By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement—software is a living thing, and those of us who have been using it throughout the beta period this summer can attest to the fact that Apple is constantly at work trying to refine its experiences.

The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the apps on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written off Siri as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down on the home screen. That last interface is available systemwide, in any app, by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen. The search interface has a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also tend to end up with a few orphan blank “New conversation” and “New photo” entries, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the months that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, early on I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I certainly would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that entails.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie from an image in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

And because of Apple’s integration, your Siri AI experience works right via your AirPods. As I was walking down a hill near my house, I found myself wondering how far away the downtown skyscraper I could see was. Without even pulling out my phone, I asked Siri via my AirPods. After a moment, it gave me back an answer, but I realized it had plotted directions, so I replied “How about as the crow flies?” and it not only understood me, but gave me back a reasonable-sounding answer. And even better, it was completely correct.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message. I took a screenshot and asked it to add a bunch of listed panels that I was speaking on to my calendar, and it added only one of them, at the wrong time and in the wrong timezone.² Sometimes it mishears things, as the time I was using my AirPods to tell my wife I was walking past Dunkin’, and it asked me if I meant Duncan.

It’s at times unsettling to realize this is the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are, in my experience, no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need to save a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of this new enhanced Siri, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding—though Siri AI will whip up a Python script for you if you ask it—but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. And, more to the point, for questions about your life, contacts, and data? As newly minted CEO John Ternus pointed out as this year’s iPhone event, to get the same results from one of those competing AI chatbots, you’d need to hand it access to all your data. Is that really a better alternative?

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or later and the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available there.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has also ramped up Siri’s vocal stylings, if you’re on an iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro or later and use the English voices with either the American or British accents. You can now tweak both the pace and the “Expressivity” of the voices with sliders, choosing the ones that sound best to you.

I’ve stuck with my standby British Voice 4 at the default “middle” pace, but I dialed the expressivity way up. Does that make me a sicko? Maybe! The good news is it’s my Siri, not your Siri, so I can do whatever I want. As can you. In general, I don’t find the new voices to be groundshakingly better, but there are improvements, and I hope the company quickly rolls out this option for other languages and accents.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.³

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

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.

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement. (That’s also one place that I find Siri AI particularly handy, since it can often find emails that I struggle to locate.)

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful. The default Auto mode chooses the best option for you based on what edits you’re making.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Just browsing

Having had a big year in iOS 26, Safari’s updates are somewhat more modest this year. It has not escaped the application of AI-powered features, with a new automatic tab organization scheme that can group your tabs based on similar themes. The good news is, this is a feature you can turn on or off, though you might have to poke around to find it. When viewing all your tabs, tap the Filter button in the top left. That’ll give you a list of topics it thinks it detects; tap any of those to just see the relevant tabs. Below that in the filter menu, you’ll see an Organize Tabs sub-menu that lets you turn on the automatic grouping.

I found it somewhat helpful, but also kind of random in its groupings. For example it described one set of nine tabs as “Crossword Puzzles,” despite the fact that only one of them was actually a crossword puzzle (all nine, however, were from the New York Times or affiliated sites). Occasionally, I have seen groups rearranged or renamed as you add or remove tabs, which is odd. But I do appreciate that you can quickly close all the tabs in a single group or move them all to a different Safari Tab Group⁴; you can also just drag any tab into or out of one of the automatic groups if you don’t agree with Safari’s decisions. You cannot, however, change the name of an automatic tab organization group.

A new Notify Me feature allows you to set an alert on a page for when content changes. This is a really handy feature, and I like the way Apple implemented it: when you set up an alert, it asks you what it’s looking for. So, for example, if you want to know when tickets go on sale for an event, or an item is back in stock, you just type that in. Then you can choose how often it checks, from hourly to monthly, including on what day or days of the week and what time. That’s it; you’ll get an alert when the thing happens. The only downside is that hourly being the option that checks the most frequently, it might not be fast enough to catch certain high-demand items. I appreciate, though, that whenever you visit the page for which you’ve set an alert, it shows it in a little banner at the top, along with an Edit button. You can also see a full list of the items you’ve got notifications for in Settings: Safari: Notify Me, along with the ability to edit them and, handy, information on the last time it checked.

Finally, there’s a big new Describe an Extension feature in Safari that allows you, as the name suggests, to create an extension just by typing a few lines. It’s a powerful application for bespoke needs—that website that never quite displays the way you want it to, or that feature that nobody’s ever implemented. I appreciate that if you describe functionality offered by an existing extension in the App Store, Safari will suggest that to you to check out—always nice to give a nod to third-party developers. I honestly struggled to find a need for an extension, but that may be just because I’ve already developed most of my own workarounds over the years; but I’m glad this feature exists and that Apple is recognizing that users want to take their customization to an additional level.

What’s the matter, never taken a Shortcut before?

It’s been a little while since Shortcuts got some time in the limelight, but iOS 27 brings a few much appreciated improvements to the automation system, along with one big new feature.

Let’s start with the big news: Describe a Shortcut. Like Safari’s extension feature, this simplifies the process of making shortcuts by allowing you to describe in plain language what you want it to do—Shortcuts then goes and builds it. I’ve been impressed what it can manage for simple workflows, which it can build more or less on its own. I particularly like that the system will ask you questions if it needs clarification, and that it can refine the shortcut with further prompting.

For more complicated Shortcuts, or ones that involve actions from third-party apps, the describe system doesn’t really work, but it can still provide a good jumping-off point. I wanted to see how much of one of my more complex automations it could duplicate, and the resulting basic functionality was much more straightforward in some ways that what I’d designed⁵, so I ended up rebuilding my automation around what Shortcuts had generated.

Despite its limitations, some of which I imagine will be eliminated in future updates, I think this is a great tool that hopefully broadens the appeal of making shortcuts—which, in turn, will hopefully mean more time and attention spent on improving Shortcuts.

Speaking of which, there are a number of smaller improvements too. I already mentioned the existence of an Otherwise If option, which is huge for those of us with complex shortcuts; the editor itself is also speedier and more usable. And automations are now directly integrated into the shortcuts themselves, rather than just being isolated in a separate part of the app. That makes those shortcuts easier to understand and troubleshoot.

Apple’s also added the ability to store persistent data, which even syncs across iCloud, a huge boon to those who want to make more complicated shortcuts without relying on third-party tools. And, in another much appreciated move, there’s a streamlined approach to privacy and permissions, which are now all viewable in a single place within the shortcuts info panel. This should help avoid the pesky repeated prompts for access that could make shortcuts fail.

While there are still issues left to address in Shortcuts, I’m very pleased by the improvements in iOS 27, and even more heartened by the fact that they happened. Shortcuts feels like it’s been lying fallow for some time, and I’m glad to see that Apple has remembered it’s a vital and useful part of its operating systems.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

I really love the new button above the keyboard that appears when you’ve copied something to your clipboard, showing you a preview and letting you tap to paste it, though it’s taken me some time to circumvent my deeply ingrained muscle memory of holding to bring up the context menu to paste. (It’s also vastly more useful than the overly aggressive “Write with Siri” prompt that appears when above an empty entry field. I’m not that desperate when I’m writing a text message, guys.)

