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.
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…
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.
I switched to Everything for search a while ago and haven’t looked back. For the start menu I replace it with Open Shell, which seems to find apps much more reliably.
Always turn off searching the internet as much as possible on both. Helps a ton. I think I set both windows and iOS to only search local applications and settings
Firefox's "awesome bar" behaves the same way. I guess it's either inherent to the problem somehow, or else everyone is sharing a library (unlikely), or else everyone just makes the same mistakes.
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.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
Don't worry, airdrop does it too! I've accidentally sent airdrop requests to strangers from their profile picture moving under my finger as I'm approaching to touch someone else's. The single most idiotic design I've ever seen in UI. I don't use airdrop for anything sensitive anymore, obviously.
I really wish apps stopped doing that "search on type" thing in search boxes. You either need to have only a couple miliseconds of response time, or you need to confirm that you want the search process to start. Or maybe at least have some feedback showing "more content is loading, watch out, don't click".
The amount of misclicks daily because of crappy slow-but-should-be-fast search probably offsets by 10x the amount of time required to hit "enter" for the search to start.
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.
It's probably asynchronous reranking doing something weird. My guess is that the underlying ranking algorithms in these desktop search bars are very ropey, and they can't debug or diagnose because privacy reasons means the developers don't get to see what results were generated for different query/index combos. Also search is probably just not staffed most of the time.
So many platforms with search have a variation of this problem now.
The other issue with Mac search is that it never tells you when it’s done, so you can’t tell if it searched and failed to find something or is still searching.
'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.
I'd take the widget! For me typing "calc" finds the "com.apple.calculator" folder. If I continue to "calcu" etc, it suggests "com.apple.ncplugin.calculator" instead. Brilliant intelligence right there.
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.
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 was trying to see what happens here. It does give the Sound settings panel as the first hit. But when I then press Return, it opens System Settings, but does not actually go to the Sound settings, but General.
Also, search inside the Settings app has been broken for many releases now. I always wonder if anyone inside Apple is actually using macOS or iOS.
I had this problem on Spotlight, I solved it once and never happened to me again, there is a setting to reindex all the files, which solves the issue. On iOS however I still have this problem.
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.
Ah, but hitting enter now takes you to the top result! Therefore it has to search as you type, so there's something to activate as soon as you hit enter! /s
...I've been seeing this search style in more and more places recently, and I hate it. Let me type my search, then hit enter, then you can go find what I asked for. Don't slow everything down by searching on every character I type.
It’s called incremental search and it’s useful, but only when there’s some debouncing involved and the search results is presented at once or the items are sorted by the order they are found.
I can't search for Apples own Notes app. I've tried the name in my local language, I've tried the original english name of the app. Nothing. It will show me OneNote which isn't even installed anymore, but not the Notes app. Very strange.
- 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.
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.
>> the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…
Some people don’t like that. I don’t know why you like having to wait but if they showed Chess for CHE you could still find other apps if you kept typing.
Maybe there are also people who like the lottery of results changing the instant you click on the app you want because it adds excitement to their lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have to send a daily email that always has the subject starting with "Work Diary". If I type "W", it doesn't come up. If I type "Wo" it comes up as the 3rd auto-complete suggestion. If I type any more characters, I have to type the entire two words. This is on Android, but I have a feeling it's no better on iOS.
I'd love to know the algorithm they're using for this. Fuzzy search seems like it was a mostly solved problem 20 years ago, and it's definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.
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.
Seems like someone got updated KPIs and decided to try the most ham-fisted enshittification move to raise registrations. Oh, it is now possible again to see about five top reviews per item. Seems like loss of traffic was rough.
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.
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.
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.
The annoying thing with Finder is when you're in a folder, you start to search, and then it defaults to "This Mac" and not the god damn folder you're in.
That's because you have that set in your Finder Settings.
With the Finder open, go to Settings > Advanced, and change the drop-down at the bottom to "Search the Current Folder". This is something I do on the first run of every new Mac I set up.
On my incredibly midrange PC that has a midrange SSD in it, the Linux `find` and `grep` commands usually can find stuff much quicker than any 'accelerated' and 'cached' desktop search, even though the only caching they usually get is when the files are in the page cache because I have interacted with them. Even when that's not the case, it's faster AND more accurate that GNOME search or whatever search is in Windows Explorer.
Windows is the same - searching the fs is faster and more accurate than using these 'quick search' tools, which are borderline broken.
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.
