iOS 27 includes new iCloud capabilities across several apps like Apple Home, Siri, Photos, and more. There are some direct ‌iCloud‌ improvements like upgrades to photo uploads and sharing, along with some indirect new features.

HomeKit Secure Video Cameras (iCloud+)

If you have HomeKit Secure Video cameras, the Home app in ‌iOS 27‌ has a couple of useful new Apple Intelligence features.

You can get text-based summaries of what's going on, sent as notifications. So when you get a notification for movement, it will say something like "Someone was seen," or "Animal seen."

The text descriptions are also shown in the video playback timeline, and you can search for specific events. Events that take place across two cameras, such as the same person walking from room to room, are paired together to give an overview of action across the home.

‌Apple Intelligence‌ features in the Home app require a 2TB or higher iCloud+ plan, which is priced starting at $9.99 in the United States. The 2TB plan is also the plan required for an unlimited number of ‌HomeKit Secure Video‌ cameras.

‌HomeKit Secure Video‌ cameras have always required an ‌iCloud‌+ plan to store the camera footage in ‌iCloud‌. A single camera can be added with the 50GB plan, and five cameras can be added with the 200GB plan.

To use the ‌Apple Intelligence‌ Home app features, you need a home hub like a HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV 4K, as well as a device that supports ‌Apple Intelligence‌ (iPhone 15 Pro or newer).

‌HomeKit Secure Video‌ cameras can also record up to 4K footage in ‌iOS 27‌, but that feature does not use ‌Apple Intelligence‌.

Apple Intelligence Limit Increase (iCloud+)

Apple said at WWDC that some ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features like image generation with Image Playground will have limits on daily use.

Those limits can be increased with most ‌iCloud‌+ plans. Apple has not given a list of features that will have limits beyond ‌Image Playground‌, nor has it said what the limits will be without an ‌iCloud‌+ plan and with the tiered options.

Siri

‌Siri‌ conversations in the ‌Siri‌ app sync across devices using ‌iCloud‌. The ‌Siri‌ app lets you revisit previous conversations, start new conversations, pin important chats, and continue chats across iOS, macOS, and iPadOS.

Photos

There are several new ‌iCloud‌ features in the ‌Photos‌ app.

• Prioritize Syncing - There's a toggle to force all of your photos to upload to ‌iCloud‌ regardless of battery status. It turns on for 24 hours and then turns off.


• Shared Albums - Android and Windows users can upload photos to Shared Albums. Shared Albums also keep full-resolution photos and videos to support the cross-platform sharing feature.


• Upload Speed - iPhones will now start uploading to iCloud Photos more quickly to make images available across devices faster.

Collaboration

• Link Previews - ‌iCloud‌ collaboration links now show richer previews so you can more clearly see what you've been sent.


• Access Requests - Users can send access requests for items shared via ‌iCloud‌.


• Speed - Apple says users will get faster access to shared content on iCloud.com.


• Links - Creating links to ‌iCloud‌ content is easier with a more accessible share link.

Journal

You can now see the ‌iCloud‌ sync status for each journal entry.

Passwords

The Passwords app can use ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to automatically fix weak passwords in ‌iOS 27‌. It uses ‌iCloud‌ Keychain and Safari to operate.

An Apple Intelligence-compatible iPhone is required to use the feature.

Read More

More information on the features in ‌iOS 27‌ can be found in our roundup.

Launch Date

‌iOS 27‌ is available to developers and public beta testers. It will launch in September alongside new iPhone models.
This article, "iOS 27: All the New iCloud Features" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Marcin Wichary:

This instruction is a fever dream of three weird things in sequence:

• What on earth is “QuickTime”?
• I am recording with a player?
• Why can’t I choose the option [“New Screen Recording”] that describes exactly what I want to do?

[…]

It’s noticing this kind of complexity, places where an easy way was chosen, design debt accumulated, and things got simply too weird. Apple allowed three weird things to accumulate here.

It makes sense in terms of the history and how the technology works, but from a clean slate one might expect this functionality to be in the Screenshot app, Screen Sharing, iPhone Mirroring, or perhaps even Finder.

Previously:

• QuickTime Player Creates .mov Files

With iOS 27, Apple focused on making improvements to iOS performance, optimizing everything from system animations to AirDrop transfer speeds. iPhone performance is smoother and faster on all iPhones able to run ‌iOS 27‌, which includes the iPhone 11 and newer.


There are over 80 ‌iOS 27‌ improvements Apple announced, with 10 of the most useful listed below.

App Launching

Apps launch up to 30 percent faster in ‌iOS 27‌, and that includes Apple's own apps and third-party apps. When you're opening apps dozens of times a day, less loading time adds up and makes the system feel faster.

