iOS 27 lands with 'Siri AI' - but the keyboard bug you hate is still there

Apple has pushed out iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27, and the headline act is “Siri AI” - the company’s rebranded, more conversational assistant built on what it calls the next generation of Apple Intelligence. It’s a genuinely significant update on paper. Whether it feels that way in daily use is, as ever, a separate question.

What’s actually new

According to Apple’s own announcement, Siri AI can understand personal context pulled from messages, emails and photos, answer questions about whatever is on your screen, and reach out to the web for up-to-date information. It’s baked into the Camera app on iPhone via a new “Siri mode” - Apple’s example is splitting a restaurant bill and paying friends through Apple Cash - and Visual Intelligence now lets you ask Siri about what you’re looking at across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Vision Pro owners get a version where you can simply look at something and ask about it.

Beyond the assistant, Apple says the release includes new parental control tools and a broad set of general refinements across its platforms. The company is framing this as a quality-and-polish release as much as a features one.

For now, Siri AI is a beta, and it’s English-only at launch. Apple says French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish support is coming in October - so if you don’t use an English-language device, you’re not getting the new assistant on day one regardless of what your update screen tells you.

So who is actually getting the good stuff

Anyone updating today gets the new interface, parental controls and general fixes. But the marquee feature - Siri AI itself - is explicitly still a beta, meaning Apple itself isn’t claiming it’s finished. That matters, because “beta” from a company the size of Apple, shipped to hundreds of millions of devices, is a very different proposition to a beta from an indie developer.

Early testers on Hacker News, several of whom say they’ve been running developer builds for months, back this up. The overall verdict from long-term users is broadly positive - one commenter calls it “one of their better releases,” with Siri now genuinely worth using despite being inconsistent. But the same thread punctures any idea that this update fixes everything: multiple commenters report that the iOS keyboard and Spotlight-style search remain exactly as broken as in previous releases, describing basic app searches (searching “chess” and having the Chess app vanish mid-type) failing the majority of the time. One person notes Apple has claimed to fix this “three or four releases now.”

What it means for you

If you’re expecting Siri AI to transform how you use your iPhone overnight, temper that: it’s a beta, English-only, and by Apple’s own admission and users’ testimony still a “work in progress.” If you’re hoping this update finally fixes long-standing niggles like search and keyboard reliability, the early word from people who’ve lived with it for months is: don’t hold your breath.

The takeaway

This is a real, substantial software update with a genuinely new assistant behind it - not vapourware or marketing spin. But “available today” doesn’t mean “finished today.” Treat Siri AI as an evolving beta worth trying, not a instant upgrade to how your device works, and expect the usual list of old bugs to still be waiting for you underneath the shiny new bits.