The good part is you have the source so you can just fork it, fix the code to prioritize results properly, compile and install it to fix Ubuntu, then see if you can get your patch upstreamed. /s
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.
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.
Check out TinyStart. It’s 5€, and the best 5€ I’ve spent in ages. It’s super fast, and handles basic math. Even lets you put the results on the pasteboard!
Spotlight works for me across files and apps on Mac, iOS, visionOS, pretty well - it has failed occasionally but usually it's because my disk is full. I haven't really found anything better (Alfred is good but is just a wrapper around Spotlight)
I quit Apple Mail (due to its poor handling of Gmail accounts) and started using Mimestream years ago. Truly excellent mail client. Actively and thoughtfully developed.
They did fix it (macOS 27, my experience). I have like 600,000 mail messages - there was a period where Mail search was awful but these days it's fast and accurate. It really comes down to whether you need to rebuild your index.
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.
Raycast2 has its own index and it's way more reliable and fast.
I don't understand how Apple does not care about many of the core services of their OS. Searching in Mail is a coinflip
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!
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.
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.
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.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
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.
Why do filesystem indices get stale? The OS can track what files get accessed, isn't inotify watertight?
I know that Windows has some equivalent stuff, that the antivirus uses to disallow opening files before they got scanned, so I'd wager that API is functionally required to not miss any changes.
Yet Windows indexing is one of the worst pieces of software in existence and frequently gets out of sync.
Even with inotify failing, if the system is plugged in and idle, it could quickly do a scan for files with update date > last known indexed time and index those. Like once per day maybe. Wouldn't take much load or memory, IMHO.
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.
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.
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
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.
Try turning off slide to type. It's under Settings > General > Keyboard.
I did it earlier this year. It seems to be much more accurate and confident with which key it thinks I want. I do occasionally miss the sliding but it's worth it overall.
Yeah, I’m not a dedicated iPhone user and my personal phones are androids so my iOS experience has been iPod Touch 2G -> employer owned iPhone 8 -> employer owned iPhone XR -> iPad Air M3. Each of those big gaps have seen the UI shift and the keyboard decline.
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.
I used a Clicks keyboard with a folded Moto Razr for a while and it was Blackberry-esque. The keyboard is a little narrow compared to the Blackberries of yore, though. I'm somewhat hopeful about the Clicks Communicator which is wider, but sadly still only a four row keyboard.
To be clear, I only kind of recommend the keyboard. I stopped using mine after a while because of how awkward it was with the Razr unfolded and never actually found it faster or more accurate than the on screen keyboard.
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".
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.
Completely agree. I switched from Android to iOS... 6 years ago now? and the keyboard immediately felt off. I thought it was just something related to needing to adjust, but I reused my old Android (Pixel 3a) for the first time a few days ago (cuz I'm working on an Android app and wanted to try it on an actual phone) and the keyboard just works. No typo, no ass completions, I can actually type fast as I feel it and the text ends up mostly (99%) correct on the first try. On iOS I sometimes really struggle writing exactly what I want (the worst offending situation is iOS "correcting" a word when I hit send, so what's sent is literally not what I typed)
As someone who has had an iPhone since the 3GS (I'm so old), but tries Android out every now and then - I can wholeheartedly agree.
The only real advantages iOS have left are not being run by an advertising/tracking company (which is reducing as Apple looks for services revenue) and the quality and variety of indie iPhone and iPad apps (yet Apple are happy to make those same devs extremely unhappy).
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.
I would actually go one step further and claim that typing has not come back to the speed and accuracy of Blackberry and Nokia phones with physical keyboard. It's taking so long that we may actually destroy humanity with AI before we have fast and accurate keyboards again.
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.
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.
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).
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.
you most likely have an Abe in your contacts, I don’t have an Abe but have a similar issue with a last name from mine. the behavior sort of makes sense if I squint and crane my neck around a bit but I have no idea how the weightings are so bad.
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.
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.
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 switched to iPhone for 2-3 months but the keyboard was so back I switched back to Android. If Apple can't get a keyboard (any keyboard!) to work in a decade, I'm going to an OS that works.
It's crazy that SwiftKey was terrible too, even though it's the one I use exclusively on Android.
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.
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 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.
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.
I have French / English and every time I start my sentence with "The" (obviously the start of an English sentence), it autocorrects as "Thé" (tea). There's veeeery few situations in French where a sentence can start with "Thé".
