Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.

The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.

The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.

Web Driver

New Features

- Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server. (176038457)

Related (From July 1st)

Introducing the Safari MCP server for web developers

https://webkit.org/blog/18136/introducing-the-safari-mcp-ser...

So that's interesting. On the other hand, looks like WebXR support for Safari will never come.

---

¹ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

* iOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ios/

* iPadOS 27: https://www.apple.com/os/ipados/

* macOS: https://www.apple.com/os/macos/

* watchOS: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/

* visionOS: https://www.apple.com/os/visionos/

* tvOS 27: no link.

* Overview: https://www.apple.com/os/?version=no-hero

  System Improvements
  Discover lots of little ways your Mac is even enjoyable, like faster and smoother experiences across the systems.

/end-rant

- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.

- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?

- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.

It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.

Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.

I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.

Glad to see that Shared Albums are now full resolution!

Now, please:

1. Allow us to edit the photo order of the Shared Album (instead of the order that the photos were added to it). Currently, my wedding unfolds in the wrong order, and my kid turns 6 months old before being born.

2. Fix identification/clean-up of duplicates.

3. Give us a way to tidy up facial recognition.

4. Allow us to join "best quality possible" collectives, which will replace our poor-quality photos with higher-quality originals from somebody else's library.

These are basic things of our lives that make us humans : caring about others, remembering what they say, knowing how to recognize a fruit, enjoying colors of the fruits with your eyes, not through your retina display, thinking about the food recipes that we know.

I don't know if this is because I'm european and the gap keeps getting larger across the Atlantic, but what a depressing life those giants are telling us here.

Now I am worried about what the new versions of iOS will bring us, I hope that the "we removed the crap" wasn't just a thing of this year, and that iOS will go back to high software standards. Phone prices are really high for me now, and I would like for my poor little iphone 13 to survive another couple of years.

I bought a MacBook Pro (M5 Pro) in march and was shocked that it did not work properly with my LG 38WN95C-W Monitor (3840x1600@144Hz via USB-C).

This has been fixed with macOS 27. I finally can use the native resolution + HiDPI with my monitor.

MacOS is fine. For the most part it gets out of my way. However I have a laundry list of small issues that have been there since my first Mac in 2012. I wish there was a Department of Details to fix those little snags in the user experience.

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2026/08/27/build-safari-extens...

For developers, there is a new framework (Core AI), that updates the decade old Core ML framework.

Core AI allows your app to use the latest model architectures and inference techniques across the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreai

available on iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max

Such a high bar for iOS. Unfortunately new Siri is not for me.

I imagine they wouldn't shift as much hardware that way though.

Paused.

… will resume when device reconnects to Internet.

Yes "Internet"! These buffoons don't even correctly say "WiFi".

And when you lock the screen, the download status message switches to "About X hours remaining" (without actually downloading anything of course) and upon unlock it glitches back to "Paused" state.

It baffles my mind at the amount of hardcoding and flag-based development this company has done. If Fable et al are let loose on these fruity pieces of software, it will lead to a global user safety-based outage.

  fm respond 'draw an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle'

And perhaps make the "System Settings" window scalable horizontally?

No? OK, I'll skip.

Is 27 good enough to upgrade from Sequoia? Is your answer the same when I tell you I have an M1 Pro Max?

How do I opt out? I'm sure it will take extra gigabytes for the models right?

Anyone who is trying to reduce their AI consumption or see fewer AI features might be interested in this change.

I posted to Tell HN about it a few minutes ago here (https://smackernews.com/item/49704226 HN), but TL;DR is that the only way to turn this off is to either disable each AI feature independently or apply a '.mobileconfig' profile that does it.

The world has data on air quality. My country, Poland, has air quality information. But Apple is still opposed to showing them. :(

I am still rocking an iPhone 11 Pro Max and even after replacing the battery ~1 year ago, every page load in Safari would take +20 seconds (Chrome was still fast) and opening / closing any app took ~1 second.

iOS 27 has fixed all of it, it feels snappy again!

Although for some reason the AI organise tab option is not showing up on me.

https://applevis.com/blog/ios-27-ipados-27-summary-voiceover...

