iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27
apple.com522 points by throw0101d 13 hours ago
522 points by throw0101d 13 hours ago
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.
"""One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.""" - Compared to a lot of others, this one have introduced more bugs than I have ever experienced in more than 10 years.
I have stopped submitting bugs because of the tedious bug reporting app, only submit really bad ones. Can't they give some helping functions to finding the correct categories based on problem description?
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
This, and then, if you notice, and backspace to remove the 'e', it doesn't put chess back into the search results, since it figures that everything that matches 'che' also matches 'ch', and so doesn't update it. Sometimes, if you add the 'e' again, it _will_ find chess, sometimes you need to type the 's', or even the final 's' before it gives you chess back again.
And sometimes, it finds what you want, but before you can select it, it decides that it has found something better, and places that in the place where you wanted to select, causing you to select the wrong thing. And then it thinks that because you selected this, it must be what you want, and starts to push it to the top…
Search is definitely frustrating.
Weird, the same stupid crap happens with Windows. I’ve had to learn the exact N character search to find the things I use often; any more or less and the result with that name is buried. It’s like Microsoft and Apple are just pip installing same broken search package.
On Windows I use PowerToys' Alt+Space command bar which does a much better job. In fact, it's the only search I use on Windows.
It's worse than this! You Type C-H-E then you go to press enter, and it changes the results as you're pressing it, opening the wrong thing! I've turned off all the search targets, except for applications and folders.
Absolutely. The mac spotlight search / bar was one of my favourite features, maybe 10 years ago? But now it’s useless.
It also has some strange behaviour when it’s not in focus, but hasn’t been closed.
I just leave every application open and command tab to them now.
Changing the results just when you are going to action on them is a fundamental UX sin.
I have the same problem when i touch a result and it changes the result line at the exact moment.
I always assumed that was intentional to save you arriving through options. I find that behaviour quite useful as I can hit anything beginning with CHE just by typing more letters.
For me search has been that way since the first MacOS 26.0 upgrade and apparently never fixed.
But speaking of quality overall (outside of the search glitch) - I use dual 5k LG monitors with my work MacBook and can get the MacOS Display Manager process to crash if I just enable variable rate refresh and put the computer to sleep, then wake it up. Apparently a known issue for a few years, still not fixed.
For me the big one is whenever I type "sys" to get system settings, it pops up for a half second and then for some reason the top result is like "reset some system setting" and then I invariably get flashbanged because it turns off dark mode and there's no confirmation dialogue lmao. Maddening.
Typing “sound” and end up with some obscure sound setting as top option and the general “sound” control panel nowhere to be found. Every time.
I've deactivated every single type of data in Spotlight except Applications. It goes out of its way to still suggest files like C system files or header files, like "system_library.c". It didn't wait for AI to turn against us.
I wish all this shit would just stop trying to search as I’m fucking typing. It’s like that person we all know that can’t hold their tongue for five fucking seconds and let you finish a sentence before the blurt something out.
This seems like a general UI bug.
Q: For those amongst us who are UI experts, what is it called when dynamic lists populate unpredictably while a finger-tap is in-progress?
a) start query and see initial results
b) start finger-navigation, moving finger over initial results
c) start finger-tap descent
d) underlying list is updated, replacing future finger-tap destination's UI element with another
e) finger-tap meets different element than intended
I feel attacked, but it’s probably the same reason, we both think we know the answer before you finished.
Don't they perform user testing?
- Do "normies" perform better with this behavior?
- Or is the goal to disturb the user and make something impractical like in Google, so that people click on ads? Software has turned into a curse. The machines have risen.
'calc' used to bring up calculator, but now it becomes some widget to calculate distance inside the spotlight box. The worst thing is you can't even backspace out of it.
Spotlight worked best in OS X 10.4. It was near instantaneous on what is now considered ancient hardware. It's been steadily downhill from there.
Mostly because people still expect to use it to find "Recipe for Egg Salad.docx" without searching the entire Internet or executing some bizarre natural language query.
I did just that. Took me half a day. I haven't used Spotlight since. I did try alternative launchers, but they are all bloated. I just need an app launcher and simple arithmetic - that's all it does.
FWIW, I find if I’m pushing the disk limit, Spotlight search becomes unusable. So I free up ~100GB (easy to do with iOS/Android dev artifacts, emulators, etc.) and then force a Spotlight re-index from the command line:
sudo mdutil -E /
You can check indexing status with:
mdutil -s /
After that it’s usually fine again until I start pushing the disk limit.
Every sibling comment's issues I've experienced. But a reindex after freeing enough disk space seems to be a semi-stable solution for me. If only I could write a tool to remind me to free disk space before it screws up spotlight. It would be nice if MacOS put the index on its own partition.
By default finder search searches all files rather than the current folder. You have to go to finder preferences to change it.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Not just operating systems. Try the following on the IMDB app or website.
Search 'True', you'll get True Detective and True Blood show up as the top results. That seems to work well.
But then if you add a space making it 'True ', 'Bill Hader' is the top result!
People still use IMDB after they introduced mandatory account registration to even see user reviews?
no he is lying and no one uses it. what a snide smug comment - hopefully you an an orphan i cannot imagine how pathetic your parents must be to have started with a child and end up with a dog.
Windows does this, too. So I really wonder how come two companies implemented the same borked behavior.
Android keyboard does that too. When I start typing my email address, for example, the keyboard app suggests the correct email after a few characters, but if I keep typing it disappears from the suggestions.
It would be interesting to learn what over engineered solution to fuzzy string matching is being used here to exhibit this behavior, so we never make the same mistake.
Just tried this on iOS 27 and both blu and blue showed me bluetooth settings. I saw someone in a different thread of this discussion mention resetting dictionaries helping with autocorrect, I wonder if there is something that would apply to this situation which helps.
Just do a fresh install every two weeks.
Aah those were the days.
These are too, but those were as well.
KDE gets it right, too.
And it offers me THREE different chess games I could install!
At some point I got the damn Chess app every time I wanted to switch to Chrome. You know, typing cmd-space, ch and enter. I've learned I can't remove Chess from my computer. After numerous incantations of various spells and reboots and updates I think it started working normally again.
Breaking interfaces, Linus Torvalds had something to say about it that Apple should heed.
Search feels like it used to be much better in finding a balance between showing app vs files vs web - feels really broken somehow and I wonder if there’s any setting I can change.
I struggle daily with Finder's search. It cannot find files in my Downloads folder even if I type the exact name. Do I need to rebuild some index or some other setting?
It couldn't hurt. I don't have problems like that.
mdutil -E -a
That command will erase and rebuild Spotlight index on all volumes.
Since Tahoe, Spotlight has multiple modes. You might have better luck forcing it into folder & files mode. That's command-2. So command-space, spotlight UI appears, keep holding command key, press 2. There's also 1 for applications only, 3 for "actions" and 4 for clipboard history.
Same example: I search Spotlight for “Voice Memos,” a built-in Apple app. Nothing. Ask Siri? It’s horrible.
It works fine for me but my wife has this exact problem. It’s absolutely mystifying how something so basic could get so messed up.