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience the new Siri is marginally worse for everything that I used to use Siri for. It's much slower to respond. It asks for obnoxious classifications. It doesn't know that when I say "call Mike" I mean the Mike I call every day vs the other Mike in my contact I have never called in my life. It defaults back to Apple products for everything, old Siri knew I liked Spotify but now if I ask it to play a song it will complain about my Apple Music subscription. I could go on.
My experience with the new Siri is objectively worse. I am on an Iphone 17 Pro Max and all searches are very slow, accessing utilities has slowed down quite a bit, lagginess when settings timers. Failure to make new notes or reminders. Stuff just not working. I've been using the OS since the RC. I give it a flat 0/10
> 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.
One pretty bad regression is that the Spotify client now from time to time has pretty bad audio glitches on my M1 Pro Mac (of course this may end up as a typical fingerpointing issue, e.g. whether the bug is in macOS or in Chromium - but it definitely regressed from macOS 26 to 27).
Otherwise macOS 27 is mostly okay-ish though, especially compared to 26.
The first part of this one is more hilarious when you ask "Find me the nearest Starbucks" while CarPlay is actively providing you navigation: "I'm sorry, I don't know your location".
"""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?
Search on Mac has been very broken for a while, whatever they use to get the text results from files just can’t handle code, one node_modules folder and that list will just be hundreds of JavaScript files no matter what you type.
What is the issue with the iOS keyboard? The support for third party keyboards is garbage but the default keyboard is reliable for me. Search is horrible on iOS and Mac though
Sure I feel that the Apple bundled apps are better, the design is better, but frankly Golden Gate broke more third-party apps than Tahoe did, including some third-party apps where I had an old perpetual license and had not updated for many years.
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.
Even weather was/is comically bad. Ask it anything specific and it would fall over, repeating the broadest, least helpful version of weather data, even if all that data is clearly available in the ios weather app. Specifics on wind, precipitation hourly, etc.
So no, you can't really ask a homepod for the weather either - Homepod's weather was more like a shitty version of sticking your head outside and looking up at the sky.
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.
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.
Not on macOS but have my own browser extension basically doing the same with Firefox, for use with agents.
It's using a clone of my real Firefox profile, and can "ping" me if it encounters a page that needs my human input, like a login page (as I don't give it access to my password manager) or captcha page. Although sometimes it "bypasses" the captcha page by itself, even though I've instructed it not to...
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:
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.)
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.
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.
Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store.
Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well.
However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused.
Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
A lot of game industry operates on a "release and move on" model; nobody has time to keep updating an old game hardly anyone buys instead of working on a new thing. On PC and console this is fine because your games keep working more or less indefinitely.
But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.
I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA.
Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed.
Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games.
It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance.
I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them.
And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does).
Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does.
> why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks.
Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
From what I understand you're saying that Apple should provide 2 things: (1) Vulkan drivers and (2) backwards compatibility forever.
I don't really know enough about graphics to discuss point (1). From what I understand, Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly, and the Asahi Vulkan drivers are significantly less performant than Metal (how much of that is due to beta/community status vs. architectural bottleneck I have no idea).
But let's say they provide (1).
Providing (2) would simply be a big mistake. It is a huge mistake of Windows, of the C++ programming language and of the x86 ISA (none of which are very good). Linux distros do not provide this either, beyond the core kernel syscalls and glibc. It is certainly a very big ask and not something trivial.
I'm only asking for (1); Apple can keep breaking APIs forever as long as they support the libraries that enable Proton.
(2) is precisely the reason why nobody can port games to macOS anymore, and largely why ARM is a second-class citizen in PC gaming too. You cannot depreciate things like AVX or 32-bit library execution modes, and then demand native builds get made to 20-year-old games. Apple Silicon's ISA extensions like AMX are not a replacement for x86's SIMD extensions, it's not standardized through Arm or supported in Asahi either. Native Mac games need to incorporate Apple's proprietary and unstable tech like Metal and the Apple Silicon microarchitecture, which makes their games unstable and difficult to support in the long term. Translation is Apple Silicon's only choice for game preservation and mainstream game support.
> Apple GPUs don't really fit the Vulkan model too cleanly
This is a misconception that stems from Metal's preference for tile-based deferred rendering pipelines. Vulkan 1.3 is fully viable on the M1 onward, which is enough to support DirectX 12 translation in Proton. The performance of Asahi's drivers are not any worse than the official Vulkan drivers that Arm provides for TBDR-optimized GPUs like the Mali line.
