iOS 27 Beta 1 Hands-On: Cool Features, No Siri

Apple dropped iOS 27 Developer Beta 1 this week, and 9to5Mac's Fernando went full send — installed it on his main iPhone 17 Pro, not a sacrificial burner — so the rest of us could watch the chaos unfold from a safe distance. The verdict after spending real time with it? There's genuinely interesting stuff here. Also, the thing Apple spent most of WWDC hyping? Not available. You have to join a waitlist for it. A waitlist. For the software that already shipped to your phone.

Okay, but we'll get there.

You're gonna need storage. Like, a lot of it.

First, the boring-but-actually-critical thing: give yourself 25–30GB of free space before you attempt this install. Fernando clocked the update at 13.7GB on his 17 Pro, and a major OS update needs room to breathe during installation. Don't be the person who bricks their phone because they were holding onto four years of unedited ProRes footage. Clear the decks first.

Once you're in, the first thing you'll notice is a settings banner telling you indexing is in progress. This is normal — iOS is essentially reorganizing itself in the background after a major version jump. The phone runs warm, apps feel slightly sluggish in those first hours, and then it settles. Fernando noted his phone "drastically cooled down" over the course of filming his hands-on, which tracks. The indexing phase is doing real work.

The Photos tools that actually work (mostly)

The most tangible additions in Beta 1 live in the Photos app, where Apple has added three new AI editing tools: Clean Up, Extend, and Reframe. Clean Up has been around in some form, but it's been refined — Fernando used it to erase some Pokéballs from a thumbnail photo, and it worked cleanly, no ghosting, no weird smearing. The tool gives you three modes (Auto, Fast, and High Quality), which is a nice touch — not everyone needs pixel-perfect results for a quick edit.

Extend and Reframe are newer and more ambitious. Extend lets you outpaint a photo — zoom out on the crop and have AI fill in what would have been there if you'd pulled back the camera. Reframe does something weirder and arguably cooler: it lets you shift the apparent perspective of a photo, sort of like bringing the spatial photo magic from Vision Pro down to a flat image. Fernando described it as changing "a perspective," dragging the view to simulate a different angle on the scene.

Neither Extend nor Reframe performed reliably in Beta 1. The Extend feature errored out on the first photo Fernando tried, then got stuck on a loading screen on the second. Reframe had similar instability — worked once earlier in the day, then refused to cooperate during filming. He showed a before-and-after screenshot from an earlier successful attempt, and honestly? The result looked pretty good. The monitor in the background got filled in convincingly. The concept has legs.

"The idea is pretty decent," Fernando said. "It's just a matter of — this is the first developer beta, so there's going to be a lot of growing pains."

That framing is fair, and I'd rather see Apple ship ambitious tools that need polish than safe tools that don't do anything interesting. But it's worth flagging that the two headlining Photos features were demonstrably broken during a live hands-on. Not catastrophically — this is what Dev Beta 1 is for — but don't install this expecting to use Extend or Reframe for anything real yet.

The one Photos feature that worked without drama: AI-generated captions for videos. Play any video in your library and you get a real-time caption overlay, complete with a little sparkle icon indicating Apple Intelligence is doing the work. Fernando tested it on a video he shot earlier that day and reported very accurate results. Currently US English only, but the style is customizable. This one feels ready.

Liquid Glass went from toggle to dial, and I'm into it

Here's the thing about Liquid Glass — Apple's new translucent UI language that's been dividing people since WWDC — the discourse has basically split into two camps online. Team "it's beautiful and dynamic" versus Team "my eyes, the goggles do nothing." Apple apparently heard both and added a slider instead of the old on/off toggle.

Go to Settings > Appearance and you can now dial the opacity of Liquid Glass across your entire UI. Fernando keeps his cranked toward clear. Personally? I think the full Liquid Glass look hits different on wallpapers with depth and movement, but I completely understand wanting a subtler version when you're staring at your phone for eight hours. The fact that Apple made this a spectrum instead of a binary choice is the right call — it acknowledges that "personal" in "personal computer" actually means something.

Smarter context in Messages, and a Wallet trick worth knowing

A couple of smaller additions that showed up in Fernando's walkthrough: iMessage now surfaces Apple Cash shortcuts contextually when financial amounts appear in conversation. His example — his mom sent him a message about a house, and iOS flagged a dollar amount and offered a direct link to Apple Cash to send that payment — felt a little uncanny valley to me, honestly. Useful, yes. Also a reminder that your phone is reading your texts and making inferences. Make of that what you will.

There's also a new "Create a Pass" feature in the Wallet app that lets you manually build a custom loyalty or membership pass from scratch — add a color, a QR code, your membership details. The full version will let you photograph a physical card and have Apple Intelligence convert it automatically, but that requires Visual Intelligence access (see: the waitlist situation below). The manual creation route works right now and is genuinely handy.

The camera app got a UI refresh too — controls are reorganized, and Visual Intelligence will eventually live there. Fernando couldn't demo that part because, again, waitlist. The UI changes are clean enough that they're worth noting even without the AI layer.

About those "30% faster" app launches

Apple claims apps open 30% faster in iOS 27. Fernando tested this informally — camera app, Twitter, Spotify — and his read was "it does feel snappy," while noting it's "kind of hard to test that when you're dealing with milliseconds." That's an honest caveat and worth preserving: this is Apple's marketing claim, not an independently benchmarked figure. The phone feeling faster after a clean major OS install is also a known phenomenon that doesn't necessarily survive the first month of use. File this one under "plausible, unverified, revisit in stable release."

Okay, the Siri thing

Here's the situation. Apple spent a significant portion of WWDC talking about the new Siri — Dynamic Island integration, in-app intents, cross-app actions, the works. It was positioned as the centerpiece of iOS 27. And in Beta 1, none of it is accessible. You go into Siri settings, see the new Siri option, and get prompted to join a waitlist.

Fernando, running the most powerful iPhone currently available — the 17 Pro with the highest-end chip and the most RAM — is on the waitlist. Just like everyone else.

"Even though I have one of the iPhone 17 Pros that gets like the best or most powerful on-device type of experience with the new Siri," he said, "I still don't have access to it."

When you actually invoke Siri right now in iOS 27 Beta 1, you get, per Fernando, "the old orb glow that we've gotten for years with the Siri over since iOS 18." So same old Siri, same old interface, just dressed up in a new OS. That's the current state of the feature that was supposed to change everything.

The waitlist energy is extremely familiar if you've been online long enough — it's the same vibe as every AI product launch that generates enormous hype and then trickles out access like it's a Spotify Wrapped drop. The comments on Fernando's video are already full of "has anyone gotten in yet?" and "still waiting" replies. The collective experience of installing a major OS update specifically for one feature and finding a queue where that feature should be is genuinely funny in a way that the internet has gotten very good at processing. The memes write themselves: downloaded iOS 27, got iOS 18 with extra steps.

Apple's likely managing server load and model stability — there are real technical reasons to gate a rollout like this. But the optics of shipping a beta where the flagship feature requires a separate waitlist are, let's say, not their best work.

Fernando is optimistic: "Once we do get access to Siri, we'll make a video immediately after that. And I'm excited to show it off. But more importantly, I'm excited to test it out." That enthusiasm feels genuine, and honestly, so does the patience it requires. The features that are working — captions, cleanup, the Wallet pass builder, the Liquid Glass slider — suggest a real update is in there somewhere.

It just turns out the connective tissue that ties all of it together is still on the waitlist.

— Zara Chen, Tech & Politics Correspondent