816: iOS & iPadOS 26

Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett and I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hello, Stephen. How are you, buddy? I am good. I missed everybody last week. Thank you to Sal for joining us as I was tied up with the podcast-a-thon. But yeah, back and kind of back in the groove.

Yeah. Are you feeling it? I mean, I feel like you've been working really hard. I'm almost surprised you're here this week. I mean, am I, how was my sleep debt? Not amazing, but that's okay. It's a good time. Had some co-workers in town. But yeah, did I nap really hard Sunday afternoon? Yes, I did. Yeah. Well, congratulations on another successful year of podcast-a-thon. Thank you. September is not over yet, gang. It's still not too late to make your contribution. Yeah, that...

That's right. We raise money all month. You can go to stjew.org slash relay and give. And I'm sure you've heard us talk about this, but the reason we do this is that my family... went through the St. Jude process. My son is a pediatric cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor as a baby, and St. Jude saved his life, and St. Jude has saved the lives of thousands and thousands of children.

And not just here in Memphis, not just here in the United States, but worldwide. St. Jude's mission is to make sure no child loses their life to cancer, no matter where they live. And September is a great time because it's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. It's a great time to talk about things, including St. Jude's Global Reach. So back in April, they announced that they're shipping childhood cancer medicines.

into five countries, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Nepal, and Zambia. But their plan is to reach 120,000 children in 50... countries in the next seven years. I love that. It is unacceptable that the childhood cancer survivor rate in the U.S. is about 80%, mostly thanks to St. Jude. But it's only 20% worldwide. That's an inequity the St. Jude is looking to solve. I love that they think about those things. But gang, this stuff's expensive, and it takes all of us.

And that's why we do this every year. To date, I was just looking at this a little while ago. To date, as we're recording this, the Relay community has raised almost $4.6 million for St. Jude since 2019. And we want to keep growing that. And that's why we do it every year. So the link is in the show notes. Please give. There is a donor advised fund giving. There's employer matching. Lots of information on that page. We try to make it as easy as possible.

Well, I'm very proud to be part of this, Stephen, and I know that the Mac Power Use audience will step up as they always do. Absolutely. It's fantastic. It's so great during the podcast-a-thon in particular to see people's names I recognize as they give because we have this big dashboard in the studio we can keep an eye on giving.

And it's really cool to see, you know, people in the community who's named that I recognize, their handles that I recognize as they give throughout the day. It was really encouraging. And today on More Power Users, Stephen and I are going to be going deep on AppleCare One, the kind of warranty program that...

As it has evolved recently, there's lots to talk about. So we thought it'd be a good day to go deep on that. More Power Users is the ad-free extended version of the show. You can sign up for it over at relay.fm slash NPU. And we'd love to have you on board.

Absolutely. So we're going to be talking about new iOS, new iPadOS, but I wanted to start with new hardware, right? It's new iPhone season. Uh, so do you, do you have a new phone sitting there on your desk? Oh man, I got all this stuff, man. I got all this stuff. This year was an expensive year. Yeah. So let's start with the, uh, both you and I went with the iPhone pro. 17 Pro. I went with the 17 Pro Max, but they're similar. So what do you think?

Man, it's fantastic. The orange is a very good orange. I kind of got nervous. You know, it looked great in Apple's keynote, but then some people were showing hands-on and even as people were, you know, sharing their reviews. I was a little worried that in some light it was going to be kind of washed out, kind of desaturated. But I think that was just kind of the way some people were lighting it. I think in the real world, the orange looks really good.

My two sons, they love the color orange, and they both gave it their thumbs up. And it's kind of a... What it makes me think of, remember several years ago when they got rid of the Touch Bar MacBook Pro and they introduced the 14 and 16 that we have now, right, where they brought the ports back.

And it's sort of like chunkier and more industrial, but it meets the needs of its users better. And it kind of feels like the iPhone Pro did that this year. Like the previous ones have been beautiful. I love the titanium era. It only lasted two years. But this one is a little bit thicker, a little bit heavier, but the trade-offs are really good. It feels kind of, it feels like sort of like a real thing, the way the MacBook Pros do. I really, really like the design in person.

Yeah, I wonder if the existence of the iPhone Air made it possible for them to be less restrained. with this and say, yeah, go ahead and put the extra battery in, you know, put the bigger lens in. You know, it feels to me like in some ways the existence of the iPhone Air makes this possible.

You know, I think there's something to that because the air is like beautiful and polished, right? It's really stunning. We're going to talk about it more in a second. I think it does free the pro up to be a little more kind of a bruiser. Like I said, I've enjoyed it. I stayed with the smaller Pro size. I went down from the Max a couple of cycles ago, and it's been really great.

I do want to ask you, we haven't got a chance to talk. How was your transfer process? What did you do to get information from one phone to the other? Well, it was kind of a mess. I tried to use a... cable connection and the battery died in the old phone i wasn't i wasn't monitoring it close enough so it was a completely failed transfer because the battery died halfway through yeah once i

got it going again it didn't remember that it was in the midst of a transfer so i had to reset the new phone and then have them both plugged in next to each other and it took about three hours which isn't terrible But my wife's phone, so we did the hand-me-down. Daisy, my wife, was coming off an iPhone 14 Pro. Okay. And she went to my iPhone 16 Pro. And that took 12 hours. And I have no idea why. Maybe the Wi-Fi chip in it or something is slower than the old phone. But, man, that was very slow.

And she was not happy. But that took a long time. But it took three hours. I like the idea of doing it directly by cable, but I'm not sure it was ever actually transferring via cable. And it definitely killed the battery. Okay. Some of our friends had that similar experience. Casey Liss, I know, had that problem. The guy spoke about it on Upgrade on Monday, and I'm sure Casey will talk about it on ATP.

The wire transfer seems great, but then how do you solve the power problem? Is MagSafe enough to keep up? Maybe it's not. In the past, I've done the wireless transfer where it just moves everything over. It takes hours. I think last time mine took overnight. And I was going to do that again on, I got my phone Saturday evening. I was going to do it Saturday night.

And it started and then failed. It kind of didn't really give me a reason. So I reset the pro and I ended up doing an iCloud restore, which I haven't done in years. I've done the direct transfer. probably the last three or four times. And I got to say the iCloud restore was much smoother than I remembered it being. It felt like the apps that were logged out.

They're the normal ones like Slack and 1Password and some others that even with direct transfer, you have to log back into. And the trade-off is you get to use your phone sooner. But then it's got to download all your apps and content. And it took like three days, you know, basically on the charger on my desk to sync my messages in the cloud. But it got done and it was really smooth.

I think if you haven't done iCloud Restore in a couple of years, it's been improved. And likewise, I heard from some people who did the... the backup to the Mac, right? Where the iPhone shows up in Finder and you make a backup and you can apply it over a cable from your Mac to your iPhone. That's still there. I know some people are still a big fan of that methodology.