Apple says it tested the app launching speed improvements using an iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 26.4.2 and ‌iOS 27‌.

Optimized CPU Scheduler

iOS includes a CPU scheduler that manages computational resources across workloads as you use your iPhone. Apple says it optimized the CPU scheduler in ‌iOS 27‌ to more efficiently handle performance-intensive tasks.

Apple extended CPU scheduler optimization all the way back to the iPhone 11, which is part of the reason even old iPhones feel faster with the update installed.

Apple is often accused of making old iPhones slower with new iOS updates, but there are noticeable speed improvements in ‌iOS 27‌ so we likely won't hear that complaint this year.

Better Wi-Fi to Cellular Transitions

iPhones are better at determining when to transition from Wi-Fi to a cellular connection, and from a cellular connection to Wi-Fi. When you're connected to your home Wi-Fi and walk out the door, you'll see less connectivity loss as your device changes networks.

Apple says the iPhone is better about choosing the best available Wi-Fi or cellular connection to help you stay connected.

Rebuilt Search Index

Apple rebuilt its search foundation in ‌iOS 27‌, giving Spotlight, Photos, Mail, and other apps a more comprehensive index of content that stays updated throughout the day.

In the Mail app, there's a new ranking system that surfaces more relevant emails for search queries instead of listing results by date. You'll see up to five ranked Top Results now.

Photo Load Time

When you take a photo and then open up the ‌Photos‌ app, your just-captured image appears more quickly so you can edit it or share it. Apple says photos and videos load up to 70 percent faster in the ‌Photos‌ library, which it tested with a ‌Photos‌ app that had a 50,000-asset library.

Waiting on a photo to unblur when you quickly swap over to the ‌Photos‌ app is a small annoyance, but cutting down on load time makes taking a photo feel much faster.

Recent camera captures are also added more quickly in the Messages app photo picker.

Automatic Message Resending

When a message, photo, or video fails to send in iMessage, your iPhone will automatically retry sending it instead of throwing up a red exclamation point and forcing you to manually try again.

Sending photos and videos when you have a poor connection also does not pause a Messages conversation while the content sends. Each photo or video has its own progress bar, and your texts will still go through while you wait for images and video to upload.

Faster Camera Launch in Low Power Mode

When you have Low Power Mode turned on, the Camera app can launch slowly. That's been fixed in ‌iOS 27‌, and it loads faster than before.

The Camera also draws less power in Low Power Mode.

Faster Keyboard Loading

The emoji and sticker keyboards load more quickly, so there's no longer an irritating pause when you want to use an emoji. The keyboard is something you use frequently, so this is a time-saving improvement.

Mail Badges

If you're tired of unread Mail badges popping up when you have read all your emails, ‌iOS 27‌ addresses the issue. The Mail app badge is now less likely to show an inaccurate number of unread emails.

Bluetooth

Apple says it improved Bluetooth power management in ‌iOS 27‌, an update relevant to AirPods, Apple Watch, CarPlay, speakers, and other Bluetooth devices.

Bluetooth accessories should draw less power for some minor improvements to battery life.

Other Useful Improvements

• AirDrop transfers are up to 80 percent faster, and AirDrop is faster to find nearby recipients


• Text recognition in images and documents is quicker


• Safari has enhanced power efficiency and web apps are faster


• Unlocking an iPhone, scrolling through Home Screen pages and App Library, and scrolling in Control Center are all smoother


• The Lock Screen no longer goes to sleep when you're scrolling through notifications


• Wireless ‌CarPlay‌ is more reliable

iOS 27 Launch

‌iOS 27‌ is being beta tested right now, and can be downloaded by developers and public beta testers. It will launch this fall alongside new iPhone models.

Read More

For more on the new features in ‌iOS 27‌, we have a dedicated iOS 27 roundup.
This article, "10 iOS 27 Performance Improvements You'll Actually Notice" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

Apple’s Liquid Glass interface has always been a bold, polarizing experiment in translucency. With the iOS 27 public beta, the company is now letting users push it even further — into “More Clear” territory. One writer cranked the new slider all the way to maximum transparency and spent a full week living with the most warped, glassy, and delightfully distorted iPhone experience yet.

From notifications that ripple and refract app icons like light through actual glass, to menu bars that turn text into momentary abstract art, the clearest Liquid Glass setting revives the playful dimensionality Apple first chased more than a decade ago. It’s not the most practical choice for everyone, but for those willing to embrace the whimsy, it turns the phone into something closer to living, breathing art.

Wired‘s Reece Rogers dove in headfirst. Here’s what it felt like to go full transparent.

