It’s been a few hours since iOS 27 was released, and I’m messing around with the developer beta on my iPhone 16 Pro. I was most interested in trying out the new Siri AI, but unfortunately, I’m still on Apple’s waiting list for it. In the meantime, I’ve been looking at a number of features that aren’t about AI and found a lot that I’m happy with – even if it doesn’t seem like a big update like in years past, the fit and finish across the entire operating system is already great to see.
Here are some neat things that jumped out at me.
Liquid Glass opacity slider should have been there from the beginning
I’ve always thought the Liquid Glass redesign introduced with iOS 26 last year was okay — not great, but not particularly bad either (well, after Apple cleaned up some initial issues, at least). But the new opacity slider in iOS 27 is amazing: It lets you make liquid glass elements like the tab bar more clear. Or More frosted, meaning you can see objects beneath them in varying degrees of opacity. want In fact See what’s under your search bar? Get glassy. Would you like things to be more readable? Select more color option. (You can probably guess which one I prefer.)
Apple has made another change to many of its icon designs introduced with iOS 26, and overall, they look much better to me. The changes are usually subtle – changing the colors or adding a little more glass-like texture – but I think they make things look more refined.
different volume settings
From Settings, you can now – finally – set independent volumes for ringtones, alarms and timers, and alerts and system sounds. In the Sounds & Haptics menu, simply turn off the switches that let you mix alarms and timers as well as alert and system sounds with your ringtone volume, and you can adjust more detailed volume settings from there.
I have to admit I never use widgets, but I noticed there were extra large widgets coming this year with iOS 27 and I had to check out some of them for myself. They are really big; They take up the entire screen of apps (except the Dock). But I find them to be an extremely useful way to view an entire calendar or long list of tasks.
You can really shorten the time on your lock screen
When editing the lock screen, you can now enter the time next to the date at the top of the screen. This opens up more real estate, which is good if you want more of your wallpaper image to be visible, like a family photo or a nice piece of art, or if you just want a little less clutter on your screen.
We’ll be digging into a lot more over the next few days, so keep an eye out The Verge. And if you want to see a huge list of promising features coming in Apple’s next big update, I’ve got you covered.
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