All major chatbots harvest what we tell them in the spirit of training their models further. Some have privacy policies that limit what they extract, but it’s all kind of beyond our control, because the models run in their data centers, and whenever we interact with them, we’re sending them our data in the clear, often directly connected to our accounts. That means that over time, chatbots learn a great deal about us, and some of that becomes the basis for future responses to other people.

For Apple Intelligence, Apple said they brought the same privacy-minded approach to using large language model processing. The company started down this path in June 2024 and updated and revised how they approach it with Siri AI. This ensures Siri can maintain conversational context, provide analysis, and deliver information without compromising our privacy.

Apple uses a combination of on-device and Private Cloud Compute to provide this sort of privacy protection:

• On-device models allow Siri AI to provide responses and Apple Intelligence to perform analysis or generation, which could include internet information requests and retrieving information from your data, without the chatbot component leaving your device.
• Private Cloud Compute is a privacy-protecting framework in which only certain kinds of data from your device leave it to head to Apple’s cloud, where they use models derived from Google Gemini without exposing data of any kind to Gemini.

On-device vs. Private Cloud Compute

As Apple describes it, any task that can performed on your device will be, avoiding privacy issues altogether. However, for the vaguely described “more sophisticated requests” Apple must send some information to their cloud for processing. This cloud system is called Private Cloud Compute (PCC).

Apple enumerates many principles of PCC in their foundational 2024 announcement, but I can summarize this for you (without involving an AI):

• Nobody but you should see your data, including Apple.
• Apple has to have control and understanding of all components that handle data, and not have modes that let their staff access information in special cases, such as debugging modes.
• The system must be designed to prevent targeted attacks that would let an attacker know exactly where an individual’s personal data was being processed and attempt to break in and exfiltrate information from it. _Apple_ doesn’t even know which server will handle the cloud portion of queries. And someone would have to overcome the system’s extreme global protections just to even begin trying to figure that out. Because of the architecture and security, it’s beyond exceedingly unlikely that a global exploit could work.
• Nonetheless, a lot of companies claim they’re impenetrable and privacy-forward. Thus, Apple said outside researchers must be able to verify Apple’s claims.

Apple first built PCC using the same secure components that protect data on their hardware, including the Secure Enclave, which protects encryption keys and biometric information (among many other security bits), and Secure Boot, which prevents devices from starting up with compromised operating systems. This cloud is a collection of nodes that sound like Macs running a highly customized, secure version of macOS that’s stripped down to the necessary components and infused with the PCC sauce.

Data is sent from your device to PCC through end-to-end encrypted connections. Information transmitted is used for the user’s specific purpose (an “inferential request”) and is destroyed after the task is completed. This data can never be accessed by Apple staff or other people, though there are limits Apple does not advertise.

How Google Gemini powers Siri AI

To make Siri AI and expanded Apple Intelligence features work, Apple collaborated with Google to draw on the technologies behind Google’s Gemini model to add to the Apple Foundation Models (the Apple frameworks used for access to large language models). Apple is not handing off data to Google. Heavens, no! Rather, they are “collaborating”—ostensibly involving some form of licensing that isn’t disclosed.

Apple Foundation Models run both on-device and in new PCC nodes on Google Cloud, where Google runs Intel-based servers with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). (GPUs turned out to be ideal for AI operations.) Apple’s in-house PCC uses Apple silicon. The Intel CPU is paired with Google Titan, a security chip that verifies the server’s boot firmware before the CPU is allowed to run it, so that an infiltrator couldn’t slip in a compromised server image.

To achieve this, Apple ensures that every piece of hardware is cryptographically tracked—so another server couldn’t be slipped in, say—and that these new nodes have the same integrity as Apple’s own.

The post How Siri AI Processing Works, On Your Device and in the Cloud appeared first on nerdsmodo.

