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Everything else

The good news keeps on coming

Some of the most helpful upgrades in iOS 27 aren’t very visible, but they are useful. The rebuilt search index takes a while to scan your phone when you first upgrade, but it’s worth it: it powers Photos, Siri, Mail and Spotlight, delivering faster and more accurate search results than before. The emoji keyboard loads faster now, and images and video load faster in Photos even with very large libraries. Bluetooth has been optimised to reduce its power usage, and Wireless CarPlay is more reliable.

One of the invisible improvements has a very noticeable effect. Apple has optimised the iPhone’s CPU scheduler, which decides what processes to prioritise, to deliver faster performance in key things such as app launching. It does this by predicting what resources an app is going to use and getting them ready before the app has fully started, reducing the gap between tapping the icon and it being ready to go. That improved scheduling should also mean that older iPhones don’t suffer from the performance drop often associated with iOS updates on older hardware, and it’s one reason why the 2019 iPhone 11 is still supported.

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MacFormat
Autumn 2026
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