Cult of Mac’s managing editor Lewis Wallace found a fix for his glitchy, unreliable iPhone — installing the iOS 27 beta!
Lewis had been running the latest version of iOS 26 on his iPhone 17 Pro.
But for the last few weeks, it’s been a buggy mess. Weird glitches. Unpredictable freezes. Odd animation hiccups. Battery draining as fast as can be.
Normally, you wouldn’t install a beta operating system to fix such problems.
By definition, a beta is unfinished software, and is usually much more unstable and unreliable than a mature operating system like iOS 26.
iOS 26 is currently at 26.5.2 — which means it’s undergone multiple maintenance patches and point releases. It should be far more reliable than iOS 27.
But Lewis’ iPhone 17 is “running better than ever” after installing the iOS 27 public beta, he reports.
It’s fast and snappy. He hasn’t experienced any inexplicable glitches or freezes. All his apps work just fine. Even battery life — usually the first casualty of running a beta — is holding up OK.
Lewis even got off the Siri AI waitlist almost immediately. He’s so pleased with the experience that his wife, Suzanne — who has almost zero interest in betas but is keen to try the better dictation iOS 27 promises — just downloaded the public beta herself.
According to yesterday’s poll, most readers of this newsletter wouldn’t touch the iOS 27 beta with a very long bargepole (see below).
But for those curious to try out the new Siri AI and other AI-driven improvements, the public beta is out, and early reports indicate it’s stable enough to run on your daily driver.
Also in today’s newsletter:
Here’s another ticklish piece of new Mac malware, and my goodness, it sounds really tricky and insidious.
This rumor about an all-glass design for the 20th-anniversary iPhone is a bit thin, but fun nonetheless.
🔥 DEAL OF THE DAY: Like just about everything else, the Nintendo Switch 2 is getting a price hike in September. But if you get this Choose Your Game Bundle now, you can save up to $130, depending on what game you choose. #affiliate
There’s one very big name missing from Apple’s blockbuster lawsuit against OpenAI — but maybe not for long.
This is good news mostly for Android switchers, but could save a lot of people some precious iCloud storage.
Brydge makes generally excellent Apple accessories, and its latest vertical docks look pretty cool — with Thunderbolt 5, too.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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One more thing ...
We can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we're just at the early stages of this tool.
Today’s poll
Will Jony Ive get dragged into the Apple's legal battle with OpenAI?
Results from yesterday’s poll:
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