There’s no exhaustive list of the commands you can issue; your best bet is simply to try whatever you’re curious about. Here is just a handful of examples to get you started:

• Change settings:
  • Increase the screen brightness
  • Lower the volume by 20 percent
  • Turn on Reduce Transparency
  • Enable VoiceOver

Some of these commands may require confirmation with a switch or button on screen.

• Work with apps:
  • Open Safari
  • Play something by Angine de Poitrine
  • Pause music
  • Add peanut butter to the Shopping list
  • Remind me to water the garden
  • Start a FaceTime audio call with Johnson
• Find information:
  • Show me documents I created last week
  • Find PDFs with the label Important
  • Look up Stacey Butler’s address

Thanks to an Apple framework called App Intents, third-party developers can provide hooks in their own apps that let Siri gather information and perform actions. Over time, as more apps add these capabilities, you should be able to ask Siri to do an ever-increasing number of tasks for you.

The post The Siri AI Commands Worth Knowing appeared first on nerdsmodo.

There’s a little nuance to how Siri answers. If you type your query in, for example, a Search or Ask field, then as you type—just as with previous versions—Spotlight finds local files and apps, images in Photos, tasks from Reminders, contact cards, App Store matches, and so forth. These start to display immediately.

If Siri identifies a search that appears Spotlight-focused, it presents a blue search button in the lower-right corner on an iPhone or iPad; on a Mac, there’s no indicator. More exact matches offer a suggestion as a completion after a long dash in gray text. If you type photoshop on a Mac with Adobe Photoshop installed, you see “photoshop — Adobe Photoshop 2025.a…” with everything after photoshop in gray.

However, if you type a question, more words, or something ambiguous, “— Ask Siri” appears in gray. On an iPhone or iPad, the search button turns into an arrow button—an Ask button, we assume. Tap the arrow button or, on a Mac, press Return, to trigger a Siri response to what you typed.

On all three kinds of devices, a Show Results button with overlapping icons—representing the kinds of items found—may appear below the Siri field. On the Mac, we saw it appear briefly before showing a scrolling results list as with Spotlight.

This automatic recognition of your query type means you don’t have to think about how you formulate a search or question: type what you want and let Siri figure it out. If the results list for a search doesn’t suffice, elaborate on what you’re asking.

You can broadly ask Siri these kinds of things:

• Find something or analyze something on my device or in my personal information that’s available on this device, like text in Notes, events in Calendar, text recognized in Photos, and so on. (See how Siri AI and Spotlight merged.)
• Provide me an answer about something that doesn’t necessarily include any of my personal data, or may not need to.
• Make me an image of something I describe.

That’s all very general. What are specific kinds of queries you might make? Remember that the data has to exist for Siri to answer. We rely on a third-party email client, so Siri seems to have limited access to our email stores for now. But nearly everything else we do is stored in and synced by iCloud.

Here are a handful of examples of the wide range of questions you can ask and commands you can make, as the list is effectively endless:

• What movie am I thinking of? It has Harry Lime in it. As you may have found with other chatbots, Siri can take a small amount of factual information and work like a memory aid by filling in the gaps, or asking clarifying questions. (Answer: The Third Man.)
• Summarize my conversation last week with *name*. We found this particularly useful because, in testing, Siri did seem to figure out the most important things talked about, provide a solid analysis of the topics, and link to individual messages.
• Start a timer for *time units. You can specify any time in any units. We tried 13 1/2* and it was interpreted correctly.
• How many times did I go out for lunch this year? Siri pulled information from one of our calendars but also from a shared calendar used by a spouse. It also didn’t necessarily identify things that weren’t labeled “lunch” but were midday meal dates.
• How do I clean a toilet that has a seemingly permanent stain inside the bowl? Siri can consult external sources and stuff that’s in its outboard LLM brain in the cloud to give you ideas for what to try.
• Create an album containing all the images that I took in June 2024. Siri adds an album to Photos, and provides a link you can click to view that album in Photos.
• Did I receive a birthday party invitation recently? Siri gave one of us a summary derived from a mix of emails and messages, correctly identifying two recent invitations for events that had already passed, while noting that it saw nothing upcoming.
• What are some times I have nothing scheduled between 10 and noon next week? Siri offers a list of days in which that condition is true, but also shows the conflicts that impinge on that range on some days.
• How do I feel about *person*? This is a question you might ask to test out the way Siri AI “thinks,” and we were surprised to find that it did a great job at accurately, if effusively, summarizing our interactions with a person by looking at email, messages, and other cues.
• Make a picture of a nice lasagna dinner in a photorealistic style. While we have all sorts of feelings about this, it’s definitely something you can do. (See the Apple Intelligence features to skip.)

