5 things I already love from the iOS 27 beta

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 in 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.)

Apple took another pass at many of its icon designs introduced with iOS 26, and overall, they seem much better to me. The changes are typically subtle — tweaks to colors or adding a little more glassy texture — but I think they make things look much more polished.

Different volume settings

From settings, you can now — finally — set independent volumes for ringtones, alarms and timers, and alerts and system sounds. In the Sounds & Haptics menu, just toggle off the switches that let you match alarms and timers as well as alerts and system sounds with your ringtone volume, and you can adjust the more granular volume settings from there.

I have to confess that I never use widgets, but I saw that extra large widgets were coming with iOS 27 this year and I had to see a few of them for myself. They’re seriously huge; they take up an entire screen of apps (except for the dock). But I could see them being an extremely useful way to look at an entire calendar or a long list of to-dos.

You can make the time really small on your Lock Screen

While editing the Lock Screen, you can now put the time next to the date at the very top of the screen. That opens up more real estate, which is nice if you want to see more of your wallpaper image, like a family photo or a cool piece of art, or if you just want a little less clutter on your screen.

We’ll be digging in a lot more over the next few days, so keep an eye on The Verge. And if you just want to see a giant list of promising features coming to Apple’s next big updates, I’ve got you covered.