New Delhi, June 15 -- CUPERTINO - For anyone who relied on Low Power Mode to squeeze a few more hours out of an aging iPhone last year, the experience was a particular kind of frustration. Enabling it on iOS 26 didn't just reduce background activity. It turned the phone into something barely functional - frame rates stuttering, apps hesitating, the entire interface behaving like a device drowning in its own software.

Apple fixed that in iOS 27, according to early testing of the developer beta released this month. And the fix matters more than the company's headline speed announcements, because it says something specific about what went wrong with iOS 26 in the first place.

The narrative Apple wants for iOS 27 centers on three numbers: a...