Games should simply not be written for a particular architecture. The rendering part of the game engine should already be abstracted away from the particular rendering API (there are other significant platforms which do not support Vulkan: PS5 and Xbox, which your game should be capable of targeting). And the math library should have fallbacks to standard C (or standard C++ etc.) and then specialized implementations for AVX, NEON, SVE, etc.
Nothing else needs to be architecture specific.
Now, sure, NEON is slower than AVX-256/512. But backending to NEON or even standard C is certainly going to be faster than running stuff over an x86-to-ARM translation layer.
Sooner or later the Steam Deck 2 will release, probably on an ARM platform (if the Steam Frame compatibility layers go well), and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when, if the games were well written in the first place, they could simply be trivially recompiled.
> 32-bit library execution modes
If your application assumes pointers are 32-bits, or any particular size, or even any set of particular sizes, it's completely broken.
As for (1), if Asahi Vulkan drivers are really good, that just goes to show why Apple isn't supporting Vulkan. Metal applications seem to be faster, and Apple wants to push devs to make their apps for the faster API.
You're welcome to disagree with me about (2), I don't care what macOS picks in this regard. It's not going to help games get ported to macOS or Apple Silicon any faster. There are hundreds of thousands of video games that will never be updated again, macOS will never support these games without translation. Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality. This is why efforts like WoW64 and FEX exist in the first place; you will never recompile the majority of Windows games. Ever.
(1) is just common sense. Go ask your favorite LLM; does hardware-level TBDR optimization degrade basic Vulkan support? No, it doesn't, and we have dozens of mobile GPUs that support Vulkan to prove it. Metal is not "faster" and it's architecture does not preclude high-performance Vulkan drivers in any way. If you don't believe me, ask anyone else.
> millions upon millions upon millions of dollars of electricity will simply be wasted running x86-to-ARM, Win32-to-Linux and Direct3D-to-Vulkan dynamic compatibility layers when
x86-to-ARM doesn't have to be slow. Accelerators like Apple's AMX can leverage autovectorization during translation, which is significantly faster than NEON and potentially more efficient than x86 SIMD.
D3D-to-Vulkan and Win32-to-Linux is almost always more power-efficient for most GPUs/games. Wine is much thinner than a full-fat Windows runtime, and DXVK can translate DirectX code into batched calls with a shader cache even if the game itself doesn't support it. Do you think the Steam Deck runs games better on Windows, somehow?
Why are you deltaing to windows? You should be deltaing to native.
Obviously an IBM 704 program will run faster on an IBM 704 emulator than on a hardware IBM 704. That's not an argument to keep writing apps for the IBM 704 and "just translate them".
> Your ideal world where programmers support and recompile games 3 decades after release does not exist in reality.
Happens in literally every other programming industry though.
The reason this cannot happen in the games industry is that game developers are not good software developers. They are much more akin to physics-numerical-methods people who can write some magic spaghetti-Fortran that runs really fast and does black magic, but no one can maintain, debug or integrate.
For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
It streams videos. It works. I'd rather they don't mess with it.
However, the guy who decided to put a useless button on the side of the remote that interrupts whatever you're watching, should get fired immediately. It's almost every day I grab the remote and press it by accident, and have to switch back to what I was watching, and resume playback, because Netflix exits out of the stream.
Sadly, Apple TV is the only Hollywood-approved streaming device that isn't a total trash heap.
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.
There is a setting in the “Reminders” app where Siri will automatically categorize your reminders into certain categories. If you have a shopping list and you add chickpeas and red beans for example it might put them into a category of “pulses and grains”. I think the idea is you probably buy all the things in a particular category from the same kind of store (or the same section of a supermarket or whatever).
For me yesterday I needed to buy dishwasher rinse aid so when I added it to my shopping list siri put it into the “beverages” category, and when my wife on a different occasion asked me to buy some makeup remover for her siri put that into a “condiments” section.
I have not done anything (on purpose) to make the classification like this by mistraining it or whatever - it’s just been that bad out of the box.
We can have these micro easter eggs clearly indicating that flawed humans were involved, or we can have perfectly proofread Opusplaining. Enjoy the former while you can!
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…)
TBH Tahoe feels like an especially buggy .0 still. I'm updating as soon as my laptop shows it as available in the hopes that it'll feel closer to a .1 than what Tahoe is.
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.
It's not year+1, it's the year that most overlaps with that OS being the latest. 27 will be the latest OS for ~9 months of 2027 and only ~3 of 2026.