While Apple announced new Pro photo features for the Camera app on the recently introduced iPhone 18 Pro, the rest of us do still get a nice feature update: you can now edit the controls you want to appear at the top of the app. By default, you get Flash, Live Photo, and Shared Library, but if you tap the controls button to the right of the shutter, you’ll see an Edit button appear at the top of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll be able to remove items from the top menu, or add any of the others for quick access. It’s a nice way to streamline the app or to make sure the features you want available are always there.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

During the beta period, Passwords offered an agentic AI feature that would scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Apple’s removed that feature for the 27.0 release, saying it will return later. That’s good because, in my experience, it needed a little more time in the oven. Only a handful of the ones it found could be successfully updated. That said, it’s a very cool utility, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to thoroughly test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. I would appreciate if it were a little smarter about some things, such as picking up timezone from a specified location. If you see the event I’m scheduling is in San Francisco and I’m in Boston, maybe at least prompt for which timezone I’d like to use. But I get it: timezones are hard.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. Buildings do admittedly look less warped when you get in close, with sharper detail. For some reason, though, the new maps in Boston appear much, much darker than the iOS 26 counterparts; I didn’t see the same results in New York City, for example. Not sure what’s going on there.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Every year, I come to the end of the review and have a moment of introspection. Who precisely is such a review for in this day and age? People don’t really need to know if an update is worth installing. Apple’s own stats say 86 percent of iPhones introduced in the last four years are on iOS 26, and 79 percent overall. (And that was for a very divisive year.) For better or worse, the vast majority of people just hit update.

So I think the role of the reviewer has evolved. Consider this less of a review of whether you should get iOS 27, and more as an overview of what to look for, what to try—what works well, what could still use some tweaking. In an update like iOS 27, which has a lot going on, that’s more important to ever. Even I’ve missed features here and there, or found ones that I just haven’t had the time or opportunity to try.

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

The Internet’s Dr. Drang on the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features announced this week:

The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that

Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.

You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word.

Notably Apple chose not to use a very common synonym for “flowing” that would be instantly understandable to most, because no doubt it did not like the implications of that word. So I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.¹

Also worth noting that the Siri Recap feature, unlike Live Rewind, does not even bother to alert people around you that recording—sorry, flowing—is happening, using similar linguistic hopscotch. From Apple’s own privacy document:

There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.

The implication obviously being only raw audio could even be considered a privacy violation. That’s an interesting way of framing it, even though I’m pretty sure there are people who would be upset to know that their conversations are being summarized even if audio is not being retained.

Glenn has already done a thorough and even-handed rundown of this feature, but I think Dr. Drang’s point about the lengths to which Apple has to contort itself to make it seem like this feature is on the up-and-up is, in and of itself, telling.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

“It’s just a big iPhone.”

A description of the Pro Max? The iPhone 6? The iPhone 6 Plus?

None of the above.

Those old enough—cough, cough—to remember all the way back to 2010’s introduction of the iPad might recall this as a common dismissal of the first generation of Apple’s tablet. Which, to be fair, was kind of just a big iPhone.¹ Not that there was anything wrong with that—in fact, it was a pretty successful elevator pitch for an entirely new product category.

But if you tuned in for Apple’s announcement of the iPhone Duo this week, you may have noticed something curious: Apple only rarely made mention of its very successful tablet line. The company’s view is clear: the iPhone Duo, even when open in all of its glory, may evoke an iPad, but it is very much not an iPad.

No padding

When introducing the device, new CEO John Ternus was clear about the Duo’s heritage:

We started with the experience that we wanted for ourselves, a larger display that feels as natural and intuitive as iPad.

At the risk of sounding like I’m nitpicking, let’s delve into that second clause there. It’s a comparison—it feels like an iPad.

Later on, when industrial design chief Molly Anderson did her best Jony-Ive-esque introduction to the device, she couched it in similar terms:

The two sides connect into a continuous frame, surrounding the largest iPhone display we’ve ever designed. Inspired by the versatility of iPad…

There’s a twofer there: the interior screen is the largest iPhone display, and it’s inspired by the iPad. Again, not an iPad.

There are only two other glancing mentions of the iPad. One when Apple mentions upcoming support for the Apple Pencil—”the first time iPhone offers the great Apple Pencil experience that iPad users love”—and slightly later when it discusses the display: “Drawing on our learnings from iPad and Mac, we developed a custom nanotexture finish…”

And that’s it. Those four mentions of the iPad are all that you’ll hear in the entire event.

Apple’s product page for the Duo takes it even further: the only mention there is about picking up a Siri conversation from your iPad and continuing it on your phone. That’s it.

By comparison, that 2010 introduction of the original iPad? You’ll hear the iPhone mentioned more than 20 times, including about how the iPad runs iPhone apps. That was a lineage that Apple wanted made very clear.

Some room of one’s own

Why am I harping on this?

Because you better believe Apple thoroughly considers its word choice in all of its marketing materials, especially in its most viewed annual event.

Like a lot of Apple product marketing choices, this one is simultaneously surprising and, somehow, obvious. Apple could have described the iPhone Duo as an iPhone that opens into an iPad, leveraging the success of its tablet product line, especially compared to its Android competitors. It might even have helped assuage those concerned about the price tag: yes, it starts at $2000, but you’re getting an iPhone and an iPad in one. What a savings!

But I think Apple was also all too aware that this would be writing checks that it couldn’t cash.² Because though the iPhone clearly takes cues from the iPad, it is definitively not an iPad. It’s not an iPad that you fold up to put in your pocket. Or an iPad with a little iPhone glued to the front. It’s not running iPadOS. You won’t be installing or running iPad apps.

And, like I said, there’s an obviousness to all of that. Because the iPhone Duo’s screen, large as it is—at 7.6 inches, it’s just .7 inches smaller than the iPad mini—isn’t necessarily ideal for all the features in iPadOS, whether it’s the multitasking windowing system, Slide Over, or even just the menu bar hanging out up at the top of the screen. Having it be an iPhone that works like an iPad when you open it up makes as much—or as little—sense as an iPad that works like an iPhone when you fold it closed.

This distinction also allows it the freedom to do things that the iPad doesn’t. Like the clever ability to pin a video to the top of the screen in portrait. Or being able to fold it and put it on its side for FaceTime calls. The way it shifts user interfaces away from the crease when it’s partially closed. All of these are specific affordances for this device, which helps set it apart from Apple’s other products. Even many of the interface layouts are distinct, like the vertical dock or the minimized status bar.

In some ways the Duo is neither an iPhone nor an iPad, but a third device. But if you’re going to pick one to connect it to, well, why wouldn’t you choose your—if not the—most successful consumer product of all time?