One of us attended a 60th birthday party recently, where former officemates regaled attendees with the celebrant’s early use of voice-recognition software. He had trained it so he could say “paste”—or rather, “Paste. Paste. PASTE!!!”—to perform that command and so on. The wits in the office would walk by and yell “erase hard drive! OK! Approve! OK!”

The post What to Ask Siri AI: Examples That Actually Work appeared first on nerdsmodo.

This can give you the answer to or produce a result based on these sorts of inner monologue statements: “What’s that plant?” “Turn the information on that poster into a calendar event.” “What sculpture is that?” “Read me the text in this screenshot.”

Starting with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27, you have more options and can get more information.

First, macOS and visionOS now support Visual Intelligence for the first time. On a Mac, you can have Visual Intelligence describe what’s on screen. With an Apple Vision Pro, you can have it describe things in your field of vision.

Second, on an iPhone or iPad, you can use Visual Intelligence directly through the Camera app with a new Siri button that sits alongside Video and Photo in the photo modes list below the shutter button.

Ask Siri about a screenshot

You can ask Siri about what it sees using Visual Intelligence in two different ways. On an iPhone or iPad, you use the screenshot shortcut to start the process; on a Mac, there’s a shortcut to capture part or the screen or a window that comes as part of macOS 27.

To take the screenshot on an iPhone, press and release the side button and the volume up button together. On an iPad, press and release the top button and either volume button; on an iPad with a Home button, press the top button and the Home button together.

You can also circle items with your finger or an Apple Pencil to highlight them.

Ask Siri about what’s on a Mac’s screen

Visual Intelligence can now see your screen. Ask Siri about anything on your screen, and it can analyze what it’s seeing and make sense of it. You can also focus Siri’s attention on just part of your screen:

• Press ⌘-Shift-6 to highlight a portion of your screen. You can then ask Siri about something in that area.
• Press ⌘-Shift-Space to ask Siri about the frontmost window.

If you’re using ⌘-Shift-6 for something else, make sure to reassign it either for Visual Intelligence or in another app using that combination to avoid a conflict.

Even if you don’t ask Siri anything, it may automatically identify plants, animals, and other elements found in screenshots. That behaviour is controlled by Automatic Visual Look Up, under Settings > General > Screen Capture.

macOS doesn’t yet apply Visual Intelligence to the FaceTime camera or Continuity camera.

Ask Siri about what Apple Vision Pro can see

If you use an Apple Vision Pro, visionOS 27 will be a delight, as it brings Visual Intelligence, as with an iPhone or iPad camera, to your augmented reality headgear. (All Apple Vision Pro models support Apple Intelligence.)

Here’s what you can do:

• Ask Siri general questions.
• Look at something and ask Siri about it. Visual Intelligence will know from context what you mean.
• Gain access to the Siri app, as on other platforms.

Apps available in visionOS, like Safari, gain the same improvements as on other platforms, more typically mirroring those in macOS 27 Golden Gate.

The post How to Ask Siri About What’s On Your Screen in iOS 27 appeared first on nerdsmodo.

First, Siri’s capability to use real-world knowledge left a lot to be desired. If you asked Siri about something in the real world—say, the plot of a movie or a recipe for risotto—it would likely as not suggest webpages you could visit to learn about those things. It couldn’t just tell you.

