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The Complete Guide to Every iOS 27 Feature

macOS 27 Golden Gate Is the Last Version to Support Rosetta

by Chris Smith

At the same time, Apple has given notice that a few features are on their way out: they’re still in macOS 27 Golden Gate, but will no longer be present in macOS 28 next year.

Rosetta

First is Rosetta, the technology that enables Macs with Apple silicon to seamlessly run apps designed to work only on Intel processors. It has been around since macOS 11 Big Sur, but now that the transition to Apple silicon is complete and macOS 27 no longer supports any Intel-based Macs, Rosetta’s days are numbered. Although any apps you have that were designed for Intel processors should still work in macOS 27, you will continue to see the warning messages that started appearing partway through Tahoe’s life cycle.

Technically, it’s Rosetta 2, as Apple had a previous emulation technology called Rosetta. However, Apple’s documentation omits the 2 to refer to this second version.

Translation: you have about a year to obtain a new version of the app designed for Apple silicon (if the developer releases one) or find an alternative. Otherwise, if you depend on that app, you may have to stay on macOS 27 for quite a while.

You can start making the transition from any remaining Intel-based apps now by going to System Settings > General > About and clicking Details under the macOS section. This shows a list of apps and some components on your Mac that have Intel-only code, showing those you used in the last year first.

The built-in tool may not find all the agents, daemons, command-line programs, and other bits and bobs you’ve installed over the years. For that, you should turn to third-party tools that work in Tahoe (and some earlier versions of macOS), like iMazing’s Silicon (free), St. Clair Software’s Go64 (free), and bzwrd’s more elaborate Rosetta Check ($6.99/€6.99 one-time fee).

DVD Player and encrypted HFS+ drives

Similarly, Apple has removed the DVDPlayback framework, which likely means the DVD Player app, which is still present in macOS 27, will be gone in macOS 28.

And, any drives formatted using the encrypted Mac OS Extended (HFS+) format won’t work in macOS 28. If you have such a drive, you’ll want to back it up, reformat it as APFS, and then copy your data back before macOS 28 rolls around in late 2027.

If you’re already running Tahoe, that’s all you need to know for now; the next step is checking your Mac for compatibility. If your Mac is still using an older operating system, there are changes in the past few releases you may not be fully prepared for.

Tag: macOS 27
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What to Do When Your Mac Won’t Start After Upgrading

by Moses Johnson

Even if you diligently followed every instruction, you might encounter problems while upgrading. I can’t anticipate every difficulty you may have (or provide solutions in every case), but here are two of the most likely issues and how to deal with them.

When the installation volume can’t be selected

If you run the macOS 27 Golden Gate installer, click Show All Disks when asked to choose a destination, and find that the volume on which you want to install macOS 27 isn’t available, chances are excellent that if you click the volume in question, the installer will usually tell you why it can’t be used and explain how to fix that problem.

When the Mac won’t start up

Following installation, if your machine will not start up under macOS 27 at all, if it gets stuck on a gray or black screen for more than about five minutes, or if you experience a kernel panic upon the first restart, try these steps in order until you are able to start up normally:

  1. Force a shutdown and restart: Press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds until your Mac shuts down. Then press it again and wait for it to restart. You should give it plenty of time, as it may be performing a lot of disk integrity operations quietly underneath that black screen—again, five minutes is not unreasonable.
  2. Disconnect non-essential USB devices: If your Mac gets stuck on a gray screen and won’t finish booting, try this:

    • Press and hold the power button for about 10 seconds until your Mac shuts down.
    • Disconnect all USB cables from your Mac except any that go to a keyboard, mouse, or other pointing device.
    • Press the power button again and wait for your Mac to start. If it starts normally, you can then reconnect your USB devices. If it’s still stuck after five minutes or so—or if it starts but then you experience a kernel panic—move on to the next step.
  3. Try safe mode: Safe mode disables some third-party software and checks your disk for certain types of errors.

To enter safe mode, choose Apple menu > Shut Down and wait until the Mac has fully shut down. Then press and hold the power button until you see “Loading startup options” on the screen. When the Options icon appears, select your startup disk, hold down the Shift key, click Continue in Safe Mode, and then release the Shift key.

