iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27

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.

Yawn, when was the last time you felt excitement for a macOS release?

Me? Snow Leopard.

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 is going to sound like a really weird and irrelevant nitpick, but I dislike how they changed the version numbers to be year+1. I like that they all unified and have a relationship to the current year, but we're not buying cars. We're getting operating systems and not being confused about chronology is pretty important for bug tracking or other minutiae. Plus, the Mac lineup use(d) the year of release. Why move away from it? Is it really necessary to market and sell an operating system like it's a car or the latest Microsoft Office suite?

Did they fix the thing where you have to wait like 2 seconds for the context menu to open up when you want to paste something? Does anyone else notice that you tap on the screen and it takes literally 3 full seconds for the little pop-up where you can press the paste button to appear,

At the bottom of the press release they have links to individual OS pages:

* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/

* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/

* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/

* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/

* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/

* tvOS 27: no link.

* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero

From the macOS 27 release notes in the System Settings app:

  System Improvements
  Discover lots of little ways your Mac is even enjoyable, like faster and smoother experiences across the systems.

Doesn't anybody proofread copy anymore?

/end-rant

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

I’ve spent a lot of time testing the new Siri. Overall I like it and believe this will become a very powerful tool but definitely think it needs work.

- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.

- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?

- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.

It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.

Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.

I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.

Siri AI feels like a beta version (I think it officially is?). It’s unaware indexing isn’t done yet so it just tells me “I can’t find any photos of Italy” although there’s many thousands. Then it tells me how to let it access my photos using nonexistent iOS settings, even though permissions aren’t the problem. Amateurish.

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 :)

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?

My favourite feature about this release is that support for ultra wide monitors dramatically improved.

I bought a MacBook Pro (M5 Pro) in march and was shocked that it did not work properly with my LG 38WN95C-W Monitor (3840x1600@144Hz via USB-C).

This has been fixed with macOS 27. I finally can use the native resolution + HiDPI with my monitor.

How can I not remove 35GB of "Apple Intelligence" download? I hope there is a way to do this both on macOS and on the iPhone too

I would typically never install a .0 release, but as an 18 holdout who begrudgingly had to finally "upgrade" to 26, I have to say 27 really is an improvement. The egregious bugs are gone. Safari is usable again. You can pretty much disable liquid glass. It feels faster. This is all I really wanted.

26GB for an update is pretty steep considering their base macs are still on 256GB SSDs.

Did they fix the slow workspace switching animation?

I tried to use the built-in foundation models to draw pelicans riding bicycles, but what I got out was SVG of roadkill. That is realistic in a different sense.

  fm respond 'draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle'

I must say iOS really went good. I am on 12 pro max. The phone really feels more snappy

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.

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

I'm looking forward to trying out Safaris new ability to vibe code extensions that will modify websites to remove annoyances.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/08/27/build-safari-extens...

For developers, there is a new framework (Core AI), that updates the decade old Core ML framework.

> Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreai

> available on iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max

Such a high bar for iOS. Unfortunately new Siri is not for me.

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.

Last year, the "you need to upgrade to the recent iOS major version to use your brand new Apple Watch" caught me off-guard. This year, I am back to the usual routine of waiting AT LEAST 6 months until upgrading iOS.

https://applevis.com/blog/ios-27-ipados-27-summary-voiceover...

I use my Mac exclusively in Terminal and IDE, so I won't benefit from Siri or any Apple-provided AI.

How do I opt out? I'm sure it will take extra gigabytes for the models right?

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.

Having updated from macOS 15 to 27, I think this is one of my favorite macOS releases in a while. macOS 27 is what I think each update should be: one, maybe two, major new features, and a ton of little tweaks and improvements everywhere. Not a bunch of new features that end up never getting touched for a decade, slowly getting worse over time. Hopefully the positive reception (at least, that I’ve seen) encourages Apple to do more future updates like this.

How depressing this first demo video about mum, grandma and the fruits.

These are basic things of our lives that make us humans : caring about others, remembering what they say, knowing how to recognize a fruit, enjoying colors of the fruits with your eyes, not through your retina display, thinking about the food recipes that we know.

I don't know if this is because I'm european and the gap keeps getting larger across the Atlantic, but what a depressing life those giants are telling us here.

I'm very happy Siri AI is not available here so there is practically nothing big and flashy changing.

It's like getting a iOS 26 Service Pack 1 :)

Any way to make Safari’s tabs look and behave like they did on Sequoia?