Verging on converging

In the end, the iPhone line is starting to impinge upon the iPad—not unlike the way the iPad itself has begun to blur the lines with the Mac by adding keyboard and trackpad support, windowing, and more.

This isn’t convergence in the way that some have feared, with all of the devices getting squished into a mushy middle ground. Instead, it’s informing each device with what the company has learned from its other products and, in typical Apple fashion, making each product the best version of itself.

Consumers fear convergence, but it’s a risk for Apple too. Because in a world where an iPhone folds out to an iPad, will people really buy both devices? The answer: some may not. But how many of those people were really in the market for an iPad in the first place? Apple is betting that people love their iPhones so much that, just as with the iPhone 6 and the Pro Max lines and even the edge-to-edge displays of the iPhone X and later, that what they really want is an iPhone, but more.

Apple’s events are always a deluge of information, delivered by smooth-talking presenters who are probably trying to hypnotize you with their soothing hand motions. So it can take a little bit of time after watching the presentation to come back to reality, and sift through the details.

This year’s iPhone event¹ was no exception. The company rolled out new Pro iPhones, two new Apple Watches, a new pair of AirPods, and, of course, the first folding iPhone. Having had a couple of hours to poke around and think about the slew of announcements, I’ve been mulling over the implications of Apple’s newest phone.

One of the biggest questions around the expected folding iPhone, now officially dubbed the Duo, was how much of a trade-off it would be compared to the year’s Pro model iPhones. There was a similar dynamic last year with the iPhone Air, which also offered a novel form factor, though at the cost of the iPhone 17 Pro’s additional cameras and battery life.

In the end, every Apple product—and probably every product—is a story of trade-offs. So, the thinking went, what will we give up to get the benefit of a small iPhone that unfolds into a larger iPhone?

The answer: some things, but less than I’d feared.

Saving face

Perhaps the biggest casualty is Face ID. That’s not really a surprise: it’s an expensive component that takes up valuable space inside the phone chassis, as well as on the screen. Then factor in that the iPhone Duo would probably need two Face ID cameras modules, one each for the exterior and interior screens, and we’re talking double trouble.²

I’ll certainly miss Face ID in the cold New England winter when I don’t want to take off my gloves, but hopefully the Apple Watch unlock will mitigate the frustration.

Camera shy

It also seemed a foregone conclusion that at least one of the iPhone Pro’s many cameras wouldn’t make the cut, and sure enough, the Duo lacks the 4x/8x telephoto lens. But it still features the ultrawide lens, which is the better choice, since that also enables macro features. The main 48MP camera also only has Apple’s first-generation sensor-shift optical image stabilization, compared to the second-generation tech on the 17 Pro and 18 Pro.

The Duo’s dual screens also raise questions about the front-facing cameras. While both its interior and exterior selfie cameras are capable of Center Stage and can flip between landscape and portrait at the touch of a control, neither is as good quality as the front-facing camera on the Pro models.

The 18 Pro, like the 17 line before it, boasts a hefty 18MP sensor; the iPhone Duo’s exterior camera, by comparison, is just 12MP. As for the interior screen’s camera, which is the first one that Apple has tucked under the display, the current specs say only that it records video at 1080p. The exterior front-facing camera also doesn’t support the new smart focus tracking feature the company announced for the 18 Pro (which does support it on both front and rear-facing cameras).

Unsurprisingly, the Duo also lacks several of the Pro models more, well, pro features. You won’t find support for ProRes or ProRes RAW, ACES, Apple Log 2, and Genlock. In other words, Apple’s probably not shooting its next event on a bunch of iPhone Duos because that would be a ridiculously unnecessary flex unless they’ve got a whole bunch of extras lying around. The Duo also doesn’t shoot spatial video, probably due to the horizontal rather than vertical side-by-side camera arrangement. I’m sure there are dozens of people who will be upset.

Lights, camera, no action?

The Duo’s other casualties seem to mostly have succumbed to the one-two combo of high cost and low return. For example, few will likely shed tears on the lack of the LiDAR sensor.

There may be more complaints, however about the lack of the Action Button first included with the iPhone 15 Pro. That’s a bummer for folks who enjoyed the customization of the hardware button, but again an understandable absence. However, the Duo does, to my surprise, have Apple’s Camera Control button for quickly launching the camera and taking photos.

MagSafe and sound

Some were worried, given its lack of mention in the Apple event, that the iPhone Duo eschewed MagSafe, not unlike the oddity that was the iPhone 16e. But the good news is that MagSafe is apparently considered critical enough to merit its inclusion on the Duo.

However it’s not without an asterisk. Unlike other iPhones which Apple says “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wallets, wireless chargers, and more” the Duo’s says only “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wireless chargers, and more.” Note the difference? That’s right, the iPhone Duo just stole your wallet—in more ways than one.

But this one’s just a matter of space, as an image from Apple’s accessories page clearly illustrates: Apple’s MagSafe wallet simply won’t fit on the shorter, squatter Duo. Will that stop someone somewhere from making a Duo compatible wallet? You might struggle to fit your credit cards, but I wouldn’t bet against it.

And because I really need something audio-related to justify this section header, in a blow to podcasters everywhere, the Duo does not have the much vaunted “studio-quality” four-mic array of the Pro models. I’ll pour one out.³

Size matters

I’ll leave you with this last thought, which amused me. Apple touted that, when open, the iPhone Duo is the thinnest iPhone ever at just 5.2mm, dethroning last year’s record-setting iPhone Air with its bulky 5.64mm thickness.

However, when folded, the Duo is itself a chunky 11.3mm. I found myself wondering if that was, in turn, the thickest iPhone ever. The answer? Just barely not. But you have to go all the way back to 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which—like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G—rang in at 12.3mm, in large part due to its slightly convex back.⁴

The thinnest iPhone ever and the thickest iPhone in 17 years. Something for everyone!

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in July 2015

What makes a gadget worth wearing? Apple is betting it knows better than anyone, and today they’ll likely reveal the final details of the Apple Watch–the most anticipated piece of technology since, well, the last Apple device to hit the streets.

Apple is rarely a first mover in electronics. We’ve all grown used to the company walking into existing markets and redefining them: the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. When it decides to jump in a pool, it strives for an epic cannonball that sends waves throughout the rest of the industry.

Could this time be different? This is, after all, the first major new category Apple will stake out under the stewardship of Tim Cook. The Apple Watch is also unlike anything the company has ever tried before: It’s a device that relies almost as much on fashion as it does technology, with a price tag that some speculate may rise into the $10,000-dollar range when most competing devices cost between $100 and $250. Is this a pure hubris play from Cupertino?

Wearables Whereabouts

Apple’s challenge to sell a look will be more intense than usual. The company has, of course, always focused on aesthetics for its devices–a source of common criticism from competitors and detractors (yet the delight of many consumers). Yet it has never relied so heavily on the buy-in of the fashion community. With models wearing the new smartwatch in magazines and high-end jewelers talking to Apple, clearly the company has its eyes trained on the world of haut-couture. Yet fashion is notoriously fickle; one day’s hot accessory is the next day’s unspeakable faux pas. Even for a company that’s often called elitist, Apple risks selling a device for the few rather than something with mainstream appeal.