If macOS 27 starts up normally after a safe boot, a third-party extension or startup item may be the culprit. Check in /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons, and ~/Library/LaunchAgents for third-party items that haven’t been updated recently (older items are more likely to have compatibility problems).

If you find any that you explicitly recognize and suspect, look for an uninstaller from the developer, and if there is one, use it. If not, consult the documentation that came with the software, or the developer’s website, for removal instructions.

Restart and see whether the problem is still gone. If so, reinstall the uninstalled items one at a time, restarting after each one, until you find the culprit or you’ve installed new copies of them all and your Mac is still working well.

  1. Try recovery mode: You can boot into recovery mode by shutting your Mac down and then pressing and holding the power button until you see “Loading startup options” on the screen; when the Options icon appears, click it and then click Continue. A few moments later, you’ll see a macOS Utilities window; that means you’re using recovery mode.

Once in recovery mode, select Disk Utility and click Continue. When it opens, select the problematic macOS 27 volume in the sidebar, click First Aid, and follow the prompts to repair any problems that may have appeared on your macOS 27 volume. Choose Disk Utility > Quit Disk Utility to return to the macOS Utilities window. Then choose Apple menu > Restart.

  1. Remove any nonessential hardware: Try restarting with only your Apple-supplied keyboard, mouse, and display attached, and (if you have a Mac Pro) without any third-party PCI or video cards. If this works, check for driver updates, and then reattach the devices one at a time, restarting after each one.
  2. Reinstall macOS 27: If you still can’t start your Mac, consider reinstalling macOS 27. Perform a clean install, omitting items in the Applications category when you work your way through the file transfer portion of the installation to eliminate any possibility of software conflicts. (You can add those items later using Migration Assistant.)

In most cases, these steps will lead to a happy macOS 27 installation.

Tag: macOS 27
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How to Downgrade macOS to an Earlier Version

by Chris Smith

In all likelihood, your experience using macOS 27 Golden Gate will be just fine, and if you’re already using Sequoia, the odds are even more in your favor. However, if you find yourself with an intractable problem that the troubleshooting steps don’t help with and your only choice is to revert to your previous version of macOS, it is possible—though not convenient—as long as you have a full backup.

macOS has no downgrade mechanism as such. All you can do is erase your disk—yes, you really do have to erase the whole thing—and then either restore the whole thing from a bootable duplicate or reinstall your older version of macOS and then separately migrate or restore the data from a data-only duplicate or a Time Machine backup. To erase your disk, you have to start from another volume—the logical options here are a bootable installer for your old version of macOS (see how to make one) or a bootable duplicate. For this purpose, recovery mode won’t work, for the reasons set out at the end of this article.

If you have to downgrade to, say, Tahoe, and you don’t have a bootable duplicate or a bootable installer volume, you’re not necessarily out of luck. While running macOS 27, you can still download the Tahoe installer and use it to create a bootable Tahoe installer volume. The same goes for older versions of macOS.

The process

  1. Start up from another volume. To do this, attach the drive containing the other startup volume, go to System Settings > General > Startup Disk, select that volume, and restart your Mac.
  2. Run Disk Utility and erase the entire disk, both the system and Data volumes, containing macOS 27:
    a. Choose View > Show All Devices.
    b. Select the topmost icon for the external drive in the list on the left.
    c. Click Erase.
    d. Fill in a name for the new volume, and make sure Format is set to APFS and Scheme is set to GUID Partition Map.
    e. Click Erase.
    f. When the Done button appears, click it. You’ll then have a new volume with the name you entered in step d.
  3. Reinstall your old version of macOS. If you already have the installer on your boot volume, you can simply run it; if not, you may have to download it from Apple first using Terminal.
  4. Using Migration Assistant at the end of the installation, restore your data from your backup—whether that’s a data-only duplicate or a Time Machine backup—following the Migration Assistant instructions.

Why recovery mode won’t let you downgrade

Even though you can do lots of things after starting in recovery mode—including reinstalling macOS—you probably can’t use recovery mode to downgrade to your old version because recovery mode doesn’t let you install arbitrary previous versions of macOS. Your only option is the most recent version of macOS that will run on your computer: probably not what you need.

In case you were thinking you can restore from a Time Machine backup in recovery mode and use that to get back to your older system…sorry, but no. Although Time Machine used to back up your full startup volume, ever since Big Sur, it backs up only your Data volume, not macOS itself. That’s why a Time Machine backup alone can’t restore an older version of macOS.

