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Posts tagged with "iPadOS 27"

Apple Releases iOS and iPadOS 27.2 with Apple Pencil Support for iPhone Duo and Smarter Siri

The iPhone Duo now supports the Apple Pencil (USB-C).

The iPhone Duo now supports the Apple Pencil (USB-C).

It’s been just six weeks since iOS and iPadOS 27 were released, but Apple just introduced version 27.2, which packs a surprisingly long list of new features, some of which were first announced back in June at WWDC, while others support the iPhone Duo. Let’s take a look at the highlights.

The iPhone Duo already has a couple of great updates. The first is support for the Apple Pencil (USB-C). That’s the model that reveals a USB-C port when you pull on the end of it. I played around with the Duo’s Apple Pencil support over the weekend and think a lot of people are going to love it. The Duo feels so much like a tiny notebook already that writing with the Pencil is very natural whether you’re using Apple’s Notes or Freeform, or one of the many new skeuomorphic note-taking apps that have been released for the Duo.

Excluding apps from Siri AI.

Excluding apps from Siri AI.

The Duo also gained support for Edge Light, which frames your Duo’s screen in a faux ring light, illuminating your face when you’re on a video call or filming yourself with the front-facing camera.

One of the limitations of the initial beta release of Siri AI was its lack of access to past conversations. With iOS and iPadOS 27.2, Siri can recall past conversations (English only), which is great, especially if you use Siri a lot. Siri has added new data sources too, like images attached in the Messages app, voicemail, and Calendar event attendees, along with better browsing history and Reading List results. Siri AI has also added a centralized setting for excluding apps from its results, along with beta support for French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Recalling past Siri conversations.

Recalling past Siri conversations.

FaceTime has added new features too. Dual Capture, which streams the front and rear cameras of recent iPhones at the same time, now works in Group FaceTime calls. Third-party sign language interpreters or live captioners can be added to a call too, an accessibility feature that I first saw demoed back in May.

Messages has added suggested actions, like adding an event to Calendar, that draw on the context of your conversation. The feature showed up over the summer during the public beta but didn’t make the final release of iOS 27. It’s not a feature I use a lot, but for quickly capturing information in other apps when you’re pressed for time, it can really be handy.

Other iOS and iPadOS 27.2 updates include:

  • Shared Albums in Photos include reminders before they expire, so you can save photos and videos before the deadline. The feature also adds caption and comment editing.
  • Podcasts’ Up Next section has been organized into New Episodes and Continue Playing, to help differentiate active from untouched episodes.
  • Games has added context on friend suggestions and now shows what friends are playing on their player pages.
  • Apple TV’s Multiview has expanded to the iPhone, allowing you to watch four Apple TV sporting events at once, an especially nice option for the iPhone Duo.

Of these, I expect that I’ll use the Apple Pencil support for the iPhone Duo and Apple Podcasts’ Up Next categories the most, but given the variety of the release, I suspect there’s a little something for most users here.

Today’s updates are available by navigating to Settings > General > Software Update.

Our OS 27 Review Extras: eBooks, Shortcuts, and the Making of the iOS and iPadOS 27 Review

Today we published not one, but three reviews covering four OSes:

The reviews cover design, new app features and more, which kicks off a big week here at MacStories that includes extra special perks for Club MacStories members. Here’s what we have planned.

For Club MacStories members, we’ve got some exciting perks to help you get more out of the reviews:

  • An eBook edition of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review that you can download and read on your favorite device or app
  • 20 additional ready-made shortcuts for iOS 27
  • An eBook edition of John’s macOS 27 Golden Gate review
  • An eBook edition of John’s watchOS 27 review.

If you’re not already a member, you can join Club MacStories for $5/month or $50/year using the buttons below:

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iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review

After years of relentless building, it’s good to see Apple sweat the details again.

