iOS 27 has solely been out for a number of hours, and I’ve been messing round with the developer beta on my iPhone 16 Professional. I used to be most keen on making an attempt out the brand new Siri AI, however sadly, I’m nonetheless on Apple’s waitlist for that. Within the meantime, I’ve been poking round a bunch of options that aren’t about AI and located loads that I’m proud of — regardless that this doesn’t appear to be as large of an replace as earlier years, the match and end all through the working system is already nice to see.
Listed here are a number of neat issues which have jumped out at me.
The Liquid Glass opacity slider ought to have been there from the beginning
I’ve at all times thought the Liquid Glass redesign, launched with iOS 26 final yr, was advantageous — not nice, however not notably dangerous (effectively, after Apple cleaned up some early issuesat the least). However the brand new opacity slider in iOS 27 is superior: it enables you to make Liquid Glass components like tab bars extra clear or extra frosty, which means you’ll be able to see objects below them in numerous levels of opacity. Wish to actually see what’s below your search bar? Go glassy. Would you favor to maintain issues extra readable? Go for extra of a tint. (You possibly can most likely guess which I want.)
Apple took one other move of a lot of its icon designs launched with iOS 26, and total, they appear a lot better to me. The adjustments are sometimes delicate — tweaks to colours or including a bit of extra glassy texture — however I feel they make issues look way more polished.
Totally different quantity settings
From settings, now you can — lastly — set unbiased volumes for ringtones, alarms and timers, and alerts and system sounds. Within the Sounds & Haptics menu, simply toggle off the switches that allow you to match alarms and timers in addition to alerts and system sounds together with your ringtone quantity, and you’ll modify the extra granular quantity settings from there.
I’ve to admit that I by no means use widgets, however I noticed that further giant widgets have been coming with iOS 27 this yr and I needed to see a number of of them for myself. They’re significantly enormous; they take up a whole display of apps (apart from the dock). However I might see them being a particularly helpful approach to have a look at a whole calendar or an extended listing of to-dos.
You can also make the time actually small in your Lock Display screen
Whereas modifying the Lock Display screen, now you can put the time subsequent to the date on the very prime of the display. That opens up extra actual property, which is sweet if you wish to see extra of your wallpaper picture, like a household photograph or a cool piece of artwork, or in case you simply need rather less litter in your display.
We’ll be digging in much more over the following few days, so preserve an eye on The Verge. And in case you simply need to see a large listing of promising options coming to Apple’s subsequent large updates, I’ve got you covered.