Wherever there’s challenge, however, there’s also opportunity–and the wearables market has many. Despite the number of devices clamoring for space on your wrist and on your face, no company has cracked exactly what gives a wearable device mass appeal. Fitbit is perhaps the closest with 70 percent of the fitness-tracker market. Still, they own a niche and one that doesn’t necessarily place it in direct competition with the Apple Watch.

The most direct competitor would be Pebble, which offers what many think is the best smartwatch around. And though it’s made smartwatches since 2013, its products have evolved considerably in that time, and Best Buy continues to sell the devices, finding a truly mainstream market has eluded Pebble.

The startup also isn’t playing in the same league. By my calculations, Pebble has–as of this writing–pre-sold nearly 81,500 of its latest color-screened Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel smartwatches, bringing in $17 million in revenue. For the sake of comparison Apple, in its most recent quarter, sold 30,000 iPhones per hour and had revenue of $74 billion. Pebble is playing single-A ball; Apple is in the major leagues.

Look at it that way, and the wearables market doesn’t seem so different from the smartphone market before Apple entered. Remember what those devices looked like before the iPhone? Bulky, inconsistent plastic objects with frustratingly small screens and physical keyboards. Fast-forward eight years, and every smartphone looks more or less like an iPhone.

Maybe the Apple Watch will do to wearable devices what the iPod did to MP3 players. But it could just as well be an evolutionary cul-de-sac that ends up in a dustbin next to our PDAs or videophones, to eventually be incorporated into some other far more compelling piece of tech down the road.

Technology That Does Less

The biggest risk for the Apple Watch is the wearable device market as a whole. As of yet, people aren’t crying out for devices to wear on their wrists or faces. They seem futuristic, but perhaps too much–and are better relegated to a retro-future of flying cars and commuting to lunar colonies via rocket ship. The reaction from most of the average folks that I talk to about the Apple Watch is, “why do I need such a thing?”

Take my girlfriend, for example. To her the Apple Watch is just another technological distraction in a world already rife with them. She’s worried that instead of constantly pulling out my phone to check Twitter, reply to text messages, and triage emails, I’ll spend all my time staring at my wrist.

That’s not unjustified. I bought the first iPhone back in 2007, and my friends often joked that it might catch on fire if I didn’t take it out of my pocket, so often did I seem to have it in hand. Eight years later and we’re all glued to our screens, spending far less time engaged with the people around us.

If I have one hope for the Apple Watch, and for wearables in general, it’s that they will make us less dependent on technology. Wearables should dole out the information we want, when we need it, and in bite-size chunks. They shouldn’t further train us to be zombies who constantly stare at screens. The challenge, then, is to smartly and seamlessly integrate technology into daily life while keeping our eyes ahead instead of fixated on glowing slabs (be they phone-sized or watch-sized). If the Apple Watch can deliver on this, then their timing couldn’t be better.

The post From the archive: Can Apple make the first wantable smartwatch? appeared first on Popular Science.

What makes a gadget worth wearing? Apple is betting it knows better than anyone, and today they’ll likely reveal the final details of the Apple Watch–the most anticipated piece of technology since, well, the last Apple device to hit the streets.

Apple is rarely a first mover in electronics. We’ve all grown used to the company walking into existing markets and redefining them: the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. When it decides to jump in a pool, it strives for an epic cannonball that sends waves throughout the rest of the industry.

Could this time be different? This is, after all, the first major new category Apple will stake out under the stewardship of Tim Cook. The Apple Watch is also unlike anything the company has ever tried before: It’s a device that relies almost as much on fashion as it does technology, with a price tag that some speculate may rise into the $10,000-dollar range when most competing devices cost between $100 and $250. Is this a pure hubris play from Cupertino?

Wearables Whereabouts

Apple’s challenge to sell a look will be more intense than usual. The company has, of course, always focused on aesthetics for its devices–a source of common criticism from competitors and detractors (yet the delight of many consumers). Yet it has never relied so heavily on the buy-in of the fashion community. With models wearing the new smartwatch in magazines and high-end jewelers talking to Apple, clearly the company has its eyes trained on the world of haut-couture. Yet fashion is notoriously fickle; one day’s hot accessory is the next day’s unspeakable faux pas. Even for a company that’s often called elitist, Apple risks selling a device for the few rather than something with mainstream appeal.

Wherever there’s challenge, however, there’s also opportunity–and the wearables market has many. Despite the number of devices clamoring for space on your wrist and on your face, no company has cracked exactly what gives a wearable device mass appeal. Fitbit is perhaps the closest with 70 percent of the fitness-tracker market. Still, they own a niche and one that doesn’t necessarily place it in direct competition with the Apple Watch.

The most direct competitor would be Pebble, which offers what many think is the best smartwatch around. And though it’s made smartwatches since 2013, its products have evolved considerably in that time, and Best Buy continues to sell the devices, finding a truly mainstream market has eluded Pebble.

The startup also isn’t playing in the same league. By my calculations, Pebble has–as of this writing–pre-sold nearly 81,500 of its latest color-screened Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel smartwatches, bringing in $17 million in revenue. For the sake of comparison Apple, in its most recent quarter, sold 30,000 iPhones per hour and had revenue of $74 billion. Pebble is playing single-A ball; Apple is in the major leagues.

Look at it that way, and the wearables market doesn’t seem so different from the smartphone market before Apple entered. Remember what those devices looked like before the iPhone? Bulky, inconsistent plastic objects with frustratingly small screens and physical keyboards. Fast-forward eight years, and every smartphone looks more or less like an iPhone.

Maybe the Apple Watch will do to wearable devices what the iPod did to MP3 players. But it could just as well be an evolutionary cul-de-sac that ends up in a dustbin next to our PDAs or videophones, to eventually be incorporated into some other far more compelling piece of tech down the road.

Technology That Does Less

The biggest risk for the Apple Watch is the wearable device market as a whole. As of yet, people aren’t crying out for devices to wear on their wrists or faces. They seem futuristic, but perhaps too much–and are better relegated to a retro-future of flying cars and commuting to lunar colonies via rocket ship. The reaction from most of the average folks that I talk to about the Apple Watch is, “why do I need such a thing?”

Take my girlfriend, for example. To her the Apple Watch is just another technological distraction in a world already rife with them. She’s worried that instead of constantly pulling out my phone to check Twitter, reply to text messages, and triage emails, I’ll spend all my time staring at my wrist.

That’s not unjustified. I bought the first iPhone back in 2007, and my friends often joked that it might catch on fire if I didn’t take it out of my pocket, so often did I seem to have it in hand. Eight years later and we’re all glued to our screens, spending far less time engaged with the people around us.

