I tried Clean Up in the iOS 27 developer beta, and Apple's AI-powered image editing tool is finally worth using — but there's a big caveat

A photo of a man on a bench edited with Clean Up in iOS 27.

For a company that prides itself on delivering polished, functioning hardware and software, Apple dropped the ball with its original AI-powered Clean Up tool.

Not only did this Apple Intelligence feature arrive almost a year after similar tools from Samsung and Google, but by all accounts, it was objectively worse at removing unwanted objects in images than those big-name rivals. We tested Clean Up against Galaxy AI last year, and found that the former “comes incredibly short of the mark when Samsung’s offering is capable of truly achieving what it sets out to do.” Ouch.