Siri could retrieve information from, and add information to, various apps (such as Calendar, Contacts, and Reminders), and could even make limited inferences (“Show me messages Pat sent me last week”), but it couldn’t tell you anything about what’s on your screen right now, what your camera is looking at, or what time your upcoming flight leaves. That is, it lacked both situational and personal context.

And, the old Siri was largely stuck in a “one request at a time” model, with only a limited capacity for follow-up requests. You could, for example, ask about the weather in Toronto and then say, “What about Vancouver?” and Siri could remember the immediate context—that you want to know about the weather there, too. That was helpful as far as it went, but there was no way to carry on an extended conversation or revisit an earlier one.

Beyond these examples, the old Siri frequently left us with the impression that it could work with only a limited list of requests, but because Apple never revealed what that list was, everything was a guess. A great many requests were met with some variation on “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”

It’s not as though the old Siri wasn’t useful! It certainly was. But anyone who had tried out Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT, Claude, or other such providers immediately felt that Siri was way behind the times, which is true. Siri AI brings it, if not into the future, at least into the very recent past.

Extended conversations

Siri can now do much more than answer a simple follow-up question. Like other AI chatbots, it can now carry on extensive conversations, with each response building on and taking into account the context of what was said before. This makes for a much more natural interaction.

Personal context

Siri can now understand what Apple calls “personal context,” which is to say, information that can be pulled from the various apps on your device—data associated with Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Messages, Notes, Photos, Reminders, and so on. That means Siri can incorporate information found in any of those apps into its responses and actions. This can come in handy if you remember seeing something—text or a photo, say—but you don’t remember where or when. Siri can figure that out now.

For instance, you can ask, “Did I talk to Phil Fumble in the past six months?” and Siri can consult your email archive, calendar, and messages to deliver an answer that might have taken you 10 minutes to figure out—if you didn’t give up along the way—while also providing summaries of the topics discussed.

In the future, this should expand to more third-party apps.

Expanded Visual Intelligence

Visual Intelligence lets your device describe what it sees on its screen, in a screenshot, or in the Camera app—and even act on it, like extracting information from a poster or a bill. This means you can ask Siri about anything on your screen, or have it do something with that information. Although part of this capability was previously available on iPhones and iPads, the feature now has expanded powers and is also available on Macs.

Access to web-based data

Although Siri could previously gather information from a limited number of websites (like Wikipedia and IMDb), it can now access the web broadly, incorporating information it finds into its responses and no longer saying things like “I found these articles on the web that might help you.”

In-app and cross-app actions

For years, Siri has been able to change system settings, open apps, and more. In iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, thanks to an underlying framework called App Intents, Siri can take a much wider set of actions in a larger number of apps. For example, you can ask Siri to send a message in Messages containing the title of the song now playing in Music. Most of Apple’s apps already support actions like these, and third-party apps are getting there.

The Siri app

A new Siri app lets you revisit and continue previous conversations, among other things, and sync your conversations across devices.

Merged Siri and Spotlight UI

Instead of doing one thing to search your device and another to interact with Siri, you can now go to a single place for both.

Other changes

Among numerous other smaller changes, the set of features formerly known as Writing Tools, and now called Write/Edit with Siri, look and behave a bit differently. And, a couple of features—more expressive voices and enhanced dictation—are available only to those with new-enough and powerful-enough devices.

The post Everything New in Siri AI Compared to the Old Siri appeared first on nerdsmodo.

Back up with iCloud

Your easiest path to a backup is via iCloud. Not only is it faster and simpler, but Apple also provides better support for restoring to your device if needed.

If it’s your first time making an iCloud backup, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud > iCloud Backup.
2. Enable Back Up This iPhone or Back Up This iPad.
3. Tap Back Up Now.

If you aren’t already making iCloud Backups, you should have at least as much available storage at iCloud+ as the size of your device’s data set, excluding iCloud Photos. That may require upgrading your iCloud+ plan from, say, 200 GB to 2 TB. You can estimate what space you need by looking at Settings > General > About > iPhone or iPad Storage.