If I have one hope for the Apple Watch, and for wearables in general, it’s that they will make us less dependent on technology. Wearables should dole out the information we want, when we need it, and in bite-size chunks. They shouldn’t further train us to be zombies who constantly stare at screens. The challenge, then, is to smartly and seamlessly integrate technology into daily life while keeping our eyes ahead instead of fixated on glowing slabs (be they phone-sized or watch-sized). If the Apple Watch can deliver on this, then their timing couldn’t be better.

The post Can Apple Make The First Wantable Smartwatch? appeared first on Popular Science.

I’m not an AI hater: I’ve used it for my fair share of projects that involve coding or for troubleshooting various technology problems. In my work testing Apple’s Apple Intelligence releases, I’ve generated some images, all truly bizarre and many of them good for nothing beyond a joke.

But I have been fascinated by the response to Anthropic’s AI watermarking scheme, especially after I read my friend John Gruber’s full-throated rebuttal. I have great respect for John as a writer. He truly cares about details: he’s meticulous about the words he picks, the way he constructs sentences and arguments.

This is why I find his defense so puzzling. Because a large language model could not be further away from those ideals. In the title of his piece, John describes the watermarking system as “a perversion of writing.” That might be the case if AIs were writing. But they are not; they are simply generating text. Those two things are not the same. As per the premise of John’s piece, writing is about carefully picking the words and crafting the meaning of what you’re saying, things that AI do not—and patently cannot—do.

LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they cannot care about anything.

Speaking of two things that are not the same, John rightly points out the difference between the phrases “he leaped at the chance” and “he jumped at the opportunity”. Those are indeed distinct—if semantically similar—phrases, each of which might be more apt in a particular situation; or, to put it in another fashion: the use of each of those phrases tells us something different, whether about the person being described or the writer.

But the LLM doesn’t know which of those phrases is the right phrase to use. It has a guess, based on its models and weights and inputs. But the ultimate choice of those phrases tells us nothing about the writer because there is no writer.

All of this outrage presupposes the existence of a “correct” answer that the LLM is eschewing because it was told to pick different words, but if there were a correct answer, then shouldn’t it be chosen every time? But an LLM’s non-deterministic nature doesn’t work that way. Because, at the end of the day, the AI does not truly know what any of these words mean. There is no ur-text. You might as well get mad at word choice in a lorem ipsum generator.¹

Likewise the example of “my favorite tropical fruit.” John points out the ridiculousness of a watermarking scheme substituting “pineapple” for “banana.” Of course! Those are not reasonable substitutions (outside of a smoothie).

For a person. But a computer has no favorite fruits. It could not possibly know the right word to use. It has never tasted the sweetness of a pineapple or cut up a banana for its yogurt. So why would I possibly care what it thinks is the correct word for that scenario, right or wrong?

I get being mad about computers interfering with what we, the users, want. But in this, AIs are only the latest example. Autocorrect and autocomplete, computational photography, search engine algorithms: all of that has led us down this path where we’re willing to accept the decisions a computer makes for us. The LLM is just the ultimate expression of that.

Getting mad about your LLM’s choice of words is like being pissed that Godzilla stomped on your garden. Dude, the rest of your city is in flames. Sorry about your flowers, but, you know, *gestures at everything*. We’re already talking about technology with huge environmental, societal, and ethical ramifications. This, to me, is quite possibly the least upsetting thing that AIs have done.

Anyway, welcome to the “mad about AI” fold. Glad to have you, even if I wish maybe you would have been a little more upset about all the words that it stole from me and other writers—words that were all carefully chosen.

In the end, I can’t summarize it any better than to ask: if you care so much about word choice, why are you using AI to generate text?

If this does truly make AI-generated text worse, well…good. A lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM churns out as “good enough” and, if I’m being realistic, I don’t think this will change anything. But if it does lead to more people being dissatisfied with the pablum they’re being fed and turning instead to writing and editing their own text, then that would actually be a positive outcome. Maybe it’d even mean fewer human writers being put out of jobs.

In the end, what upsets me the most about this is the tacit equating of AIs generating text to writers writing. A computer that has digested the work of thousands if not millions of people and regurgitated them according to a statistical model is equivalent to a person toiling by the sweat of their brow to bring meaning into existence from nothingness?

Get out of here with that garbage.

Backups, as any computer user knows, are worth their weight in gold. If it isn’t backed up, it might as well might not exist. That’s why I have for years trusted ShirtPocket’s SuperDuper! to ensure that all my data is safe and sound. And now, for the first time in a very long time, the venerable backup utility has gotten a top-to-bottom update that brings it into the modern era without sacrificing any of the features—and, most importantly, the reliability—that its users have come to depend on.

While SuperDuper! 4 may look like an entirely new beast, its history has stuck around. It still explains what it’s doing in plain English. It still allows you to make complete, bootable backups. It still has its excellent Smart Update option to optimize the copying process.

But it’s gotten some significant updates too. There’s a new interface, for starters, which conforms to Apple’s current Liquid Glass aesthetic, love it or hate it. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long without a change, but it’s hard to deny that the old look had grown somewhat antiquated. The result is an app that makes backups as simple and straightforward as they should be, so that anyone can figure it out: click here to set your destination, choose what method, and click Go.

The changes to SuperDuper! 4 also run more than just skin deep. For example, it’s considerably faster than the previous version—up to an order magnitude faster using the new Turbo implementation of Smart Update, according to Shirt Pocket. That’s borne out in my real-world usage. For example, my last nightly backup of 20.55GB took less than 4 minutes.

There are new capabilities here, too. A new Preview feature lets you perform a dry run of your copy job, letting you see every file that will be changed without actually doing any of it. With a new background helper app, copies won’t interrupt whatever you’re doing. And there’s Shortcuts support, so you can run a workflow when your copy job is completed—or even have one of your shortcuts kick off a copy job.

I’ve been using betas of SuperDuper! 4 for a month or so now, and what’s impressed me most is how much it maintains that set-it-and-forget-it strength of the previous versions. The most important thing for a backup is that element of reliability, so when I open up the app and see “31 successful in a row” note, I know that my data is right where it should be. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier than ever to see what happened: click on a failed job and you’ll get the details, including an Apple Intelligence-powered summary of the job. (You can get that for completed jobs too.)

There are way more features here too, ones that I just don’t have much reason to use for my purposes, but might just well be what you’re looking for. For example, copy rules that let you handle certain files and folders in granular ways, such as excluding certain ones from backups; support for any file system that macOS understands; and there’s support for multiple copy jobs at the same time, even for those that are scheduled.

Backup apps may not be the most exciting software category, but I dare you to find one that’s more crucial. For me, SuperDuper! has done the job for years and I’ve never had any reason to complain about it. Nothing about that seems poised to change with version 4.

SuperDuper! 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. A free trial version lets you make unlimited full erase backups, but to unlock the rest of the features requires a one-time payment of $43.95. There’s also an upgrade discount for owners of SuperDuper 3 of up to 30 percent. (And, if you bought version 3 very recently, you may be able to get version 4 for free.) And good news: if you need to run backups on older systems, SuperDuper 3 is sticking around.

