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for.

Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.

  • So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.

    • Upgrading the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro has been a fucking revelation. I just don't run out of battery any more. I'm sure Apple was telling me it was only 20% degraded or something too, but I would strongly, strongly recommend this if thinking about battery life is currently an issue for you.

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Not updating from Sequoia until the Liquid Glass era is over.

  • It's really not that bad.

    • I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.

    • The thing that I disliked the most about Tahoe is that they made light mode extremely bright, so it was a lot more uncomfortable to look at than Sequoia. I had to switch the computer to dark mode as a workaround. Did they fix this in Golden Gate or is light mode still too bright?

    • I just upgraded last week. For the most part, I really don't care. It was not a noticeable change.

    • It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.

So, is it better (faster, stronger, etc) than iOS 18? Everyone says iOS 26 was not good at all and iOS 27 is much better, but it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26. A more interesting question is whether it's better than iOS 18? Does anyone have any experience switching from iOS 18 to, say, some beta of iOS 27?

That's all I want! A not-completely-useless Siri, and performance/quality of life improvements.

MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.

Updated a bit ago to give Siri AI a go for some basic stuff I've been wanting it to do with personal context. It had some false positives in there, but it's notably better now, pretty fast, and handled context well. It allows you to see where it got the context from, which is great considering that doesn't sound like a very Apple thing to do.

I don’t want a new screen time experience , I just want it to work. Much to my surprise, it’s extraordinarily brittle, to such an extent that it’s virtually useless.

  • As a parent of kids with iThings, the parental controls/screen time experience is incredibly bad. I have no idea why they are not interested in having it work.

Anyone else accidentally upgrade to 26.7 first?

  • I did that too! The update servers are hammered as is tradition.

    • Things are or were labeled wrong... I clicked a button for "upgrade to iOS 27" but then follow up dialogue is talking about upgrading to 26.7. When supposedly I'm already running 26.7. It's very weird.

I wish they allowed iCloud subscribers with older hardware to use cloud-only Siri AI.

I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.

  • Same. Siri has been so bad for so long, and this announcement gave me a brief glimmer of hope that it would finally get better. However, every phone in my family is a 15 or older, and there is no support for our newer HomePod either. Boooooo Apple, booooo.

    • Yeah, the 15 owners got hosed badly by it, especially since they were marketing it as the "AI iPhone" when it launched.

      Personally, new Siri is the only reason to upgrade from 13 Pro, and it's just not worth the money to bother.

Still on iPadOS 18.7.8 on a 9th generation iPad out of fear for performance degradation of ProCreate using an Apple Pencil on iPadOS 26. Considering the size of this update, I fear iPadOS 27 might equally wreck my workflow.

People who are still on Chrome as main browser should seriously try Safari 27. Compatibility greatly improved, super speedy.

Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.

  • I wish they would improve the extension support in Safari. I'm on Safari full time but I always dread the moment I have to install an extension. If the extension even exists (Firefox / Chrome is easy, so developers always do that and they don't have to pay Apple a fee) download some app, then click some button to open Safari settings, then enable the extension there, then give it permissions in the Safari menu bar. Horrible UX.

  • When I switched to macOS in '22 I went to Safari from Firefox and I don't think I've run into a single compatibility issue.

  • Does uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) work in Safari?

    • The standard answer is Wipr but nothing is as good as uBlock Origin imo. It's passable enough that I daily drive Safari now.

I was surprised to see that macOS is 28GB. Is that all the local models that come with it?

Can this AI integration now mean that Siri can finally just read the wikipedia page of a topic when I am driving? Or can I finally have Siri add a stop at Mcdonalds on google maps during a road trip?

  • Adding a stop at McDonalds on Google Maps won't necessarily work unless Google provides the hooks to accomplish that.

    But yes, it can give you information on a topic in a way the old Siri couldn't.

I wonder if Apple have fixed the issue where the user want the Siri to use a different language than the UI language.

