Calendar
Apple Intelligence lets you describe an event to Calendar more naturally than you previously could. Before the latest releases, you needed to have some structure and order. With iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, you can be a bit more freeform, and Calendar plucks out the details required. You can’t speak off the cuff, as you would with a chatbot, but it’s still better than it was before.
It’s similar to natural-language event creation in some third-party apps, but slightly more expansive in what it recognizes and matches against, such as locations.
For instance, you can’t say, “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at that place we had coffee at last year for a couple of hours in the morning on September 15.” But you can say, “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at the Fremont Coffee Company on September 15 for two hours starting at 10 in the morning.” The bolded parts are what Siri highlights in red or gray.
Red indicates that it’s matched what it thinks you want and has filled that into the event. Gray indicates a choice, such as a person with multiple emails or phone numbers in your contacts: tap or click to choose, and then they’re added as an invitee, and their name is now highlighted in red, too. That will also simplify the event title, removing ambiguous inline elements, such as turning “Grab coffee with Stacey Butler at the Fremont Coffee Company” to “Grab coffee with Stacey.”
Finder
Starting in macOS 27 Golden Gate, the macOS Finder offers to name files and folders automatically based on their contents. Select a file or folder and press Return to select the name. Hover over it with your pointer and one or more suggested names appear in a pop-up menu. Click one of these to use it as the new name.
If you dislike this feature, you can turn it off: Go to Finder > Settings > General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”
macOS also suggests names for new, untitled documents you create in most apps once they have a bit of content. The suggested names appear in the title bar and in the Save dialog when you save the file for the first time. One of us has found these suggestions to be wildly inaccurate during testing, but your experience may be different.
The naming may also happen automatically when you use AirDrop to transfer files from another Apple device, such as the contents of a screenshot when you AirDrop it from an iPhone to a Mac. In this case, you’re not prompted to approve the name.
Home
With Apple Intelligence, Apple Home reduces the amount of “attention noise” that motion-detecting cameras can generate. Home combines related activity notifications, so a series of motions doesn’t result in the current 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.
So far, we haven’t been able to get this appear for us. We’ll update this section when we can.
To use the Home-related Apple Intelligence features, you have to subscribe to the 2 TB iCloud+ tier or higher. Your home hub must be a HomePod (2nd generation or later), HomePod mini, or Apple TV updated to the latest release, like tvOS 27. The Home app and Home accessories must have access to location services.
Lock Screen
In iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, you can use Apple Intelligence in two ways with your Lock Screen: one is good; the other…mmm, not so much.
Extend a Lock Screen image
You can extend an image you pick for the Lock Screen using the same approach as Extend in Photos. To reach the point where you can use Extend:
- Lock your device.
- Touch and hold a spot on the Lock Screen that isn’t taken up with a notification—the time display is a safe place. If you have a Touch ID device, you have to scan your fingerprint after touching and holding the Lock Screen.
- The Lock Screen shrinks in. Tap the add button to add a new Lock Screen. (You can also swipe left until you see an Add New screen with an add button in its center, and tap that.)
- Tap Photos and select an image.
Pick an image that doesn’t fill the entire screen proportionately, or you can pinch to shrink an image smaller than the screen. In either case, tap Extend, and the image will be filled in—make sure the results don’t look bizarre.
Create an image with Image Playground
When you reach step 4 above, you can now select Image Playground and generate an image for your Lock Screen. We don’t recommend this, for the reasons set out here.
Maps
Apple says Maps has an “enhanced Flyover” experience. This translates to less weird-looking landscape and building interpolation from satellite and street-level data when you look at cities using Maps’s 3D perspectives.
Maps now also features Local Lists, which are ostensibly algorithmically generated guides to local areas based on aggregated searches. Apple uses the word “trending” a couple of times in describing this feature, so it’s unclear if it’s just search-related—which gives zero insight into the quality of a restaurant or an experience—or factors in other data. (This may or may not involve Apple Intelligence.)
Also, Apple says that Maps offers “natural language search expands to cover routing.” We have not yet seen an example of this in action.
Notification Center
If you receive more than a handful of texts, you know how quickly Messages notifications can add up—sometimes hundreds of messages in an active multi-party group chat. You can review every message individually, and that may be appropriate or required. With the summary feature for notifications available with Apple Intelligence enabled on supported devices, you might find yourself fully informed without reading 100 messages.
Summarization is straightforward and available across notifications. For Messages, go to Settings > Notifications on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Notifications on a Mac, and enable Summarize Notifications. With that turned on, you can tap or click the menu item and scroll through apps, including Messages, to enable or disable summarization previews. Once turned on, notifications summarize single messages or groups of messages.
You can go a step further within Notification settings by choosing an individual app: setting Notification Grouping to Automatic makes the summaries more useful for loads of messages from that app! Go to Settings > Notifications > App Name on iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Notifications > App Name on a Mac, and tap Notification Grouping or click the “Notification grouping” pop-up menu to modify the setting.
Passwords
Before iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, Passwords could already identify passwords that are too weak, or that have appeared in data breaches. Passwords like these that need changing are marked with a red exclamation point and feature a Change Password button that takes you to the appropriate page on the website. Version 27 takes that concept further, letting you go to the site, choose a strong new password, save your settings on the site, and save the new password in Passwords—all with one click or tap.
But there’s a catch: the site has to support the mechanism Passwords uses—and most of them don’t. If none of the logins are both in need of a change and have the necessary site architecture, you’ll see a banner telling you that you’ll be notified if there are passwords eligible to be automatically fixed. That’s what we see, so we can’t describe precisely what happens when a password meets those criteria.
Phone
Apple Intelligence brings Call Context to the Phone app: during a call, Phone offers information from other apps that seems contextually appropriate, like a reservation number or a flight number when you’re calling an airline. We have yet to experience an example of this.
