(bright music)
- All right, another year, another version
of iOS coming to an iPhone near you.
It seems like usually these updates get smaller
and smaller and less and less crazy
but it feels like this year, for whatever reason,
Apple has packed a ton of stuff into iOS 17.
This is gonna be launching
in September when the new iPhone comes out
on everybody's iPhone, but it's in beta now
and I've been using it and there's a lot of stuff here.
I'm gonna try to pack it into a top five,
but it was kind of hard.
I've been using this iOS 17 beta for a few weeks now.
The public beta is out, so if you wanna try it
before the new iPhone even comes out, you can do that.
But let's take a look
at the five most impressive new things
that are coming to the iPhone.
But as we go through this,
I do want you to keep something in the back of your head.
Just just keep this in mind.
A lot of times in the past,
those features that we'd get were really, really big
because they were new capabilities.
Most if not all of these features
depend on having another iPhone in the mix.
Whether your friend has an iPhone
or your family has an iPhone,
you need two iPhones for a lot of this stuff to work.
Just something to keep in the back of your head.
All right, so number five, airdrop.
Airdrop is one of those things.
It's one of those features that when it works
it feels like it's one of the best things ever
but sometimes it's glitchy
and it doesn't work and it seems terrible.
So I hope some stability improvements are also
in the works here.
But basically Apple is expanding Airdrop to be more capable
and easier to use.
The big one is that
if you meet another person who also has an iPhone,
you can walk up to them and bump your phones together.
You literally hold your phones up next
to each other at a an inch or two apart
and it'll play this sweet animation as the phones talk
to each other and transfer a contact poster with your name
and contact info to that other person in a single touch.
It's called name drop.
It's pretty cool.
Couple things about this.
One is it lets you actually choose
which info you wanna share.
So you do that phone bump thing
and then it goes, oh, you wanna share something?
Do you wanna share just your phone number?
Okay, cool.
Do you wanna share your email address
and not your phone number?
You can switch it over to that.
Wanna share a fake number?
Sure. Program that in too.
This will all come from the my card
at the top of contact settings that you can customize
with whatever photo you want,
whatever fonts you want, et cetera.
And everything you change will show up to people
that have you in their contacts.
What's cooler though is you can actually now
bump to share photos or videos
or content, links or even start a share play session.
Basically it's making it easier to find a certain iPhone
on airplay by getting it roughly
within NFC distance of another iPhone.
And then you can share stuff.
And then another cool thing
typically Airdrop is a wifi direct connection
between two iPhones.
But if you leave each other, if you walk away
down the street and you wanna continue
this file transfer that hasn't finished yet
it will resume over cellular.
So it'll start uploading to cellular
and their phone will download
and you can just walk away and the airdrop should finish.
I dunno if you remember an app
from a while back called Bump.
This was in like 2009.
It was literally just an app to bump phones together
to share contact information.
Google ended up buying them.
But I do have a feeling that if they still existed now
this would be a sort of a Sherlock situation.
Just another example of the Remora Fish to Apples Shark.
If that reference doesn't make any sense
I'll leave a video link below
to the video that I did comparing Apple to sharks.
It makes sense when you watch the video, I promise.
So anyway, number four is a feature called personal voice.
So this one's an accessibility setting.
It's not even something that they talked about on stage.
This is something that is not meant
for most people to use, but it's pretty cool.
Anyway, so in settings then accessibility.
You scroll down to the speech section that's new here
and there's something called personal voice.
And you'll see a button that says Create a personal voice.
Basically what's gonna happen is your phone's gonna ask you
to take it to a quiet place, and then it's going to
display a number of phrases on the screen
and it'll ask you to say those phrases into the microphone.
It's 150 phrases.
They're pretty random.
It'll be like, Sally sold seashells in 1979
and the president of Morocco is very tall.
And you just go through the list and you say a bunch
of these phrases and when it's done, it compiles all
of your voice and will stitch together a new synthesized
voice that can say whatever you wanna make it say.
It does all of this locally on device, so it has
no servers involved, it doesn't send your voice
recordings everywhere.
It does all of the compilation overnight.
And at the end of this, you basically get a new voice
on your phone.
You can go to accessibility settings and then
enable live speech so that on the triple tap
of a power button, it brings up a text block
and you can type whatever you want to make the voice
say and then just hit, send.
- [Phone] A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
- Eh, it's all right.
Let's try another one here.
A little more substance.
- [Phone] 30 frames per second is the correct frame rate.
And anyone who says otherwise is probably lying to you.
- It kind of sounds like me and it's decently good.