I don't think there's any way around it that this process has to move a lot of data, but this year was pretty smooth for me. Yeah, and I should have done the iCloud restore for Daisy's phone. I think that would have been probably the best.

uh but i you know and the other thing is you i always in my head think that when i do the direct transfer either cable or wireless that it's going to have more logins and things done for me but it doesn't feel like that it feels like everything doesn't work anymore When you first start it up, you've got to reinitiate and re-log into everything from my Vesta board to my car.

Living in the future over there. Yeah, nothing really worked. I have to get it logged in and reset. So I may just do the iCloud restore next time. I will say that Slack in particular, which is where I exist for work,

They have a thing in the desktop app called sign into mobile and it puts a QR code on your Mac screen and you can scan it with the phone and it automatically logs you in. That used to be really annoying. If you're like me, you're in multiple Slack channels and you use a different email address for all of them. It used to take me like 15 minutes.

is get signed back into Slack. So that's better. You can do the same thing with one password. But yeah, you do end up spending, I'm sure even now a few days later, I'll open an app later this week and realize that, oh, it doesn't have my credentials. I think that's just kind of part of it, but I think they've made improvements. I think somebody at Apple, it's probably their job, make iPhone transfer better for people.

Yeah, I mean, so many people are doing it every year. They've got to nail that down. Yeah. The cameras, I have found that the cameras are better. Like, I get a new phone every year, so I don't get the big jump that you would get if you waited three or four years. But one standout for me is that 4X lens. I think it's really better than the Zoom we had before. And I've actually been having fun.

shooting some 4x portraits like just shoot people or things at like portrait length and you're getting natural bokeh you don't need to do the fake you know portrait mode yeah and uh Just overall, I mean, I think it's a nice year for camera upgrades. Yeah, the camera's great. I do really like the 4X as well.

I've had a little bit of trouble with the 8X. It seems like sometimes the 8X is a little slow to focus indoors, like in low light, but it gets there. Like, don't get me wrong, but it's not broken. It just... That surprised me a little bit. Maybe it's just low light indoor thing. But yeah, the 4X is great. And the new selfie camera, I'm not a big selfie person, but playing with it, like being able to switch it to horizontal or vertical.

in software without having to turn the phone is really really smart and and i'll say if you have a third-party camera app they do have to be updated to support the square sensor so like in widget smith we have a mirror tool so you can like

take a quick selfie within WidgetSmith and put it into a widget or send it to somebody. And we had to do an update because the pictures were sideways. And it's just an issue with the way that new sensor works. So if you have a camera app that acts a little goofy in the selfie camera, like... Developers are on it. They'll be updating their apps. But I think that's really kind of been the only hardware thing for developers to have to contend with this year.

Yeah. And the selfie camera, I think that's going to be the standout feature for most users. It's just so much better. And the nice thing for me is I can now take selfies without... you know, embarrassing myself. It's just, I'm not that good at turning it on its side and stuff. That's where my kids are better at technology than me. And now Apple has given me a way around that. Yeah. One thing that I noted.

that i didn't expect was my hearing aids sound better and i've been trying to get to the bottom of that the new phone has a bluetooth 6.0 And the prior iPhone 16 had Bluetooth 5.3, I believe. And maybe that's why. Or maybe it's the antenna thing. I don't really have all the answers yet, but...

The same hearing aids have more fidelity, and I don't really have a way to test it because, you know, I wiped the old one. But it's really nice. It sounds like it does sound better, so I didn't expect that. And I just, you know, the return to aluminum. doesn't bother me at all. I mean, I feel like a lot of folks were like, well, titanium was fancier. This phone does stay cooler than the titanium phone did. I had the titanium out of the case for the last week or two.

And I've had this one out of the case, and I can see why they made this choice. It's the thermals. And they got the whole vapor chamber thing in there where they're using, I think they said distilled water. It's kind of weird to think about, but using liquid to move things around. A lot of Android phones have done that. And yeah, even during the iCloud restore, which I mean, sometimes a phone would get really hot.

during the iCloud restore, or even just in the truck when I plug it in for CarPlay. Sometimes my 16 Pro, like I'm not charging, I'm too hot. And I have not had any of that on the 17 Pro. So I think the material change, the vapor chamber, the other design changes, clearly this was like a top of mind thing for them. And I think they've gotten it really good. Yeah.

Yeah, so I went to the Apple Store twice. I did my phone pickup, and then I went back several days later and upgraded my watch. And when I went back for the watch, the store wasn't that busy. So I was able to spend significant time with the iPhone Air. And boy, is it thin and is it light? I mean, it really... I would recommend going and playing with one if you're near an Apple store just to get a feel for it. I will say that when I went back to get my watch.

I overheard them talking to another customer and they said they didn't have any iPhones in stock except the iPhone air. And then the customer said, well, what about like in the other stores in the area? And they said the only. phone available anywhere in the area is the iPhone Air. I don't think the iPhone Air is selling like hotcakes. And I kind of understand having picked one up. I think that there's a very unique audience.

People who are willing to sacrifice camera quality and battery for thinness and lightness. It's really that simple. Yeah. I mean, and I know, like, I personally know a few people who are glad to buy an iPhone Air. That's what they wanted. They want it thin and light. And they don't care that the camera's worse and that the battery doesn't last as long. They're totally fine with it. But that's the trade-off. And I think for most of us,

we don't want to make that trade. I certainly don't. Yeah. I know that looking at our usage and widget Smith and sleep plus plus, but honor plus plus the pro max and. The Pro, so the Pro is the most popular over the opening weekend. Again, this is just a couple of apps, but a couple of big apps. 41% 17 Pro, 31% Pro Max. 21% iPhone 17 and just 7% iPhone air. And that is almost exactly the distribution of the 16 pro pro max 16 and 16 plus.

Maybe that fourth iPhone spot is cursed and they just can't find something that works there. But it's early and, you know, these apps are used very widely. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that usage looks in the future. Well, I think, honestly, Apple, they're not idiots. I mean, they made a phone that has shorter battery life and not as good cameras.

in exchange for making it thin and light. And I think they know that some people really want that, and most people don't. And so I can't imagine they expect it to sell in equal numbers to an iPhone Pro. Yeah. And also...

This is one half of a folding iPhone. That's my theory. And so they're on the way to make an iPhone fold next year. So why not put this out? I don't really look at it that way. I feel like, yeah, it's going to be. less popular but to the people that like it they're going to love it i think so too um so i have one i've been sitting on my desk and it is

I was talking to Chance Miller about this at 9to5Mac this morning. It is the newest phone since the iPhone X. It kind of feels like, oh, this is something different. The thinness, the lightness. The fact that basically all the phone computer parts are in the plateau is amazing. And like very clearly the folding iPhone is two of these things with a hinge, right? It just, that's where they're going.

But in the meantime, it really seems like, yeah, this phone has compromises. The one camera being 1X and 2X, not really having a zoom past that, no ultra wide. That's a bummer. And for me, that's probably the deal breaker, not necessarily the battery life, but it is something special. And even if it's only around for a couple of years, I think...