For me it's gotten way better in iOS/macOS 27. It's also way faster. They claim to have rewritten the spotlight index to handle the new Siri integration.
The new Siri UX needs improvement and to match the UX of talking to chatGPT. At least in settings have an option to keep the Siri window always on top (just have a prominent X out to go to the screen below) and always listening ready to continue your conversation like the experience is with chatGPT.
Been running the beta since June -- on the latest beta now and 8 out of ten times to continue the conversation with Siri (most notably in the car with my phone docked) I have to constantly say "Hey Siri."
One thing it's current UX has over chatGPT voice tech as it shows you the text and provides visuals while chatGPT's UI shows no text and or visuals.
The first thing I do on any mac is replace the default search, usually with alfred.
Ever since they re-did Spotlight I've had issues. When I type something and press Return it should activate. I shouldn't have to wait for it to populate the results and then press Return a second time. Moreover they've broken the ability for me to use Cmd to locate files quickly. I have to awkwardly Cmd-double-click the result with my cursor because trying to Cmd-Return triggers Ask Siri!
I’ll have it not show Xcode. It’s apples main developer ide. Most of the time it works. Then it gets into some weird loop. Only shows the Xcode website. Very helpful.
I got so annoyed at this recently I turned off spotlight entirely and replaced it with 3rd party software. I couldn’t be happier with my choice.
Check out Raycast / Alfred.
Yeah, Alfred is one of the first things I install on a new MacOS install.
Also enjoying Rectangles WM.
Alfred is wonderful for launching applications and custom actions, but it’s actually worse than Spotlight search for searching for files and folders. It finds a lot of results but inexplicably it likes to rank partial matches ahead of exact matches.
This is why I use Alfred instead of spotlight.
Alfred afaik uses the spotlight index too, so if that's the problem you're out of luck.
Turn off all the web search and other domains that the index uses. Apple took a really brain dead decision to include web search in the results, and they are the worst. It is completely useless, and even though the recall has expanded, the precision is abysmal.
It’s really sad, because they mostly aped search from BeOS and had best in class search for a decade or so. Now indexing frequently breaks or works when an external disk is not attached, but won’t find local files after it’s connected.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
Hi Pavel. I remember your work on Eddie and Tracker and Queries. Do you still follow the development of Haiku (even if infrequently)?
Cool.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
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.
There is also a new, larger voice to text model available... but not for an old iPhone like the 13 mini. Only like the iPhone 17 Pro and above.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
Dictus is one that I’ve been playing around with.
This is GREAT! It’s not possible to enable local-only dictation on iOS with the OS alone. :(
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
I use it constantly and it mostly works well for me since as long as I can remember. My biggest gripe with it is all the random ass commas it puts.
i’ve been using the beta for a few months now, and the speech to text is significantly better. Put in parentheses using apple speech to text
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
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...
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
That drives me crazy. What's crazier happens when the suggested word is the one you are going to type. You hit the next letter in the word, recognize that it has already been suggested, yet right after you hit the letter, it decides to suggest another word.
OMG you're giving me PTSD just reading about it. It happens every single time!!!
This happens everywhere. On menu items to. You would think they would invalidate a click id the item changes in the last 0.1 seconds. But no.
What's hilarious is that typing was nearly perfect on my 3gs (with "iPhone OS 3"--back before it was even "iOS").
That's because it used to be a simple Markov model back then.
Today's implementation is using more advanced ML techniques ;)
Sounds like a third-party keyboard opportunity: “Just like the standard Apple keyboard but not ML”.
Compliments of product managers, engineers, etc making millions and millions of dollars to produce a much worse end user experience, if it wasn’t painful enough
Yes, it was a solved problem. Then they had to figure out how to utilize the ML features of their chips... and fucked it all up.
It's been getting noticeably worse with every update. iOS 26 was a significant step down from whatever version was before that.
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
Interesting. Because I have a much harder time typing on my Pixel. In fact, I hate it. I wish I had a blackberry.
When I use iOS devices, it feels better but I don't use them enough to have used them in anger. Ok, well, yes they have made me angry but for other reasons than the keyboard hence why I'm on Android lol.
Ah, so that’s why that happens? I was gaslighting myself.
someone posted high speed videos a few months ago where the keyboard will popup the key you thought you pressed (therefore did press, as far as the UI is concerned) but iOS will insert a different character anyway.
Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.
Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).
Yep; this has been the case since the very first iPhone, it can't be disabled, and there is no feedback it happens other than the typos. It is very crazy making and mind boggling.
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".
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
Unfortunately for us swipers, disabling slide to type on an iPhone makes typing significantly more accurate. I can only guess as to why, but after seeing anecdotal reports over the last year or so from people raving about how much better typing was with swiping disabled I finally got fed up enough to give it a shot myself. It is much, much better, to the point where I'd never re-enable slide to type until Apple finally fixes this.
Sometimes I swipe the same word 5 times in a row and it gets it wrong every time, despite me being slower and more precise each time. I give up and type it by hand. Note: this is NOT the censorship issue, that's separate (where it will not allow you to swipe certain words or phrases AT ALL, no matter how hard you try. Like if you type "kill" it won't let you swipe "him" or "her" after it, though some other words work. There are many instances of this)
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
Yes! It will give me Andy, ABE! abs, and's, anything but friggen "and"!
This drives me crazy. Sometimes I'll just put the phone down and move to a proper keyboard to type what I want. It definitely makes me use my phone less, maybe that's a good thing overall.
And’s! Fucking and’s! Every goddamned time, regardless of the fact that I have never once intentionally typed and’s (until now, which probably means that it’ll now either appear constantly or never again).
I can't do "is". I get "OSS" instead. I'm not even that into open source.
I get “is” more often than “and”, though nowhere near what I got with Swype on Android ten years ago.
Considering that Microsoft bought Swype, I have no idea why SwiftKey isn’t absolutely amazing, but it isn’t.
"ABs"
That is common. The one that I haven’t seen lately is “Abbas”, like the Palestinian politician. Except, I don’t ever write about Middle Eastern politics. At all.
But it was a favorite for a while.
It's intriguing. Danny! Infuriating.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
I also use it all the time and I hate it very much. It almost never works right on the first try.
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.
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
Yay, I found my people…
I switch between Android and iPhone every few cycles, and I really do miss my swipe keyboard on Android.
iPhone swipe and tap keyboard always gives me trouble. I hate that it keeps trying to type my contacts’ names.
Also, text selection OSS frequently maddening. Yes, I swiped “is” and it decided I’m a fan of open source software… When I try to select some words or position my cursor, iOS always wants to put the cursor far away from where I held my finger. Doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Each time you type the wrong letter there’s a big chance you didn’t miss but the keyboard typed the wrong key anyway.
Have to wonder how often you hit the wrong letter and the keyboard corrects it to what you actually wanted though.
Would have been totally gaslit by my iPad on this only I have an android phone to compare my typing accuracy on.