Reece Rogers for Wired:
‎

Fear not — if you don’t feel the same way as I do about transparency — you can drag that same slider to the right and boost the overall opacity of Liquid Glass. There’s still the option to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast as well.

I immediately cranked my settings to maximum clarity after I downloaded the public beta and left the setting on for a week to get the full experience. I understand why some prefer the heavily tinted version or need to switch it for accessibility reasons, yet I reveled in the warped colors and characters as I experienced Liquid Glass in its clearest glory.

The “more clear” option also added an increased depth to my device — reminiscent of an Apple update from more than a decade ago, in iOS 7, that you likely haven’t thought about in a minute: 3D apps. Apple added a parallax wallpaper effect during the iPhone 5’s heyday that used the smartphone’s gyroscope to make it appear as if app icons on your home screen floated slightly above the background, visibly shifting to the phone’s tilt.

Both Liquid Glass and 3D app icons gave the iPhone a more tactile sense of dimensionality…

Halfway through my week of testing, this option started to look so normal to me that I worried I had accidentally reset my phone to the default and checked my settings to ensure “more clear” was still enabled. It was. Which was a relief, and a sign I’d adjusted to this clearer version of Liquid Glass even faster than anticipated…

[T]his clear-minded update was delightful to try, and I’m keeping up with my transparent lifestyle even after the weeklong experiment ended.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: You might even say that Apple’s Liquid Glass cranked up to maximum transparency makes the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.

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The post Crank up Apple’s Liquid Glass to maximum transparency and you’ll enjoy every warped second appeared first on MacDailyNews.

iOS 27’s new paste shortcut puts a live clipboard preview right above your keyboard, so pasting text, links and photos takes just one tap.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Apple on Wednesday pushed out the second public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and watchOS 27 to members of its public beta testing program. The updates arrive roughly one week after the first public betas and continue Apple’s focus on refining its next-generation software ahead of the expected September launch.

Major Siri AI Upgrades Across Platforms

The most significant highlight across both releases is the expansion of Siri AI, Apple’s more intelligent, context-aware assistant.

• On iPhone and iPad, Siri AI can search the web, access personal information, understand what’s on your screen, and perform actions across apps. It now resembles conversational AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, complete with a dedicated Siri app for extended interactions. These capabilities require a device that supports Apple Intelligence.

• On Apple Watch, Siri AI brings similar smarts to your wrist. Users can ask questions, get answers based on personal data, and complete tasks directly from the watch. A new dedicated Siri app sits prominently in the updated dynamic app grid that appears when pressing the Digital Crown.

iOS 27 & iPadOS 27 Highlights

Apple has continued polishing the Liquid Glass design introduced last year, adding a new slider to control transparency levels and making further visual refinements. New AI-powered tools appear throughout the system:

• Enhanced photo editing in the Photos app
• Automatic tab organization in Safari
• Natural language creation of Shortcuts and Safari extensions
• Visual Intelligence now integrated into the Camera app (with features like meal nutrition analysis and bill splitting)
• “Write with Siri” for text generation and refinement

Other notable additions include custom EQ for AirPods, 4K video camera support in the Home app, improved parental controls, and broad performance enhancements that make apps launch faster, AirDrop transfers quicker, and the overall experience snappier—even on older iPhones.

watchOS 27 Highlights

The watch update emphasizes convenience and fitness improvements:

• New gesture for selecting widgets in the Smart Stack
• Smart Stack suggestions for parked car location, transit cards, and birthdays
• Workout Buddy that works independently of the iPhone
• More accurate treadmill run/walk distance tracking
• Unified Find My app with Precision Finding support

tvOS 27 brings a redesigned Podcasts app, Hi-Res Lossless audio and AutoMix in Apple Music, faster app launches, and quicker AirPlay connections.

How to Install the Public Betas

1. Sign up for the Apple Public Beta Program at beta.apple.com.
2. On your device, go to Settings > General > Software Update and install the available beta.

MacDailyNews Note: As with all early beta software, users should back up their devices before installing and expect some bugs or battery life impacts during testing.

Apple is expected to continue seeding weekly or bi-weekly betas throughout the summer, with final versions arriving alongside new iPhones in September. For full details on new features, check MacRumors’ dedicated roundups for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and watchOS 27.

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Apple is preparing for a major expansion of device financing with the upcoming “Apple Upgrade” leasing program — and iOS 27 already contains the tools to enforce it. Code discovered in the beta reveals a new “Restricted Mode” that can limit access to most apps and services on leased iPhones if payments fall behind, while preserving essential functions like Phone, Settings, and Health. Paired with a new “Partner Finance Lock,” this system gives financing partners powerful remote controls without handing over location data.