Tag: macOS 27
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What Setup Assistant Asks After You Install macOS

by Dave Johnson

Setup Assistant runs at the end of the installation, whether you upgraded in place or installed clean. It looks like a continuation of the installer and never shows its own name, which is why the screens it puts in front of you can feel like part of macOS 27 Golden Gate itself.

After an in-place upgrade

What happens next depends on how your Mac was previously set up:

  • If you had Automatic Login turned on previously, macOS 27 should log you in automatically.
  • If Automatic Login was off, your entire screen becomes a login screen. Select (or enter) your username if necessary, enter your password, and press Return to log in. This initial login process may take longer than usual, so be prepared to wait a few minutes before the login screen disappears.

The first time you use macOS 27, the installer’s Setup Assistant app runs, although you won’t see that name; if it appears at all, it looks like a continuation of the installer itself. Setup Assistant may display one or more screens that ask you to make various setup choices.

If you happen to be installing macOS 27 onto an external drive connected to a Mac with a Touch ID sensor, you may see an additional screen here prompting you to set up Touch ID (again).

One choice you’ll see is a Liquid Glass slider, which lets you adjust the transparency for some Liquid Glass interface elements. Set this however you like. (I prefer all the way to the right, the most heavily tinted—or as little transparency as possible.) You can change this later in System Settings; see how to reduce Liquid Glass.

Depending on which version of macOS you’re upgrading from and your previous settings, you may also see one or more additional screens. Those include (not necessarily in this order):

  • Sign in with Your Apple Account: Even if you were signed in to iCloud in your previous version of macOS, this screen may prompt you to sign in again. Depending on the circumstances, you may be asked only for your password, or for both your Apple Account username and password. If you don’t want to enter an Apple Account username—and are willing to forgo all iCloud features for the present—select Set Up Later, click Continue, and then click Skip again to confirm. (You can enter this information later, in System Settings > Apple Account.)
  • Terms and Conditions: Setup Assistant wants to be sure that you’ve consented to a bunch of additional legalese, so it may invite you to read, study, and agree to one or more statements, such as “macOS Software License Agreement” or “Game Center Terms and Conditions.” Handle these however you want; I’ve found that my lawyer enjoys chatting with me about each paragraph of such agreements in detail (at his usual hourly rates).
  • Enable Location Services: If you hadn’t previously enabled Location Services (which is used for iCloud’s Find My Mac feature, Maps, Spotlight suggestions, and numerous other things), a dialog may appear asking whether you’d like to do so. Check “Enable location services on this Mac” if you like (if you leave this disabled, you can enable the setting later in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Privacy > Location Services), or click the “About Location Services & Privacy” link to learn more.
  • Analytics: macOS 27 can automatically send diagnostic and usage data to Apple and/or third-party developers to help them track down the causes of crashes and other bugs you may encounter. This information is anonymous and doesn’t contain personal data.

If you want to send this troubleshooting data in the event that a problem occurs, select Send Diagnostics & Usage Data to Apple. With that selected, you may also select Share Crash Data with App Developers. (You can’t share crash data with app developers unless you also share diagnostic data with Apple.)

  • Siri: You may see a Siri screen that simply reminds you that you can now say “Siri” instead of “Hey Siri” if you like. If you’re updating from a much older version of macOS without Siri enabled, you may also see a prompt asking whether you’d like Siri to listen for your spoken requests. A second Siri screen, titled Improve Siri & Dictation, could also appear, asking you to give Apple permission to listen to recordings of your voice in order to improve speech-to-text accuracy. For privacy reasons, I recommend selecting Not Now.

You can always enable or disable Siri later: go to System Settings > Siri > Requests once macOS 27 is up and running and choose your desired setting.

If you had to struggle through any or all of that, here’s when the “Setting Up Your Mac” screen makes its brief appearance. Then Setup Assistant quits automatically, and your macOS 27 desktop appears.

Not sure whether you’ve successfully upgraded since you missed the end of the process? Choose Apple menu > About This Mac. If the window says 27.0 or higher at the top under “macOS,” you’re running macOS 27.

After a clean install

Setup Assistant is an app that looks like a continuation of the macOS 27 Golden Gate installer, and the installer doesn’t display the name “Setup Assistant.” The assistant runs automatically after macOS 27 restarts at the end of the installation process, and walks you through a number of setup and configuration questions. It also offers to transfer files from another Mac or PC, another volume (which can be a bootable or data-only duplicate), or a Time Machine backup. That part is covered in how to use Migration Assistant.

Here’s an overview of the main screens you may see. Depending on your hardware setup and which decisions you make as you work your way through the installer, this list may vary somewhat:

  • Hello: A “hello” screen greets you in a series of languages, changing every few seconds. There’s just one button at the bottom of the screen, “Get Started,” which you should click—even if the language has changed and you can’t read what it says!
  • Select Your Country or Region: Your first task is to select a country or region on the Welcome screen and click Continue.
  • Written and Spoken Languages: In some cases, you may be asked to confirm your preferred written and spoken languages, including those used for your keyboard and dictation.
  • Accessibility: This screen gives you a convenient way to set a wide variety of accessibility preferences. Clicking any of the four titles shown (Vision, Motor, Hearing, or Cognitive) leads you through a series of options in that category, each with graphical descriptions of what the options do. You can adjust any or all of these, in any order—or click Not Now if you want to adjust them later in System Settings.
  • Select Your Wi-Fi Network: Setup Assistant next looks for a network connection. You see a screen called Select Your Wi-Fi Network. Select the network to which you want to connect and, if required, enter the password. Then click Continue. (If you connect to the internet some other way—or if you have no internet connection—click Other Network Options and select the appropriate option.)
  • Data & Privacy: A Data & Privacy screen appears, showing a handshake icon. Read the screen to learn that this icon should appear when an Apple feature is asking for permission to use your personal information. Finally, click Continue.
  • Migration Assistant: Next is the Migration Assistant screen, which enables you to transfer files from your backup.

Although you could choose not to transfer your information now and use the standalone Migration Assistant app later, I generally find it quicker and more convenient to do it here. If you’re tempted to skip this step in order to have a completely clean copy of macOS 27, be sure to read about the nuke-and-pave option.

The next steps in Setup Assistant are mostly self-explanatory.

Depending on which version of macOS you’re upgrading from, what information you transferred, and your previous settings, you may see one or more additional screens. Most of these are identical to those described above. After each one, click Continue to advance through the remaining screens.

Regardless of what, if anything, Setup Assistant displays, macOS 27 itself may display any number of dialogs and alerts the first time you use it, such as password prompts, software update messages, and requests to enable various features. To learn how to deal with these and other immediate concerns, see what to do after installing.

Check for proper operation

In all probability, your upgrade will have gone smoothly, and everything will now work more or less the way you expect. However, even if everything looks fine, don’t declare upgrade victory until you have worked through the post-installation tasks, including dealing with any alerts and queries that pop up shortly after installation, checking for software updates, and configuring a few new options in System Settings.

If anything did go amiss, or if you later discover problems that aren’t solved by troubleshooting the upgrade, you can fall back to a clean install.

Tag: macOS 27
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Every Siri Setting in macOS 27

by Abigail Shilets

The short-lived Apple Intelligence & Siri setting pane is no more. In its place is a Siri pane, complete with a new icon. (For more about Siri on the Mac.)

In order for the new version of the pane, with its new icon, to appear, the Language setting on the pane must currently be set to English (United States). Set it to anything else—even English (Canada)—and you get the old icon with the Tahoe-era Siri features. Language support should expand in the future.

The most prominent change is that unlike the old pane, the new one no longer has either an Apple Intelligence switch or a Siri switch at the top. That is, you can no longer disable Apple Intelligence completely, and if you want to disable Siri (along with portions of Apple Intelligence), you must scroll to the bottom of the pane, click the red Turn Off Siri button, read a long description of all the things that will stop working if you do, and then click Turn Off Siri.

Interesting to note, however, is that even if you turn off Siri, “Visual Intelligence will continue to work but with more limited capabilities,” though Apple doesn’t spell out what those limitations are, and other Apple Intelligence features such as Writing Tools, Image Playground, and Shortcuts continue to work. All this is Apple’s heavy-handed way of pushing these new features, even if you actively dislike them and don’t ever want to use them.