Are they still using Gemini? Curious to see how fast all these AI features will feel.

  • I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.

  • They've never used Gemini, and they are not using Gemini here. Gemini and Siri AI are both based on Google technology though.

Finally Apple has a screen time that allows different configurations for different time segments. What took them so long? /j

I take it this is the one that tosses out Rosetta 2 on macOS?

  • Nope, that's macOS 28.

    > Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.

    Sauce: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

    • i wonder if M7 will not have elements in it that help with x86 to ARM on the fly translation that M1 had now that macOS 27 and beyond is ARM only with no Rosetta

  • The warning dialog I received the other day while running macOS 27 Beta said that it will be removed in macOS 28.

Updated my iPad to iPadOS 27 and disabled Reduce Transparency because I figured that they’ve fixed Liquid Glass.

The notifications on the lock screen are still completely unreadable. What the fuck is Apple doing?

Can’t even be happy about the bug fixes because my biggest one, Spotlight not getting keyboard focus when you use it, is still present.

I’m adding representation to an issue that I hope is fixed:

for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there

searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use

I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible

I hope this OS refresh fixed that

  • > unable to share them

    What does "unable" mean?

    • on instagram, tapping the thumbnail has no user feedback and is never selected

      on whatsapp, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a "preparing media" modal that never ends, until pressing cancel

      on airdrop, a similar preparing model appears that never makes any progress and only has a cancel button

      on imessage, tapping the same video thumbnail results in a circular progress bar overlay, as if it was downloading it from icloud, except it never finishes and was never in icloud

      unable

Can we please have a 1 release focus on fixing bugs? not more ai but fixing bugs, 1 release where you can disable AI... 1 release to make it faster again, 1 release to polish... not to push the next "game changing UI design..."

the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...

New Siri is not available in the EU. And no plans to change that.

I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me

  • As a European, and Apple household: no new iPhone Duo, Watch or iPhone 18 Pro Max purchases in this house until Apple desists with its malicious campaign to break the DMA. I'll get by fine with other AI products in the meantime.

    • You do know that Google is fighting the same DMA rules as Apple?

      They need to similarly make Gemini hot-swappable to anything on Android and don't want to.

      Apple was just first because they're a bigger and more visible target.

  • There's approximately zero chance Google would go along with the changes that Apple would have had to make to support EU's DMA.

Is it just me or is clicking “iOS 27” on iPhone showing upgrade screen for 26.7?

I'll stay w/ Sequoia as long as I can.

  • I definitely wanted to skip Tahoe by any means and was reluctant about this new version. I recently installed it because the wm I was using (omniwm) wasn't compatible with Tahoe anymore so I had to choose. I have to say it has been completely usable to me after reducing the liquid glass thing as much as the system allows.

  • I am currently on Sonoma and I was considering to upgrade to get the things that I missed in these years. I think and hope that macOS 27 will be faster wrt Sonoma...

  • Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.

    On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).

So if you don't want to use Apple's AI, this brings... faster app launching on iOS? I guess I'll use the Liquid Glass controls, but otherwise this is a dud.

  • > Otherwise this is a dud

    This comment is a dud. The whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability. They literally rewrote the CPU scheduler to improve UI performance. Safari UI and page rendering is no longer shit compared to how it was on iPadOS 26. There’s an insane amount of under the hood changes for this release, something people have been asking for them to do for a while — focus on making things run better instead of adding endless new half baked features.

    Updates don’t always have to bring shiny, flashy new features. Holy shit.

    • The linked page is 90% AI and not much about stability. If "the whole point of this update was to focus on fixing bugs and improving stability" they don't say so, so excuse me for not knowing that.

      If it's a stability release, then great! But that's not what they're saying. Stability is mentioned once regarding search only. Performance has a very small sub-section half way down the page. Where do they mention the CPU scheduler rewrite, or any of the under-the-hood changes you're talking about? You seem to expect people to know about these things from somewhere else.