If you already have iCloud Backup enabled, go to the iCloud Backup section and tap Back Up Now.

Your iPhone or iPad shows a Backing Up label and a Cancel Backup link while the backup is in progress. A bar shows an “Estimating time remaining” message until all changes are collected, at which time it shows a rough countdown and a progress bar.

When the backup is successfully completed, the pane shows the time of the last successful backup as the current time or a moment ago. You can now proceed.

Back up with a Mac

While iCloud might be best, you can also back your iPhone or iPad up using a Mac. Start by connecting your device with a USB to a Mac unless you’ve already enabled Wi-Fi syncing and prefer that method.

To enable Wi-Fi syncing, you first connect with USB. Then, after selecting the device in the Finder’s sidebar, check the “Show this Device when on Wi-Fi” box in the General view and click Apply.

To back up to a Mac:

1. Click your device in Finder’s sidebar.
2. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
3. On the device’s General tab in the Finder, select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this Mac.”
4. Click Back Up Now.

The General tab also shows the time of last iCloud backup for a connected device.

Back up to a Windows PC

Apple offers the Apple Devices app for Windows, which enables backups as easy as those offered on a Mac. First, install Apple Devices before proceeding. Next, follow these steps:

1. Connect your iPhone or iPad to your PC with a USB cable.
2. Open Apple Devices.
3. You may be prompted to have each device trust each other with a Trust button. Click and/or tap Trust. Enter your iPhone or iPad passphrase, if required.
4. Select General in the lefthand sidebar in Apple Devices.
5. Select “Back up all of the data on your Device to this computer.”
6. Click Back Up Now.

Install the upgrade

With a backup in hand, you can now install iOS 27 or iPadOS 27. Here’s how:

1. Go to Settings > General > Software Update.
2. Tap either Install Now or Download and Install.

You may be prompted to offload some apps if your device lacks enough storage to handle the upgrade. Offloading an app deletes the app, but not its data, from your device. After the update completes, the apps are reinstalled automatically.

It usually takes from about 10 to 30 minutes for your device to complete the steps necessary to verify, install, and restart. However, in case of delays or problems, you should plan on it taking up to a couple of hours.

The verification can take a considerable time when huge numbers of users are installing all at once, such as on release day. You may want to upgrade your devices in the evening or on a weekend.

Be sure to keep your iPhone or iPad plugged in while the upgrade is underway to avoid an interruption.

Your device may feel very hot to the touch, sometimes even uncomfortably so, during the installation and restore, as your iPhone or iPad works at full bore.

After the upgrade is complete, your device has restarted, and you’ve entered your passcode, the operating system walks you through a few screens describing major changes.

You may also be asked for preferences you chose before in previous upgrades, such as Light Mode, Dark Mode, or Automatic. During this process, you may also be asked to allow your device to send analytics to Apple and some reporting to third-party developers. I tend to allow Apple and disallow developers for privacy reasons.

When this process is done, you’re ready to use iOS 27 or iPadOS 27.

Optimizing search and Siri

On a device with Apple Intelligence support, you can’t access all features until “optimization” is complete. This may take a serious amount of time. While underway, a message appears near the top of Settings. (During testing, this remained in place on a test phone with almost no personal data on it for over a day.)

For more on what that indexing enables, see what Siri AI means for your iPhone and iPad.

The post How to Install iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 appeared first on nerdsmodo.

Apple Intelligence was more of a success, if limited. The company, making use of mostly on-device computation, focused their use of Apple Intelligence on specific tasks within apps or systemwide. I think many of these attempts were boring or unnecessary: generating custom emojis, Image Playground for slightly icky picture generation, and the global Writing Tools, which were worse than many previous generations of non-AI-based assistants.

