An Underrated Apple Update: iPadOS 27

It’s that time of year again, and if you’re an Apple fan there’s some good news. There’s also the bad news, so let’s get that out of the way first: no M5 Mac Mini. In fact, no hardware at all. I know a lot of you were holding out for a Studio refresh or at least a tease of new desktop silicon, and I personally really wanted that Mac Mini, because pound for pound it’s one of the best-value Apple products ever made. Instead, this WWDC went back to being entirely a software show.

And look, I can already hear the comments: developers are the target audience. Sure. But the hardware expectation is justified by Apple’s own record. WWDC 2022 gave us the M2 MacBook Air; 2023 gave us the Vision Pro and the Mac Studio refresh. This year we left empty-handed.

Liquid Glass: shiny, and a bit of a diversion

Liquid Glass does look great, and using the Dynamic Island’s space properly is a better use of those pixels. The new glowing Siri cursor is visually slick, very Apple in a good way. But let’s be honest about what this is: more depth, more separation, a slider to adjust the effect, glassy app icons on macOS “Golden Gate”. Apple calls these design improvements. To me they’re window dressing, and the fact they talked about it for so long tells you how much else there was to announce.

The performance work underneath is the genuinely welcome bit. Faster animations, especially on the iPhone, which I’ve complained about for years (the phone was never slow; the animations made it feel slow). Quicker app launches. Photos loading about 70% faster into the library. Smarter network switching so your phone stops clinging to the café Wi-Fi you just walked away from. And the sleeper feature: a completely re-architected search index across iOS, iPadOS and macOS. Search on Apple devices used to drive me nuts, genuinely unusable at times, so this promises to remove a huge amount of friction. Support for iOS 27 stretches all the way back to the iPhone 11, which is insanely good.

My one miss: still no plain-English settings search. Windows and Samsung both let you type “I forgot my reading glasses, make the font bigger” and just do it. Apple’s contextual image search got its overdue overhaul, but settings and menus deserve the same treatment. Maybe after the beta.

Credit where due on trust and safety, too: the child-safety controls got real attention this year, and as the parent of a fourteen-year-old I appreciate every extra allowance and control more than Apple probably realises.

The real story: iPadOS 27

With Mac hardware clearly stalling, the most meaningful update of the entire event got the least stage time. Apple has spent the last couple of years turning the iPad into a true standalone desktop, which is exactly what I’ve been waiting for (and ranting about) since the M1 iPad Pro. And here’s a statement I never expected to make, as a hardcore Samsung DeX user since day one:

Apple’s windowed apps are now way superior to DeX.

That saddens me a little, honestly. DeX was the leader for years, but Samsung sat on it, and it now looks and feels outdated while Apple caught up and then improved on it. Windowed apps are more intuitive, more polished, and they make the iPad, wait for it, a computer. Only took a decade. DeX keeps one real advantage, and it’s a big one: it runs on practically every Samsung device, not just tablets, while windowed apps demand recent M-chip iPads. And the Android side isn’t standing still either; Xiaomi, OnePlus, Honor and Google are building genuinely impressive tablet ecosystems. Competition is finally working in this space, and we all win.

Siri, powered by… Google

The Siri overhaul is the headline story, and the architecture is now officially Gemini-based, a Google collaboration we all saw coming a couple of years ago. Why they didn’t do it from the start is anyone’s guess, but we’re here now, and considering how bad Siri was (you practically had to speak like a robot), this is a massive usability win.

Screen awareness is the standout, though my cynical side notes it’s essentially Circle to Search baked into the Apple ecosystem, presented as if freshly invented. The on-device processing angle is genuinely good. Writing assistance won’t change your life if you’ve used any AI model in the past two years. But cross-referencing between apps is the actual game changer: the demo where Siri pulls your flight details from email while you’re on a call is exactly the kind of usefulness assistants should have shipped years ago.

The bummer is availability: launching this autumn, English only to start, probably right before the iPhone 18. Which is also, I suspect, what this whole event was really about: laying software groundwork for what comes in September, hopefully including Apple’s foldable. I want them in that market, late or not, because it pushes everyone.

That was WWDC: good software news, no hardware, and one genuinely underrated update. Are you as disappointed about the Mac Mini as I am? The full video is here, and as the betas land I’ll be testing everything as usual. Nobody paid for these opinions; they’re 100% mine.