---
title: 'iOS 27: Top 5 New Features You Need to Know'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=_oRgdlJUD18'
video_id: '_oRgdlJUD18'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 918
---

# iOS 27: Top 5 New Features You Need to Know

> Source: [iOS 27: Top 5 New Features You Need to Know](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_oRgdlJUD18)

## Summary

iOS 27 is a refinement update with no major overhauls but many small improvements. The top five features include new photo editing tools (extend and reframe), long-awaited settings like separate alarm volume, aesthetic tweaks, a revamped Siri with AI capabilities, and overall performance boosts.

### Key Points

- **New Photo Editing Features** [01:03] — iOS 27 introduces 'extend' and 'reframe' tools. Extend uses generative AI to expand photo edges, useful for changing aspect ratios. Reframe lets you adjust perspective, though quality degrades faster. Requires internet connection.
- **Finally Added Features** [03:40] — Separate alarm volume, better Wi-Fi to cellular switching, CarPlay scrubber for media, and custom EQ for AirPods with H2 chip. These are long-requested features.
- **Aesthetic Tweaks** [05:35] — Home screen icons are crisper. New appearances tab includes a slider for liquid glass opacity. Lock screen gets compact clock option. Search combined with Siri.
- **New Siri (Siri AI)** [06:36] — Complete overhaul: new animation, conversational context, on-screen awareness, and personal data indexing (messages, emails, photos). Can answer questions like 'What was that watch Dave sent me?' or 'Where was I two Saturdays ago?' No third-party app integration yet.
- **Performance Improvements** [13:36] — 70% faster photo loading, 30% faster app loading, 80% faster AirDrop. Noticeable on older phones (iPhone 11 and later). Optimized CPU scheduler makes older devices feel newer.

### Conclusion

iOS 27 is a stable, refinement-focused update that enhances performance and adds useful features, especially the new Siri and photo editing tools. It's recommended for all users, particularly those with older iPhones.

## Transcript

All right, it's time to talk about iOS 27 coming to an iPhone near you. So, I've been running the latest beta of iOS 27 for a little while now since WWDC. well. And this is the update of refinement. Like, there are a lot of
there's no big sweeping changes. There's a lot of little things in here that that this has been among the most stable, like best set of developer betas
the everyday person who's going to wait till September when it officially drops where I'm sitting. Anyway, this is the top five features of iOS 27 in my order
this channel, make sure you get subscribed to be among the first to see the new iPhones that this launches on when that comes out in a few short months. So, number five is the new photo editing features. So, in the photos app
now, when you open a photo and you go to edit, there's two new tools. Cleanup was noticeably better. But now, there's also two new ones, extend and reframe. I've
going to use generative AI to extend the edges of a photo no matter what camera it was taken on in any direction. And it seems maybe a bit silly at first, but
I just want to change the aspect ratio of something. Maybe I shot something in portrait, but I want to make it landscape for this video instead. Okay, you can just extend and pinch out and it does a pretty great job of
reconstructing more of whatever was on the outer edges of the frame. Obviously, it works best with more consistent patterns and abstract stuff, but it's also been shockingly good with whole entire objects, too, just sort of
creating more of it from scratch. But definitely the crazier one that we haven't seen before is this spatial reframe feature. So, this one is going to let you drag around and morph the perspective from which it appears a
photo was taken. So, it's like kind of being able to move where the camera was in physical space and then it takes some time and generates all these new pixels that it wasn't originally able to see. And yeah, it does it. Now, I would say
the quality of these refframes isn't quite as good. like it definitely degenerates a bit more quickly than the extends, but it is kind of insane that it works and that Apple's just letting you do this to your photos. I think
refframe. It's a very cool tech demo, but I do think it's kind of convenient those perfectly symmetrical shots where you kind of just get the snap like 96%
So, you get those last few percent by reframing it and getting it just right. Is that still a photo that you took with your phone? In my opinion, no. But who's
counting? Also, it will not let you extend or reframe the same photo more enough." But you can also sort of screenshot it and get your way around it these features require an internet connection. So, if you try to do this
because you need those bigger models on the cloud to actually pull this off. All right. So, then number four is what I'm calling the freaking finally section cuz it's about time. Each one of these things was like Apple stubbornly
refusing to do it for some reason to the point where it became a meme. Like, it's been years. But now for iOS 27, they've found the time. So finally separate alarm volume from the rest of system volume in iOS 27. Freaking finally, bro.
This has been an Android feature for like 20 years at this point. And toggles and it makes it very clear. But hey, at this point, I'll take it. I don't care. It's about time. Also, better management of switching off of
weak Wi-Fi networks back to cellular. This is something I've dealt with for and you pull up maps to like navigate to work or wherever and just want to see traffic for like the first two blocks every single time. I have like a tree
instructions are. It's not going to know the traffic until I pass it. It gets off of my house's Wi-Fi and then it connects to cellular. But I've noticed it actually being better on iOS 27. Just leaving, just going straight to cellular
in CarPlay. in iOS 27. And then now playing, you can finally scrub the media back and forth that you're actually playing on the timeline.
Finally. What's taking so long? And then AirPods are finally getting custom EQ. What? Finally. At this point, it's been so long. I was convinced they were holding back on this on purpose for some weird reason. But okay, it's here now.
at least for AirPods with an H2 chip or later. And it's only a threeb equalizer, but still, it's crazy to see. I'll take it. It's about time. I don't know who had to lose a bet over there for this stuff to happen, but thank you for
losing that bet. It's about time. I appreciate it. Moving on. So, number three is the aesthetic tweaks because there are a ton of little aesthetic improvements everywhere throughout this update. Obviously, iOS 26 was a big one
with liquid glass. That's not going anywhere. But right from the jump on iOS 27, you can see like the home screen, the icons are just, you can tell they're read. They're a little crisper. If you look at Apple's stock apps, they've
caved and added a new appearances tab. And in this tab, right at the top, is a literal slider to dial in exactly how much liquid glass you actually want. By
default, it's in the middle, which I found is just a tiny bit more opaque more opaque and frosted, or all the way to the left, which makes it way more glassy and transparent for you real liquid glass sickos out there. It's
Also, on the lock screen, there's this new compact clock option if you just want to shrink that thing all the way down. But they've also completely redesigned the home screen swipe down search which is now combined with Siri
which conveniently brings me to number two which is the new Siri aka Siri AI. So okay I would say the bar was very low for Siri before like the last 10 years
of Siri it's been borderline useless. I would say uh probably have been more of Google, it's gotten this complete overhaul from the ground up. It starts with this new animation. So you can hold down the power button like before and it
expands out of the dynamic island and it's this half see-through halfop opaque sort of crystal orb thing that moves as you talk. And then once it pops up your answer as an overlay, you can actually drag the bottom down to turn it into
this full overlay conversation window. And then you can even full screen it to being an overlay to being in the Siri app. And this app actually does keep a
history of your requests. It's not every single request, but it's most of them and you know keeps the bigger ones that you might want to revisit. It also has a customizable. I appreciate that you can make it talk faster.
>> Hi, let's find the right voice for you. Hi, let's find the right Let's find the right voice for you. Hi. Hi. Let's find the right voice for Hi, let's find the let's find the right voice for you. >> So, that's pretty sweet. Uh, and yeah,
it just it generally feels like they've caught up to the basic functionality of, say, Gemini on an Android phone. It's more conversational now, so you can ask context and keep it going. Uh, it has broad world knowledge that it actually
uses now instead of just saying, "Hey, I looked this up for you or I Googled it." And it has on-screen awareness now, so you can ask it things about whatever because there's no UI to get it to look at the screen. But I'd say its biggest
new capability is being able to dig into the data and the personal context that's actually on your phone. So, I'm talking about like your iMes, your emails, your
actually indexes in the background for a while. It'll say it's optimizing for the new Siri. For me, this was a couple of days, actually. But once that's over, you can ask it things like, "What was that watch Dave sent me?"
>> Dave Lee sent you a message about the light meter watch LMWV1 from Kickstarter. He mentioned that he thought David Im Brandon would like it. See, that's coming straight from my messages. Or where was I two Saturdays
ago? >> Two Saturdays ago on June 27th, 20126, you were in Greensboro, North Carolina. You stayed at a hotel in a rural area >> So, if you pull down, you can see this is pulling from my wallet transactions,
my messages, and it seems like geo tags from photos I took on those days. So, it's it's pretty comprehensive and it actually lets you dig up stuff from your personal history as long as it's gone through one of these Apple apps. It's
similar to what Google is doing with Gemini, which is going to the cloud and pulling from your Google services like Gmail or Google Calendar, but in my much more visual display. And it's also multimodal. So, like I said, it can
answer visual questions about what's on your screen, but also they just added a new mode to the camera app. It's one swipe away and it just says Siri, so you can now take a photo in Siri mode and then ask Siri about that image. So, kind
honestly pretty good. I'd say it's caught up to what you would say is like the base expected functionality from an AI assistant on your phone in 2026. It's no longer a seller dwelling shadow of an AI assistant. Now, here's the thing
about this new Siri. Uh, no third party app ties yet. So, this is the thing I course, it's going to work best if you're using a bunch of Apple services, iMessage, Apple Photos, Apple Calendar, all that stuff. Like when I asked about
conversations I've had in WhatsApp or Telegram or Gmail or any of these other understanding now is basically that these developers or these app developers
will be able to push an update to their app that allows Siri to look into their data and basically find stuff that is flagged for Siri to find it Siri, hey, this is more messages here and other things like calendars and even
there's even little tiny hints of them starting to trickle out now. Like when I ask what's the battery status of my car, it then actually asks me the user if I
want to enable Siri to look into these other apps. And so I selected one and when I said yes to Porsches, it was able to tell me. Although you can see show up in the list for me. So clearly they haven't pushed an update yet.
Basically now it's a waiting game to see how many of these developers will actually update their apps to let Siri look into their data. And I think we'll the new iPhones come out and everybody gets iOS 27 at once. But for now, it's
uh TBD on how much this sort of access levels up Siri to being this little comments under the like button, let me know if you want a review just on the
new Siri against like Gemini on Android cuz I think there's a lot more that I could talk about that I have opinions on from like sourcing to how it displays other stuff, but that that's a whole separate thing. Let me know what you
think. I just for now series pretty good. So that's why it's my number two mentions, some things that I would like to show you, but that didn't quite make my top five. So if you open a picture of food in the new photos app in iOS 27,
Siri will not just identify that it is food, which it can already do, but then it also services a lookup nutrition button that will tell you on a sliding scale of how healthy it thinks that food is. Nothing super detailed like trying
potentially interesting information when it's accurate. The passwords app now also can do the thing where it goes through and agentically automatically logs in and fixes all of your weak or compromised passwords and then I guess
makes you an official password zapper liar. Insane. Uh, you can also describe from scratch and let you edit it after the fact. That is incredible. And you can also now do threaded replies in iMessage with Android users finally. But
the number one best new thing in iOS 27 is that everything is noticeably faster. So this is crazy. I know they said a bunch of like huge crazy numbers on stage like 70% faster photo loading into the gallery after you take a picture or
30% faster app loading across the board or 80% faster airdrops. Just like the phone and feeling it being noticeably smoother and snappier is
actually pretty sick. Now, okay, on a brand new iPhone 16 or 17 or 18, this is I do notice the faster aird drops, but where this really shines is older phones
because for all that talk about iOS updates like slowing down your phone, it's pretty refreshing to see compatibility for this software go all the way back to iPhone 11 back from 2019. And with this new optimized CPUer,
it's really kicking in and making an even bigger difference for this older phone to feel much newer again. And I'm personally all here for an update that the behind-the-scenes bloat and inefficiencies to just make everything
run that much more smoothly. So, there you have it. iOS 27. I think when this update hits your phone, download it, install it, do it. I know that there's I don't really want to install this one. I feel like it's going to mess things
up. But this one, you should you should install it. do it. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace.