iOS 27 is out now, here are the features actually worth trying first

[Beth]

iOS 27 rolled out this week to every iPhone 11 and newer, and while Siri AI and the broader Liquid Glass redesign have understandably grabbed most of the headlines, there is a genuinely solid batch of smaller features worth trying immediately once you actually update. Performance is the first thing you will notice, with Apple speeding up a long list of everyday interactions, animations run quicker, apps launch faster, AirDrop transfers complete faster, and even opening the keyboard or switching Home Screen pages feels noticeably snappier than it did on iOS 26.

The Photos app picked up two genuinely useful new generative AI tools worth trying, Reframe and Extend. Reframe lets you shift the apparent camera angle of an existing photo after the fact, as if you had physically moved before actually taking the shot, while Extend analyzes the surrounding texture, lighting, and color of a too tightly cropped image and generates believable new background detail around its edges. The existing Clean Up tool for removing unwanted objects from photos also got a real quality boost, doing a noticeably better job of cleanly filling in whatever gets removed rather than leaving an obvious smudged patch behind.

Writing Tools now work system wide too, with a new Write with Siri option accessible directly from the keyboard that can draft text from scratch, give feedback on something you already wrote, adjust tone or wording, or even analyze your own past emails and messages to write convincingly in your specific personal style. Your iPhone also now automatically suggests grammar fixes on top of the existing spelling correction. Elsewhere, the redesigned Weather app adds a new panel showing detailed six hour conditions with tappable icons for clouds, rain, or wind, each offering its own extended ten day prediction, and a new Tap to Share feature brings genuinely closer parity between in person Apple Pay at a physical register and the Apple Pay experience you already know from using it inside Safari.

For anyone who finds Liquid Glass's transparency effects genuinely distracting rather than stylish, there is finally a proper slider in Settings under Appearance letting you drag between More Clear and More Tinted, with a live scrollable preview showing exactly how the effect will look over real text and images before you commit to a setting, on top of the existing more binary Reduce Transparency accessibility toggle for anyone who wants to flatten the effect completely

10 New Ios 27 Features You Should Try Right Nowwww.pcmag.com

[Starfield Wolfhound]

The Liquid Glass opacity slider is honestly the update I am personally most relieved to see land, since the original all or nothing Reduce Transparency toggle from last year felt like a pretty blunt instrument for something this visually significant across the entire operating system. Being able to actually fine tune exactly how much of that effect you want, with a live preview to boot, is a much more sensible and genuinely useful approach

[JonMoxley19]

Writing Tools finally being able to analyze your own past emails and messages specifically to write convincingly in your personal style is a genuinely meaningful step up from the more generic tone adjustment sliders competing AI writing tools have offered up until now. Whether it actually pulls that off convincingly and consistently in daily real world practice remains to be properly seen once more people actually get real hands on time with the full released feature

[HollywoodHogan02]

Tap to Share bringing closer parity between physical in person Apple Pay and the existing Safari checkout experience is a small but genuinely smart unification that should make the overall payment experience feel meaningfully more consistent regardless of exactly where or how you happen to be actually paying for something at any given moment

[Karen88]

The Weather app's new six hour detailed panel is such a small addition on paper, but it is exactly the kind of quiet, unglamorous quality of life improvement that ends up genuinely used constantly in daily practice, completely unlike some of the flashier headline AI features that people try out once purely out of curiosity and then quietly never actually touch again afterward

[Linda85]

Photo Extend sounds like the single most immediately useful feature in this whole list for me personally, since cropping a shot too tightly in the moment and then regretting it later is such a universally common and relatable problem for basically anyone who takes photos on their phone regularly.

Curious how convincingly it actually handles genuinely complex backgrounds like detailed architecture or busy natural scenery compared to something simpler like an open sky or a plain wall

[UltimateWarrior]

Performance improvements rarely get anywhere near the same headline attention as flashy new AI powered features, but noticeably faster everyday app launches and animations genuinely matter more to overall day to day satisfaction with a phone than most people tend to give that kind of update credit for. Glad Apple is still investing real, visible effort into pure raw speed and responsiveness rather than only chasing flashier headline capabilities every single cycle