The reboot has come, however. With Siri AI and Apple Intelligence in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, Apple is resetting our expectations for Siri and adding Apple Intelligence features in many more apps. Those features are a mix of machine learning and large language models (LLMs), and some tie into off-device, data-center-based LLM assistance.

Learning by rote versus guessing the next word

Machine learning typically refers to training an algorithm with a massive amount of data so that it can loosely pattern-match a result. In Photos, the loose searching you can do to find matches for people, places, buildings, and things relies on this. Likewise, voice transcription and Live Text are largely machine-learning-based.

LLMs, by contrast, use huge bodies of text and images to produce essentially sophisticated autocompletion. Given a set of words, what is the constellation of the next most likely one? Randomly selecting among those provides something that sounds like human writing. However, they are actually providing a statistical guess. Image generation is more complicated, but it relies on extracting features and then inserting them seamlessly, with the same degree of random guessing about which one to add.

Let Siri AI answer your questions

While Apple has rebranded Siri as “Siri AI” on supported devices and in their marketing, you won’t see that name on your devices. It’s still called Siri. But everything is affected by the availability of Apple Intelligence. Whenever you invoke Siri on an Apple Intelligence-supported device, you’re invoking Siri AI.

Instead of the glow around all four edges of your device in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, Siri in iOS 27/iPadOS 27 appears as an orb at the top of the screen. The design cleverly hides the non-screen areas in Dynamic Island on the many iPhone models with that carveout.

You can bring up Siri (by default), as in previous releases, by saying “Siri” or “Hey Siri,” or by pressing and holding the side button. However, the change introduced in iOS 26 that let you double-tap the bottom of the screen is gone. Instead, you can swipe down on a Home screen to reveal the new combination of Spotlight and Siri: a field labeled Search or Ask. You can type into that field, or tap the Dictation icon and talk to Siri that way.

Siri now provides much more accurate and detailed answers than before, even reaching into other apps to provide more information. Ask it a question, and it parses the results instead of trying to squeeze them into a format it understands.

Here are the most significant things Siri AI can do that its predecessor Siri could not:

• Use your data to produce better results or find things. One of the biggest ongoing complaints about Siri is that for software that ostensibly had access to our email, messages, contacts, calendar entries, photos, and other private data while running entirely on our devices, it sure didn’t know much about us. With Siri AI, you can ask, “Who did I have lunch with in 2013 in New Haven?” and it may be able to answer.
• Answer questions about what’s on screen. You could be looking at a webpage, reading a Wikipedia entry, having a conversation in Messages, or writing an email, and can ask Siri for more information about or to explain something that’s visible.
• Engage in a back-and-forth conversation. Siri has become something more like a chatbot, though it’s not quite as open-ended as the ones from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others. However, it retains context and remembers aspects of conversations to provide better insight in the future.
• Create a plan. You might ask Siri to help you figure out the best sights to see in New York. Unlike chatbots that rely solely on synthesizing vast data stores, Siri can use your information, Apple’s human-made travel guides, map data, and other information to produce something that could be much more useful.
• Use a Siri app. You can revisit Siri conversations using the Siri app, the first time Apple has offered that kind of interaction with Siri.

Isn’t this invasive?

Didn’t we think one of the best things about Siri, and Apple’s overall approach to data privacy, is that everything stayed on our devices and within our control? Or, if it were synced in the cloud, we had two tiers we could choose from to protect it, including end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for nearly everything?

Yes, and that remains the case. Siri AI performs as much processing as possible on your device. When it needs to tap into more or different AI models, it uses what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute, which includes servers under Apple’s control and those that are part of Google Cloud. Apple says our “personal data is not stored nor made accessible to Apple or anyone else.” There are limits to that promise worth knowing.

When Siri AI leaves beta

After being burned in the past, Apple has hedged on details around Siri AI, stating only that it will be available in beta form, and not specifying when that beta might end. This could mean that the beta version will ship in September 2026, the usual time of year for new operating systems, when iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 should be released. If that’s the case—and I have no way of knowing—I expect the production release will appear before the end of 2026 with a 27.1 or 27.2 update given pressure on Apple to produce a better Siri.