For everybody who’s already backing up their Macs, SuperDuper! 4 may offer some new features and speed increases that will make the process even smoother. For those of you who aren’t yet…what are you waiting for?

A story by 404 Media’s Joseph Cox, who last month broke the news about a flaw in Apple’s Hide My Email feature, is now back to report that iCloud Private Relay, a feature that is supposed to obfuscate users’ IP addresses, may not be so private:

A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say.

Fascinatingly, this flaw seems to be due to the implementation of passkeys: the authentication happens out of band, in a separate connection, and therefore never runs through Private Relay.

The security researchers who uncovered the issue have put up a site that lets you check if you’re affected; I wasn’t able to test it this morning, as the Wi-Fi network I’m using as of this writing doesn’t support Private Relay at all. (Joke’s on me, I guess!) They’ve also reported the vulnerability to Apple, who did not provide a timeline for fixing it, but allowed them to disclose the issue nonetheless.

Cox points out that along with the Hide My Email bug, this is the second time that a vulnerability has affected Apple’s paid privacy features, since both are part of the iCloud+ subscription. Though Apple did finally patch the Hide My Email flaw late last month, a second flaw is not a great look for a company that prides itself on privacy and security.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

From an un-bylined post on OpenAI’s site:

Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.

The post itself includes numerous transcripts of message conversations¹ and emails that supposedly bolster OpenAI’s case that it studiously avoided using Apple information.

This is, as The Verge’s Jess Wetherbed notes, a pure public opinion play. Because if they have evidence, the only correct answer is “we’ll see you in court.”

What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Ford CEO Jim Farley has been bullish on CarPlay and the UEV project was previously headed up by Doug Field¹, who spent several years at Apple both on the Mac hardware team and, more significantly, leading up the abandoned car effort.

This integration is interesting, though, because of the lukewarm reception of CarPlay Ultra in the automotive industry. The new “MapKit for Automotive SDK”, which as far as I can tell is being announced in this press release, seems more like the Android Automotive approach of building in support at a low level, though here it’s predominantly focused on navigation rather than providing the full stack for the car. Here’s how Apple describes it:

This integration is made possible by Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, which allows automakers to embed and customize Apple Maps. The SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles, and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences.

I also appreciated this little tidbit nestled at the very end of the press release:

In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford’s UEV Platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car.

Translation: Eat it, GM.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The market for small e-readers has been booming lately. Earlier this year, Jason took a look at the Xteink X4, a pint-sized reading device that was about as light and small as they come. But those maniacs at Xteink weren’t done yet: they followed it up with the $79 X3, which is unbelievably even lighter and smaller.

I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if there’s such a thing as too small and light—at 3.84 inches by 2.51 inches (and just 0.2 inches thick) the X3 is still larger than, say, a credit card, but not by much. The screen itself measures just 3.7 inches, more than half an inch smaller than the X4’s 4.3 inch, but its 259 ppi resolution still makes it plenty easy to read on.¹ At that size it’s little imposition to take it with you wherever you go. Easy to lose? Maybe. Easy to love? Yes.

For one thing, this small size unlocks at least one capability that the X4 couldn’t fully deliver upon—the ability to stick to the back of your phone. Like the X4, the X3 has a MagSafe-compatible magnet in its rear case and it fits just about perfectly on the back of my iPhone 17 Pro, nestled below the camera plateau.

However, the magnet is not particularly strong, and it lacks the secondary stabilizing magnet that you see on official MagSafe accessories, meaning it wobbles around a bit. I wouldn’t call it a super secure connection, but it’s pretty good if you’re just slipping it in and out of a pocket. Just be aware that it probably will come loose.

Like the X4 before it, the X3 features a pair of rocker switches on the front for a total of four possible buttons. But they’ve opted to skip the X4’s side mounted rocker switch in favor of a single buttons on each side. There’s also an on/off switch at the top (plus a recessed button used for resetting the device). And with all of that, they somehow managed to continue to fit a microSD slot in the top. The bottom left corner also has a little set of holes for a lanyard or wrist strap.

The one casualty of the smaller X3, however, is the port. The X4 was big enough to accommodate a USB-C connector, but the X3’s thin profile makes that impossible. Instead, there’s a pogo-pin USB cable that connects to four magnetic contacts on the reader. Is this a step back? Strictly speaking, yes. Using a proprietary connector is a bummer in the year 2026, especially because it means having to keep track of a single-use cable. That said, once you get the X3 up and running, the only real need for the connector is charging, and the battery on this thing lasts a very long time. (I’ve yet to run it down in several weeks of usage.) Just remember to make a note of where you stow that cable for the point months down the road when you do need to charge it and find yourself wondering whatever happened to it.

As with the X4, the X3 lacks any sort of screen lighting, meaning that it’s strictly a “read in bright light” device. But don’t worry, because Xteink has already unveiled a new X4 Pro with the company’s first lit screen.²

All in all, I found the X3 very comfortable to read on, whether attached to my iPhone or not. The side buttons work great as page-turners, and the screen is high-contrast and sharp enough to make text render very clearly. All in all, it’s a great reading experience—if you take into account one major caveat.

Soft where?

The elephant in the room for the Xteink X3 is the software. Xteink ships the X3 with its own built-in firmware which, by all accounts, has improved since the first version. But I can’t really tell you, because upon opening the box and powering up the device, the first thing I did was install Crosspoint, the open-source community-built firmware that has turned this device from a curiosity into a real contender.³

Unlike a lot of other firmware replacements, Crosspoint is super easy to install; you can do it right from a web browser. While it’s not fully free of technological hurdles, I’d say that most people comfortable using an e-reader or updating their iPhones will be able to handle the process with few problems. And the benefits are manifold.

Crosspoint goes beyond simply turning this into a functional device and into one that is actually fun to use. It’s got a straightforward, easy to navigate interface that makes it simple to do everything from reading to loading books (accomplished via a web-based interface). For those who like to tweak their reading setup, there are plenty of configuration options, everything from screen orientation to hyphenation and, yes, custom fonts loaded via the SD card.

Even the onscreen keyboard that you need to use for various configuration tasks is pretty solid for what’s available—on par with navigating via an onscreen keyboard with a game controller, in my opinion. I wouldn’t want to have to type in my Wi-Fi password every time—and you don’t, because it saves it for you—but one time was fine.

There are also a bunch of other features that might appeal to those who want to take reading to the next level. For example, support for Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) standard means that if you want to host your book library on your own server, you can point your reader at that and download any of the books you already own directly to your device. There’s also support for KOreader sync to help keep your place between supported devices.⁴

Crosspoint has been so successful, in fact, that the team at Xteink has smartened up and started collaborating. (This after a brief moment when it looked like the company might try to firmware lock its devices.) Now, not only do the “developer editions” sold directly by the company continue to allow you to install the custom firmware, the company has been working with the Crosspoint team to make sure new devices, like the X4 Pro, will already be supported when they arrive. While Xteink hasn’t quite adopted Crosspoint as the default OS, it’s not far off.