I know the autocorrect is broken -- I consistently hit a bottom row character like "n" instead of spacebar, and it's simply unable to comprehend that you might have hit a letter instead of space. It comes up with all kinds of insane, implausible suggestions for the autocorrect, but never the obvious one that's 1 character from what i typed.
Yes! The way it tries to be smart about what you actually wanted to press but has certain areas that are exceptions to that rule — like space bar — drives me crazy.
I am so very glad to see all of my complaints with ios text entry so thoroughly articulated in this thread. My first thought with the iphone duo is "how many people are going to develop a repetitive stress injury with these awful text entry interfaces and giant heavy devices?"
Typing is more important than ever. We're a ways off from BCIs and there should be responsible and serious consideration for this problem.
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 .
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
It can. I don’t understand how anyone willingly keeps autocorrect enabled on iOS. The autosuggestions are nevertheless still bad.
The iPhone keyboard "intelligent" tap target size is independent of autocorrect, however, and you can't turn it off or adjust it's behavior.
Yes, the keyboard is pretty bad in various ways. I’m still surprised how many comments in this thread (and similar threads in the past) are mentioning the autocorrection, implying that they haven’t turned it off.
"O can" instead of "I can" on the iPhone is the one which has been driving me bonkers for at least a couple of years now.
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.
https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo - [It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken]
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.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
What do you find lacking in iOS’s swipe keyboard implementation?
I can't comment knowledgeably. I just regularly have to try over and over again to get it to produce the word I want, and my memory is that this happened rarely on Android.
Wait! I do have a specific criticism!
There are certain two-word sequences it will not produce ("kill myself", "white women") and I could do without that little bit of editorial oversight thank you very much.
And expletives. If I want to say fuck, that's my business, I don't need my phone refusing to allow it. If not for how embedded I am right now in the ecosystem, this keyboard & vocabulary behavior they force on me might be enough to make me switch.
Yep, there's a whole set of censored phrases. Kill won't let you type a lot of things after it, including "him" and "her" (well, I haven't tested on iOS 27 yet). I haven't tried the white woman one though, that is cracking me up.
update: Okay I tried and sure enough, I'm laughing even harder now. The closest I could get it to swipe was "womanhood". Lots of Wohan's though.
Who’re women
Blank women
Chinese women
Indian women
Jewish women
Black men love Chinese women
Black woken live Ellie men
Kill your
Kill mussels
Lmao I never noticed this. I wonder if this is just risk aversion, since they don’t care if I type “white women make me want to kill myself” normally and even autocorrect half the sentence.
I really need the spacebar to expand slightly more on the right so my thumb doesn't miss it while typing. Wish it were customizable.
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
macOS has the prior keycombo for 'home' and 'end' occupied for other uses.
command + up/down arrow
Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
Command+up arrow and down arrow behave exactly as you say on my computer: like home and end do on PC/Linux. Command left and right for how it also behaves on Linux/PC if you're in a text field. They always have? I use that combo all the time and only have issues in Safari tabs that overload the arrow keys with bullshit.
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").
(adjacent to keyboard) It has no way to select all text. That makes the whole platform a toy.
In my experience new Siri has been better only marginally. Still tons of I didn’t understand the query responses
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
I don’t recall exact queries. What I do remember is giving a demo of the developer beta to friends thinking it’s gotten much closer to ChatGPT and it embarrassing me. And being much slower, requiring a gesture at the top of the screen to dismiss etc just made me deactivate Apple Intelligence. It’s embarrassing in 2026 for Apple.
Meh, I don't think it's so clear cut. It's so much worse than the AI that all of us are used to using, that's it's not worth using as AI. And it's now much slower at the few tasks it used to be good at (phone calls, timers, etc..)
So while yes, I would say overall it is much more powerful than it used to be, it still sits in the "every few reasons to use it" bucket for me. I'd sooner just reach for Grok/Chat/Claude
edit: keep in mind this is my experience over several months of beta. I haven't installed the public release yet.
> 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.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
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.
its when you type it wrong two times, and then slowly type it. Then it works.
> The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition.
Jeez. I wish they could just roll the keyboard back to iOS 7. That's the last version where it was good.
one day we'll find out they have only one QA person on the team which develops keyboard among other things, and they have comically alien fingers.
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.
Wait what was so bad about siri before? I've been using it for years on homepod, asking it for weather and setting timers.
You'd be surprised how well a T9 keyboard works on iPhone. You should give Type Nine a shot! https://apps.apple.com/dk/app/type-nine-t9-keyboard/id926008... Here's some promo codes for anyone interested XRF4TMKJHTYY NYX7TELHTAEN 74HXFT9K6H7H 47X4MR96K6YE NNTRRJFPH49E L6JMLEAAMKPP TEMNHXXJRA3T TK7KX9MEJHPX NFWPHALHTH6M 3J9TRR3MAKKE
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?
They’re telling you the year where the new OS will be stable enough that it’s a good idea to upgrade (joke’s on them, I still haven’t “upgraded” to Tahoe…)
From a psychological standpoint, maybe customers thinking 26 is old on their brand new device in 3 months isn't exactly good. People might start expecting 27 in 3 months when actually 27 is going to be around for most of the year.
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...
I've been using the Safari MCP in a "grocery agent" tool I built. It takes the weekly menu my wife puts together, turns it into a shopping list, and then uses Safari to add things to the shopping cart on Walmart's website. It's pretty solid, I like it more than the Chrome dev protocol I had been using before Safari.
How are you getting around bot detection shutting you out? I tried exactly this but for stop and shop.
I've actually never had it trip any bot detection, captchas, or anything like that, and haven't built anything into it for evading detection. If I had to guess, it's because I make sure to manually sign in to my Walmart account before it begins adding things to the cart.
This is the case for me too. If I try to automate sign in, it trips bot detection. But if I manually sign in then let the agent rip, I'm fine.
Unfortunately, not well suited for stealth use cases for personal automation. Here's a comparison to an mcp tool that allows driving your live safari via osascript:
[1]: https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp#vs-apples-of...
Given that Safari needs the most debugging and automation tooling for Safari was hardest to come by, this is a welcome change. I wonder if it works with pages on a connected iPhone though? Anyone tried it? Because debugging on iOS Safari is the most maddening. (No, responsive design mode doesn't cut it, iOS Safari has its own special bugs that don't manifest in desktop Safari merely emulating a phone viewport.)
True WebXR for the Apple ecosystem will never come. At least that’s what I’m assuming given their behavior so far
It's really powerful. I have been using it in Chrome for a while.
This is how to enable: chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging
This MCP server for Safari is pretty neat. I think I'm going to start automatting some tasks for our corporate websites.
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,
Probably continuity network slowness. Universal Clipboard is probably seeing if your other device just added something to the clipboard.
Everything in 26 takes longer with all the bs easing that got drizzled over the interface.
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
No disrespect to you for posting this, but those iOS/iPadOS/MacOS are almost identical launch pages. Feels like a waste of time even having them be separate.
Poor tvOS :(
I was at WWDC for the Vision Pro launch and asked someone a technical question about tvOS. He said, 'ah, [Jim] could answer that, but he isn't here today'. When I asked if anyone else from tvOS was here the reply was, '[Jim] is the only person on tvOS' and I am pretty sure he was serious.