I also don't know why this would be considered more confusing for chronology. The year is in the name, whereas it was previously at best, years since version 1, or something more confusing in the case of macOS. I couldn't keep track of all the latest OS versions before, now we will be able to going forward.
They do yearly major releases in September for all their OSes. They are directly tied to the year.
But Ubuntu sticks to the year and month the OS was released. I think OP was complaining about MacOS using year+1 as the version, even though the OS is being released in the current year.
I personally find Ubuntu's versioning to be the easiest to understand because you know when this Ubuntu version was released. It would be very annoying if they called Ubuntu 26.10 Ubuntu 27, though.
As someone who has been doing iOS programming for ~16 years I'm glad they did something. Nothing better than running Xcode 16, on macOS 15, to do iOS 18 work. Unless, of course, you also have watchOS 11 work too.
This feels like the kind of thing where the mismatching version numbers bugged some influential people internally. But I suppose a practical application could be recommending matching versions if customers run into issues since they are trying to integrate devices more.
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.
To refine my statement on lazy or non-design. Notifications can be valuable, for me i'd like backup notifications and find my messages. Only those, ever. When only those are enabled, MacOS has their own secret settings and is allowed to nag about updates, incompatibility and maybe some other things i don't remember. Part of the problem is the illusion of control, and being spammy about self-importance of new OS versions. Great for some users, insulting to me.
This is made even worse by "focus" which still shows notifications but without the text. Then i'm distracted AND i don't know why.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
If Apple wanted to make the OS more secure, they would make the OS more modular, allowing users to reduce the surface risk by not installing bloated components
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
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.
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 finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.
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
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 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.
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”.
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,
100% not sarcastic. I disabled all continuity options and the annoying delay to bring up the context menu is gone. My phone is my only apple product. I don't need it.
So after disabling this I realised since I only have an iPhone (and no Mac or other Apple devices) I should disable anything and everything in the settings that syncs stuff between devices. There was also one about the Focus options (like Do Not Disturb) and some other ones. I figure this can only simplify everything and speed up the phone if it never has to check for any (non existent) device to sync settings against. Still have all my local phone settings backing up to iCloud
You think that's ridiculous, try sharing a video on WhatsApp that's longer than a minute. See how "easy" that process is, especially if you walk away from your phone while it's "processing" or "preparing" the video.
The problem with this is that iirc, this also signals to web pages that you do not like a lot of motion, which IS a nice UX enhancer for some pages, but might supress animations from (auto)playing where it's not what you want because the animations are the reasons you're visiting that page.
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.
I've had the latter with Gemini in Android Auto. In fact, my scenario was even worse.
Me: "Send a message to ".
Gemini: "OK what's the message?"
Me: "Can you bring Tylenol I'm having a headache?"
Gemini: "I'm sorry, I cannot help with that. If you need medical advice..." <-- or something to that extent.
Up to this point, I thought when Gemini would prompt for a message, it would simply accept whatever I said essentially as plain text - and maybe with the new Rambler feature on Pixel phones it may cleanup my message slightly.
But now I can see scenarios where Gemini would possibly need to parse my input. And it should have been obvious since I would often say things like "cancel" and I never questioned it.
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.
I don't use voice often (I'm also not quite sure what you're asking with 'three fifty', but if I just type '50F' into the new Siri it immediately shows '10C'. Hopefully the voice recognition continues to improve.
Ah, doh! I just tested it and it worked. Siri clearly can answer the question, now it seems more like a speech to text issue. I wonder if everything is using the new models or if stt is still using the old ones?
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.
Definitely made it worse for me. I'm on 15 pro, and when I have anything intensive open (ranging from youtube video ~ games), the phone starts burning through my hand and the battery in it. I would've kept 18 forever, except the camera on the old one died out and replacement came with 26 :(
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.
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
"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.
> The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.
I didn't see a single reference to iOS 18 in that article. So while I understand it would be faster than 26, those of us wondering about the comparison to iOS 18 are still in the dark.
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 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.
I think Apple's top-down approach is showing here. Google is more bottom-up, which has its flaws, but it's more suited for cases like this one. I seems that unless one of Apple's higher-ups notices a problem nobody is going to do anything.
For example, Android and Google Assistant has had excellent support for Polish for more than a decade. Siri still doesn't support Polish at all, even though all of Apple's AI suppliers support Polish perfectly well...
> Apple's incompetence in AI / Assistant etc stuff has to be studied.
Why should Apple focus on technical excellence when the company and their products are touted for literally gimmicks? In the end this is what brings the money and profits through the door, can't blame a company for providing what the market craves.