Assuming you’re using English as your language—and that’s the only language supported in the initial release of macOS 27 Golden Gate—the pane adds three settings regarding the Siri App:

  • Opens To: Select what appears when you open the app: either Recent Conversations or A New Conversation.
  • Keep Conversations: Select 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever. Note that there’s no longer a Delete Siri & Dictation History button, though you can manually delete any or all of the history items in the Siri app.
  • Preview: Select None or 1–5 lines.

In addition, the Requests entry replaces the previous “Listen for” pop-up menu (where you can select “Siri” or “Hey Siri,” “Hey Siri,” or Off), and the Responses item gives you only two options: Spoken Response or Silent Response. (Tahoe had an Automatic option, along with Prefer Silent Responses and Prefer Spoken Responses.) Instead of clicking Siri Suggestions & Privacy to specify each app’s Siri settings, you now click App Access. And there are some additional ChatGPT options, for anyone who connects Siri to ChatGPT.

The Automatic Visual Look Up switch also lives here; what it does is covered in Siri AI on the Mac.

Finally, Tahoe let you set the keyboard shortcut used to invoke Siri, but macOS 27 does not. You can invoke Siri with ⌘-Space, the Spotlight shortcut, or with a second dedicated shortcut; holding that second shortcut speaks to Siri even if Requests is turned off. Although you can still change the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Spotlight), there’s no evident way to change the dedicated Siri shortcut to anything else.

Control Siri conversations syncing among your devices in System Settings > Your Name > iCloud: click See All, then click Siri. You can disable Sync this Mac (enabled by default). The Keep Conversations setting is synced with the main Siri retention setting: change it here, and it’s changed globally, not just for iCloud.

Tag: macOS 27
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What’s New for Apple Pay and Wallet in iOS 27

by Kevin Hollington

Wallet bulges with the addition of even more features to an already stuffed portfolio.

You can create entries for cards, membership cards, and other kinds of barcode/QR code-related proofs of entry or membership from scratch, a task formerly available only for third-party apps and websites.

Tap the Add button in Wallet, then tap Create a Pass. You’re guided through a few steps, one of which lets you scan the existing card, so that Wallet can pull in its number, barcode, or QR code. You can fill out details that aren’t present on the card or captured by Wallet.

A “poster”-style card display used for passes now extends to membership cards, gift cards, and loyalty/reward cards. This new display allows up to two tappable actions.

In unrelated updates, Wallet now shows trip details and other real-time updates to hotel keys at hotels that support these new options.

Finally, a new Preauthorized Payments section in Wallet gives you a one-stop insight into what you’ve allowed other companies to charge you for. Apple describes this as “subscriptions and auto-reloads to installment loan repayments, recurring billing, and deferred payments” among other preauthorizations.

Apple Pay and Tap to Share

Apple made one systemwide change, with big updates to Apple Pay and point-of-sale payments.

After many years of mostly unchanged experiences, Apple offers a blowout with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.

The updated Apple Pay checkout sheet lets you change your payment card directly without canceling, exiting, and starting over. It will also show information like available rewards, debit card balance, and alternative payment options. These changes are noted as coming “this fall,” while “later this year” you’ll be able to add funds to a debit card during a checkout session without exiting, or within Wallet.

Apple now allows merchants to let you pay with a third-party browser using Apple Pay with a scannable code and an iPhone as the glue. Start the payment in a third-party browser, choose Apple Pay, and the merchant’s site will display a code that can be scanned by an iPhone to authorize Apple Pay.

Entirely new is Tap to Share with merchants at the point of sale, such as in a store or at a fair. This makes in-person Apple Pay more akin to Apple Pay in Safari. Tap to Share lets an entire set of interactions occur before you pay. You start by approving a connection with a merchant’s iPhone that has a supported payment app. (Ostensibly, this may encompass not just companies like Square and Stripe, but in-house developer apps for retailers like Old Navy or Lowe’s.)

