iOS 27: Every New Feature, and Which iPhones Actually Get Them
iOS 27 came out yesterday, and Apple’s press release reads like every iPhone in the last five years just got the same update. It didn’t. Apple says iOS 27 supports the iPhone 11 and the second-generation iPhone SE onward — real, and worth knowing if you’re deciding whether to update tonight — but a good chunk of what’s actually in the keynote requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. If you’ve got an iPhone 12 sitting in your pocket, you’re getting a different update than the one being demoed on stage.
Here’s what’s actually in iOS 27, split by who gets it.
Runs on anything from iPhone 11 up
These aren’t gated by chip or memory, so they land on the full supported range:
- Performance: Apple’s own numbers claim app launches up to 30% faster, new photos loading into the Photos library up to 70% faster, and AirDrop transfers up to 80% faster than iOS 26.
- Liquid Glass slider: a new Settings control that lets you dial the system-wide Liquid Glass look from fully clear to fully tinted — a direct response to the readability complaints that followed last year’s redesign.
- Find My: you can now share your location for a custom duration (“four days and six hours,” not just Apple’s preset options) or pause sharing until end of day without the other person getting notified.
- Safari: automatic tab grouping by topic, plus a “Notify Me” option that watches a webpage and tells you when it changes.
- CarPlay: developers can now build CarPlay apps with video browsing, and AirPlay video works on compatible in-car displays — but only while the car’s parked.
- Accessibility: incremental improvements across VoiceOver, Magnifier, Accessibility Reader, and Voice Control.
- iPhone Handoff: move your number between two iPhones without a SIM swap. It’s carrier-dependent — T-Mobile is charging $5/month for it, Verizon and EE aren’t turning it on until later this year.
- Apple Cash bill splitting: point the Camera app at a restaurant receipt, and Siri mode reads the items and splits the total (with tax and tip) between people, settled through Apple Wallet or Messages. US-only at launch.
Requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer
This is the actual Apple Intelligence tier, and it’s the one doing most of the keynote’s talking:
- Siri AI: the rebuilt assistant that reads what’s on your screen, pulls context from your messages, mail, and photos, and can chain actions across apps instead of just running one command at a time. There’s a dedicated Siri app now too, so a conversation you start on your phone carries over to iPad or Mac.
- Photos: Spatial Reframing (adjust a photo’s composition after the fact), Extend (generate new image content past the original frame), and an upgraded Clean Up for removing larger objects from a shot.
- Image Playground: generates photorealistic images and wallpapers on-device using Apple’s private cloud model.
- Write with Siri: drafts and rewrites text inline in Messages and Mail.
Two catches that didn’t make the keynote slides: Siri AI is English-only at launch with a daily usage cap, and it’s not available at all in the EU on iPhone or iPad, for regulatory reasons. If you’re in the EU with an iPhone 15 Pro, the hardware qualifies and the software still won’t turn it on.
Why the split exists
None of this is Apple being stingy for its own sake. Siri AI’s on-screen awareness and cross-app action chaining are exactly the kind of workload that needs to run locally to be fast and private — round-tripping every screen you look at to a server isn’t a real option. That’s a genuine hardware dependency, not an artificial upsell, and it’s the same reason last year’s Apple Intelligence features needed an iPhone 15 Pro too: the Neural Engine headroom to do this on-device didn’t exist before that chip.
What’s worth taking away from this isn’t “AI features need a newer phone,” which is old news by now. It’s that the free part of iOS 27 — the performance gains, the Liquid Glass control, Find My, Safari, CarPlay video — is bigger and less talked-about than the AI headline, and it’s the part every supported iPhone actually gets tonight. If you’re on an iPhone 12 or 13, don’t skip the update expecting nothing changed; you’re just getting a different half of the release than the one on Apple’s homepage.