As Apple partners with Klarna to make iPhones and other devices more affordable through longer-term leases, these findings show exactly how the company plans to protect itself from defaults.

Marcus Mendes for 9to5Mac:
‎

9to5Mac can now confirm that code found in the iOS 27 beta appears to reveal a broader system for managing a financed iPhone, including the ability to restrict apps and services when payments are missed…

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…

The code does not appear to cancel, suspend, or otherwise modify App Store subscriptions associated with blocked apps. As a result, a subscription could continue billing even while access to its app is restricted.

Additionally, there isn’t a fixed number of missed payments that automatically triggers the restrictions. The financing provider’s app decides when to lock the device based on its own policies.

Finally, the new framework also introduces a new type of activation lock called “Partner Finance Lock,” which is meant to prevent users from erasing, reselling, or stripping a restricted device for parts.

‎
MacDailyNews Take: It makes perfect sense for Apple to have digital repossession capabilities for leased devices which, after all, users do not own until they are fully paid off.

If you don’t like this financing setup, buy your Apple hardware outright like normal people with basic financial sense.

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The Apple Upgrade leasing program could help cash-strapped consumers, but hidden iOS 27 code shows it might restrict your iPhone.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

iOS 27 beta 5 arrives after a few weeks of wait, bringing some minor changes and improvements.

(via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Ready for a glimpse into our future as Apple users? Public betas for macOS 27 Golden Gate, iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and other major Apple operating systems are now available—but beware of bugs and be sure to back up your devices first.

iOS 27 beta 4 for iPhone, and iPadOS 27 beta 4 for iPad, have been released for users engaged in the OS 27 developer beta system software testing programs. A concurrent public beta testing program is also now ongoing, though those betas are typically delayed a day or few behind dev betas, but otherwise match ... Read More

The post iOS 27 Beta 4 Update Available to Download for iPhone & iPad appeared first on OS X Daily.

Apple has finally completed its silicon transition: macOS 27 drops all Intel-based Macs, and iPadOS 27 and watchOS 27 each leave five models by the wayside, whereas the iPhone compatibility list remains unchanged.

Apple on Monday released the fourth developer betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate (macOS 27), continuing the rapid beta cycle following the company’s announcements at WWDC 2026. The new builds arrive exactly two weeks after the third betas, signaling steady progress toward the expected public releases this fall.

How to Download

Registered developers can obtain the updates directly on their devices:

• iOS 27 / iPadOS 27: Go to Settings > General > Software Update.

• macOS Golden Gate: Go to System Settings > General > Software Update (with Beta Updates enabled and a developer account linked).

Major Features in This Cycle

Both platforms continue to emphasize Apple Intelligence and a refined user interface centered around the new Liquid Glass design language.

Siri AI takes center stage as a more capable, chatbot-style assistant. It combines general world knowledge, personal context from apps like Messages and Mail, and on-screen awareness to deliver smarter responses. A dedicated Siri app now stores conversation history, and system-wide Write with Siri helps generate or refine text. On the Mac, users can also create custom voices with personalized pace and expressivity. Visual Intelligence has been enhanced and relocated (to the Camera app on iOS and integrated into the desktop on macOS) for better contextual understanding of what’s on screen.

Design and Performance Improvements include:

• Enhanced Liquid Glass with better opacity, readability, and a new transparency slider.

• Refined window shadows, uniform toolbars, edge-to-edge sidebars, and subtler rounded corners on macOS.

• Faster app launching, quicker keyboard appearance, improved AirDrop speeds, and smoother Wi-Fi-to-cellular handoffs across iOS devices.

• Overall performance optimizations that make the system feel snappier, even on older hardware.

Apple Intelligence Expansions add new capabilities in Photos, Safari (AI tab organization), Wallet, Passwords (automatic weak password updates), Shortcuts, and the revamped Image Playground app, which now supports photorealistic image generation.

MacDailyNews Take: With beta 4 now available, Apple is expected to continue refining stability, battery life, and features in the coming weeks. A public beta is likely to follow soon, ahead of the official launch of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate in September.

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Set Safari to alert you when a website publishes new posts, an out-of-stock item comes back in stock, or concert tickets go on sale.

Federico Viticci (Mastodon):

The AI frontier from the two big labs (and – we have to be honest with the numbers here – probably SpaceXAI and Meta now, too) is in a completely different league at the moment. I spent my first couple of weeks with Siri AI trying to convince myself that I could replace Codex with Siri AI, and that was the wrong approach. There is a potential future in which Siri AI can become a more proactive and capable agent, but that’s not what Apple is shipping this year.