Once you begin, you can choose what you share with the business—like contact details, a shipping address, or your email. This also means you don’t have to state this information aloud or rely on the merchant typing it in correctly! A merchant can offer to sign you up for a membership or loyalty program. You can use a pass from the merchant, or they can issue one, related to discounts, credits, or other transaction-related purposes. Finally, you see the full cart as a digital receipt before completing payment with Apple Pay.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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What’s New for iPad in iPadOS 27

by Moses Johnson

Apple rethought the iPad interface with iPadOS 26, adding robust windowing and multitasking features that brought it much closer to a general-purpose computing system like macOS. However, it still retained its unique iPad nature, such as its heavy reliance on gestures.

iPadOS 27 builds on these improvements with refinements that help you use an iPad even more fully in the liminal space between tablet and computer.

Use keyboard automation triggers

Apple previously didn’t offer a way to trigger an automation when a keyboard was connected to or removed from an iPad. This frustrated some users, who interact with their iPad differently when a keyboard is connected—such as in a dock-style environment—and when they are using only the touch screen or an Apple Pencil.

Now, you can use Shortcuts to create automations based on whether a keyboard was connected, disconnected, or the keyboard connection state changed. This includes the “Set multitasking mode to” item. You might want to switch between Full Screen Apps and Windowed Apps when using your iPad without a keyboard. You’d have to set up two shortcuts: one would trigger when the keyboard was attached; the other when detached.

Relearn and persist the menu bar

In iPadOS 26, the menu bar had to be triggered either by swiping down from the top of the display or by hovering with a pointing device, at which point it would appear. It then hid, after a short delay, when it wasn’t in use or being hovered over.

In iPadOS 27, the default behavior appears similar, but there are two significant changes:

  • The app name always appears on the far-left side of the menu bar, at the upper-left corner of the screen.
  • To unfurl the menu bar, tap or drag over the app name.

Along with that new behavior, you can also opt to have the menu bar remain in place, persistent at all times. Go to Settings > Multitasking & Gestures, then disable Automatically Show and Hide Menu Bar.

Perform magic tricks with Apple Pencil

Siri AI on iPads that support it can extract text from notes written freehand with an Apple Pencil. These are indexed, and thus searchable.

In the Notes app, you can use Image Wand to turn a sketch you make with an Apple Pencil into a photorealistic image with Apple Intelligence.

Resize iPhone apps

iPadOS 27 fills a missing piece in Windowed Apps, the default setting that lets you resize app windows or use them in full-screen mode. iPhone apps that haven’t been developed as universal apps for both iOS and iPadOS still floated in their own fixed-size window.

iPhone apps released for iOS 27 automatically gain the capability to be resized in iPadOS 27, just as they can work at different sizes on different iPhone models.

Tag: iPadOS 27
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Where to Find Apple Intelligence in Each App

by Chris Smith

In the iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 updates, Apple expanded the use of Apple Intelligence across more apps and added features to apps that already had some Apple Intelligence support. Apple Intelligence is designed to synthesize information, like creating summaries, as well as generate stuff, such as text or images. Some of the elements are distinctly more useful than others.

Where to look for Apple Intelligence in individual apps:

  • Calendar and Reminders: Enter text that is more freeform in nature than rigidly structured in Calendar or Reminders, and the apps offer suggestions for structured data replacement.
  • Camera: Visual Intelligence is integrated as a Siri option in Camera alongside Photo and Video. With Siri selected, pointing the camera at certain items, like food, a restaurant receipt, or an event’s details, will result in a prompt you can tap. You can also tap the Siri button to analyze what’s in the view.
  • Mail: Mail offers suggestions as you type to insert information from other apps and libraries, such as photos, or to take action, like creating an entry in Notes.
  • Messages: Messages makes a suggestion when it thinks it makes sense to insert something from another app, like a photo.
  • Notes: After making a sketch with an Apple Pencil on an iPad in Notes, you can use Image Wand to make it photorealistic.
  • Passwords: The Passwords app scans for weak or compromised passwords at websites that support Apple’s method for automated password updates, then offers to fix those passwords for you.
  • Photos: Photos improves its Clean Up feature to provide much better generative image replacement. It adds two new Apple Intelligence tools: Extend, to extend the borders of an image, and Reframe, which allows slightly changing the point of view and perspective of an image.
  • Phone: While on a call, Phone may suggest contextually appropriate information, like a flight number when you call an airline.
  • Safari: You can have Safari automatically organize tabs, bookmarks, and Reading Lists into a grouping within a tab group. Keep tabs (ha, ha) on changes to webpages with Notify Me, which lets you describe what you want to monitor and have it automatically checked at a recurring interval.
  • Shortcuts: You can describe what you want via Siri AI in Shortcuts, and the app will attempt to write a shortcut for you.