Finally some more DPI options for those of us with non-Apple high-resolution monitors. Still, the upgrades only go up to 5K. Crazy to me that Windows support for ultrawide screens is so much better than Mac, especially when it's not a particularly new category!

I held off installing macOS 26 due to all the negative press.

Should I upgrade to macOS 27?

I usually use beta OSs, but I completely skipped MacOS 26 and 27, mostly because I heard terrible things about 26.

Is 27 good enough to upgrade from Sequoia? Is your answer the same when I tell you I have an M1 Pro Max?

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.

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.

Any chance Podcasts now takes less than 30 seconds to load the Latest Episodes list? I'd rather an outdated list than none at all.

All I really want is a spellchecker as good as GNU Aspell and a way to turn off all AI features I don’t use to get battery life back.

Anyone else accidentally upgrade to 26.7 first?

My only problem with iOS 27 (and I mean that literally. It's been a great release so far.) is that the light/dark mode switching when connected to my car is insane. There's no dead band built into it so, for example, driving down a tree lined road, Carplay is constantly switching back and forth in rapid--RAPID--succession. My other phone, still on 26, doesn't do that.

Are they no longer publishing the complete feature list PDFs for each OS? E.g. https://www.apple.com/os/pdf/All_New_Features_iOS_26_Sept_20...

Nice. Can't wait for all my binaries to suddenly stop building.

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.

Did they remove the rounded corners mess?

My MacBook has an external 1440p monitor (@1x) which has been adequate for Sequoia, but macOS 26 and 27 look awful for bold text, like the list of users in Messages looks really bad. The AppleFontSmoothing fixes seem to make you pick between "bold text looks ok" or "everything else looks ok" - and macOS 27 doesn't fix it.

iOS 26 made my phone unusable!

I am still rocking an iPhone 11 Pro Max and even after replacing the battery ~1 year ago, every page load in Safari would take +20 seconds (Chrome was still fast) and opening / closing any app took ~1 second.

iOS 27 has fixed all of it, it feels snappy again!

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

I'd normally suggest waiting till a .1 release, but 26 was such a disaster that I might forego this advice.

so, finally ipad 8th gen support is over. any idea if performance improvements would be released to 8th gen as feature update?

Hmm, got the liquid glass slider, put it all the way to the right, but still lost a lot of contrast in my notifications...

Can't wait for this trend of making absolutely everything rounded to go away. It looks so ugly.

Pretty sure their decade old iCloud Tabs bug, that leaves phantom tabs from other devices stuck, isn’t fixed.

They also allow an app to start backing up their data in your iCloud quota without your explicit apoorval or enabling. In fact when you notice, you go ahead and uncheck it, and next time you check it again, you’d see Uber again happily backing up 500MB (or lord knows what) into your iCloud account, a massage and home chores booking company app backing up 650MB data! It’s just pathetic - and that patheticity lies on Apple’s side that they let it happen.

But no, this is a historic release, like every other release, all hail the fruit. I used to think Apple does not care about such issues. But now I suspect they have really been incapable of making these things better for years (in some cases even more than a decade).

Safari does in fact feel snappier.

I'm using it now; it's pretty good. My phone feels a bit faster. That's always a good thing.

My biggest complaint is the regressions on font size both on macOS and iOS. Some of the copy which was of comfortably readable size is now microscopic (for example, the organization and job title on a contact card in the Contacts app). Similarly, on macOS, when the sidebar icons are set to small, the labels also become terribly tiny.

Better more refined windows, faster more responsive, cleaner look, wallpaper window however still presents a narrow requestor window why can't you open the window to fill the screen when choosing background pictures?

Ultra Studio XDR Monitor

Darn. My iPhone 12 still works great but doesn’t get most of this. I’ve been waiting for an AI interface that doesn’t suck and I think Apple stands a chance at nailing it, given that’s what they’ve historically been good at.

(i(Pad)?|mac)OS 27 no longer allows Apple Intelligence to be disabled from one place like you could in iOS 26.

Anyone who is trying to reduce their AI consumption or see fewer AI features might be interested in this change.

I posted to Tell HN about it a few minutes ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704226), but TL;DR is that the only way to turn this off is to either disable each AI feature independently or apply a '.mobileconfig' profile that does it.

Can't stand the UI. I've turned off transparency. I've zoomed in a bit. I heavily use the swipe down search on the Home Screen and it's obnoxious now.