I think it's an important step for them. And there are going to be some people who absolutely love it. And it's their, you know, even some people on social media the last couple of days, like this is, you know, I saw someone who went from a 12 mini to this, like.

The screen size is way bigger than the mini, but the thinness and lightness won them over. And yeah, it's super interesting. And I can't wait to see where Apple goes next with it because clearly it is a look at the future, right? One day.

all iPhones could be like this. You know, not next year, maybe not even for a few years, right? They got to work it out. But this is like pointing the way, I think, towards... towards a future that apple has been working towards for a long time yeah i'd be very curious to see how they put good cameras in all phones that thin but you know what they'll figure it out

If anyone can, they can. AirPods 3, AirPods Pro 3. What do you think? I think the sound is... incredible i've been doing a lot of like listening on my airpods pro 2 listening to the airpods pro 3 i think a lot of that sound improvement is because you have a better seal so a lot of people i think including you had done the

thing where like you swap the ear tips on the airpods pro or you like you put foam and then the rubber ones over there were a lot of different ways to do that and effectively apple's done that this time mine out of the box were actually really uncomfortable and The audio check was good, but it just was uncomfortable. And I ended up going down a size from the medium to the small, and that fixed it for me. And I think that's the case if these things feel a bit tight in your ear.

The small size is, you know, one size smaller than you were may be the way to go. So that helped. I'm still not sure they're as comfortable as the Pro 2s for me. But I think I can adjust, and I think that the sound difference is so good that I will want to adjust. I'm going to make it work. Yeah, I don't think you need to upgrade from twos, but they are better.

And the five sets of tips makes it really, I think it's going to make it easier for most people to get a fit that works for them. I thought it was funny when you wrote that because I also went down to small, you and me, podcast brother. Small tips. But overall, I mean, they're just great. They're great. And this is a product that doesn't have problems, and it just gets better with every iteration.

I wish every product worked as well as the AirPods Pro do. Yeah. I think they're going to sell a whole bunch of these in the holiday season. Great Christmas gift. Yeah. We had a couple of questions I saw about the size of the case. So it is a little bit if you're looking at the front of it, it's a little bit wider, but not as deep as the two. But honestly, unless you have them both in hand.

Like if you picked one up without the other, I'm not sure you could tell the difference. You know, it's still like a slippery little stone. It's easy to get out of your pocket. It still has the lanyard clip on the side, which I like. I have like a red little string on mine to make it easier to see when it's inevitably covered by something else on the kitchen counter. It's very much the case that the twos...

you know, the USB-C case that the twos came in, the size difference is not really anything to write home about. Agreed. Agreed. There's really not much more to say about them, except they're great. And you'll probably, if you haven't had them fit in the past. With the five sets of tips, you may find that this is the year you get them to fit. With the twos, with the third-party tips, I was able to get them to fit. They still would occasionally fall out. These are the best fitting.

The threes are the best fitting that I've ever had of the AirPods Pro. So it's all roses here. But I did also get a new Apple Watch. So I went ahead and upgraded. I didn't do it until... several days after the launch, went into the store, traded in some stuff and, and got it. And. I have to admit, it was a weird experience going in there. I was getting tossed around in the store. They're like, go to this line, go to that line. It felt like I was at the DMV a bit.

Launch day was fine. They hand you off to a person, they give you your phone, you leave. That's all good. But actually buying the watch felt a little weird. Because they had me like, the person that was taking care of me was also taking care of two other people at the same time. I'm just like.

I don't know. I get it. But I feel like they've gone a little bit too hard on the efficiency angle in the Apple store. I think so, too. You know, I think on an average day, a store like mine, at least, which is not. hugely busy most of the time. It's mostly fine, but that does break down a bit when they're busy. I went Saturday evening to get mine. They were still sort of in pickup mode, like came in, there was somebody right at the door.

Hey, are you picking up? Yes. Okay, go get in line here. They brought it to me. It was pretty smooth. But in general, I think the App Store is sort of the current era of the Apple Store, which has been the model for a long time now. It just doesn't scale super well, but it's kind of an unfortunate thing. When I was an employee there, we still had a point of sale at the front. It's like, yeah, go to the front to check out. Sometimes I still miss that.

Yeah. Well, that said, this upgrade, you know, I did wait several years for this upgrade. So I did get kind of the, you know, long-term upgrade benefits where... immediately the battery is insane like it's just crazy to me how long the battery lasts in this thing now which is awesome uh the screen doesn't look any different to me i know it's slightly bigger and slightly brighter but i can't tell the difference

The gesture, the wrist gesture is amazing. You're going to love it when you upgrade your watch. It's like turning off timers and stuff by flicking your wrist without tapping on the screen. Super awesome. And, you know, it's the Apple Watch Ultra, but a little better.

that's my review yeah yeah it's it's not a huge change you know i think they kind of nailed the form factor on the ultra from day one and i don't i don't know what i would do to the ultra really like i think it's good that it's chunky and got the crown guard and everything. We'll see. We'll see what they do in the future, but I feel like the Ultra 3 is in a good spot.

They've got a new face that came out for the Ultra, which is like the navigation face where there's a live compass around the edge, the time in the center, and then the date in the lower right. And I really like that new face because I can, without reading glasses on, I can see the time and the date, which, you know, old man problems, right? But it's also got four widgets, or actually three widgets.

Plus the date. And as much as I complain about Apple Watch faces, the new one is kind of nice. Yeah. All right. Well, that was our new hardware of the year. Yeah, it's... Fun time of year. Now we just need our wallets to cool off. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm. If you're looking to get into video, you need Ecamm.

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Our thanks to Ecamm for the support of the show and all of Relay. We've been dancing around the topic of liquid glass throughout the beta process. Now it's out there. It's in everybody's hands. Let's talk about liquid glass. Yeah, I feel so conflicted about it personally. But first, if you haven't played with it, it's this idea that... Your controls and the navigation in an application is really, in some cases, really, really transparent or translucent. And you see the content sort of scroll.

behind it and and the buttons and the ui react to that so if you're on dark content they move light and vice versa but well and they've brought i think really like One of the most interesting things is they brought it to all the platforms at once, from the watch all the way up to the Mac and even tvOS. Have a little glass now. We're going to talk about the Mac version next week. We're going to be talking about macOS Tahoe, but I think at least...

In my opinion, it was clearly designed for the iPhone first. I think that's where the vision of it is the clearest. It's where you get those new layered app icons.