[…]

Siri AI is a dramatically better Siri for typical Siri stuff. The new Siri understands your commands and nuanced requests better because of the LLMs behind it; it can often perform multiple requests in one go (such as setting multiple timers with one command); the new expressive (and customizable!) voices sound great, and they’re terrific at reading and summarizing notifications. Apple’s first advantage compared to other chatbots is right here: only Siri can integrate with the iPhone and iPad to this extent, so even if the Foundation models aren’t as smart as the competition, Siri can do a lot more for most people on their devices because neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have OSes they can control.

[…]

The biggest issue I’ve encountered is the inconsistency of it all. Very often, the new Siri AI still replies with a generic “Uh oh, something went wrong“ error that doesn’t explain what the error was or why it happened. Sometimes, I ask a question via voice, and it errors out, but then a few seconds later, I type the same question in the app, and it’s fine.

[…]

My problem is that, right now with Apple’s own apps, both the index and Siri’s ability to perform actions are very inconsistent. The assistant hallucinates abilities it doesn’t have, and it frequently just doesn’t work.

Dan Moren:

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.

[…]

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.

John Voorhees:

Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.

The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places.

[…]

A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript.

Previously:

• macOS 27 Public Beta
• iOS 27 Public Beta
• No Siri AI in EU
• Siri AI Announced

Update (2026-08-04): Benjamin Mayo:

Thanks to the top-to-bottom revamp that is Siri AI, Siri is reliably intelligent. Finally. We are still in the midst of beta season, and Apple is yet to confirm whether Siri AI will formally launch with iOS 27 in September or sometime later in the year, but the feature is up to scratch. There are bugs and glitches and edge-case quirks, but on the whole, it wipes the floor with old Siri and is competent enough to supplant my everyday usage of other chatbots too.

[…]

Siri AI can get a snapshot of what’s on screen, but it cannot control the UI for you autonomously. As such, if you ask it to do something outside of its library of available app actions, it will say it can’t do that. Often, it can quote the relevant steps for you to do it yourself, but obviously that falls short of the ideal experience. This feels a bit lacklustre to people already embracing AI agents en masse. Claude and Codex on Mac do not hit these walls; they are all too keen to move your mouse for you and run terminal commands until the job is done.

Previously:

• ChatGPT Work and ChatGPT Classic
• Claude Desktop App
• Perplexity Personal Computer
• Codex for Almost Everything

Juli Clover:

Apple released the iOS 27 public beta today, and if you’ve been curious about the new software, now’s the time to try it out. iOS 27 brings Siri AI, performance improvements, and lots of new Apple Intelligence features.

[…]

Everything feels snappier than it did in iOS 26. Animations are quicker, apps launch faster, and AirDrop transfers complete faster. You’ll see improvements when taking photos, opening the keyboard, using the App Library, and swapping Home Screen pages. Your iMessages between devices sync more accurately, messages won’t fail to send and will be automatically retried, and your iPhone can transition more smoothly between Wi-Fi and cellular.

Dan Moren:

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.

[…]

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.

Previously:

• Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27
• Siri AI Announced
• Glow Leopard
• Liquid Glass 27 Slider
• iOS 27 Announced
• appleOS 26 Public Betas

Sarah Perez (PDF, Hacker News, MacRumors):

The iPhone maker alleges that this misconduct, which it says reveals a pattern of theft from OpenAI employees who previously worked at Apple, was directed by OpenAI’s senior leadership, including Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses Tan of using Apple’s confidential project code names during OpenAI’s recruiting process, asking job candidates to bring in Apple hardware components to their interviews, coaching departing Apple employees on how to evade the company’s security procedures, and asking for details about the company’s unannounced products.

Apple’s allegations are detailed and shocking, and it sounds like they have a lot of evidence.

Chance Miller:

The lawsuit names Chang Liu and Tang Tan as two of the defendants. Tang Tan served as VP of product design at Apple, leading iPhone and Apple Watch product design. He departed the company in February 2024 to work with Jony Ive. Chang Liu, meanwhile, worked at Apple for eight years and was a senior system electrical engineer before departing to join OpenAI in January 2026.

Apple’s lawsuit also names OpenAI and io Products as defendants.

OpenAI’s hardware efforts are being led by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer.

[…]

Ive, Hankey, and Cannon are not personally mentioned anywhere in Apple’s initial filing today.

Emma Roth:

Here are the most surprising claims in Apple’s 41-page filing.

Marcus Mendes (MacRumors):

OpenAI’s Director of Strategic Communications, Drew Pusateri, took to X to comment on the company’s behalf.