I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery?
It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console
Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
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.
/end-rant
Seems like this is a draft / filler that was supposed to be updated. At least it’s not AI.
The download on my iPhone said it’s iOS 26.7, but it definitely installed 27 (:
proof of not ai
Or it could be new, improved AI that's appearing not to be AI by sounding more human...
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.
That was almost 10 years ago. Seems like it was just yesterday.
> That was almost 10 years ago. Seems like it was just yesterday.
Time is an illusion. (Lunchtime especially so.)
From what I recall, the only people actually eating Tide pods were elderly folks with dementia. The kids were joking about it a lot, though.
My favorite bumper sticker from when the Millennials were in college was a riff on the old "I {$cause}, and I vote" from the 80's:
"I eat Tide Pods, and I vote"
Most Millenials were 30+ when the Tide Pod trend happened. It was solidly a Gen Z thing.
Siri is for entertainment purposes only. As in, it's so bad, it'll make you laugh.
Is this a joke? My iPhone is still running 26 and I just did that exact test and it went into "Household items".
No. Dishwasher rinse aid in beverages happened yesterday but I’ve also had makeup remover in condiments and various other fun ones. I have an iPhone 16 so it’s not like the hardware is terribly underpowered either. It may be dependent on regional settings or something but Siri shopping classification has been hilariously terrible for me. If I make a shopping list of 10 items there is always at least one that is wildly misclassified - I leave it on because it makes me laugh.
The other thing that has been terrible for me in 26 is they made some sort of change to the pronunciation in “maps” when it gives directions. It seems like they tried to make it clearer or something but it breaks loads of UK street names in hilarious ways. For example, there is a street near me called “Speldhurst road”. You would normally say this “spelled hirst” or similar. Siri? No. Siri says “Spellduster”. There are many like that. It’s kind of ridiculous.
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.
It blows my mind that a trillion-dollar company with the ability to attract the world’s top talent has struggled for years to make a chatbot.
My phone kept saying it couldn't find anything, until I realised I turned off Spotlight Suggestions for photos, contacts, mail etc. Once I turned them on, Siri could access it.
It is still not multi language. I mean I can talk to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, fucking Grok in any language I want and it will understand / respond in given language. Apple being Apple, I have to choose a language in Siri menu and it has to be the phone language for some reason.. Otherwise it downgrades to old Siri.
Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
Yes, I've been encountering this for weeks (because that's how long it has taken indexing to run...) and my workaround has been to switch to GooglePhotos since I backup everything to it.
Apple search in Photos has always been garbage so I almost always flip over to Google Photos anyway.
At this point Gemini has been fully integrated in android for like 2 years, why is Apple so behind?
Apple’s scatterbrained OS-bundled software is just embarrassing at this point. Half-baked release after half-baked release. I’m convinced that modern Apple simply can’t ship good software any longer.
The “headline features simply must not slip” cadence is ruining the products. The moneymaker, the iPhone, needs the new OS to work (iPhone 18 hardware has never run on iOS 26), so the OS release can’t be delayed for any reason. The other OSes are lashed to this sinking ship, quality-wise, because they all come out together.
Once per year, everyone has to crunch against an impossible deadline, and something has to give. That thing is quality.
Its crazy to insist on releasing all new operating systems for these devices at the same time. I didn't realize they were doing that. If one team is behind they would still have to ship it anyway
This is precisely what it is, which is why 27.0.1 will come out so rapidly, and will fix the immediate jank, and then 27.1 the next month (tbh it is probably already massively underway right now and 27.0.1 is likely in testing).
I agree. I worked at a company where we transitioned to big releases aligned with a yearly event and it was a disaster. It became all about marketing and bodges.
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.
One of the few things I use Siri for is converting units and still in iOS 27 we have:
- "What is three fifty degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius?" -> "53°F = 11.67°C"
Also disappointing:
- "Add mow the lawn to my chores note." -> "Sorry, I can't help with that."
“Then preheat the oven to three fifty, and give that spoon a lick …”
No high hopes for how that recipe turns out with Siri in the kitchen then
It’s really pathetic. I would think even the lowest quality LLMs could figure out tool use like this. It has to figure out the tool and most of the time, it’s stated in the command. Like remind me or put this in notes, so why can’t it do this more easily. I’m just having trouble figuring out why. I’m curious if they still have tons of rules in the background in a way that is muddying the pure LLM experience.
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?
It's "better" if you like eye candy, animations are more drawn out and deliberate. Otherwise they're functionally identical (and has ever been since iPhone X).
For me 26 absolutely chews through battery compared to 18 (I have the last gen iPhone SE). Hopefully 27 doesn't make that worse, but i'm holding off on upgrading. Really took me by surprise.
”it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26”
Regression to the mean
You can always read a review:
> The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/ios-27-review-little-thin...
An update that improves performance on even the oldest supported device is a win.
That's a nice overview, but it seems to compare iOS 27 to iOS 26. Isn't iOS 26 known to be terrible, though? I'd like a comparison to a "known-good" iOS version. Basically I skipped iOS 26 (so I have zero experience with it) and am now wondering whether iOS 27 is any good
That's dramatically overstating it. iOS 26 was just... alright. It wasn't great. It also wasn't the devil incarnate in a phone. iOS 27 has been legimately good since the early public betas.
Why would I read reviews for "the promise"? So after reading the review, how much has performance improved over 18?
"Better" is subjective. I've been using iOS 27 beta and other than a few bugs it hasn't been that bad. I only had some minor downgrades in Safari UI, but those are minor and personal.
One thing I hated was a downgrade in Photos app on iOS 26 though, that hasn't improved in 27. Unfortunately it seems I was the only one loving Photos on iOS 18.
I did jump from macOS 18 to macOS 27 beta though and Safari's UI is abhorrent.
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 :)
Normally I’d agree.
But my experience with 26 hasn’t been great. From the top of my head: Random repeated flashing window chrome in the background, notifications that keep on showing while everything is disabled, Finder tooltips from four windows down, tooltips that don’t disappear, Java update interruptions that hijack your flow - just when you where about to hit enter for something else the pop-up shows and bam: you’re installing it. There is nothing right about the update process of Java anyway. Spotlight search has completely stopped working. People I’m mailing with for over a decade are not suggested when drafting a mail. Clicking on the dock icon does not reveal the app. The list goes on and on. It has been a total grueling experience. Worst in all my experiences since System 7.
I’ve shut down the notification system at some point, which alleviated the constant reminders of non-compatibility with the next OS version. Being reminded of that four times a day for months on end is just insulting, even if I used compatible versions. There was no way to shut it off. Notifications are lazily designed and completely uninspired, as they could also adjust the app icons and so on and actually do it right.
I promised myself to update once it came out and then just screen record everything to collect residual garbage to help the Apple team make this stuff work well for everyone.
Sorry to let this all out, but it has been on my mind for a while and I’m happy they say they focussed on quality. Therefore I’m upgrading asap this time.
