I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
> 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?" Two very similar things, the difference between which is inconsequential. Dealing with this "Sorry" has made reminders take too many 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 line and I'll figure it out myself"
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.
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:
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 :)
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 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.
Reminder to wait a couple of months before upgrading macOS!
Karma-farming aside, a more legitimate reminder is to disable Little Snitch before upgrading.
A couple of times recently, LS hasn't been compatible with the new version of macOS. Usually a new LS update is available quickly, but a couple of versions ago it was a bit of a wait.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Usually I wait until december to install the new iOS on my phone, since most of the time I don't care about the upgrades. This time I installed iOS 27 beta on my phone since the public beta was out, and I had 0 new bugs compared to iOS 26, but it hasn't been the big relief that I hoped for.
Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.
So what's your experience in terms of speed and battery life with iOS 27 on the iPhone 13 so far? I have a 13 mini, and I still haven't gotten over the (perceived) shorter battery life with iOS 26.
Upgrading the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro has been a fucking revelation. I just don't run out of battery any more. I'm sure Apple was telling me it was only 20% degraded or something too, but I would strongly, strongly recommend this if thinking about battery life is currently an issue for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I agree, despite being quite the Liquid Glass hater at first. It has grown on me, and they have ironed out the worst kinks. I still don't love it, but it's great that we're getting a bit of three-dimensionality back, after all the ambiguity that comes with the flat design trend of the decade or so before Liquid Glass.
The 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.
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?
It's fine on iOS, it's painful on macOS. The "squircle jail" is one of the worst design crimes Apple has shipped in a long time and another step back for Mac iconography.
So, is it better (faster, stronger, etc) than iOS 18? Everyone says iOS 26 was not good at all and iOS 27 is much better, but it seems like it's fairly simple to make something that's better than iOS 26. A more interesting question is whether it's better than iOS 18? Does anyone have any experience switching from iOS 18 to, say, some beta of iOS 27?
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
I definitely wanted to skip Tahoe by any means and was reluctant about this new version. I recently installed it because the wm I was using (omniwm) wasn't compatible with Tahoe anymore so I had to choose. I have to say it has been completely usable to me after reducing the liquid glass thing as much as the system allows.
I am currently on Sonoma and I was considering to upgrade to get the things that I missed in these years. I think and hope that macOS 27 will be faster wrt Sonoma...
Same. In addition to UX regression, we’re two major revs in, there’s nothing that’s a compelling enough value-add to be worth the trade-off, let alone the risk of unexpected side effects on any OS upgrade.
On my Xcode dev machine, I’ll be biting the bullet soon out of necessity, but my personal machine will stay Sequoia until they course-correct on “style over substance” (and not holding my breath).
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
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
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...
Today's implementation is using more advanced ML techniques ;)
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
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.
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 .
Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
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.
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?" Two very similar things, the difference between which is inconsequential. Dealing with this "Sorry" has made reminders take too many 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 line and I'll figure it out myself"
Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.
or am i the only one experiencing it like this?
* 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
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...
[1]: https://github.com/achiya-automation/safari-mcp#vs-apples-of...
This is how to enable: chrome://inspect/#remote-debugging
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.
Karma-farming aside, a more legitimate reminder is to disable Little Snitch before upgrading.
A couple of times recently, LS hasn't been compatible with the new version of macOS. Usually a new LS update is available quickly, but a couple of versions ago it was a bit of a wait.
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.
Gotta say, a massive downgrade.
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.
That doesn’t sound like a cultural divide issue.
"I eat Tide Pods, and I vote"
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/08/27/build-safari-extens...
For developers, there is a new framework (Core AI), that updates the decade old Core ML framework.
> Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreai
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.
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.
I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.
Personally, new Siri is the only reason to upgrade from 13 Pro, and it's just not worth the money to bother.
Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.
They added the ability to vibe code your own custom extensions in this version.
- Wipr (Ad Blocker)
- 1Password (Password Manager)
- Dark Mode HN (HN dark mode hack.)
Not really sure what else I need tbh
[1]https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
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.
But yes, it can give you information on a topic in a way the old Siri couldn't.
And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?
No? OK, I'll skip.
I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me
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.
> Rosetta is available for any Mac with Apple silicon using macOS 27 or earlier. Starting with macOS 28, the next major macOS release, Rosetta functionality will be available only for certain older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
Sauce: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527
I bet with all the transistor count increase, that circuitry is a blip.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
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).
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.
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.
I use Raycast now and it's 1000x better simply because it actually selects the highlighted thing.
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
What does "unable" mean?
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
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...
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.
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.