In his post, he claims OpenAI has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” adding that OpenAI remains “focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”

This seems like a weak response, given that Apple says it reported its findings to OpenAI in February and never heard back. Presumably, they’ve already investigated but see the situation as serious enough that they need to say as little as possible.

It’s not clear to me the extent to which Apple believes the behavior was limited to the named defendants. It’s hard to believe that the rest of OpenAI’s leadership—including Altman and Ive—were unaware, given the scale of their recruiting from Apple. It’s equally hard to believe that they were aware and thought they could get away with it. I guess little from Altman would surprise me at this point. I’d like to believe that Ive wasn’t part of it, but then are we to believe that his former coworkers all kept him in the dark?

Nick Heer:

What is immediately notable about this whole thing is the myriad conflicts of interest. Apple, of course, has a current partnership with OpenAI to power Apple Intelligence features, something repeatedly mentioned on the previous version of its marketing webpage, and conspicuously absent on the current one.

But the history runs far deeper. Among the defendants in the suit is io Products — do not blame me for that capitalization choice — founded by Jony Ive and acquired by OpenAI last May. Total mentions of “Ive” in the body of this lawsuit? Zero. Also, one of the investors in Ive’s company was Emerson Collective, founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, and which now has equity in OpenAI. Neither Emerson nor Powell Jobs are defendants.

M.G. Siegler:

It all reads a bit as if Apple has been building up evidence of these allegations for some time and recently got their smoking gun. It’s not just nebulous “trade secrets” either, there are specific mentions down to “metal finishing techniques” that Apple apparently invented and protected.

It also comes a little less than a month after OpenAI was rumored to be threatening Apple with a lawsuit over the perceived failure of their deal to bake ChatGPT into the iPhone. As I wrote at the time, even just that threat was clearly not going to go over well in Cupertino.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Footnote 13 on p. 15 states:

Apple and OpenAI have a commercial relationship involving the integration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence. The companies have entered into a written agreement governing that integration. That agreement is not at issue here. OpenAI’s acts of trade secret misappropriation alleged herein do not arise from and have no connection to that agreement.

Be that as it may legally speaking, in practical terms it seems untenable for that Apple Intelligence partnership to continue after this.

Jason Snell:

All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open!

M.G. Siegler:

Namely, while Apple frames OpenAI – or at least its fledgling hardware division – as “rotten to its core” (interesting terminology!), they really only have a case against two and maybe three individuals. But they also clearly believe that if this case goes to trial, they will have a case against a lot more.

[…]

The parallels to the Anthony Levandowski situation after he left Google for Uber have been drawn.

[…]

It is interesting that Apple is not suing Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, who is named in the suit as a co-conspirator with Liu while she was still employed at Apple, before she also subsequently went to work at OpenAI. Is it possible she’s cooperating or has cooperated with Apple in this investigation?

[…]

Even if these allegations are found to be untrue or embellished, can he reasonably stay at OpenAI now? And perhaps that’s the real outcome Apple is looking for here, as they clearly frame him as the ringleader of the 400-plus people who have come over to OpenAI from Apple.

Hartley Charlton:

OpenAI’s ambitions to build a hardware rival to the iPhone are already running into trouble because of Apple’s trade secret lawsuit, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who argues the damage is showing up well before any court ruling.

[…]

The scale of the talent drain is a major part of why this matters to Apple. More than 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI, including former Apple design chief Jony Ive, and Gurman says the company poached so heavily from Apple’s iPhone product design group specifically that Apple had to rebuild parts of the team. Apple has responded with bigger retention bonuses and executives personally working to keep engineers from leaving.

Jeff Johnson:

OpenAI stole stuff? I can’t believe it! I thought they were done with stealing after they stole literally everything on the internet.

Colin Cornaby:

I’m sure there’s no problem with sending this company all your source code they pinky swear not to train on.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I can’t believe this awful company solicited confidential information and stolen trade secrets, hiring from this other company while pretending to partner with them. ‘Rotten to the core’ indeed

😛

He’s referencing Apple doing this to Masimo. And, of course, Steve Jobs himself directed Apple to engage in illegal hiring practices.

Previously:

• OpenAI Acquires Jony Ive’s io
• Apple v. Optis Cellular Technology
• OpenAI to Become For-Profit Company
• OpenAI and Ive
• Masimo v. Apple
• OpenAI Is Today Unrecognizable
• Inside Apple’s Design Team
• BlueMail Antitrust Case Against Apple Dismissed
• Apple Suing Former A-series Chip Lead
• Apple/Google Hiring Lawsuit, Settled

Update (2026-07-17): See also: Dithering.