I'm still on Sequoia (which took me ages to jump to from Ventura). :)
For anyone jumping versions: remember that Apple messed with the login keychain not being able to be backed up in the most recent Tahoe release [1], which means that issue will be around in Golden Gate.
Me too. I was just thinking recently about updating from Sequoia, now I've got to take a while and reconsider everything.
I'm staying on Sequoia for at least one more year.
iOS 27 is pretty good though.
I was on Sequoia as well, and just updated ... first thing I noticed is LaunchPad is gone.
The Tahoe Dock "App View" / Spotlight just lists my 30 installed apps intermingled with Apple System Apps, which I hardly ever use. Hard coded categories, no way to re-order as far as I can tell.
Seems like the closest thing to LaunchPad is dragging ~/Applications to the Dock.
The other thing I have noticed is scrolling in Firefox is more choppy, and animations are more Janky than Sequoia on this old MacBook Air M1.
I feel pretty good about the 27 series in a way I haven't in the past (I've been running iOS 27 and it's working well), except for one thing, they remove x86 support (no more Rosetta), so just keep that in mind in case that might disrupt anything for you.
People have already replied in part, but to clarify:
macOS 27 itself won't run on Intel chips, just Apple Silicon
but it does still have Rosetta (macOS 28 will drop it completely though)
Rosetta is still present in 27.
I keep getting so many warnings about this though - maybe I'm misreading it? is 27 the LAST version with Rosetta maybe?
Yes, 27 is the final Rosetta version. The warnings are worded in a way that makes sense if you already know that but are easy to misunderstand if you don’t. I think they initially didn’t want to commit to the next version being called macOS 28. The final 27 release has started explicitly saying it’s going away in 28 which makes it a lot more straightforward.
I thought they weren't removing Rosetta until macOS 28. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
I normally suggest the same, but 26 has been universally bad. This is the "point release" or "Snow Leopard" edition of 26.
I don't understand this viewpoint. So, the release version is 27.0 build 26A428. That build is static, how can it get more stable than it is right now? Lets say 27.1 comes out in 2 weeks - do you update to 27.0 instead of 27.1? When is it snappy enough?
There have been far more buggy iOS releases than stable ones. A few years in particular were absolute disasters until December or January. It is very sound graybeard advice to wait until the .1 release. Apple has not earned the trust to upgrade on day 1.
I don’t understand what you mean by snappy. Apple is notorious for releasing buggy macOS major versions. You wait 6 months, then upgrade without having to be their tester. Snappiness has nothing to do with that, any macOS version on apple silicon is snappy
Taking this at face value they say wait for the incremental updates. I think some big rollouts have had fringe issues and they are saying to minimize the probability you get a random bug it's better to wait for a 27.x or 27.0.x before upgrading, and to upgrade to that one, not 27.0
This seems to be the consensus viewpoint but outside of a few highly specific and known-in-advance incompatibilities on work laptops, I have been essentially a day-one adopter since Leopard and I cannot recall any issues that rose above a minor annoyance.
There have certainly been changes like Liquid Glass that were for the worse overall (though the degree of which had been highly overblown). But outside of directional disagreement with a release, I can’t say I’ve ever seen an issue where I’ve regretted pulling the trigger on an update.
Don't worry I am still on Sonoma :)
I'm still on Sequoia and I have zero intention of updating to this AI-saturated slop.
There are over 200 security patches in the newest versions of macOS. AI is helping patch previously unrealized holes.
> AI is helping patch previously unrealized holes.
AI is also making plenty of holes.
I have not seen a single case of anything that an AI has found that could not have been automatically found without AI.
Mozilla had 400 Firefox CVEs found by Mythos; if those were so easy to find, why didn’t humans do it before?
Humans did do it before.
------------------------
It's also worth pointing out that the developers at Mozilla literally decided to make a brand new programming language (Rust) that eliminated an entire categories of bugs and started working on a new browser (Servo) where its components could be switched into firefox.
Then Mozilla fired the team working on it.
Lesson 1: Better tools and processes eliminate bugs.
Lesson 2: If you don't have the tools, make them.
Lesson 3: Mismanagement leads to security vulnerabilities.
Good point about the whole new language as a tool for eliminating many thousands(?) as a whole category
Yes, and even after introducing and using Rust, there were still vulns in the remaining code.
FWIW, Rust is my main language, so I am grateful to the humans that created it, and it is indeed a monumental effort. But vuln finding is a different kind of creative endeavour, and one that is heavily weighted against defenders.
Yes, which is why you don't stop at rust.
You would choose rust (from a security standpoint) because it massively reduces memory safety issues (which from a Microsoft study was responsible for around 70% of bugs).
Then you look at things like linting, fuzzing, design by contract, proofing, deterministic test runs, etc...
As I said above: use better tools and processes.
LLMs don't fit that criteria.
Yes, I should have been clear - I don't mind AI working on patches or vuln-hunting; my issue with MacOS 27 is the amount of AI included in the OS that is not opt-in. I use Claude Code everyday - but it doesn't run locally on my main production machines.
You have the same long list for Sequoia 15.8, so how is that better? Besides, newer OSes are also more likely to have uniquely knew bugs from both AI slop and in general all the shiny new broken features
i'm sure most of those patches will keep coming to Sequoia over the coming years
In theory that makes sense, in practice I've never had any issues with updating on day one and it's often necessary if you want to develop for iOS / macOS anyway unless you have a dedicated developer machine.
I’ve been running it for a couple months, I’d say we’re pretty much out of danger.
yes. I have been waiting 12 months already because Tahoe didn't convince many people, and I dread the moment I upgrade my mpb m3. Maybe I should just keep the factory OS
I have updated macOS and iOS around day one of release since 2008 and have yet to experience meaningful issues, AMA.
I used to always do this but I hate liquid glass with such passion that I even upgraded to an iOS beta just to get any improvements to it. Worst UI update in the history of the company.
I just updated my Mac Studio from Sequoia to Tahoe.
Gotta say, a massive downgrade.
why did you do that to yourself when an alleged fix is coming in a few months?
Figured it might be slightly less painful to update one major version at a time.
iPadOS 27 also isn't looking so hot that I'd believe macOS 27 to be a magic bullet.
yep last time it completely broke Internet but fortunately there was a workaround available via cellular
You do you. I backup and install once the RC goes live. Have done for years. Only problem I recall was a few years ago Homebrew got in a tizzy for a day.
One exception maybe is for music producers. For some reason AU/VST/DAW developers don't seem to take part in the beta programs and their software can take a while to get updated. But I've happily been playing with Bitwig (with some Arturia VSTs) over the weekend on Golden Gate without issue.
I keep the studio computer OS a full version behind.
My impression from audio developers is that the audio infrastructure is very badly documented (like so much of MacOS nowadays) and using it properly requires a combination of luck, WWDC videos, and devrel threads. Also, Apple introduces changes that are genuine improvements in theory, but break undocumented assumptions.
