After over a month of testing iOS 27, on this week's episode of The MacRumors Show we circle back to the beta and talk through our experiences with Siri AI, Liquid Glass refinements, and more.



‌iOS 27‌ is expected to launch this fall, bringing sweeping performance work across the system. Apple has cited more than 80 speed and efficiency improvements, with app launches up to 30 percent faster and AirDrop transfers up to 80 percent faster than on iOS 26. Animations, keyboard responsiveness, Home Screen page swapping, and App Library loading have all been sped up, and Apple says the improvements extend even to older iPhones like the iPhone 11.

The centerpiece of ‌iOS 27‌ is Siri AI, a substantially overhauled version of the assistant positioned as a rival to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT. ‌Siri‌ AI can hold back-and-forth conversations, draw on personal context from Mail, Messages, Photos, and Files, and see what's on screen to answer follow-up questions. A new standalone Siri app houses ongoing conversations, while a "Search or Ask" interface, accessed via the Dynamic Island, has effectively replaced Spotlight as the default way to search the device and launch apps.

Liquid Glass, the translucent design language introduced in ‌iOS 26‌, has also been reworked. ‌iOS 27‌ adds a system-wide transparency slider in place of the binary "Clear" and "Tinted" toggle from iOS 26.1, letting users dial the effect anywhere between fully opaque and completely clear. Apple also improved how the material diffuses busy content behind it, addressing readability complaints that dogged the original rollout, and refreshed first-party app icons with additional Liquid Glass layering.

Elsewhere, Apple has leaned into contextual, on-device intelligence. For example, Call Context, a new Phone app feature, automatically surfaces relevant information, such as a flight confirmation number or order code pulled from Mail, when a user calls a business they've recently corresponded with. Apple says the feature works entirely on-device and looks only at who is being called, not at call audio, and it also appears on the Apple Watch during a call.

Calendar and Reminders now support natural language entry, letting users type something like "meeting at 2pm with Eric on July 14" and have the app suggest the date, time, and attendees automatically. Apple says ‌Siri‌ can handle more complex natural-language scheduling requests directly, including edits to recurring events.

The ‌Photos‌ app gains three generative editing tools grouped under an Apple Intelligence Tools section: an upgraded Clean Up, a new Extend tool, and Spatial Reframing. Clean Up now offers Fast, High Quality, and Auto modes for object removal and can reconstruct more complex backgrounds than before. Extend uses generative AI to fill in new content when a photo's borders are expanded, and is capped at a maximum of 25% per side. Spatial Reframing, which draws on the same spatial data used for Portrait mode, lets users shift a photo's apparent camera angle after it was taken.

The Shortcuts app has been rebuilt around a "Describe a Shortcut" interface, where ‌Apple Intelligence‌ assembles an entire automation from a plain-language description rather than requiring users to build workflows action by action manually. Safari picks up a similar natural-language approach with a new Create an Extension option for building custom browser extensions on the fly, automatic AI-driven tab organization by topic, and a "Notify Me" tool that monitors a webpage and alerts users when it changes, which is useful, Apple says, for tracking ticket sales or restocked products.

Image Playground has also been overhauled for ‌iOS 27‌, adding support for photorealistic image generation, edits to existing images via text descriptions, and additional aspect ratio options for wallpapers and Contact Posters.

‌iOS 27‌ is available now to developers and public beta testers, and Apple plans to release the software officially in September. The MacRumors Show has its own YouTube channel, so make sure you're subscribed to keep up with new episodes and clips.



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If you haven't already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up to hear our discussion about OpenAI's move into hardware and the trade secret lawsuit Apple filed against the company earlier this month.

Subscribe to ‌The MacRumors Show‌ for new episodes every week, where we discuss some of the topical news breaking here on MacRumors, often joined by interesting guests such as Kayci Lacob, Kevin Nether, John Gruber, Mark Gurman, Jon Prosser, Luke Miani, Matthew Cassinelli, Brian Tong, Quinn Nelson, Jared Nelson, Eli Hodapp, Mike Bell, Sara Dietschy, iJustine, Jon Rettinger, Andru Edwards, Arnold Kim, Ben Sullins, Marcus Kane, Christopher Lawley, Frank McShan, David Lewis, Tyler Stalman, Sam Kohl, Federico Viticci, Thomas Frank, Jonathan Morrison, Ross Young, Ian Zelbo, and Rene Ritchie.

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This article, "The MacRumors Show: Revisiting iOS 27 Ahead of iPhone 18 Pro" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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The touchscreen and the OLED panel have dominated discussion about Apple's next high-end laptop, but the redesign wrapped around them may prove to be an equally consequential change, largely because it is not expected to stay unique to the machine for long.


Bloomberg's Mark Gurman last week laid out Apple's plan to refresh every Mac it sells over the next two years. In the report, he mentioned that the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro due in 2027, reportedly code-named K104, is said to resemble the design of the high-end K114 and K116 machines while using a standard M7 chip. The design debuting on the rumored "MacBook Ultra" would therefore reach a considerably cheaper Mac within roughly a year of launch, a pattern first reported at the start of July.

Apple last redesigned the MacBook Pro in 2021 alongside the introduction of the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, and that overhaul ran in the opposite direction to this one. The machine grew thicker and heavier, and Apple restored the HDMI port, the SD card slot, and MagSafe charging that it had stripped out in the preceding generation. Five years on, the company is apparently trying to reverse the thickness.

The chassis is expected to be noticeably thinner and lighter. Swapping a mini-LED backlight for a hybrid OLED stack removes an entire physical layer from the lid, since ‌OLED‌ pixels emit their own light. There has so far been no indication that Apple intends to sacrifice ports to find the rest of the millimeters, which is just as well given how poorly that went last time.

The front of the machine is where the change should be most obvious. The notch is expected to disappear in favor of a much smaller hole-punch camera, a change first indicated on a roadmap from research firm Omdia and since corroborated by Bloomberg. The cutout is said to be pill-shaped, paving the way for an interactive Dynamic Island that expands contextually in the way it does on the iPhone.

Whether the screens themselves will grow is less settled. Omdia claimed that Samsung Display will supply 14.3-inch and 16.3-inch panels, marginally larger than the 14.2-inch and 16.2-inch displays on current models, which would imply slimmer bezels wrapped around a slightly bigger screen. A February report from Bloomberg, however, indicated that screen sizes were not expected to change, but that rumor may not have accounted for a slight reduction in bezels.

Apple is said to be fitting a reinforced hinge so the display does not wobble when tapped, but it is not clear if this will result in any external visual changes. Gurman described the approach to touch as "touch-friendly, not touch-first."

What will become of the high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ is still a loose thread. Gurman's roadmap lists a high-end 14-inch and 16-inch "MacBook" without the Pro suffix, and no separate high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ sits alongside it, though that phrasing is hard to lean on when the exact branding itself is unresolved. The new MacBook "Ultra" could replace the current M5 Pro and M5 Max models outright at a higher price point or arrive above them as a genuinely new tier while they stay on sale.

If the high-end ‌MacBook Pro‌ gains Apple's next-generation M7 Pro and M7 Max chips in late 2027, considering that the entry-level M7 model will gain the MacBook Ultra's design in the first half of that year, it seems inevitable that the high-end machines will follow, meaning that all five of Apple's most powerful laptops will share the same overall design.
This article, "MacBook Ultra's New Design Won't Stay Exclusive for Long" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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