Two more sit outside the apps themselves: Siri AI across the system, and Visual Intelligence on whatever is on your screen.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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What to Ask Siri AI: Examples That Actually Work

by Kevin Hollington

Once you invoke Siri using any of the many methods, you can start asking questions or asking Siri to perform tasks.

There’s a little nuance to how Siri answers. If you type your query in, for example, a Search or Ask field, then as you type—just as with previous versions—Spotlight finds local files and apps, images in Photos, tasks from Reminders, contact cards, App Store matches, and so forth. These start to display immediately.

If Siri identifies a search that appears Spotlight-focused, it presents a blue search button in the lower-right corner on an iPhone or iPad; on a Mac, there’s no indicator. More exact matches offer a suggestion as a completion after a long dash in gray text. If you type photoshop on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop installed, you see “photoshop — Adobe Photoshop 2025.a…” with everything after photoshop in gray.

However, if you type a question, more words, or something ambiguous, “— Ask Siri” appears in gray. On an iPhone or iPad, the search button turns into an arrow button—an Ask button, we assume. Tap the arrow button or, on a Mac, press Return, to trigger a Siri response to what you typed.

On all three kinds of devices, a Show Results button with overlapping icons—representing the kinds of items found—may appear below the Siri field. On the Mac, we saw it appear briefly before showing a scrolling results list as with Spotlight.

This automatic recognition of your query type means you don’t have to think about how you formulate a search or question: type what you want and let Siri figure it out. If the results list for a search doesn’t suffice, elaborate on what you’re asking.

You can broadly ask Siri these kinds of things:

  • Find something or analyze something on my device or in my personal information that’s available on this device, like text in Notes, events in Calendar, text recognized in Photos, and so on. (See how Siri AI and Spotlight merged.)
  • Provide me an answer about something that doesn’t necessarily include any of my personal data, or may not need to.
  • Make me an image of something I describe.

That’s all very general. What are specific kinds of queries you might make? Remember that the data has to exist for Siri to answer. We rely on a third-party email client, so Siri seems to have limited access to our email stores for now. But nearly everything else we do is stored in and synced by iCloud.

Here are a handful of examples of the wide range of questions you can ask and commands you can make, as the list is effectively endless:

  • What movie am I thinking of? It has Harry Lime in it. As you may have found with other chatbots, Siri can take a small amount of factual information and work like a memory aid by filling in the gaps, or asking clarifying questions. (Answer: The Third Man.)
  • Summarize my conversation last week with *name*. We found this particularly useful because, in testing, Siri did seem to figure out the most important things talked about, provide a solid analysis of the topics, and link to individual messages.
  • Start a timer for *time units. You can specify any time in any units. We tried 13 1/2* and it was interpreted correctly.
  • How many times did I go out for lunch this year? Siri pulled information from one of our calendars but also from a shared calendar used by a spouse. It also didn’t necessarily identify things that weren’t labeled “lunch” but were midday meal dates.
  • How do I clean a toilet that has a seemingly permanent stain inside the bowl? Siri can consult external sources and stuff that’s in its outboard LLM brain in the cloud to give you ideas for what to try.
  • Create an album containing all the images that I took in June 2024. Siri adds an album to Photos, and provides a link you can click to view that album in Photos.
  • Did I receive a birthday party invitation recently? Siri gave one of us a summary derived from a mix of emails and messages, correctly identifying two recent invitations for events that had already passed, while noting that it saw nothing upcoming.
  • What are some times I have nothing scheduled between 10 and noon next week? Siri offers a list of days in which that condition is true, but also shows the conflicts that impinge on that range on some days.
  • How do I feel about *person*? This is a question you might ask to test out the way Siri AI “thinks,” and we were surprised to find that it did a great job at accurately, if effusively, summarizing our interactions with a person by looking at email, messages, and other cues.
  • Make a picture of a nice lasagna dinner in a photorealistic style. While we have all sorts of feelings about this, it’s definitely something you can do. (See the Apple Intelligence features to skip.)