Tim Hardwick (FT, Hacker News):

Apple has reportedly sent legal letters to dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI, telling them to preserve potentially relevant documents and communications as it continues to pursue its trade secret lawsuit against the AI company.

Update (2026-08-06): Hartley Charlton (PDF):

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s lawsuit accusing the AI company of stealing trade secrets, calling the allegations “meritless.”

Previously:

• OpenAI Open Letter Responds to Apple Lawsuit

Apple:

You manage all the devices that appear in Xcode as run destinations using Device Hub.

Run your app on simulated devices in Device Hub to quickly evaluate new features and fix bugs, and to see how your interface works on devices that you don’t have physical access to. Run your app on physical devices to test features or services that have hardware dependencies or investigating performance issues. For more information, see Running your app on simulated or physical devices.

Fatbobman:

Device Hub is undoubtedly a major surprise. It integrates simulators, physical device management, system state testing, and dynamic size adjustment into a new workflow. Its impact on day-to-day development experience may be more direct than that of many individual APIs. That said, iPhone apps now also support dynamic size adjustment, which will bring new challenges for developers, especially in terms of data and state organization. Adapting to different sizes is not something that can be solved merely by relying on dynamic layout containers. In many scenarios, large and small sizes correspond to very different navigation logic.

Collin Allen (Mastodon):

Xcode 27 introduced, among other new features, a new Device Hub app for developers that takes the place of the Simulator app. Where Simulator relied on separate windows for each device, Device Hub brings them all together into a single window where each simulated device is the detail view from a source list of devices on the left. It’s a more organized approach, made necessary by the wide variety of platforms Apple and Apple platform app developers have to build and test against.

[…]

In releases prior to Xcode 27, you could resolve this by importing the root public certificate into the simulated OS. On iOS, this could be done by dragging and dropping the .cer file onto the Simulator device window. Nothing would appear to happen, but you could then navigate to Settings, General, About, Certificate Trust Settings and mark the certificate as trusted.

[…]

In Xcode 27 with Device Hub, this process is much more uniform. […] While this new process does require you to wrap certificates in an Apple Configurator profile, this is much more consistent with how Apple’s device management system works, as it relies on signed profiles with policies, not loose .cer files. And now, just by adding the .mobileconfig to the Profiles section of the device inspector, the embedded certificate is automatically marked as trusted, greatly speeding up installation on new virtual devices.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

I get what Apple is trying to do with the Device Hub, but it’s nowhere near as usable and as useful as the iOS Simulator (in this seed)

Adam Overholtzer:

Device Hub is missing the “pixel accurate” and “point accurate” zoom options and that’s not acceptable.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Maybe someday the Simulator/Device Hub might even be able to output screenshots in the same orientation as the emulated device 😛

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Thanks to the remote control / screen sharing features of Device Hub, I can remotely navigate to Settings and start a software update on all my iOS27 devices without having to go collect them around the house 👌

Steve Troughton-Smith:

For all of Apple’s nonsense about adding iPhone Mirroring to the EU, the new Device Hub (iOS Simulator) lets you remote-control your physical iOS devices just fine. I don’t think the DMA has an opt-out for developer tools 😛

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s such a shame for now that Xcode 27’s Device Hub doesn’t support remote screen sharing with iOSes earlier than 27. I wish the screen sharing functionality was part of the developer disk image, and backported to iOS 26 and even iOS 18. Having a physical device plugged in somewhere is so much faster than booting a Simulator.

Previously:

• WWDC 2026 Links
• Xcode 27 Announced
• No Apple Intelligence or iPhone Mirroring in EU at Launch

Update (2026-06-26): Léo Natan:

Xcode 27’s “Device Hub” is a broken shitshow, but most importantly, it lacks the Debug menu, where you could toggle slow animations and simulate memory warnings. Apple works tirelessly to destroy any good tool they used to have.

He has a thread of issues. Hopefully these will be addressed before it’s out of beta.

Update (2026-07-01): Craig Hockenberry:

The Device Hub sometimes doesn’t kill CoreSimulator processes when you quit the app (not sure if this is a bug or intentional). Given that each device uses several hundred processes, the memory/processing impact is significant.

You’ll probably want to keep an eye on how many you have running: use right-click on the simulator in the list to “Shut Down” as necessary.

Swift 6.4 is now available in beta form with Xcode 27. The Swift Evolution proposals are listed here.

What’s new in Swift:

Discover the latest language advancements, including updates for everyday ergonomics, improved concurrency, and safer high-performance code. Explore workflow and language interoperability improvements and updates in embedded Swift.

Build real-time apps and services with gRPC and Swift:

Build engaging live experiences with gRPC in your Swift app and backend. gRPC is an open-source RPC framework designed for high-performance, bidirectional streaming APIs. Explore how the gRPC Swift package provides a modern, safe runtime built with Swift concurrency.

