iOS twelve is available as a free download today and it will make your phone run faster.
What's going on? I'm rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech.
iOS twelve was previewed back in June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, and now it is ready for prime time. The new software is scheduled to launch today for iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices.
I've been using the.
Beta version of it and it's pretty cool. It does bring some new changes. But first things first, who can actually get this? Well, if you have an iPhone, you can get this. If you have an iPhone all the way back to the iPhone five S, so five S and above you will get access to iOS twelve. With iPads, it goes all the way back to the iPad Mini two, iPad Air, iPad, fifth generation iPad pros, so you've got
a lot there. And with the iPod Touch only the latest sixth generation iPod Touch will be getting the update to iOS twelve. Now, the thing about this release is that Apple made it a point to tell us that this will actually make your old iPhones and old devices run faster. They made it a priority to make it so that this software runs speedier on even old devices. So that's some good news if you have an old phone. If you have an old device you want to breathe
some new life into it. I think you can probably squeeze an extra six months or a year out of your device if Apple's claims are true, and that's a good thing because it'll save you money. Apple says app's launch up to twice as fast, the camera launches up to seventy percent faster, and even the lowly keyboard will
appear faster on your screen and feel more responsive. Now, I've been running the beta on my device, which is an iPhone ten, and this is a new device, so clearly it has the best processor, or well, it used to have the best processor until the new A twelve Bionic came out in the new phone. But it does seem snappier, and although this version of iOS doesn't bring a huge visible change, there are a lot of nice
little touches and especially things under the hood. The first thing you'll probably notice is how it handles your notifications. They are now grouped together by default, so they're much easier to manage, especially if you get a bunch of notifications all from one app like Instagram. You can see them all kind of like in a little stack, and then you can tap to expand them to see them
all one by one. Now, if you don't like them grouped together, and for certain apps you might like to have them stay one by one, you can go into the notification settings for that individual app and change it, or you can turn off grouping all together.
Now.
The other new big thing is a revamp of Do not Disturb and the introduction of screen time. These are two items that should help with our digital wellness, but that remains to be seen.
Who knows.
So with do not Disturb, the big difference here is that you can now choose a bedtime option, so your phone will not show you a whole screen full of notifications when you're trying to sleep at night.
Come on, you know you've done it.
You kind of like wake up in the middle of the night and you take a little sneak peek at your phone and you see.
All those notifications and you're like, oh my gosh, now I'm stressed.
Out because I want to reply or look at all those Well, that will no longer happen if you turn this feature on. It's a new toggle under your do not Disturb settings, it says bedtime and basically so there's two different things you've got do not disturb, which kind of like doesn't ring your phone unless it's important. But now if you add the bedtime option in, it actually won't even show you anything on your screen when it's bedtime. I highly recommend doing that because we need some digital
wellness in our lives, so do that. And you can also have this turn on with the bedtime feature, So if you're not using this, I highly recommend you use it. If you're using a standard alarm to wake you up, you probably want to switch to bedtime. It's a little bit trickier to set up because you kind of have to use a slider to set your alarm, but it's so much better because bedtime alarms actually wake you up gently.
Their audio slowly gets louder in the morning.
So if you're familiar with the standard iPhone alarm, there's only one setting. It's basically really loud, really blaring, all in your face all at once, and for me, I can't deal with that early in the morning, So I love the bedtime feature because it slowly gets louder. Screen Time is also fascinating because now you can see how long you spend in each app and on your phone in general. And more importantly, you can now set limits on yourself and your kids.
So there's a feature called downtime. This is new.
It's sort of like do not Disturb, but it's for apps. And once you turn it on, you only have access to certain apps of your choice. So some apps you can say you always have access to, like your phone and your camera, but you can turn off access to these other apps on your phone if you have downtime turned on. And you can also turn this on for your kids devices, which will really come in handy. And you can also have it turn on automatically and off
at certain times of the day. Like let's say you want them to read in bed for an hour before they go to sleep. You can have this downtime feature turn on at let's say seven pm if they're supposed to go to bed at eight pm. Basically it renders their I devices useless, so hopefully they read the book. And yes, your kids are not going to like you for turning on this feature. I can guarantee that. Then
you have something called app limits. These are time limits that you can set on individual apps or categories of apps like social networking, entertainment, games, reading, and more. You don't have to put the apps into these categories. Apple automatically does it. So for me, I've been setting a one hour time limit on all my social networking apps, and yeah, I pretty much reached that.
Limit, like in the morning most days.