The world is not enough

Given how positive I’ve been above, you might be all too tempted to run out and snap up an Xteink X3 for yourself. I don’t blame you! At $79 (and often discounted for less than that), it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap⁵ and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.

Both of these companies benefit from lock-in in the form of Digital Rights Management. DRM is, of course, largely pushed by publishers, who insist upon cryptographic schemes to lock down the books they sell in order to nominally protect against piracy. Never mind the fact that books are still easily and widely pirated, the DRM is relatively simple to crack⁶, and many of those books have been vacuumed up by the boatload by an even more insidious thief in the form of AI training data.

I come at this, of course, from the perspective of both reader and writer. As a writer, I certainly want to be compensated for all the hard work I put in to create my books, but I also want people to read and enjoy them. That’s why you’ll find no stauncher defender of libraries.

Personally, I find the industry’s insistence on DRM misplaced, just as I did with the music industry two decades ago. The lack of these security features does not automatically turn people at large into thieves and it’s insulting to think that it would. In fact, the sci-fi publisher Tor, one of the biggest names in the business and a subsidiary of Big Five publisher Macmillan, has put out its titles without DRM for almost fifteen years and I haven’t seen any significant indication that it’s harmed their business. Many of my books are also available directly from my publisher without DRM, and I don’t think that’s put a dent in my bottom line either.

I would love to be able to easily load any book I’ve ever purchased onto my Xteink devices—or, for that matter, any e-reader or e-reading app of my choice. There are, of course, extensive repositories of DRM-free public domain books available. Amazon, to its credit, does now allow you to download DRM-free copies of any book that you’ve purchased.⁷ I argued a few years back that this is an opportunity for Apple to distinguish its stagnant ebook marketplace from the competition. But for first-run books, your options are currently more limited (and sometimes harder to suss out).

I’d also love to somehow see support for Libby, the popular library ebook borrowing app, on Xteink devices, though I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But in my opinion, the bottom line is that more ways to read makes more readers of books, which in turn makes more customers of books.

But I digress.

The conclusion

The other week I was riding the train with my kid, our usual weekend pastime. As he was enjoying looking out the window, I was reading a book on the X3, magneted to the back of my iPhone 17 Pro. As we neared a stop, a woman nearby caught sight of it and marveled over it. “Is that a tiny e-reader?”

I extolled its virtues for a moment before they got off at their stop. But it told me one important thing: there’s a hunger for these types of devices. Because people who self-select as readers in this day and age are, above all, passionate. You have to make a choice to be sitting and reading a book when you could be watching TikTok or Instagram or listening to music or a podcast, all of which are constantly at your fingertips.

That’s where the X3 (and the X4) deliver. A Kindle or Kobo isn’t exactly bulky, but they’re not pocketable either. Being able to take your e-reader with you just as we stuffed mass market paperbacks in our back pockets in days gone by is freeing and fun. Now if the world might just shift a little bit more to meet us, maybe we could free ourselves a little further.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is set to announce a new “Apple Upgrade” program (paywalled) next week to replace both its existing financing offerings and the iPhone Upgrade program. Details are still vague at present, but it will supposedly offer lease-style arrangements for not just iPhones, but Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches as well.

I’ve been in the iPhone Upgrade Program since Apple debuted it more than a decade ago. There have been plenty of ups and downs over that time—especially in the early years, when Apple was still figuring out how the whole program worked, but more recently it’s been pretty smooth.

And, I have to say, effective: I’ve had a new iPhone every year, without fail, and I’ve ended up paying only about half of what I would pay for a new phone outright.¹

I do, however, have some concerns about the details Gurman does report. For one, the involvement of Klarna. They’re best known for their buy-now-pay-later service—a realm Apple was prepared to play in but ended up quickly abandoning. At the time I wondered if part of that about-face was Apple “perhaps not wanting to be in a business that can feel a bit troublesome.” But the company still subsequently partnered with other companies that offer that feature, like Affirm and, yes, Klarna.

Unlike the iPhone Upgrade program, this new offering will also reportedly not include AppleCare, meaning that you’ll have to shell out to protect the device you are leasing from Apple. There’s more than a whiff of “services revenue” around that, AppleCare now being somewhat more expensive than it was. No doubt some will choose not to go through the hassle and additional cost of purchasing it, which means a subset of those people will invariably damage their phones and incur additional payments to Apple. AppleCare as part of the iPhone Upgrade Program was fundamentally a good deal because it insured devices that Apple was probably getting back, whether for eventual refurbishment or just for parts.

But the iPhone Upgrade Program often felt like an afterthought to Apple—for example, despite Apple officially telling me devices on it were eligible for the company’s restructured AppleCare One program, I heard from several users that this was effectively not the case.

Additionally, this part of Gurman’s story made me hesitate:

The Apple Upgrade service will work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. In certain cases, those transactions will incur an additional fee. Like a car lease, it can also be returned at the end of the term. [emphasis added]

So “certain cases” and “an additional fee” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. How many cases? What kind of fee? 9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy points out that if this really is structured like a car lease, that could mean some serious charges.

The iPhone Upgrade Program was, by comparison, straightforward. The cost of buying your phone was divvied up into 24 payments; after 12, you can upgrade. Loans were backed by Citizens Bank, but there were no interest charges or other fees. Hence it probably wasn’t a big money-maker. I don’t know what Apple’s deal with Klarna will be, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to be as consumer-friendly.

Finally, the other questionable part circling this is this report from 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes that code in iOS 27 suggests Apple will be able to restrict features of devices that fall behind on their payments:

The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks.

If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in “Restricted Mode,” which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available.

Forget paying for heated seats, imagine if your car just decided not to offer CarPlay or, I don’t know, climate controls if you fell behind on your lease payments. This just feels, for lack of a better term, gross. Certainly predatory on lower income consumers who are most likely to take advantage of such a payment structure to buy an expensive phone.

As I said, details are still not concrete, so it’s always possible that this won’t be the exact situation. But if it is, I can say with some confidence that my days in Apple’s upgrade programs are at an end, and I certainly would be loath to recommend them to anybody.

Writing at The New York Times, tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the strange story (NYT gift link) of coming across an AI-generated biography of herself on Amazon.

To me, the sobering part is when Hill, unable to track down the source of her own biography, talks to an “author” of hundreds of AI books:

Mr. Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.
“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

[stares directly into camera]

Lest you think this exclusively an Amazon problem, this comes just a few weeks after Joanna Stern’s story of AI-generated knockoffs of her book on Apple Books.

You know, it’s hard enough making any sort of living as a writer, but crowding the field with AI slop? It’s not even as if people are buying them and reviewing them favorably. They’re just old socks stuffed down the drain, clogging up the sink with putrid water.¹ What are we even doing here, people?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement, but this is the beta period, and improvements may be forthcoming.