The lack of rigor is a bit surprising given that audio is probably the only mission-critical hard-real-time thing MacOS does. People routinely run an entire live concert on a Mac and an audio glitch is not OK! (Yes, if it’s Taylor Swift budget then there are at least two machines in sync with a big red button to switch over…)
But given what they’re dealing with, I understand why it’s more involved than just “the developers didn’t try the betas”.
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
Apple Intelligence and Siri were separate toggles before, but no more.
Curious if it lets you reclaim space if you turn off Siri.
I turned it off on my iPhone and no... you don't reclaim the space
CNET says that the OS auto-reclaims the space when needed: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/how-to-turn-...
They don't have incentives to reclaim space imediately since disks that appear to be full sell more iCloud subscriptions.
Apple should not be allowed to have a monopoly on iCloud. They ought to be forced to have an open spec such that competitors could offer alternative cloud storage services.
Don't get me started as well on how the iCloud plans jump from 200gb to 2TB with absolutely nothing in between. Apple really knows how to extort their customers!
That's not just an Apple thing though. Google does the same thing. Dropbox only offers 2TB plan. OneDrive is just as expensive but offers 1TB.
They are all counting on you not using all of that space in the 2TB plan. So the avg user is subsidizing the usage of some small fraction of power users. They don't want to offer pay-per-use pricing plans because then they would have to increase the price ($/GB/month) to keep their existing margins.
26GB for an update is pretty steep considering their base macs are still on 256GB SSDs.
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'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 :)
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.
I just updated my M1 MBA, it feels basically the same as 26 performance wise (that being said, I didn't notice a performance difference between 18 and 26 either).
I think the appearance is actually worse. They haven't addressed the giant padding areas 26 added to everything, but they added a faux-3D effect to the Liquid Glass. Even if you set the glass to opaque, the faux-3D remains. I don't mind faux-3D (I thought Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 looked fine) but it looks out of place here because the majority of the UI still uses flat design. It looks like if you installed a Windows 7 theme on top of Windows 10, then cancelled the install midway through so it's half applied.
The light theme still has the contrast blown out and hurts my eyes to look at, so I still have to use dark mode even though I preferred light mode on 18 and below.
I’ve been having a different experience with Safari. It’s crashed my phone a half dozen times so far. Surprisingly, when it comes back to the lock screen afterward, it doesn’t make me enter my passcode.
I only had 2 extensions installed. I disabled uBlock, that didn’t fix it. I just manually rebooted my phone to see if that helps. If it crashes again I’ll be disabling all extensions.
I’m a bit shocked, since “stable” was the one thing I kept hearing about this release.
> You can pretty much disable liquid glass.
the semaphore too? i am hating it.
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.
Are you exaggerating? I tried the latest beta about a month ago and experienced multiple bugs within half an hour. Had to downgrade back to 26.
No, not exaggerating at all, but I'm not a power user of the phone. I just do really simple stuff, and I didn't find new bugs, just old ones. But obviously that's my experience... The most noticeable stuff was the app launch speed.
Interesting. Bugs on mine were from using core apps, IIRC. I wonder if bugs manifest on some iPhone hardware versions? Or maybe even which iOS version the phone was upgrade from?
I concur with gekoxyz - I've been using the iOS and macOS 27 developer betas since about beta 3 on my personal devices, and had actually forgotten to a large extent that I was running beta software. It's been excellent - a marked difference to the 26 releases.
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.
I would say bettery is about the same of iOS 26, but mine is quite cooked (78% battery health) and I have to replace it.
Performance is for sure better. Not as much as I expected (I expected to notice it everyday), and I can't give you a number, but I remember that I noticed stuff being faster the first couple of days that I installed the beta, but now I got used to it
I run iOS 18 and have no problems with my battery, it is at 73%. iPhone 14 Pro. Don't think I'm going to install 27 either.
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.
That could be a factor for sure, but this iOS upgrade basically broke mu iPhone as switching between apps got noticeably slower and sometimes the UI gets stuck for a second or two especially when switching between the camera and other apps. I'm so sorry I gave in and installed it.
I think it's different for mini owners. I upgraded my battery in march of this year and its already at 89%, I blame ios26 frankly.
Oof! Mine is still the original one, and it’s incidentally also at 89% after maybe 3.5 years of being my daily driver.
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.
Not updating from Sequoia until the Liquid Glass era is over.
They literally give you a new slider to increase or reduce the Liquid Glass effect to align with your personal preferences.
Just anecdotally, increasing the blur seems to have an associated performance cost, especially in Springboard ("the home screen".) It's probably only ~100ms for each interaction, so it probably won't impact latency-insensitive users.
As others have said, it helps with the legibility but Liquid Glass is still distracting and illegible. I share the wish that Apple eventually returns to a more sensible, legible UI.
Transparency is obviously not the only change they added with this liquid glass thing.
Unfortunately the slider does not fix Liquid Glass. Notifications are still unreadable even when you go full opaque. You need to also toggle Reduce Transparency to actually get the UI to be opaque enough to be readable.
Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!
I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).
But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.
That's certainly not what the reviews say:
> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ive-been-usi...
That's certainty not what the reviews say, the complaint was about notifications, your quote doesn't mention them
It looks significantly better on the Mac with this release.
Waiting 10 years for the next major overhaul seems like a bad plan.
You’ll probably be waiting around a decade, then (about the amount of time Apple has between these refreshes), and won’t be able to upgrade your Mac hardware (because they never support OSs older than what they ship with). For people developing for Apple platforms, there are even more restrictions.
All of that is fine, of course, just as long as you’re aware. I also hate Liquid Glass, but unfortunately don’t think I can avoid it for another year. I just hope that the stuff they rolled back makes it bearable.
Still daily driving the 6s after almost 11 glorious years, and I can't imagine software ever being painfully slow on M series hardware. But if you need, well, are forced, to be on latest MacOS, then you are out of luck and you have my sympathy.
(My relatives iPhone updated and its just bad all around. And with increased font size for accessibility, elements don't cover all the text. Feels rushed and not the promised Apple land.)
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.
but it's bad enough to be worth not upgrading.
The panic is overblown.
The panic was, frankly, underblown at first. The first iterations of Liquid Glass were truly awful. It’s now okay, after a lot of tweaking and a LOT less “glass”. Now we have more frost.
But Liquid Glass is still broken at a conceptual level. The only way to fix it is to start all over. Which they basically are, by swapping parts of liquid glass out with every release.
Indeed, such a basic and obvious design fail yet all those "I can't read text, but it's grown on me"
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?
There's a fix on the keyboard, it's got a little sun icon, next to the escape key.
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.
...relative to what, Windows 11?
> 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.
The iPhone 16 was the big "Built for Apple Intelligence" release, where they added hardware to support AI. So not too surprising to me that iPhone models before the 16/15 Pro wouldn't be able to support the new AI Siri.
The surprising part to me is that it took a full 2 years after the iPhone 16 launch to release the feature - and even then it's still a beta release.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying it out, but right now I'm still in the waitlist to actually enable the feature. I'm mostly just looking for a usable hands free driving experience compared the old Siri which I found to be almost completely useless. Anything beyond that would be a bonus. I have so little faith in Siri though at this point, though, that I am not expecting miracles.