And the tit-ticking stuff is also on the Mac, but all iOS icons kind of have this new look now. And I think from a customization standpoint, it's really strong. Like you can do... clear icons like you see your wallpaper through your icons you can the tinting is much better the tinting last year was pretty bad now there's light mode and dark mode tinting it's much better and it's got some clever features like

One of my favorite things is a color picker. So, hey, I want to tint my widgets and icons to go with my wallpaper. I can now pull my wallpaper up and pick a color, and it tints to that color. It can also tint to the color of your iPhone or the case of your iPhone if you're using an Apple case. So from a customization standpoint, I think it's really great. Yeah, that's a new feature where you can have it.

match the color of your phone or your case. And I dig it. I think that's cool. I really like the idea sometimes of making the phone less sexy. A lot of people use monotone icons and stuff to keep their phone less distracting. I'm not sure how much that really works, but I have found that matching the case color and matching the phone color are both.

uh kind of fun and i've been playing with those uh it can make sense like to apply that to a certain focus mode even for instance but yeah i think that's all good i agree with you that this was designed for the iphone first

There's a lot of people unhappy with just kind of the general state of Liquid Glass as we release it, like it's not quite there for accessibility, for instance. I feel like it's okay. I just don't feel that worked up about it. And you're working on an active app right now, so you probably see it more, and you probably see it with the customer complaints. But just in general, I think...

I think it looks okay. I do think it's going to evolve and needs work, but I'm not too wound up about it. And sometimes I find it kind of fun to look at it, look at the way the light reflects through the icons. But I also, I don't think it's, I guess what I would say is, I don't think it's as big of a deal as Apple's making out of it.

No. And I don't think it's bad as a lot of developers are making it out to be, you know, but that's just me as a power user. Not really. I'm not a developer and I'm not, you know, Apple. Yeah. I think, I think you're right about that. developers for developers is not as turnkey as you would think like yeah you can make liquid glass controls pretty easily but getting it right is a little bit more work and there's a lot of places

where it's just unclear from Apple what you should do. You know, sort of a rule of thumb with this sort of thing is look at how Apple designs the first-party apps, Safari, Notes, Reminders, etc. But they're even inconsistent with each other. And so you're going to see developers, I think, sort of push and pull on this really over the coming years as it evolves.

Because there are some bad parts of it, right? There are legitimate legibility concerns in places. Not everywhere, but in places. Now there, as always, accessibility options. You can reduce transparency. which basically makes all the glass kind of look like the iOS 18 material. You can increase the contrast. You can differentiate without color. And these settings can help, but this is not going to work for everybody.

And that is interesting. I think we said on the WBDC episode that Apple takes accessibility really seriously. Accessibility was in mind when they were designing this, but it doesn't mean it's perfect.

there you can get it into a state where you may have to like move the ui a little bit you may have to scroll a little bit to see what a button says and you know how they deal with that and keep it shiny and refractive and all these things i don't know you know there was a beta over the summer that really turned down the transparency right it was like oh this is much it was like frosted glass and it was one beta

And they went back to the clear look. And I like the clear look. I think it's fun. I don't know how long it'll be fun for, but the refractions and reflection and like... If you scrub over a tab bar or text selection, like the little bubble has some momentum to it, kind of slides past your finger and snaps back. All that's really cool, but they do need to keep working on it. This isn't finished. I think Liquid Glass is here to stay for a while.

And just like iOS 7 evolved into what iOS 18 was, if you look at them side by side, they really do look different, right? It's kind of incredible, actually. It happened so slowly.

I think liquid glass will follow a similar route where iOS 27, there'll be some changes. iOS 28, there'll be more changes. And it will mature. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I also think that... The accessibility stuff, they'll get that nailed down probably this year with updates. They're not going to wait a year to fix those types of problems. No. Well, I don't feel as worked up about it as some people are, but.

um i understand the frustration if you're a developer i still have to do it for the no list i haven't i need to get icon composer and redo the icon and do some other stuff on it i but you know that's that's a little free app i make it's not a big priority uh but the uh it's uh it's okay i the interesting thing to me was talking to my family about it like because these are they had no idea it was coming i haven't said anything

and i like my wife has been using it for a few days and and she said um i said what do you think of the new operating system she's like oh it's fine she's all but you know what she's worked up about is how the music app does the transitions you know You can turn that off. Yeah, I did. But she was apparently driving to work and going through her Taylor Swift therapy. And at the end of the song, the key changed and it sped up.

That to her is a much bigger deal than liquid glass. And I showed her how to turn it off. So she's happy. But yeah, it's just, it's funny to me, like the people in my family who are not into stuff. like i had to tell one of them that they added it she didn't even realize that it was there you know and so

It's like, no, it's more transparent. Is it really? It didn't look like this before. I'm like, no, it didn't. Yeah, because structurally, it's the same, right? The lock screen, control center, they all work the same way. that they that they did last year in fact control center is like really shockingly similar i thought maybe even though that design the multi-page design is pretty new i thought well maybe they'll do something interesting there

But it's effectively the same. So this is underselling the work that went into it. but it's closer to a coat of paint than a remodel, right? It is not, they didn't rip out like the today view and put something else over there. Notification center, control center, all of that stuff still works the same, which.

I think is like a lesson learned from iOS 7. Like you can do a redesign or you can rearrange things. Don't do them the same year. And iOS 7, if you remember, introduced Control Center, had the, you know, like the multi-tabbed.

notification center down from the top it was really weird they did a lot structurally and design wise in seven and this year it's mostly design you know and i think that's i think that eases the blow when the masses upgrade right like i was honestly i was kind of bracing for like feedback from friends and family of like you know how does this how does this work i haven't gotten any of that now some people have been like wow it's kind of

One friend in particular really dislikes it. He's like, man, this is ugly. I was like, I mean, it's up to you. Like, I don't think it is, but I don't think it's created the confusion in the world that iOS 7 did. And that I'm sure Apple is relieved to see.

yeah the today view that's when you scroll to the left you've got like a list of widgets yeah do you use that i do um i use it pretty heavily i've got because i've got two home screens and then the app library so i stashed a lot of widgets over there on the today view and my widgets on my home screen are pretty static i've used basically the same ones for a long time

That Today view, I change. Like right now, we're still in the St. Jude campaign. I have some widgets looking at the St. Jude campaign in there. And when September ends, you know, those will go away and other things will take their place. So yeah, I really, I really dig the Today view.

yeah me too i would be sad if they took it away because like that's i keep like the calendar the task list the weather all that stuff is there and you just swipe one swipe and you've got it right there but then you don't need to junk up your home screen with it i i i feel like you know they kind of made the right call there i i don't really want them to redesign all this stuff but to uh to make it you know get this coat of paint changes

i i just generally am okay with it and i feel like it's gonna be fine they're gonna get it more sorted out over time and it's a different look and uh it's finally somebody's done transparency right yeah

That's right. That's right. We mentioned that on the phone, there weren't big structural changes, but on the iPad, there really are. As I was talking about iOS 7, I was like, well, that is true for one device, but not the other. a huge year for iPadOS. You know, it's been a few years since we got Stage Manager. Every three or four years, Apple, like, oh, let's try a new multitasking thing. And this time, they really did the thing that I think a lot of people wanted. It was like...

Make it like a Mac and have, you know, free, freely resizable overlapping windows like computers have had since the 90s. Really let the user do what they want to do. Now, and we've talked a lot about this. We talked about it with Stage Manager those years ago. The iPad is a product intention, right? You've got users who...