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.
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.
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.
Why Apple doesn't say "I'm sorry but your photos aren't accessible because they are being sorted and indexed at the moment"?
I didn't know inadvance why Siri can't access my photos (turns out it's because indexing isn't done) - at the beginning I thought there was some sort of other problem. Later I figured out (after going through privacy/permissions stuff) that it's too stupid to know why it can't see my photos.
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.
This is one of the very techniques under which the entire Apple Empire has been built. They take the "sweet spot" for $product and intentionally offer options on either side of that sweet spot. They also nerf the lower-end option in other ways (i.e. fewer ports) so to make the upgrade more enticing. This enables them to offer "Prices starting from...." that are dead-end options (like 8GB RAM or 128GB HD's).
Lots of companies do this across various industries. But it works best when the brand name is really strong and/or the competitive landscape is very weak.
I've grown to accept that it's just how they operate.
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.
Glad to see that Shared Albums are now full resolution!
Now, please:
1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
2. Fix identification/clean-up of duplicates.
3. Give us a way to tidy up facial recognition.
4. Allow us to join "best quality possible" collectives, which will replace our poor-quality photos with higher-quality originals from somebody else's library.
It’s a study in the rather tricky double edged sword of the Apple walled garden; on one hand they have control that allows providing extremely satisfying interactions and performance, on the other hand, because it’s been a soulless line-go-up corporation, it has very low pressure incentives to take anything beyond the 85% level.
So we are all stuck with an 85% very performant, e.g., Photos app, that has 15% extremely annoying and/or lack of features and functionality; because Apple cannot let go of control, but also fails in its responsibility, as is typical of controlling entities.
> 1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.
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.
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.
> So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.
I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck.
I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it.
Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works.
Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.
So I don't have kids but in the keynote I remember them making a big deal about totally revamping it in 27. I know they definitely added a way to officially lock it (with a passcode) so your kids won't be able to theoretically just deactivate screen time. I think before you technically could do sorta the same thing (you can restrict almost any app to require FaceID or passcode to unlock).
There's also the assistive access or whatever which really locks the phone down but that seems more like for old people.
Alternatively if you wanted to get advanced you could maybe (not sure if it's free) create an Apple business account and try to manage the phone like corporations do. Or you may just be able to generate a configuration profile for free and add to the device. I would expect that process to be a lot more robust generally. You can control pretty much anything. Downside is if you don't have an MDM your stuck with whatever settings are baked into that config profile. Depending what you want to restrict you could pair it with something like NextDNS and lock it down to only safe sites.
Sounds like Android is way better though in this regard. Having to setup a child specific account at the beginning of setup sounds like a pain. If I ever have kids makes me really want to only give them a dumb phone or something like the new (unreleased as of yet) Commodore Callback - has some smartphone features but intentionally no social media
The main problem here is that even if they revamp it, it likely still won’t work since the most basic features don’t work as advertised . It’s like buying a car and it won’t start every other day and will only move backwards.
My least favorite part is how the parental controls are locked into iMessage. There's no way to manage parental controls from anything other than another iDevice. I suppose this is a sales strategy for them - parent must buy an iDevice as well.
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?)
Yeah, few hours/days after the meeting about a minor detail... In a business settings meetings are routinely recorded and transcribed because everybody is just lazy.
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.
Who wants to spend time with family, cooking, taking care of self, when there are the shareholders, who need bigger yachts? Seriously, you guys are so out of touch... Why care for any of these, when we are loosing the AI race, and maybe it won't be "our" (employer's, or even favorite product manufacturer's) AI obliterating human race, but a competitors? /s
What did you expect on this SV VC funded site? There is a serious selection bias here, and in all SV.
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”.
This reminds me so much of the movie Her, where the main character’s job is to write heartfelt letters to people’s friends, family, even lovers, that they can’t be bothered to write themselves.
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.
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.
Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.
The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...
> 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.
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.
I want to stress this isn't something I measured. There are just these noticeable lags before the sigmoidal animation starts when, e.g. opening a folder.
It's on top of the latency inherent to the animations of sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, etc. that are throughout the interface. ~100ms on top of a ~600ms input-blocking sigmoid probably just looks like a 700ms sigmoid to people.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 reviewed the battery test results for iOS versions 26 (26.2, 26.3, 26.4, 26.6) and 27.
The comparison covered the iPhone 14 series and newer models.
The batteries in each model retain their charge 10–15% less effectively on iOS 27.
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.
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.