That’s not correct. It reaches back to the 12.
They might be referring to the Apple Intelligence features in particular.
Even further back. iOS 27 supports iPhone 11 (released 7 years ago, btw).
Source: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ near the bottom of the page.
This was already known when Apple Intelligence was first announced years ago so nothing surprising there.
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.
100% agree. We had to turn it off because it was too frustrating for everyone involve. Now we’re at “trust, but verify” where “verify” is looking at Screen Time stats at the end of each week.
My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
That’s a good idea . So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords.
One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off.
As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device.
I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
The state of parental controls on apple devices is absolutely appalling.
The more time kids spend on the device, the more revenue Apple generates. They don’t have any incentive for it to really work.
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.
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.
> I'm looking forward to trying out Safaris new ability to vibe code extensions that will modify websites to remove annoyances.
Sounds like a great way for people to get hacked.
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.
I just want a Siri that doesn't trigger when my partner says "Siri set a timer for 20 minutes" on a completely different floor of the house.
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 got the same feeling from the scene about the new Apple Watch features in the media event on Wednesday. Having a device listen to your conversations for you, so that you can avoid the hassle of having to ask someone to repeat themselves when you zone out, seems a little depressing to me. It makes Apple seem a little out of touch as well. (Are AI note taking "pins" and hardware devices really something people want? Why emulate them?)
You’re mad that Siri was asked to find a recipe in an email and add its items to a grocery list?
That doesn’t sound like a cultural divide issue.
I went to see the video expecting to agree with you, but actually I agree with the parent poster.
The video comes off as she doesn't care about her mom, or the recipe, or cooking, and the person doesn't even know what a peach is. The tone in which she says "what did mom mention...", as if she's clearly distracted thinking about something else, probably her busy NY job, and just have AI deal with this annoyance of family as fast as possible... plus she needs AI to read the email and tell her which peaches to get? I dunno, read the email and interpret it yourself, you probably know your mom better than Siri? And call your mom in case of doubt? Maybe I'm too Spanish... but it felt quite dystopian...
All of these AI demos have the same vibe "You'll save so much time now AI can reword your mum's text messages". I don't know what these SV guys are doing, but writing shopping lists, talking to my friends, or booking a haircut doesn't take me very much time at all.
What I want is an AI that detects I'm scrolling social media and closes the app. That would save me many hours a week vs trying to save 30 seconds on reserving a table for dinner.
This is actually how it works in silicon variety. Tech workers are expected to give 100% to the company, families and other matter like a kid are seen as “disturbance”.
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 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 think its good especially if you are on an M1 generation. This is one of those releases with loads of fixes and speedups and not a whole lot of anything else
I would upgrade if only because you would otherwise stop receiving security patches at this point.
macOS 15 should be getting security updates until at least the end of next year. I've been using it for ~2 years and I'll happily spend another year using it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that macOS 15 security updates are only made available for devices for which 15 is the last compatible macOS version.
That's not how it's worked in the past. They did security updates until three versions later released regardless of the hardware. What you may be thinking of is that there was some weirdness around Intel vs M series chips and how those got updates.
Yes. I have a M1 8GB MacBook Air that I use as a lightweight travel machine, and macOS 26 utterly trashed the performance on it. Things I used to do fine (work on small Xcode projects) were completely unusable, to the point where I had to downgrade it to Sequoia.
I've been running it on the macOS 27 beta all summer, and it's night and day. It's usable again.
Generally you wanna wait for 27.2
I’m on a same boat
Should probably do clean install at this point - M1 still good enough and new laptops cost a fortune.
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.
How does CarPlay still not have a brightness control? I leave my CarPlay perpetually in dark mode because light mode is searing in all but directly sunlight.
Is it using the light sensor?
In my experience in a Subaru, a Toyota, and a Volvo, it seems to be connected to the car's light sensor (so it triggers at the same time as the automatic headlights). A third-party head unit I've tried was just always light.
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.
Can't wait for this trend of making absolutely everything rounded to go away. It looks so ugly.
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.
I have a 16 Pro, who’s sales pitch was “built for Apple Intelligence”, or something to that effect. I can’t customize the Siri voice. I’m a bit shocked that they would have all the features on the 16 to avoid a class action based on their sales pitch of that phone. Tweaking the voice didn’t seem like it would be all that demanding.
Even for iCloud subscribers with newer hardware, as the cloud version should be faster. You’d have the choice between privacy and better performance.
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.
Anyone else accidentally upgrade to 26.7 first?
In moments like this I kind of assume that I should do 26.7 first because probably they test incremental transitions more thoroughly? I wish I had more faith in software updates.
There was a bug in my update UI. I selected iOS 27, told it to install, and then it said it was downloading and installing 26.7 the whole time. When it rebooted it did come back up on 27 though.
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.
It did both. I didn’t get offered 26.7 until noon. I did it. Then it offered 27. I did it. But instead it showed that it was updating to… 26.7.
Except when it was complete it actually had done 27.
Lots and lots of Reddit posts with the same bug. It’s not just you… Apple botched the meta that shows during the 27 upgrade.
Good news is the upgrade worked fine.
Yep. You could choose "26.7" or "upgrade to iOS27" but after tapping "upgrade to iOS 27", the next option was JUST 26.7 I think it did both upgrades in series though, I don't think I had to manually select 27 again later.
same, I saw the exact same weird transition from 27 -> 26.7... def seems like a bug
so, finally ipad 8th gen support is over. any idea if performance improvements would be released to 8th gen as feature update?
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.
That’s what the beta released at wwdc is for! To test software before the release, to get build breaks before the general public and fix them then.
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.
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).
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.
A suggestion: try to use BetterDisplay’s HiDPI in reverse, rendering your 1440p monitor as 2880p (macOS Retina), then downsampling it to the native 1440p. There's an entry about it on their GitHub Wiki, look for "HiDPI, LoDPI"
Did they remove the rounded corners mess?
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 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.
Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.
I'd normally suggest waiting till a .1 release, but 26 was such a disaster that I might forego this advice.
Hmm, got the liquid glass slider, put it all the way to the right, but still lost a lot of contrast in my notifications...
Yeah, I did the same but found the experience worse. Currently I've set it at 75% where it is tolerable.
What happened is that the accessibility setting “reduce transparency” which indeed used to reduce transparency and made glass backgrounds darker, now makes them fully black. So dark icons don’t come out of the background anymore. What we got back is a slider that does not make the glass darker, just more opaque. But notifications are still white on light glass. So it really got worse for me.
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).
I'm using it now; it's pretty good. My phone feels a bit faster. That's always a good thing.
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.
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.
(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.
that seems mostly sensible? you are still able to do it, but the features probably should not be treated as a monolith
I liked the monolith. If I didn't want any AI on my device, I liked having the ability to switch that off and be done with it like Firefox offers (and what Apple offered in the last major release).
Looks like it's time to update to macOS 26. Should be stable now.
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.
> I wish they would improve the extension support in Safari.
They added the ability to vibe code your own custom extensions in this version.