Explore numerical computing in Swift with MLX:

Bring NumPy-style computing natively to Swift with MLX Swift. Discover how to eliminate cross-language friction in your machine learning workflows by handling image processing, tensor operations, and neural network training in a single, type-safe environment. Explore the APIs that let you leverage GPU acceleration while enjoying the compiler, tooling, and debugging experience you already know.

Swift Group Lab:

Join us online for a deep dive into WWDC26 with Apple engineers and designers to ask questions, get advice, and follow the discussion about the week’s biggest Swift announcements.

Matt Massicotte:

There’s a voting system. And that means a number of questions weren’t selected. This time I copied those down and I thought it could be fun to take a shot at answering the ones that are more in my area.

Xcode 27 Beta 2 Release Notes:

The Swift dependency scanner has been optimized to avoid redundant setup work and header searches when looking up Clang modules during a single dependency-scan action, substantially improving scanning performance.

As a consequence of this change, every Clang module reachable from a single Swift dependency-scan action must have a unique module name. If two module maps visible to the same scan declare a Clang module with the same name, the scan may report an error.

[…]

System now provides Swift APIs for the C stat, lstat, fstat, and fstatat system calls. This includes a new Stat type with initializers from FilePath, FileDescriptor, or a C string; FilePath.stat() and FileDescriptor.stat() instance methods; and supporting types (FileType, FileMode, FileFlags, UserID, GroupID, DeviceID, and Inode).

Wade Tregaskis:

The final piece of the Prospective Vision for Accessors, this allows for more efficient accessors on structs, in a nutshell.

[…]

Now there’s a safer version of the existing withUnsafeTemporaryAllocation (first introduced in Swift 5.6). It works just like you’d expect. It comes in both “raw bytes” and typed elements versions, just like its unsafe predecessor.

[…]

The new isTriviallyIdentical(to:) method offers a guaranteed-fast way to check two objects for equality. It is essentially an optimised version of the existing equality condition provided by Equatable and the == operator. It’s useful because it guarantees O(1) time complexity, whereas == makes no formal guarantees at all (and for many types is O(N) or worse). But unlike the existing identity comparison operator === – also O(1) – it promises to do more than just tell if two objects are the exact same pointer, and it works on value types (not just reference types).

[…]

These new types generalise the existing patterns of borrowed and mutable references, that have previously existed in Swift in much more restricted forms (e.g. inout parameters are essentially MutableRef parameters, and Span & MutableSpan are array equivalents).

There’s now a built-in function for demangling Swift symbol names, in the Runtime module (that’s bundled with the Swift toolchain, alongside the stdlib etc).

Khoa Pham:

As Apple has aligned OS version numbers across platforms, Swift 6.4 takes the next step by letting you collapse repetitive availability attributes into a single anyAppleOS token.

[…]

There are situations where you need to call a deprecated API while you plan a migration, or audit a critical function for unsafe usage, without letting those concerns bleed into the rest of the project. The new @diagnose attribute handles both cases.

[…]

Some work should complete even after a task is cancelled, like flushing a file to avoid corruption. withTaskCancellationShield wraps a region where Task.isCancelled always returns false.

Antoine van der Lee:

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0493: Support async calls in defer bodies. This is one of those changes that feels obvious once you need it.

[…]

Swift 6.4 improves error handling for unstructured tasks through SE-0520: Discardable result use in Task initializers. The change helps you catch a subtle bug: creating a throwing task and then ignoring its returned task handle.

[…]

Swift 6.4 also implements SE-0530: Async Result Support.

[…]

Swift 6.4 implements SE-0518: ~Sendable for explicitly marking non-Sendable types. It allows you to communicate that a type has been audited and should not conform to Sendable.

Slava Pestov:

I thought it would be a good time to detail some of the type checker performance improvements we worked on since I shared the type checker performance roadmap last year. I’m also going to outline a couple of things we plan on looking at next.

Previously:

• Swift 6.3
• WWDC 2026 Links
• Xcode 27 Announced
• Swift Pitch: Borrowing Sequence
• Roadmap for Improving the Swift Type Checker
• Swift 6.2: Subprocess
• Swift Prospective Vision: Accessors
• Swift Proposal: Precise Control Flags Over Compiler Warnings

Update (2026-07-09): I was optimistic about improvements to the type checker making compilation faster, but I found that compiling my predominantly Swift project with Xcode 27 Beta 3 was only 0.3% faster than with Xcode 26.6. I wonder if there’s some extra setting I’m supposed to enable.