In the 11 years I’ve been writing annual iOS and iPadOS reviews every summer, I don’t think I’ve ever struggled to find an “angle” for my story as much as I did this year. The reason was twofold: I wasn’t particularly enamored with Siri AI and Apple’s belated chatbot efforts; and, as I realized during the summer, it can be challenging to write about an OS update that is largely focused on performance improvements and refinements.

“Everyone wants a so-called Snow Leopard year until it actually happens,” I thought to myself on several occasions over the past few months. Think about it: on paper, we all love a good ol’ basket of bug fixes that just make our phones better without changing much about the overall design and experience of iOS. It’s a commendable effort, and there’s no denying that iOS 27 is the snappiest (insert meme here), most stable version of iOS I’ve ever tested – and it has been since the first developer beta. In practice, though, it turns out that considering a major iOS update merely through the lens of improvements and fixes can be…a little boring.

So I’ve been sitting on this review for a while. I let it simmer. Then, a month ago, as I was sunbathing with my girlfriend Silvia down south in beautiful Vieste, Puglia, it hit me: iOS 27 is a geographically ambiguous update. Stay with me here. Depending on where you are in the world, this update can either be a little boring or pretty exciting.

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Siri AI and Apple’s Trickle-Up Strategy

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

In the month that I’ve been using iOS 27 (launching in public beta today) and the new Siri AI, I’ve come to a few conclusions: Siri AI is a much better Siri and will (probably) be a massive success; the newfound chatbot capabilities of Siri will pose a serious threat to OpenAI and the vast majority of free ChatGPT users they have; and the new Siri is (again, probably) not for me at the moment. At the very least, it can’t be right now given its lack of support for third-party apps and technical issues I’ve encountered during beta testing.

It took me a while to accept the fact that Siri AI can’t be the kind of AI assistant I’d spend hours working with every day. But after testing iOS 27’s new Siri experience every day (and breaking it often in the process), I think that’s okay – and, arguably, what Apple is shooting for at the moment.

The new Siri AI is not designed for people who have grown accustomed to working with frontier models and agents such as Claude Code and Codex. The first version of Siri AI can’t be considered an “agent”, nor can it be compared to products from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google that are targeting power users living at the bleeding edge of AI. If you go into Siri AI thinking that it’s Apple’s answer to ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork for long-running tasks or deep research queries, you’re going to be disappointed – like I initially was.

Instead, Siri AI carries all the typical traits of a new Apple product: it’s a user-friendly experience designed for the masses, without any of the complexities that define a power-user tool, for better or worse. This is how Apple rolls: they don’t start from a high power-user ceiling and let products trickle down to consumers; they always start from the consumer level and refine, iterate, and extend until products trickle up to power users. This perspective isn’t meant to excuse the (many) current flaws of Siri AI. (More on them below.) It’s just the necessary lens for understanding how Apple is addressing their AI shortcomings in a way that doesn’t betray the company’s soul and design ethos.

There will be plenty more to say about iOS 27, the improved Shortcuts app, Liquid Glass tweaks, and other system enhancements later this year. After all, I have a review to write. Today’s column is merely an opportunity for me to reason through the obstacles I’ve faced with Siri AI and the way I’ve had to re-learn how to think about Siri.

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iPadOS Lets You Automate Window Placement with Shortcuts

MultiSwitcher for iPadOS.

MultiSwitcher for iPadOS.

Update: An earlier version of this article referred to this feature as having been introduced in iPadOS 27, but it was actually introduced in the iPadOS 26 cycle. I missed it. My apologies.

In iPadOS’ Shortcuts app, the existing ‘Open App’ action was recently updated with the ability to launch an app with a specific window placement parameter. This means you can now automate window positions on iPad by opening a bunch of apps and programmatically selecting where their windows be placed.

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iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Overview

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple unveiled updates across its family of OSes. The keynote itself was very different in structure from previous years, with a lot of the focus on Siri and Apple Intelligence, which, for the most part, are fully cross-platform. (For more on those announcements, check out Devon’s coverage.)

Nevertheless, there were plenty of new features announced for iOS and iPadOS, along with a slew of child safety tools. Let’s take a look.

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