I honestly think vibe coding your own extensions would be safer than using 3rd party ones which are malware more often than not.
On Safari I use
- Wipr (Ad Blocker)
- 1Password (Password Manager)
- Dark Mode HN (HN dark mode hack.)
Not really sure what else I need tbh
WBlock is great too if you’re looking for something that’s free and/or more customizable. It’s the uBO of Safari basically
I use 1Password, RSS Button (To highlight if the page has a feed, so I can subscribe with my own Miniflux instance), 1Blocker (Ad blocking), Tampermonkey for loading userscripts on some websites, Readdeck extension to easily send something to my "read later" pile. It's not a lot of them, but every time I want to test a new one I dread it.
Just a heads up, you can have dark mode on every website on iOS Safari with Dark Reader: https://darkreader.org/
I use Dark Reader on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, but I've found Noir to be better on Safari.
Feels like the perfect thing to vibe-code based on existing FF/Chrome extensions? Decent agent should make pretty light work of it.
That gives you the extension, but the workflow within macOS for users is still very user hostile. Problem with extensions might be that the training data isn't that great as there's not that many open source Safari extensions.
Still waiting for them to allow me to use any search provider I want (e.g. Kagi).
I had Safari build me an extension that lets me press control+space on any page to bring up a spotlight-type search box and to search in Kagi.
It did it, it works… but it’s beyond stupid that this still isn’t just a setting to add a custom query string, even if they bury it in the advanced settings.
Do tech savvy people actually use chrome on iOS? Why?
My assumption would be for account syncing.
I use Safari, but whenever I go on a pilgrimage to try a different browser, I also get it on my phone so I can access tabs and bookmarks whenever I am.
Does uBlock Origin (or something equivalent) work in Safari?
There’s an official Safari version [1], but it’s more like a toy compared to Firefox.
[1]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
The standard answer is Wipr but nothing is as good as uBlock Origin imo. It's passable enough that I daily drive Safari now.
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.
>> Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.
From what I recall, I had this in the first beta then it disappeared and never came back.
Safari does in fact feel snappier.
It actually feels smoother on my iphone, and changing liquid glass effect is huge!
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.
I Do not like the new battery icon on MacOS. I think they made it the same as iOS.
Woo! WiFi icon changes into Ethernet when it is connected and prioritized. Nice. Long overdue.
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...
But— are they faster?
IOS claimed to have improved app startup over the previous version
> For example, app launches are up to 30% faster,8 new photos load in your Photos library up to 70% faster,9 and AirDrop transfers are up to 80% faster.10
I was surprised to see that macOS is 28GB. Is that all the local models that come with it?
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.
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?
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.
Isn’t the whole hope is that Google (and other app vendors) doesn’t even get a say at what’s possible through Siri.
All it takes is to expose application’s UI to the model, and let the model send actions. If a human can do it tapping on the screen, the machine should be able to do the same thing.
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.
Can I disable AI?
Was hoping for advanced iMessage filtering and enhancements to the Passwords app. Bummer.
I only just spotted that the AirPods Pro 3 can do heart rate monitoring. That's some amazing miniaturization.
I wonder if Apple have fixed the issue where the user want the Siri to use a different language than the UI language.
Should developers upgrade yet, or wait?
Is battery life of the new iOS version comparable to pre iOS 26?
If not, I’m staying at iOS 18.
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.
At last, the feature Windows has had since XP: separate volume for different audio sources (alarms and ring tones).
Embarrassing.
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.
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).
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...
I jumped from Ventura to Sequoia when 26 was first released, and I can safely say it's been around the same.
I'd probably make a similar leap to 27 when 28 gets released.
Sequoia it's quite fast and stable.
Also, I really really really abhor the new UI.
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.
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.
Last year. They started basing it off the release year with 26. Though it comes a little early, kind of like the model year of a car.
siri is kinda useless nowadays imo
Siri has always been, is, and will always be, useless. That’s consistency for you!
Upgraded just now. Went pretty smooth!
macOS 27 ade my M2 MBA feel like new. Tahoe just felt a lot less responsive most of the time.
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
Why not series 8 apple why not?
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.
you can add square corners with a terminal command afaik https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/want-the-bigger-window-...
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.
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
I bet it will, because cross-platform virtualization and containerization is a boon for Apple. Also, Rosetta will stay for older programs (esp. games) and some Intel specific frameworks per Apple's docs.
I bet with all the transistor count increase, that circuitry is a blip.
Apple can’t wait to ditch rosetta2, and dump all the development work on fex for supporting old legacy x86 software.
oh right, forgot about virtualization. Apple probably still need those customers that spend half of their day in Parallels Desktop
Also, being able to run x86 Linux binaries is important for developers:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
The warning dialog I received the other day while running macOS 27 Beta said that it will be removed in macOS 28.
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.
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."
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!
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.
The majority of the people in your address book probably store their contacts in iCloud but do not have Advanced Data Protection enabled, so their entire address books are held by Apple unencrypted. I wouldn't be surprised if most of my friends allow social media apps to read all their contacts, also.
Is it just me or is clicking “iOS 27” on iPhone showing upgrade screen for 26.7?
same. and at the bottom it says "Also Available : iOS 27" with a button which leads right back to iOS 26.7.
Same, but I clicked it, awaited the update, and I'm on iOS 27 proper now-- so just a visual bug.
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
There's approximately zero chance Google would go along with the changes that Apple would have had to make to support EU's DMA.
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.
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.
Watch is too cheap to care about. It’s a disposable thing that you’re expected to toss away every year, it’s obvious.
Why the fuck is this trending? Beta was out months ago
It’s the same every fing year. People (developers) don’t test the beta, but just complains when the .0 is released in the fall with ”how could anyone have anticipated this?”
Not everyone on the Mac is a Mac developer, nor can they afford the bugs in beta software when they are trying to get work done.
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.
27 got the slider so I though: finally I can turn it off even more. Turns out the max value of the slider is what toggling “less Liquid Glass please” was already doing in 26. But at the same time they modified it and now it somehow looks eee worse? I don’t know whst they did but it’s just looking less readable, at least in dark mode.
And the worse thing about LG is the floating bottom nav bar that keeps shrinking to an icon when you least expect it, moving all elements.
MacOS 26 forced me to give up spotlight for Raycast. It would do this thing where new delayed results would steal highlight focus so hitting the enter button to select something from the list became a lottery. Would you select the thing you see or would something else replace it in the time you press the button.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
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
> 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
Makes sense - definitely an "unable" - I was just curious where the delay was coming, but that iMessage example really sounds like a system issue I agree.
Glad iOS 27 fixed it.
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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.
They discussed it in the Keynote https://www.newegg.com/insider/ios-27-performance-boost-ever...
I mean, this is nice:
"Apple framed WWDC 2026 around three pillars: platform improvements, trust and safety, and Apple Intelligence."
and it could have been mentioned in the launch announcement post.
Compare it to 18 before the UI fail and you might have a non-dud of a response. And no, it wasn't the whole point, just read the announcement to see how much space is devoted to other points