One of us attended a 60th birthday party recently, where former officemates regaled attendees with the celebrant’s early use of voice-recognition software. He had trained it so he could say “paste”—or rather, “Paste. Paste. PASTE!!!”—to perform that command and so on. The wits in the office would walk by and yell “erase hard drive! OK! Approve! OK!”

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27
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How to Install iOS 27 and iPadOS 27

by Stacey Butler

You don’t want to upgrade without a backup from the last state of your iPhone or iPad on hand. You can create a fresh backup via iCloud or by connecting to a Mac or Windows PC.

Back up with iCloud

Your easiest path to a backup is via iCloud. Not only is it faster and simpler, but Apple also provides better support for restoring to your device if needed.

If it’s your first time making an iCloud backup, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > iCloud Backup.
  2. Enable Back Up This iPhone or Back Up This iPad.
  3. Tap Back Up Now.

If you aren’t already making iCloud Backups, you should have at least as much available storage at iCloud+ as the size of your device’s data set, excluding iCloud Photos. That may require upgrading your iCloud+ plan from, say, 200 GB to 2 TB. You can estimate what space you need by looking at Settings > General > About > iPhone or iPad Storage.

If you already have iCloud Backup enabled, go to the iCloud Backup section and tap Back Up Now.

Your iPhone or iPad shows a Backing Up label and a Cancel Backup link while the backup is in progress. A bar shows an “Estimating time remaining” message until all changes are collected, at which time it shows a rough countdown and a progress bar.

When the backup is successfully completed, you see “Last successful backup” with the current time or a moment ago. You can now proceed.

Back up with a Mac

While iCloud might be best, you can also back your iPhone or iPad up using a Mac. Start by connecting your device with a USB to a Mac unless you’ve already enabled Wi-Fi syncing and prefer that method.

To enable Wi-Fi syncing, you first connect with USB. Then, after selecting the device in the Finder’s sidebar, check the “Show this Device when on Wi-Fi” box in the General view and click Apply.

To back up to a Mac:

  1. Click your device in Finder’s sidebar.
  2. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
  3. On the device’s General tab in the Finder, select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this Mac.”
  4. Click Back Up Now.

The General tab also shows the time of last iCloud backup for a connected device.

Back up to a Windows PC

Apple offers the Apple Devices app for Windows, which enables backups as easy as those offered on a Mac. First, install Apple Devices before proceeding. Next, follow these steps:

  1. Connect your iPhone or iPad to your PC with a USB cable.
  2. Open Apple Devices.
  3. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
  4. Select General in the lefthand sidebar in Apple Devices.
  5. Select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this computer.”
  6. Click Back Up Now.

Install the upgrade

With a backup in hand, you can now install iOS 27 or iPadOS 27. Here’s how:

  1. Go to Settings > General > Software Update.
  2. Tap either Install Now or Download and Install.

You may be prompted to offload some apps if your device lacks enough storage to handle the upgrade. Offloading an app deletes the app, but not its data, from your device. After the update completes, the apps are reinstalled automatically.

It usually takes from about 10 to 30 minutes for your device to complete the steps necessary to verify, install, and restart. However, in case of delays or problems, you should plan on it taking up to a couple of hours.

The verification can take a considerable time when huge numbers of users are installing all at once, such as on release day. You may want to upgrade your devices in the evening or on a weekend.

Be sure to keep your iPhone or iPad plugged in while the upgrade is underway to avoid an interruption.

Your device may feel very hot to the touch, sometimes even uncomfortably so, during the installation and restore, as your iPhone or iPad works at full bore.

After the upgrade is complete, your device has restarted, and you’ve entered your passcode, the operating system walks you through a few screens describing major changes.

You may also be asked for preferences you chose before in previous upgrades, such as Light Mode, Dark Mode, or Automatic. During this process, you may also be asked to allow your device to send analytics to Apple and some reporting to third-party developers. I tend to allow Apple and disallow developers for privacy reasons.

When this process is done, you’re ready to use iOS 27 or iPadOS 27.

Optimizing search and Siri

On a device with Apple Intelligence support, you can’t access all features until “optimization” is complete. This may take a serious amount of time. While underway, a message appears near the top of Settings. (During testing, this remained in place on a test phone with almost no personal data on it for over a day.)

For more on what that indexing enables, see what Siri AI means for your iPhone and iPad.

Tags: iOS 27, iPadOS 27
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