How is the Android world faring in this regard? My last Android device was an Android One, but that seems to have been cancelled.

edit: holy crap, iOS 27 made an iPhone 11 pro max I just installed it on so much snappier! Absolutely crazy level of improvement.

It gave me the verbal answer in miles, but the on-screen pop up showed the answer in kilometres.

Never mind that this is a failure of internationalisation (because I live outside one of the two backwards places that hasn’t yet caught up to metric.)

The inconsistency between verbal and written answers is just… bizarre. I’ve never seen an AI agentic system wired like this!

It's like getting a iOS 26 Service Pack 1 :)

You can’t use CarPlay without Siri enabled, so you can’t use CarPlay without doxxing your friends to Apple. Same goes for the image enhancement stuff.

Privacy, that’s Apple.

Overall it took over 1h20m or so for download and install this version in my iPhone. And Settings still displays indexing notification while I have little on the device, and I have disabled searches for every app. So I wonder what it does optimizing and indexing then?

the "upgrade to 18.4" took my iphone to 26.whatever and siri got even worst... siri set an alarm for 10:40 (creates one at 12:08)... NO, delete that one, 10 40 (does nothing)... hey siri... (ajum), delete the previous alarm... (done!) now set an alarm at 10:40 (alarm at 4pm....)... eventually you get tired... you go to the alarms app.. and then there is the previous "deleted" alarm and the other one...

What on earth is happening at Apple?

Meanwhile haven't found an actual new feature yet

Ultra Studio XDR Monitor

Allow your agent to connect to a Safari browser for development and debugging via the Safari MCP server.

I was using Chrome MCP, but this one seems better. The Chrome one was making a lot of messy

They also allow an app to start backing up their data in your iCloud quota without your explicit apoorval or enabling. In fact when you notice, you go ahead and uncheck it, and next time you check it again, you’d see Uber again happily backing up 500MB (or lord knows what) into your iCloud account, a massage and home chores booking company app backing up 650MB data! It’s just pathetic - and that patheticity lies on Apple’s side that they let it happen.

But no, this is a historic release, like every other release, all hail the fruit. I used to think Apple does not care about such issues. But now I suspect they have really been incapable of making these things better for years (in some cases even more than a decade).

I'll probably switch to Android once my phone and watch batteries degrade enough to annoy me

The notifications on the lock screen are still completely unreadable. What the fuck is Apple doing?

Can’t even be happy about the bug fixes because my biggest one, Spotlight not getting keyboard focus when you use it, is still present.

I don't understand why Apple went towards unifying the UI around a failed product (Vision Pro).

Embarrassing.

Should I upgrade to macOS 27?

If not, I’m staying at iOS 18.

What I am annoyed about, is that I'm stuck with Watch OS 26, which introduced their new workout app, which is so laggy. One of the few things I use my Apple Watch for, and that UX is a major regression from previous OS versions.

I really wish they released a .x update to Watch OS26 to fix this.

for the last couple months I’ve been able to record videos and watch those videos but am unable to share them, whether on instagram, whatsapp, airdrop or imessage. some limited luck saving the same video to the file system and sharing from there

searching this issue is notoriously difficult, and there is one partially related thread on Apple support forums talking about spacial h264 and spacial h265 video codecs further complicated by being wrappers, with something suggesting the latter is the issue, the final post having a bewildered user asking for clarification that the iphone can create videos that even it cant use

I looked in my camera settings and there are soooo many switches and file formats now, that its impossible to know which edge case has been run into, and there’s no reset button to put the settings back to their most compatible

I hope this OS refresh fixed that

note, this only affects some videos and the common denominator is not obvious. all videos are recent and made in the same timespan. some are sharable some are not

There appears to be no way to keep it from the Dock without actually killing it or disallowing the "Running in Background" permission for it.

This is the stupidest forced opt-in feature I've ever seen.

Just insane the shit they pulled last year that I'd say straight up defaced years of great designs. Golden Gate has reverted a lot of things though it's still not as good as it used to be in a lot of areas. Step in the right direction anyway.

Hopefully that means a few more years of security updates for the last reasonably sized devices they made.

iOS itself has been getting strictly worse every release.

Maybe graphene or something will save us from the android/ios enshittification embrace.

What if I don't want that Siri AI. It should be optional.

Me? Snow Leopard.

Don't fall for the security patch fearmongering