One app at a time, even SlideOver, which we're going to talk about in a second, that was confusing or like, oh, why do I have this weird app on the side? Or suddenly I have two apps side by side. How do I get out of that? Apple made that easier over time. But there's a lot of users who want just one app at a time. And so stage manager was like a totally separate mode. Like you go into control center and turn it on. And they've continued down that path.

this time if you want to use your ipad like you always have especially if you have like an ipad mini one app at a time is still there it's still the default it's still great But if you want to move into that, hey, I've got five windows and they overlap in weird ways, you can do that. And I have really enjoyed... that changed you know i'm not a huge ipad user i have an 11 inch ipad pro with the the keyboard and trackpad and

There have been several times this summer in the beta where I found it really helpful to have three or four windows. Now I have an 11 inch iPad. It's a little tight on the 13 inch, or if you have an external display, I think it really shines.

But I think they did a pretty good job of this. Yeah, I agree. I think, although I will, again, have an asterisk, I loved Slide Over. Yeah. And I wish that had stayed because it's like a muscle memory for me. It was it was great if you were like watching something and you wanted a social media app on the side or like I would always have one password in the slide over stack. It's like you just need that all the time. Right. And it was very helpful to have it.

have it nearby or to have messages nearby. It's a shame. Maybe it was just a victim of simplification. Like they didn't want to keep stacking system on system, but I'd imagine Apple's paying attention to that feedback. The way I used it was with drafts, and I would dictate into it. So it was just a very handy little dictation window, and I could bring it in, get text, get it out. But with the new windowing system, I'm adapting.

And, you know, it really is like the Mac in a lot of ways. They've got the traffic lights now. They've got expose. They've got a menu bar. I mean, there's enough here that we're actually going to do a show in the future on. rethinking the ipad because i think with these changes kind of the the old mac power users lying on the way to use an ipad is changing and i'm still figuring it out for myself but i'm looking forward to that show because i

I really need to nail down my workflows on this thing. But it's a changed game. If you've got an iPad in a drawer and you haven't turned it on in a while, update it and look at it again. Because the iPad is now substantially... I think more powerful and more flexible if you want to use the power user mode. Yeah, and you don't need a trackpad or mouse to use this. I think it's a little better with it.

But it's not a requirement. And yeah, we're going to talk about the iPad later in the year, partially because we want to give apps time to fully support this. Almost everything does, but a few don't. But yeah, we're trying to sort of figure out where the iPad lands.

The menu bar in particular is, I think, really useful. Apple has done the weird thing for years on the iPad where, like, I think he held down the command key and you get this floating pallet of shortcuts, but then it would go away. It's like, wait, what was my shortcut, you know?

It's like, just put the menu bar up there. And what's really cool is Catalyst apps, which are iPad apps that have been refactored to run on macOS, a lot of that work shows up both places. And so if you're working on a Mac Catalyst app... You get a lot of this basically for free, which is really cool. And I think as time goes on, the menu bar is going to become more important because it helps free up iPad apps to be more complex, right?

At least the ones that are geared towards pro users. I think it's super smart. I see why Apple didn't do it for a long time, right? They were trying with the iPad to make something... different than the Mac. Because if you don't do that, then just put macOS on it and be done. They're trying to reimagine these things to have the best of the Mac and the best of the iPhone ecosystem in one place.

And yeah, that means bringing the stoplight buttons over, but they're kind of small until you hover over them or tap them and then they spring to life. The menu bar is up there for you if you need it. I'm really impressed by the work that they've done. And even in the beta, my experience was it's extremely smooth. The multitasking stuff is really easy to understand. It doesn't...

In my experience, like slow down or do weird things. You know, stage manager was kind of rocky in the beginning and they cleaned it up over time. This feels like fully baked on day one. My suspicion is this has been under wraps for quite a while at Apple. Yeah. And to be clear, it's not a Mac now. It really isn't. I mean, it's got some Mac-like interface elements, but it's still fundamentally an iPad. And you can still use it one app at a time, like an iPad.

Like, you know, we grew up using iPads. So I feel like this is probably the right trade-off. If I was at Apple, I think they should be pretty happy with what they've accomplished here. But it does change the way you use the device. And for me, one of the reasons why we're not doing the show right away is I'm still figuring it out. Because I've got really used to using my MacBook Air mobily and my Mac on my desk and the iPad.

was really taking a second tier, but that's not necessarily the case anymore, and I've got to sort that out. I think it's going to take some time for everybody to kind of get there with it because it is so radically different. A couple other things beyond the interface is the inclusion of background tasks. So up until iOS 26. If you were rendering something in Final Cut or iMovie or Logic or some other audio editor, you had to leave that app open and in the foreground.

for the export to complete, which is like 1990s level computing. Yeah, it's crazy. Finally, they've done that. Now developers need to adopt the new API, but it's there in Final Cut, and I think Logic both now have it on the iPad. it's great because it lets you use it more like a computer, right? And if you're using Final Cut on the iPad, you're already a power user. Like you're at the tippy top of the iPad ecosystem and then have to sit and wait for the thing to render.

It just doesn't make any sense. So that is, I think, a long overdue addition. Yeah, agreed. And also just acknowledging the hardware. It's like, of course you can do this on this hardware. Yeah. It's the same chips they're running Macs on.

Preview is now on the iPad and the iPhone too. That's kind of awesome. Dude, that saved my bacon this summer because we bought a house. when you sell and buy homes you're just dealing in pdfs like just thousands of pdfs it feels like yeah and having preview on the iphone and ipad is like it's super welcome because

PDFs in particular kind of didn't really have a good place to go on the iPad. Like you could use one of many third-party PDF viewers and annotators. But that preview has been on the Mac since the day one of OS X. And now it being on the iPad and iPhone, it makes it really easy just to open something, sign it, send it back. It makes those sort of common tasks that we all do with PDFs in particular just much faster. And so I was super happy to have that this summer.

Do you think they're going to tick talk now and just like say, okay, iPad's good. Next year, we're going to focus on the iPhone. I mean, I mean, maybe, you know, the iPad has kind of been on a slightly longer cycle than that. Yeah. But I do think. what iPadOS 26 is. That's basically going to be what 27 and maybe 28 are. They're not going to introduce another new multitasking scheme. This feels like the one.

Yeah. So maybe the iPad finally is in a place where, okay, this is what this is, and now we're going to work on refinements. And that doesn't mean there's still not work to do, right? It's not finished, but it feels... much more like something that works for everybody than it ever has before. Yeah, I think it's more likely tick, tick, tick tock with the iPhone being the tick.

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So let's get into some app updates that come along with iOS and iPadOS 26, right? Apple still, and I'd like to see this change. These system apps still really only get updates. Definitely like in the major like .0 releases, sometimes like .1, .2, there's features. But it's not like they're updating messages or mail. separate from the OS, right? They are still part of, for lack of a better phrase, part of the operating system.