Still, the promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new possibilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

As of today, iOS 27 is available to any and all who want to try it as a public beta. Some features are buggy, others aren’t yet finished, and every once in a while something may go haywire. But it’s all in the name of getting everything working for the final release in the fall.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written Siri off as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down from the middle of the top edge of the screen, a gesture that’s now available not just on the home screen but in any app. It’s got a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the month-plus that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that includes.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie still in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message.

Of course, some of this is easily ascribable to this being beta software. But some of it also the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of AI, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding, but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. Especially because it’s already there, built into your phone.

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available on that continent either.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

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, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

AirDrop transfers were also notably rapid, though I say was because in recent beta builds my iPhone has stopped sending files via that method, though it still receives them. (That’s betas, folks!)

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement.

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones, but the public beta experience will certainly bear out the truth of that claim.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

Passwords has an agentic AI feature that will scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Even on that subset though, my experience was uneven, with just 5 of 18 updated. It’s a very cool idea, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses, but right now it’s hit or miss.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. Unfortunately, my experience with this was a little disappointing, with it not correctly assigning the event to the right day and ignoring my attempt to provide timezone information; nor did modifying the event with natural language after the fact seem to work. I hope that gets ironed out before the end of the beta period.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. In my testing, this isn’t fully rolled out everywhere yet: Boston’s satellite maps were actually two-dimensional compared to iOS 26’s, but if I flew down to New York, I could see far more detail on a building like One World Trade Center.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

Apple’s improved Shortcuts with a bunch of new actions and streamlined automations by including them as part of the shortcut itself. There’s also an impressive new AI “describe your shortcut” mode. It works pretty well for simpler shortcuts, but can start to get a little off the rails the more complex you get. Unfortunately, Shortcuts has been among the buggiest features during the beta period; I’ve had a lot of them stop working, and run into some perplexing issues.

Safari likewise has a few new features, including being notified when a page content changes (as frequently as on the hour, if you’re watching for price changes, for example), as well as a “describe your extension” feature not unlike the Shortcuts functionality. I haven’t had as much of a chance to put this through its paces, but it’s a fascinating addition and will be interesting to see if lots of people who never would have tried their hand at this kind of thing will end up making extensions.

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

As for the shortcomings, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a beta period. Proceed with caution. Sometimes things just don’t work, and you may have to live with it until the next build comes along. But sometimes things also improve build-to-build, and that’s the fun of being at the cutting edge. For the next couple months you get your chance to live in the future.

If you’ve ever wondered why your data transfers to external drives aren’t going as fast as you’d like, or a certain peripheral just isn’t working, you could probably use WhatCable, a helpful little app from developer Darryl Morley.

WhatCable looks at your Mac’s USB ports and anything plugged into them, and lets you know about speeds and power supply for your currently connected USB and Thunderbolt cables, as well as what their maximums are. While there are other places on your Mac that you can find this information, such as System Information, WhatCable presents it all in a well organized, easy to read manner. It even details all the devices connected to your USB hubs.

For example, after looking at it, I realized that my backup drive was only connected via a USB2 cable. Fine in general for overnight backups, but when it reminded to me when I was troubleshooting some backup issues that maybe I should switch to a high speed cable that supports USB-3.¹

You can choose to run WhatCable in your menu bar, or as a standalone app; there’s also a “Show technical details” option that gives you even more information that could be helpful for troubleshooting. There are options for font size, translucency, and menu bar icon, in case you’re so inclined.

For its base functionality, WhatCable is free and available either via Morley’s site, or via homebrew. For a £9.99 one-time purchase, you can unlock WhatCable Pro, which works on up to two Macs, lets you assign names to cables so you can remember which one it is when you plug it in later, provides more in-depth diagnostics, offers live power metering to see how much juice is being delivered right now, and even more.

[via Michael Tsai]

Joseph Cox at 404Media reports on a hole in Hide My Email’s security:

A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.

This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.

According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.

While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.

The company recently announced that it would be shifting all new anonymous addresses for both Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple to a single subdomain, a move that some critics say would make it easier for services to block using those addresses specifically. Previously, that would have required blocking all icloud.com addresses, which would obviously be untenable.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Smart home reporter Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge reports that parent company Assa Abloy has folded Level, which it acquired in 2024, into its Kwikset brand and removed the company’s founders:

The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.

As an owner and daily user of three Level locks, this news is certainly worrying. An Assa Abloy spokesperson told The Verge that the company will “continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware” but given that the majority of the engineering team seems to also be out, there are certainly questions around it.

On the upside, all of Level’s products now support Matter, which means that at least basic functionality ought to continue working for some time to come. But this is still potentially a disappointing move for a unique product.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Say this about Tim Cook: he always follows through. After telling the Wall Street Journal last week that Apple would have to raise prices thanks to the ravages of the memory market, the company today did just that. The Verge, among others, have the full breakdown.

What’s interesting is the manner in which they did so. Today’s prices apply across several product lines, most prominently the Mac and iPad, but also the Apple TV and HomePod. The increases vary, but they affect both low-end devices—the MacBook Neo, whose starting price jumps $100 to $699¹—and the high-end—the Vision Pro which, yes, it seems, can get more expensive, now starting at $3699.

If there’s a winner here, it’s probably the full-size HomePod, which rose just $50–back to the same price it was when Apple released the first-generation of the product eight years ago. Losers include the highest-end Macs, with maxed-out MacBook Pros jumping $1800 and a top-of-the-line Mac Studio increasing by a whopping $4200. But that’s not shocking, as those are all fully loaded with RAM and storage.

I also have to wonder if they purposefully did this price increase during Amazon’s Prime Day sales, knowing that would at least give customers a chance to snag devices at discounts before these changes ripple all the way down the supply chain.

Not every product line was hit today, though: unchanged for the moment are the prices for Apple’s most prominent device, the iPhone, as well as the Apple Watch. Those are due for a refresh in September—it seems likely at higher prices or, as Jason speculated last week, dropping the low-end configurations, but at this point, who knows? We’ll find out in just a few months, when the most expensive iPhone ever arrives, and is probably even pricier than we’re thinking now.

Basic Apple Guy has a rundown of the new icons in Golden Gate compared to their Tahoe predecessors:

The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

It’s not just Golden Gate: upon installing the beta, I immediately noticed the improvement on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 as well. The changes are mostly pretty subtle and, without having the side-by-side comparison, they’re hard to define. But if I had to chalk it up to one element, it would be “sharper.” Look at the edges on Books or the popsicle sticks on the App Store, for example: they are less fuzzy than the 26 version, by far.

Apple’s screens have always been among the best in the business, and given how great the Retina (and up) displays are, it feels in retrospect like a tremendous flaw on the part of the 26 year updates to make have prominently blurry/fuzzy/diffused icons on screens renowned for their sharpness.

But again, I return to the point that even very subtle changes can tremendously improve the experience and just make the icons feel better. That’s good design.

Go to the linked site.

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