So once you reach your limit, the app is greade out and you see a little kind of sand timer next to it, and that tells you, Nope, no more time on this app. So if you want, if you still want to use that app, you can just tap it and it will give you a little menu to say ignore, and you press ignore, and then you could ignore for fifteen minutes or the full day. And once you ignore that app, it doesn't it doesn't affect the
other apps. So all the other social networking apps are still grade out, so basically you can kind of use them on a one by one basis. Now for me personally, in the social networking is included Facebook Messenger is included in there, and that's kind of like an oversight.
I got to figure out how to take that out of the.
Social Networking bundle because I'd still like to use that even when I'm not using Twitter or things like that. You can also set a pass code so your kids can't just ignore these time limits. And there's the ability to combine you usage times across devices, So if your kid has an iPhone and an iPad, or if you do, you can have one timer across all your devices. So if you use Twitter on your iPhone and your iPad, you can say, look, I only want to use it
for an hour across everything. This is a pretty powerful feature. I think Apple did a really nice job on it. Obviously, it will evolve as people use it and as Apple gets feedback on it, but I think it's a good thing for us to have this. Personally, I cannot wait to limit my kids to one hour of Netflix a day. I will be updating their iPads with that, and yeah, they'll probably disown me as their dad. The other thing I'm super excited about in iOS twelve is Seriri shortcuts.
You can find these under settings and Siri and Search. You'll notice there's a few suggested shortcuts already made for you. But what's brilliant about these is that you can now set a shortcut of your making, plus an associated SII phrase, kind of like a keyword phrase that you come up with what Siri reacts to. For instance, phone will listen to my podcasts and navigate to work in the morning.
I could set a series shortcut that says I'm headed to work, and when I say that, Siri would spring into action, playing my morning podcast playlist and then navigating to work for me. So she kind of does this little routine of things, and you do record the serie shortcut, So you come up with the phrase and then there's a little record button and you record it, and I guess Siri reacts to that the.
Next time, so it's kind of cool.
Keep in mind, individual apps do have to activate all these shortcuts in there, so you might not have a ton of shortcut options all on day one. But I think this is really going to extend the functionality and usefulness of Siri in a very big way. Another thing I'm very excited for, and this doesn't apply to everyone, but now CarPlay in iOS twelve has support for third party navigation apps. So nothing against Apple Maps. It's beautiful, but I'll be honest, I like to use my Google Maps,
so that will now be available in iOS twelve. Ways will be available other third party navigation apps will be available.
The big question is when will they be available. Now.
If I was Google, I would have it immediately available day one, but I don't think that's how Google works. Hopefully we'll see Google Maps and way on CarPlay very soon when we plug our phones in in our car. Now for other little improvements, there are some revamped apps, like the Voice Memo app. It's all new and now auto titles your memos based on your GPS location. Plus it can sync your audio files to iCloud. There's a new virtual tape measuring app called Measure. This uses augmented
reality to measure things. It's kind of cool. iBooks is now renamed Apple Books that has a whole new look and feel, and the battery now shows a lot more information. So the battery stats inside your settings now shows you a whole bunch of stuff. For instance, you can now see which one of your apps are using the most battery over time. So for me, over the past ten days, it is Google Photos twenty four percent of my battery.
But that's fine because I know I'm backing up a lot of pictures, then Twitter, then Camera, then Instagram.
For me.
You can also now see your average screen time and screen off time for your battery.
So for me.
Today or I guess the last ten days, I got four and a half hours on my charge and then two hours off my charge, So I guess that means I got six and a half hours of battery life on a charge on my iPhone ten. That seems kind of low, but I do do a lot of stuff on my phone, and again that's an average. So maybe one day I use my phone for like a Facebook Live and I use a ton of battery in a short amount of time. But today I'm averaging eight and
a half hours on my battery, so that's good. Anyway, you can see how iOS twelve will bring a whole bunch of new stuff to your iOS devices. I know some of you do not like to download these things immediately. That's fine, but I will say the beta of iOS twelve has been rock solid, so if you want it, you can check for it in your settings, go to General then Software Update, or you can wait for a
notification from Apple. Usually these things hit earlier in the morning, but who knows, it could happen anytime during the day.
Thanks so much for listening.
You can find links to everything I talk about here at richontech dot tv, or you can check the show notes. Also, I was up in Petaluma over the weekend, so I filled in for Leo Laporte on his radio show, and also did an episode of the new Screensavers on Twitter. So if you want to see any of that stuff, I'll put all the video and audio you in the show notes. You can watch that, listen to that, and also put it on my website as well.
I'm Rich Tomiro. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon.