GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
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iOS 27 has only been out for a few hours, and I’ve been 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 waitlist for that. In the meantime, I’ve been poking around a bunch of features that aren’t about AI and found a lot that I’m happy with — even though this doesn’t seem to be as big of an update as previous years, the fit and finish throughout the operating system is already great to see.
Here are a few neat things that have jumped out at me.
The Liquid Glass opacity slider should have been there from the start
I’ve always thought the Liquid Glass redesign, introduced with iOS 26 last year, was fine — not great, but not particularly bad (well, after Apple cleaned up some early issues, at least). But the new opacity slider in iOS 27 is awesome: it lets you make Liquid Glass elements like tab bars more clear or more frosty, meaning you can see objects under them in different degrees of opacity. Want to really see what’s under your search bar? Go glassy. Would you prefer to keep things more readable? Opt for more of a tint. (You can probably guess which I prefer.)
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1 / 3 The default Liquid Glass opacity. Image: Apple
App icons got an upgrade
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