That's fine. But if an app needs attention, then it's like, well, we got to wait. And I don't know if they're ever going to kind of break those two things apart. You know, it's different with iWork, right? Pages, numbers, and keynote get updates throughout the year. Sometimes major updates, not dependent on an OS release, but a lot of these other things are kind of more built in. Yeah, I talked about that with Sal last week because, you know, the iWork team is a team.

It's a group of people. They're actually out in Pittsburgh. They're not even in Cupertino. And so they have their own independent development schedule. It would be nice if some of these... these integrated apps and the operating system had the same thing do you think it's because they need to be integrated to operating system updates that they wait or is it just

now let's just do it once a year kind of thing yeah it's probably a bit of both i mean something like the camera update which is the one that most people are going to notice immediately like clearly there's updates in there with the new phones in mind But yeah, I think it's hard to say. I would love to hear if anybody kind of knows. Surely some things are dependent on new APIs, but not everything is.

Lots of people, lots of third-party developers can release big updates without a new OS. Maybe it's just sort of the history of it, right? And like pulling out mail into its own project. internally, maybe that's just like a really steep hill to climb and there's other things to do. And so the, maybe it's sort of like the, the, the history of it is kind of maybe holding it back. I don't know. I don't know.

All right, so let's talk about this UI in camera, though, because it is very simplified now. When you open the camera app, you get photo or video. Yeah, it's kind of a throwback. When the 3GS came out, right, there was a little toggle. It looked like brushed metal because it was a different era, but all those other modes are still there. The video photo control is actually like a liquid glass slider, but...

Honestly, most people just want those two modes, right? So things like time-lapse and night mode and styles, all that stuff is still there, either in the main control or in the overflow menu up in the corner. They are, I think, really tuning in to what people use. Opening the camera, making it quick to take a picture or switch to video and take a video. That's what people want. That's what I want.

Right. Very rarely do I go into those other modes. Occasionally I'll do a time lapse, but I may take one time lapse for 3000 photos I take. Right. So I think it's a good move. I think if you use those other modes, like maybe you're a little annoyed at this, but I think it's a very small number of users. And one of my favorite changes actually is up in the upper left-hand corner, you can very easily change the format.

You know, modern phones, you know, they have a 48 megapixel sensor, but they save a 24 megapixel image to save space. It still looks great. That way they can combine like 48 and 12 megapixel data and kind of do their magic. But if you want to shoot in 48, you can change it. Or if you want to shoot your video in...

1080 instead of 4k or vice versa that's really easy to change now that used to be a trip into settings like deep settings yeah and and now that's easier to get to and i think i think that's a great change for people who are really dependent on this camera Well, it also, it gives you the information because the old days you had to, it wasn't the phone, the, the, um.

It wasn't the settings in the camera app. You had to go into the settings app, then find the camera, then change it. And then if you didn't remember to change it back. then you were shooting in the wrong format. And now you've just got it on your screen. You can change it dynamically, which, frankly, all these little third-party cameras do. I've got some of the DJI cameras.

they all make it really easy to see and change these settings. So, I mean, this isn't like Apple thought of something amazing here. They're catching up, but I'm glad they did. Yeah.

An interesting change related to this is camera control, right? That thing on the side of the phone where you can tap and like take a picture, open the camera, take a picture, or you can like swipe between all these modes. And we said at the time. when it was new this feels really complicated like all the swiping and like tapping and long pressing you had to do

And there were settings then to turn all that off and basically make it a camera launcher and a shutter button, which is how I set mine up. I haven't gone back. When you set a phone up from scratch, I confirm this because I've set a couple of phones up this week. If you set a phone up from scratch.

that extra camera control stuff is turned off by default. And if you're upgrading, like I upgraded my daughter from a 12 to a 16. So in the setup flow, camera control was there because she didn't have camera control before. And in that situation, the extra stuff is off. I think that's the right call. I think having all that extra swipey stuff on by default in the beginning, it kind of overloaded.

the gestures, the things you had to remember. Is Apple backing away from camera control? I don't think so. They redid it to fit on the tiny edges of the iPhone Air. They're still working on it. But I think this is an acknowledgement that most people just want to launch the camera and take a picture really quickly. And the other stuff is there if you want it. Just like they've got just two buttons when you open it. I think the default.

behavior for that little button should be take a picture and i was going to set it for my wife to turn off the camera control but they actually do it through the setup process they say okay this is turned off would you like us to turn it on No, thank you. I actually keep it turned on. I've got good at it. I use it for zoom control.

And it's not that hard, honestly. Everybody makes such a big deal about it, but it's not that hard. You should try it again, just out of curiosity. It's fine. But I also think, thinking about the vast majority of their users. simplifying the user interface in the camera app, turning that button into just a take a picture button. I think that all makes sense. We both had some notes about the AirPods in the camera app. You want to go first?

Yeah, really like a lot of integration with the AirPods and camera this year. So you can use the AirPods as a remote shutter. you know, you can do that with the watch, right? Like you're taking your family photo at Thanksgiving and on your, your phone's on a tripod and you could use your Apple watch as a shutter button, which is way better than a timer, right? Then you're like running to get back with the family trip over the Ottoman. You're not in the picture way better.

But now you can use AirPods as a remote shutter as well. So you can press and hold the stem of the AirPod while inside the camera app to take a picture or record a video, kind of depending on what mode you're in. And I think that's great. I think more ways to trigger the shutter when you're not at your phone is good. Yeah, and the big win for me is that you can use your AirPod as a remote microphone to your video.

If you're shooting a video and you're across the room and you've got an air pod in, it's going to pick up the microphone from the air pod and add that to the video. I mean, it's not as good as like a set of dedicated wireless mics, but it's. pretty good you know i mean and if you've got a pair of airpods in your pocket now you've got the ability to get decent audio without being right next to the camera i love that yeah it's uh it's it's really really clever

Honestly, it's stuff like that that really keeps me in the Apple ecosystem, the way they're always integrating and finding ways to tie everything together and just make it easy. You just don't experience that with other platforms. No, no, you don't.

What about messages? That's, I think, the most popular app on the iPhone, according to some reports. And every year, Apple's making changes. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's good. Some of the customization stuff, so you can set a background image in what Apple calls the transcript, which is just the messages area. That's fun. I turned it off because I'm in a bunch of group threads with... nerds and they kept changing it. It is cool that you can customize that.

I think a really nice addition in messages is that they've redesigned the conversation detail panel. So if you're in a message and you tap someone's name or the group name at the top where you see. You know, the info, any find my information, links, photos, that's been kind of reorganized into tabs. It makes it much easier to...

scroll back through the message and see, you know, look for the photo or whatever that you're trying to find. Particularly on the Mac, I think that's really well done. I know we're not talking about the Mac today, but the Mac's pretty good there. What do you think about the filtering stuff? I'll take it. I mean, it used to drive me nuts when I had a badge on for one unread message and I couldn't find it.

You know, and so now you can get to it. So yeah, that's a quality of life improvement for me. Messages is one of the few apps I allow badges on. Yeah. And it was driving me nuts that I would have this like. unread count and then you'd find it and it was like three months ago or something you know it's like so now now you can get through to those i think that's nice and honestly i kind of like the background stuff too because

It just makes it really easy to know who you're talking to. You know, if you're doing a bunch of different messages, like you and I shared a background. I didn't realize you turned it off. I've still got it on. So I know exactly when I'm texting you versus my wife, you know? Sure. Which has led, frankly, to some very uncomfortable text between you and I over the years. It's not that bad. Yeah, it is. The filtering is really...

I think the ability to like, Hey, if I don't know this person, just put them over here. I don't know about you, but I get so much spam. Oh yeah. It's text. Now it gets, it's out of control. It's getting worse. Yeah. Someone really wants me to like. really wants to like invest in my company is like, yes, I'm going to take a million dollar investment over SMS. That's definitely how business works. I get approved for a loan every couple of days. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah.

But I don't even read them. I just don't. I guess if anybody, actual friends are trying to get to me, I don't read the filters that much. It's like, no. It's like, sorry. Yeah. I kind of have a reputation for being hard to get a hold of, and I kind of like it. I got stuff to do. A couple of other niceties.

You can now see when people are typing or even multiple people are typing in a group thread, which is fantastic. You can now select a portion of text within a message. It used to be you could basically copy an entire message. Now you can long press and then get text within the little bubble, which is fantastic. The threads app does that where you long press on a thread and you have a little window pops up and you can pull text out individually. I think that's really good.

And a great one that I really like, and I can't wait for more people to be on iOS 26 so I can use it more, is the ability to create a poll. You know, back in the day when Apple was like, I message apps, they demoed. a third party app that did this and I message apps went nowhere. And now it's just built in where you can have like, Hey, we're going to have dinner. You guys want to do five, six or 7 PM and people can vote. And.

the results are reflected in real time. It's great. It's really well designed. It's really easy to do. And I am looking forward to, like I said, more people in my life. being able to use this because i want to use it right because it just cuts down on all the back and forth sometimes in a group thread yeah yeah totally well is there anybody in your life that hasn't upgraded yet uh oh yeah like i mean i can tell you based on app data

Apple's rollout of this seems slower than iOS 18 because Apple doesn't push the button and every iPhone on planet Earth say, hey, get iOS 26. They slowly roll it. That seems slower than previous years. And yeah, I'm sure I've got family members in particular who don't upgrade quickly or maybe even can't upgrade. I discovered my brother-in-law was still in an iPhone XS, and so he is getting my...

No, getting my 16 Pro as his new phone. Yeah, so we'll see. I don't know how long that'll take for people to get on board. When I was in the Apple store getting my watch, there was a guy that was trading in his iPhone 8 for a new phone. Oh, man. And it looked like something from a time lost looking at that phone. Oh, yeah. I was amazed that the battery still worked. Yeah, that's a heck of an upgrade.

He goes to the Apple employee, he's like, you think it'll be better? And she's like, yeah, it'll be better. In every way. All right. The phone app. We don't normally talk about that with these updates, but this year the phone app got a lot of updates. Yeah. I want to talk about the design first. There is a new design called Unified. It is optional.

At first, the phone app will prompt you to do it, and if you say no, you can still get to it through a menu, but the optional unified design kind of compacts things.

So you just get three tabs. You get calls, which at the top, your favorites are at the top using the contact posters, like the vertical, like if you call somebody and the full screen image of them takes over your phone, that's the... contact poster i had a lot of people in my life who didn't have those set up so i spent some time creating them for my favorites so be prepared to make some of those probably and then under that you have outgoing missed calls and voicemails

kind of all mixed together. And once you get the hang of it, it's pretty clear, but it took me a little while to kind of get adjusted to it. And it's got filters in there, so it's all calls and missed calls, just show voicemail. So you can still drill down into that list, even though they're all kind of intermingled based on time. But then you have the contacts tab.

And the keypad tab, and they are basically the same as they've been, right? Very straightforward. And then you have search over to the right because part of the liquid glass redesign is a lot of tab bars at the bottom of the screen. May not be full width. And they pick up a search on the far right side. And then the search expands into where the tab bar is. It's a nice little animation there. I understand why they made it optional.

I think changing the phone app is a really big deal for a lot of people. And it's been the same since the original iPhone. It hasn't really changed. And I think... And that's why it's optional. You know, I saw some people say online, like, well, it's because they're not sure of the design or they need to be bold. Or it's like, I don't think you mess with the phone app. Like, I think you leave it alone. And people who want the unified.

you know, we'll click yes or go find it. And so it's interesting. I'm using it, but it took me, you know, even me, like a power user. I feel like it took me a little while to kind of get the hang of it. And like, okay, yeah, filtering is really helpful here to like find all my voicemails because they're not in a dedicated tab anymore. Yeah, no, I think it's superior. I, you know, like you, I first looked at a little funny because I'm so used to.

just what it was. But if you spend some time in it, I mean, your favorites are at the top, recents are below that. Usually that's all you need, but... You can filter it as you wish. I was talking earlier about those messages I get on all the loans I get approved on. I can go delete those and mark them as spam very easily. I feel like it's actually better.

But I think it takes some work to get used to it. And I think for a lot of people, and I'm not talking about our audience, I think our audience is going to gain to kind of check it out. But a lot of people don't want it to change. They're like, yeah, I know where the buttons are. That's fine.

Sure, which is totally fair. Totally fair. I mean, it seems like there's a theme here this year. Like, they do have power user features, but they're always defaulting away from them. And that's an evolution of the product, right, over time. It does get more power usury features, but Apple sells millions of these things to people who don't want anything to change. I was just talking to someone the other day who says, yeah, I like my new iPhone, but man, I sure miss the button.

He's talking about the little button on the bottom with a thumbprint reader on the bottom. And that guy is never going to let go of that, right? Yeah. Because that's how he learned how to use an iPhone. And the fact that they changed one button. Still drives them a little nuts. The phone app also picks up, we mentioned the filtering, but it picks up some more advanced features. So if you go into the settings app and then phone, you can turn these on and off.

You've got hold assist detection. This is not in every country or language, but it's here. If you're on hold, it's playing hold music. Your phone will detect that and alert you when the person comes back to the line. notify you to pick the phone back up. Have you tried that? I tried it in the beta. I had to call Comcast for something because that's my life now. I had to say goodbye to my sweet AT&T Fiber.

And I mean, it worked, but I definitely realized like, I still kind of have to pay attention because if I don't pick up relatively quickly, are they going to think I'm gone and hang up? And then my hold was made useless. You know, I don't know. Yeah.

That's going to be a little like cat and mouse, I think, with call centers and stuff. I feel a little tense when it's there, right? It's almost easier just to leave the... lousy hold music playing because i i tried it a few times as well and each time i'm anxious it's like okay well

When they come back, I have to hit the button quick or I'm going to lose the call. And one time I did, you know, and it's like, yeah. So I'm not sure. I think it's a good idea, but I'm not sure how well it works, you know, just kind of given the nature of the whole system. yeah i think i think so too although call screening but baby i'm down with that all the way okay so three options uh screen unknown callers never

You can ask for the reason for the call, or you can silence unknown callers and send them straight to voicemail. Number three for the win. I just always go to voicemail, and I love that. That was a no-brainer for me. Yeah, because here's the thing. If it's an important call, they're going to leave a voicemail, right? If it's your kid's school because your kid is sick and for some reason you didn't have the number, they're going to leave a voicemail.

And so I think that's really a great set of options. And you've got filtering, so you can even hide those unknown callers from the main view. So they're out of your recents list as well. So yeah, I think messages and phone both have given users more control over how they want to see their stuff, but also trying to get rid of the stuff we don't ever want to see. Yeah. A big one.

especially for nerdy people like us, is in Notes, you can now export an Apple Note as a Markdown file. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, if you've got notes in your workflow and you also have Markdown somewhere, now you can send them over. Yep, import and export. I tested this a bunch in the summer, and it does a good job.

It doesn't really do anything unexpected. I mean, Markdown's relatively simple. And it's, you know, the data portability has always been something, like anytime we talk about notes, that comes up, right? This is a big step in the right direction for that. I mean, I'm all in on notes. I've got almost 600 things in there. But it's nice because sometimes copying and pasting out of notes gets kind of janky.

And so I could, yeah, you can export as Markdown and, you know, then put that in something like Marked or something else if you want to, to make it pretty again. So I'm super excited about that. Well, I mean, you and I share Notion databases for the work we do here. And we do sometimes have research in Apple Notes and Notion imports Markdown just fine. So we good. Yep. Voice recorder audio. I wanted to mention this, you know, the voice recorder app is just silently been getting better. And now.

The audio filtering and the microphone filtering got, I think, substantially better this year. So you can get a really clean recording even in a noisy environment. And the one-two punch here is that you can record your voice better than ever. And the onboard AI-based Apple intelligence transcription just keeps getting better. I mean, there are third-party apps about here. I've talked about Whisper Memos and some of the other ones that I like.

But if you want to do something entirely private on device and you don't want to spend any money, using voice recorder and the transcription feature these days is pretty good. Yeah, it's come such a long way.

it's private right it's doing stuff on device i think that's a sort of a hidden gem that continues to get a lot better yeah well i mean that's that is part of the boon of apple of artificial intelligence and apple intelligence too but the um I just feel like there are certain things AI is good at now, and then there are promises of what it's going to be good at in the future.

And I like to focus on the stuff that it can do now. And transcription is definitely one of those. That's the reason why we're also getting translation, universal translators in our AirPods because of AI. I think one last place to stop off today is the Files app. The Files app started life really pretty basic. I mean, just a mere shadow of the Finder. Let's just be honest. It started off terrible. It was just unusable. It's still not Finder, but it's come a long way.

This year, you get resizable columns and collapsible folders in the list view, like we've had in the Finder since, I don't know, 1980-something. A really cool thing is you can add folders to the dock. And just like you can on the Mac, it actually looks just like macOS stacks, which were new in Leopard. But great if you have a folder of PDFs that you need to get to a lot for a time period. You can put those on the dock, which is really cool. There's...

Folder customization, we're going to talk about that more next week, but that stuff's also on the iPhone and iPad. But I think the biggest deal in files this year is the open with menu. It's... It's really useful. Just like on the Mac, you can say, I want this text file to open in this app instead of this other app. You can choose it.

And you can set a file type to always open in a certain app. Again, like the finders, if you hit command I on the Mac, the get info window comes up. You say, no, I want all my text files to open a BB edit, not by word. And you can say, change all that's now. And it really makes it feel much more like a complete file system manager than it did before. The open thing was so annoying before. It was, yeah, such a point of friction. Yeah. Way better.

Yeah. And the files app doesn't suck anymore. I will say that it's not finder, but it's an iPad, right? So it's not supposed to be, but it's really a lot more useful. Yeah, big improvements against something I, along with preview, it's kind of two sides of a coin to a degree. Very useful for me this summer as we were super busy with a bunch of stuff.

And yeah, it's far less frustrating to use than it was. And of course, it still integrates with a third-party file provider. So someone who uses Dropbox, right? All that's just in there still. None of that's gone away, but they keep making it more powerful.

There's still room to go for sure, but I feel like this year they got a lot of low-hanging fruit taken care of. Yeah, okay. So overall this year, iOS and iPadOS, thumbs up? Yeah, absolutely. I mean... I love the customization. We didn't even talk about the lock screen with like, you put the widgets at the bottom, have your clock super tall and all that stuff. Like customization is a win across the board. I think the ability to filter.

Messages and phone calls with more powerful options is a huge win. And I think for people who want to use their iPad in particular, more like a computer, obviously a massive win with multitasking and files and preview and those things.

I think it's a great release cycle. And even though there's room to go on Liquid Glass, I don't think it holds this other stuff back, right? I don't look at this and think, gosh, these are some great features, but they totally bombed it on the UI. Because I don't think that. I think there's room to improve.

But I think it's way more usable than some people think it is. And so, yeah, I give it a thumbs up this year. Yeah, I'm going to be controversial. I agree with everything you said, but I even give liquid glass a thumbs up. I realize it needs work. But you've got to release it at some point. You do. And look at this as a point in time and just keep working on it, and it'll get better. And I think it's a good year for Apple software. We've been hard on them.

for years every time there's new ipad hardware it's like oh great now if ipad os just didn't suck right and this year they you know they uh they they deliver the goods i think When we get new iPad hardware, maybe even as early as next month, that's not going to be the complaint anymore. No. I would like to see them figure out a way to encourage more power user type iPad apps.

Because the hardware is so powerful. The operating system is good enough now. But I think that's kind of a chicken and egg thing. Now they've delivered the software. The hardware is good. Maybe that will encourage some developers to... to take a take a shot at some more powerful ipad apps i hope so the the it's so capable now but it's a lot of inertia to overcome for developers uh but i think that

I think the, I think it'll get there. And I think Apple, you know, finally, as of a couple of years ago, having found a cut in logic are good examples, right? That you can build powerful applications for the iPad. And I just hope that the more developers see that and realize that they can do it too. Do you think they've missed their window? I mean, everybody's so excited about AI, maybe people aren't going to be thinking about making iPad apps at this point. I mean, I think it's a risk for sure.

I think that a lot of developers wrote off the iPad because the phone was so successful. It's like, oh, well, my usage on the phone is so great. You know, why bother with the iPad or why put specific time into the iPad? But the future of software development on Apple's ecosystem and its platforms is an app that scales from the watch up to the Mac and TV. And if you really embrace that future.

then the iPad, you get a lot of the iPad stuff for free. And now with the menu bar and other things, like you can bring some of your Mac stuff to the iPad, some of it will happen naturally. But yeah, I do worry that the window... You know, it's definitely not as wide open as it was five years ago or 10 years ago when the first iPad Pro came out. But I think it'll get there.

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