Where Siri AI is available

• European Union: Siri AI will first appear in macOS and Apple Vision Pro. It’s unclear when they will roll out to iPhone and iPad.
• China: Siri AI and new features in Apple Intelligence were originally slated to be delayed at launch in China (PRC), with Apple saying regulators need to review changes. However, news reports in mid-August 2026 indicated Apple had trained an AI model with a Chinese partner that would allow it to offer Apple Intelligence features in China at launch.

The post What Siri AI Means for Your iPhone and iPad appeared first on nerdsmodo.

It took this long for Apple to let you set the volume of alarms and timers hitting zero seconds separately from your ringtone volume. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics and, under Alarms and Timers, disable Match Ringtone Volume.

Find My

The native Find My app on all platforms has two changes related to duration or availability when you share your location with other people:

• Previously, you could share your location for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. Now you can set a custom period of time.
• If you’re sharing your location with someone, you can hide your location from your end until the next morning (at 4 a.m.), and they’re not notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing, or “unhide” your location. They simply see you with a “location unavailable” label.

This is widely seen as another tool for people facing family or intimate-partner abuse to hide their whereabouts without an abuser knowing.

Health and Fitness

The big news in the Health app for iPhone is that, if you have periods, Cycle Tracking supports perimenopause and menopause by notifying you when it identifies patterns consistent with perimenopause.

Other changes worth noting include:

• Health now has a Browse button (instead of a search icon), which better identifies what the action is. The design has changed from a list to a series of small color-coded cards.
• iPhones now support GymKit, which was available only on Apple Watch before this. You can now pair an iPhone directly with supported treadmills, bikes, and other gym equipment.

Home cameras

The Home app now supports 4K resolution video for live streaming and recording from cameras designed for HomeKit Secure Video and with any tier of iCloud+ and that, of course, have 4K output. (Apple still uses the HomeKit name there, even though the concept has been renamed Apple Home.)

If you have more than one camera, Home used to require awkward navigation among them. Now, you can see the previews in the main Home view, but tapping any camera brings up an aggregated view with a unified set of detected events.

With Apple Intelligence, Home reduces the amount of “attention noise” that motion-detecting cameras can generate. Home will combine related activity notifications to prevent a series of motion events from resulting in a constant stream of alerts. It can also stitch together video from multiple cameras, allow natural-language searches for recorded events, and provide summaries you can read without watching the video.

To use Apple Intelligence features, you must subscribe to the 2 TB iCloud+ plan or higher. Your home hub must be a HomePod (2nd generation or later), HomePod mini, or Apple TV updated to the latest release, such as tvOS 27. The Home app and Home accessories must have access to location services.

Podcasts episode search

If you navigate to a podcast’s view of all of its episodes by tapping the podcast and then tapping Episodes, you can now search against the title and show notes of all listed episodes.

This doesn’t search transcripts, which Podcasts generates for some shows. It searches only the per-episode notes published in the podcast feed.

The post Clock, Find My, Health and Podcasts in iOS 27 appeared first on nerdsmodo.

Use Siri for search

You can still search for files, photos, and other items on your device exactly as you did using Spotlight in the past. What’s new is that you can search more broadly, using natural language, in ways that require Siri to perform analysis, make inferences, or combine data from multiple sources.

For example, one of us got a text message in which the new school bus driver for one of his kids introduced herself. Later, he tried to recall the driver’s name, so he asked, What is the name of the new school bus driver?

Sure enough, Siri produced the correct name from the text in Messages and also provided a link to the original message. In other words, you’re still searching, but in a way that’s simpler for you while producing more sophisticated results.

Here are a few other examples:

• Files related to dancing
• People who sent in support requests in the past year
• The dates of my last three dentist appointments
• All the books I wrote between 2021 and 2025

Spotlight without Siri?

