The MacRumors Show: Revisiting iOS 27 Ahead of iPhone 18 Pro
After over a month of testing
iOS 27, on this week's episode of
The MacRumors Show we circle back to the beta and talk through our experiences with
Siri AI, Liquid Glass refinements, and more.
iOS 27 is expected to launch this fall, bringing sweeping performance work across the system. Apple has cited
more than 80 speed and efficiency improvements, with app launches up to 30 percent faster and AirDrop transfers up to 80 percent faster than on
iOS 26. Animations, keyboard responsiveness,
Home Screen page swapping, and App Library loading have all been sped up, and Apple says the improvements extend even to older iPhones like the iPhone 11.
The centerpiece of iOS 27 is
Siri AI, a substantially overhauled version of the assistant positioned as a rival to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT. Siri AI can hold back-and-forth conversations, draw on personal context from Mail, Messages,
Photos, and Files, and see what's on screen to answer follow-up questions. A new
standalone Siri app houses ongoing conversations, while a "Search or Ask" interface, accessed via the
Dynamic Island, has effectively replaced Spotlight as the default way to search the device and launch apps.
Liquid Glass, the translucent design language introduced in iOS 26, has also been reworked. iOS 27 adds a
system-wide transparency slider in place of the binary "Clear" and "Tinted" toggle from iOS 26.1, letting users dial the effect anywhere between fully opaque and completely clear. Apple also
improved how the material diffuses busy content behind it, addressing readability complaints that dogged the original rollout, and refreshed first-party app icons with additional Liquid Glass layering.
Elsewhere, Apple has leaned into contextual, on-device intelligence. For example,
Call Context, a new Phone app feature, automatically surfaces relevant information, such as a flight confirmation number or order code pulled from Mail, when a user calls a business they've recently corresponded with. Apple says the feature works entirely on-device and looks only at who is being called, not at call audio, and it also appears on the Apple Watch during a call.
Calendar and Reminders now support natural language entry, letting users type something like "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14" and have the app suggest the date, time, and attendees automatically. Apple says Siri can handle more complex natural-language scheduling requests directly, including edits to recurring events.
The Photos app gains three generative editing tools grouped under an
Apple Intelligence Tools section: an upgraded Clean Up, a new Extend tool, and Spatial Reframing.
Clean Up now offers Fast, High Quality, and Auto modes for object removal and can reconstruct more complex backgrounds than before. Extend uses generative AI to fill in new content when a photo's borders are expanded, and is capped at a maximum of 25% per side. Spatial Reframing, which draws on the same spatial data used for Portrait mode, lets users shift a photo's apparent camera angle after it was taken.
The
Shortcuts app has been rebuilt around a "Describe a Shortcut" interface, where Apple Intelligence assembles an entire automation from a plain-language description rather than requiring users to build workflows action by action manually.
Safari picks up a similar natural-language approach with a new Create an Extension option for building custom browser extensions on the fly, automatic AI-driven tab organization by topic, and a "Notify Me" tool that monitors a webpage and alerts users when it changes, which is useful, Apple says, for tracking ticket sales or restocked products.
Image Playground has also been overhauled for iOS 27, adding support for photorealistic image generation, edits to existing images via text descriptions, and additional aspect ratio options for wallpapers and Contact Posters.
iOS 27 is available now to developers and public beta testers, and Apple plans to release the software officially in September.
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If you haven't already listened to the
previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up to hear our discussion about OpenAI's move into hardware and the
trade secret lawsuit Apple filed against the company earlier this month.
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Kevin Nether,
John Gruber,
Mark Gurman,
Jon Prosser,
Luke Miani,
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Quinn Nelson,
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Frank McShan,
David Lewis,
Tyler Stalman,
Sam Kohl,
Federico Viticci,
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Ross Young,
Ian Zelbo, and
Rene Ritchie.
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