At this year's WWDC, Apple announced the 27 family of its operating systems. For me, only two things matter: the new AI-powered Siri and performance / stability improvements.
As I mentioned in last year's retrospective, the 26 releases were a fiasco. Not because of liquid glass (I'm completely indifferent to it), but because of the critical issues, especially on macOS. So the fact that the 27 systems are basically a big service pack with the bonus of the new Siri suits me just fine.
Since I work on a product where a significant share of users come from iOS, I always install the betas on my iPad to check that nothing critical broke in the app. As a bonus, I also get to try out what's coming ahead of time.
On my iPad Air (M1), the performance improvements were quite noticeable from the very first beta. Apps really do open faster, and even Mac screen mirroring feels more responsive. The only problem I still have is the Apple Pencil double tap, which stopped working in the current beta (4).
Given the positive experience, I decided to risk it on the iPhone, and the results were nice too. Even though my phone (15 Pro) doesn't have the biggest battery capacity in the world, I got clearly better longevity in everyday usage. As someone who a few months ago went back to using an Android flagship alongside the iPhone, I still think iOS has a long way to go before it comes anywhere near Android. But this release is one more small step toward a more flexible future for the platform.
The new Siri is promising as well. Even though it only works in English at the moment, I know it will solve several of the annoying problems I have today, especially in CarPlay, where half the time the assistant complicates things that should be simple. Even with the beta's limitations, you can see that the contextual understanding Apple promised a few years ago is there, however subtly.
Unfortunately, with macOS 27 the story is different. I only tested it in a virtual machine to check the visual changes, because the betas released up to the publication of this post have plenty of issues: memory leaks, data corruption and so on. Since macOS is an operating system where I can't afford to deal with problems, I think I'll only try the RC version around September. Overall, what bothered me the most in macOS 26, which was the terrible use of space in sidebars, has been fixed. It's practically the same as macOS 15.
All in all, it looks like a good direction for the coming year. I hope the final releases are stable enough for most users to update.