What if you just want a plain Spotlight search, without Siri’s involvement at all? You can still have it, with some extra effort.

On a Mac, activate Siri and type a search term, then press ⌘-2 to search for that term only within files and folders. You can also press ⌘-1 to look for apps, ⌘-3 to look for actions, or ⌘-4 to search your clipboard history.

On any device, you can also specify as part of your search term where Spotlight should look—for example, Files about cats or Contacts named John or Emails about Apple.

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The 2026 set of releases, numbered 27—like car models are numbered in fall for the following year—is a “dub.” We see the rollout of the long-promised Siri upgrade, called Siri AI. Along with its improved performance, Siri AI and Apple Intelligence both extend much more deeply into apps and system functions across nearly all platforms. That’s the flagship feature.

This includes significant improvements to on-device searching. When you use Spotlight in iOS 27 or iPadOS 27 on devices with Apple Intelligence support, the Spotlight field has changed from Search to Search or Ask. You can perform searches or ask Siri questions via the same entry field, which expands Spotlight’s reach and Siri’s scope.

Starting in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 (as well as macOS 27 Golden Gate), Apple has leaned very heavily into so-called artificial intelligence to enhance the overall operating system experience and many apps. They rebranded Siri as Siri AI on devices with the minimum required hardware. (Check whether your device qualifies.)

Apple also offered four additional areas of focus:

• Interface tweaks: Apple devoted significant time during their Worldwide Developer Conference presentation in June 2026 to stepping way back from interface overreaches with the Liquid Glass interface. Apple made a number of worthwhile improvements in macOS 27, but far fewer in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. The key change is a Liquid Glass slider—also in macOS—that lets you choose a degree of translucency. In iOS 26.1/iPadOS 26.1, Apple added a binary choice of Clear (original flavor) and Tinted (somewhat less translucent). In iOS 27/iPadOS 27, that choice is now a slider.

The company also provided minor improvements to iPadOS 27, following the significant overhaul and improvements introduced in iPadOS 26, which were generally well received. See what’s new for iPad.

• Child safety and Screen Time: Nobody loves Screen Time, because it works erratically and doesn’t always map to what parents want to limit. Apple has regrouped and reworked Screen Time to better allot time. Let’s see if it works better, too! Child safety enhancements include intervening for gore and violence, and better oversight of new connections in FaceTime, Messages, and Phone.
• Accessibility: A cornucopia of individual improvements in Accessibility adds up. Among them: on-device subtitles for any video across all platforms, developer access to FaceTime that will let sign language interpreters join a call, and greater use of Apple Intelligence to describe things in images and in Magnifier.
• Communications: While Apple didn’t perform the same kind of huge overhaul to FaceTime, Messages, and Phone in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 as they did in the previous releases, I’ve provided a one-stop shop for changes affecting those apps, as well as cellular and Wi-Fi.

Apple also discussed in the lead-up to the release of the new operating system how much faster everything would be, but a list of those promises doesn’t help you get more familiar with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27! Because this book doesn’t benchmark these sorts of changes, I can only say: you should be pleased.

I don’t want to say everything else is miscellaneous, as there are hundreds—maybe thousands—of other changes. (You can find extensive rundowns.) Instead, let me say that Apple’s extensive work means many apps and system features have been modified, matured, or enhanced, as you will see in the rest of the book.

How Apple numbers its operating systems

Apple began their current numbering system in 2025, with the releases of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS all with a base number of 26 for 2026. This continued in 2026 with the release of all operating systems numbered 27.

Before this, Apple incremented their operating systems differently depending on whether they were initial or subsequent releases. A change described as coming from an older version will therefore show an 8- or 9-number leap—say, from iOS 18 to 26 or 27—even though “26” is the very next version after “18.”

Apple Intelligence reaches into a dozen apps. Where to find it in each one is set out separately. For the upgrade itself, start with which iPhones and iPads can install iOS 27, then how to install it.

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