I don't understand why Apple went towards unifying the UI around a failed product (Vision Pro).

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.

For the first time in years I will upgrade early. Apple Support required me to update to iOS 26 back in November or else they refused to troubleshoot an iCloud issue. The issue remains to this day and I regularly regret upgrading. But it seems many things about the interface has improved. Hoping for the best now.

It actually feels smoother on my iphone, and changing liquid glass effect is huge!

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...

Woo! WiFi icon changes into Ethernet when it is connected and prioritized. Nice. Long overdue.

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

I Do not like the new battery icon on MacOS. I think they made it the same as iOS.

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

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?

But— are they faster?

does anyone have wifi disconnect all the time on the iPhone/iOS 27? been happening since Dev Betas and seems to still happen all the time for me at home.

Looks like it's time to update to macOS 26. Should be stable now.

I only just spotted that the AirPods Pro 3 can do heart rate monitoring. That's some amazing miniaturization.

Was hoping for advanced iMessage filtering and enhancements to the Passwords app. Bummer.

I’m really disappointed that Apple removed the one-toggle option to turn off Apple Intelligence / Siri AI features in the last beta. Writing tools magically reappearing after I had it off is not a great experience.

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

Can I disable AI?

Is battery life of the new iOS version comparable to pre iOS 26?

If not, I’m staying at iOS 18.

Should developers upgrade yet, or wait?

I miss the old John Siracusa reviews on Ars. Was always a vibe to read thru those while taking snapshots and pulling the latest update image.

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

At last, the feature Windows has had since XP: separate volume for different audio sources (alarms and ring tones).

Embarrassing.

I've just installed macOS 27 on my personal laptop and I'm losing my mind. My OrbStack app is now permanently stuck in Dock showing as "Running in Background"

There appears to be no way to keep it from the Dock without actually killing it or disallowing the "Running in Background" permission for it.

This is the stupidest forced opt-in feature I've ever seen.

Can I disable apple intelligence on macOS?

And somehow they managed to break Dock magnification (it stays magnified after you expand a folder in grid view and launch something from expanded folder until you hover over the dock again). Does no one use this at Apple.

Upgraded just now. Went pretty smooth!

siri is kinda useless nowadays imo

macOS 27 ade my M2 MBA feel like new. Tahoe just felt a lot less responsive most of the time.

Why not series 8 apple why not?

Semi-related but I'm ignorant: when did Apple change to use a universal version number? Is it just for the public, like how Windows 11 is actually NT 10.0? I can't believe I missed the HN discussion on this one.

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

WatchOS, too. Not tvOS, though.

Can the new AI browse the web?

Can I have my square corners back, please? And while you're at it, add sorting by alphabet in the WiFi networks list. Maybe even a filter field (I know, too advanced, but hey...)

And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?

No? OK, I'll skip.

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

I tried Siri AI a few times and it keeps disappointing me, it will suggest something like "Would you like me to open <APP> for you and <DO THE THING> next?", then I go and prompt "Yes." and it replies with "Sorry, I don't understand."

STT is definitely better on my iPhone 15 pro which doesn’t get the large model. It’s usable now but not up to the real deal like parakeet with a LM cleaning up the output after.

Reminder: you can’t use any Apple gen AI without enabling Siri, and enabling Siri will upload your entire address book unencrypted to Apple each time you use it.

You can’t use CarPlay without Siri enabled, so you can’t use CarPlay without doxxing your friends to Apple. Same goes for the image enhancement stuff.

Privacy, that’s Apple.

Whatever you do just stop doing OS updates after 2 years of owning any device these guys make if you don't want to be forced into an upgrade cycle

Don't fall for the security patch fearmongering

I tested its general knowledge by asking some simple questions like “how far away is the moon”?

It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.

Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)

The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!

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

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

Can we turn liquid glass fully off?

welcome to 2024, Siri

I'm not annoyed that my OG Apple Watch Ultra doesn't get the latest OS. I get it - tech moves at a fast pace.

What I am annoyed about, is that I'm stuck with Watch OS 26, which introduced their new workout app, which is so laggy. One of the few things I use my Apple Watch for, and that UX is a major regression from previous OS versions.

I really wish they released a .x update to Watch OS26 to fix this.

Why the fuck is this trending? Beta was out months ago

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

note, this only affects some videos and the common denominator is not obvious. all videos are recent and made in the same timespan. some are sharable some are not

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

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.