5 things I already love from iOS 27 beta

iOS 27 was released just a few hours ago, and I’ve been messing around with the developer beta on my iPhone 16 Pro. I’ve been very interested in trying out the new Siri AI, but unfortunately, I’m still on Apple’s waiting list for it. In the meantime, I’ve been looking at a bunch of non-AI features and found a lot to be happy with – although this doesn’t seem like a major update like previous years, the fit and finish throughout the OS is actually nice to see.

Here are some cool things that jumped out at me.

The Liquid Glass opacity slider should have been there from the beginning

I’ve always thought the Liquid Glass redesign, introduced with iOS 26 last year, was good — not great, but not particularly bad (well, after Apple cleaned up some Early issuesat least). But the new opacity slider in iOS 27 is great: it lets you make Liquid Glass elements like tab bars more visible or Cooler, which means you can see objects underneath at varying degrees of opacity. want truly See what’s under your search bar? Go glassy. Prefer to keep things more readable? Choose more dye. (You can probably guess my preference.)

Apple has had another go at many of the icon designs it introduced with iOS 26, and overall, they look much better to me. Usually the changes are subtle – color tweaks or adding a bit of glassy texture – but I think they make things look more polished.

Different volume settings

From Settings, you can now finally set independent volume levels for ringtones, alarms and timers, alerts and system sounds. In the Sounds & Haptics menu, simply turn off the switches that let you match alarms and timers as well as alerts and system sounds to the ringtone volume level, and you can adjust more precise volume settings from there.

I have to admit that I never use widgets, but I saw that really big widgets were coming with iOS 27 this year and I had to see a few for myself. It’s so huge. They occupy a full screen of apps (except the dock). But I can see it being a very useful way to look at an entire calendar or a long list of tasks.

You can make the time very small on your lock screen

While editing the lock screen, you can now place the time next to the date at the top of the screen. This opens up more real estate, which is good if you want to see more of your background image, like a family photo or a cool piece of art, or if you just want a little clutter on your screen.

We’ll be digging a lot over the next few days, so keep your fingers crossed Eye on Edge. And if you just want to see a huge list of promising features coming to Apple’s next big updates, I’ve got you covered.