9to5Mac's Fernando Silva installed iOS 27 developer beta 1 on his main iPhone 17 Pro, and the headline of his hands-on is an absence: the rebuilt Siri Apple spent WWDC talking about sits behind a waitlist, even on the newest iPhone. Summoning the assistant still brings up the same glow iOS 18 shipped.
The features that did make beta 1 mostly work, starting with Photos' new Tools section: Clean Up, Extend, and Reframe. Clean Up erased a set of Pokéballs from a thumbnail photo convincingly but chewed on the request even on the 17 Pro; Extend errored out on every on-camera attempt; and Reframe, which fakes a Vision Pro-style perspective shift, only worked in a test he ran before filming, filling in the edge of a monitor as the shot rotated. Growing pains, his words.
Videos anywhere in the operating system now get auto-generated captions marked with an Apple Intelligence sparkle, US English only at first. The Liquid Glass toggle in Settings becomes a slider, Wallet gains a manual Create a Pass builder, and Messages surfaces an Apple Cash shortcut when money comes up, with Split Bill grayed out until Visual Intelligence clears its own waitlist. The update itself is heavy: Silva's install showed 13.7 GB, and he suggests keeping 25 to 30 GB free. He relays Apple's claim that apps launch faster, but wasn't pretending to measure it.
It's kind of hard to test that when you're dealing with milliseconds.
Siri, again. The waitlist gates the in-app intents and cross-app actions that were the keynote's spine, and Split Bill and camera-to-pass ride the same Visual Intelligence queue. iPhoners itching to install should treat beta 1 as a Photos-tools preview; Silva promises a follow-up the moment Siri access lands.