I wouldn't pass it off as human
if I like played this recording to you
you wouldn't think it's a person
but it kind of sounds like I'm talking on the phone
to someone and it kind of has a poor connection, you know?
But this isn't some mainstream feature.
Like I said, it's an accessibility setting.
So a reason, this is designed
for people who may know that they're
at risk of losing their voice at some point
or maybe they're vocal cords fatigue after a long time.
There are conditions like that.
MTD is a common one.
And so they can sort of go
through this process and create a voice
on their phone so that they can continue to interact
with the world without using some generic Siri voice
and it actually kind of still sounds like them.
- [Phone] All right, let's move on
to the next bullet point number three.
The little things.
- The little things.
Apple's always tweaking
and adding little features here
and there to their stock apps especially.
There's a bunch of those this time around.
And in total you could say they add up
to a welcome refinement.
You probably heard about the new keyboard
which looks the same but should be way smarter
with transformer based auto correct and improved dictation.
It's much faster dictation actually.
Oh, and also that thing where you're typing a word
and then you spell it a little bit different
and then you hit space
and it corrects you and then you hit backspace
and type it the way you want again and hit space
and it corrects you again and it doesn't seem to learn.
They fixed that.
Also, widgets are thankfully interactive now.
The whole point of a widget I always thought
was to be able to view and interact with information
without jumping into the app
which is trying to suck you in.
I'm surprised it took this long
but I am happy to finally see that here.
And there's also now a bunch of new messages features
including one called check in.
This is good for I think either kids
or maybe significant others or friends.
You know the dance you do where someone's going somewhere
and you're like, all right, text me when you get there.
And then you wait
for them to text you back or you can share location
or you just have them text you when they arrive.
Now there's just a feature built in.
You just hit the plus button, you go to check in
whoever is going to be checked in
on can decide who to share their location with,
how much data they wanna share.
And then there's this nice little tracker that updates you
and lets them know when they've arrived where
they're supposed to.
And there's a bunch of other little stuff
like that sort of sprinkled around the OS.
No doubt you've noticed still a lot
of these depend on also having a friend with an iPhone.
That's how most of this works.
But you know, if you do have that ecosystem
in your life, then yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff
that adds up to a good welcome improvement.
Good little stuff.
So, all right, number two is called standby mode.
So when I first saw this feature
I thought it was really interesting
but now I've thought about this a lot.
The more I think about it, I have this so high
on the list because I think genuinely this is better
than a home pod for most people who already have an iPhone.
Basically it's a smart home display
so anytime your iPhone is both charging and horizontal,
it triggers the standby mode, which is basically a clock.
And then whatever useful widgets or photos you want to have
in the background, it really reminds me of the Apple Watch.
It kind of has a bunch of these preset layouts
and then you can literally swipe
between these three faces to find the one you like
and then swipe vertically to go
through the different styles.
So a lot of these, yeah
will look just like an Apple watch face.
But yeah, to be honest, very useful.
So that's already pretty convenient.
You can kind of just have it display information ambiently
to you, whether it's
on a nightstand or in your kitchen, whatever.
But then on top of that,
what makes it much more home pod like is the fact
that Siri is better in two ways.
First of all, it's conversational
so you don't have to keep hitting the button over
and over again to keep asking questions or follow ups.
You can just keep talking
and it keeps listening, which is great.
The other's been doing that forever.
And then the other is you don't have to say, hey, her name.
You can just say, Siri
what's the weather in Manchester on Saturday?
- [Siri] Expect rain
in Manchester, United Kingdom on Saturday.
Daytime temperatures will hover around 67 degrees
with overnight lows around 57.
- What about Sunday?
- [Sir] Expect rain
in Manchester, United Kingdom on Sunday.
- Thank you.
- [Sir] You're welcome.
- And then it sort of stops listening
but the idea is it's just gonna keep listening
and talking to you, and that's better than before.
Also, that weather is not great for golf, but I don't know
we'll make it work either way.
Big improvements to Siri there.
That's what makes it feel kind of like a, you know
a smart home display.
Now if only they could make Siri actually good
at other things.
So then number one, the top new feature in iOS 17.
I think we forget, our phones are still phones sometimes
but it's the phone app actually I'm combining
combining the phone app and FaceTime.
But generally there's a lot
of nice features that sort of just make it easy
to clean up and have a better phone experience.
First of all, are the contact posters.
Like I mentioned earlier, you set up your own contact poster
and then everyone else who has you
in their contacts gets that updated in their phone,
at least if they have an iPhone.
But then, yeah, whenever you call someone
that's what they see.
And this sort of automatically cleans up
everyone's contacts with a nice photo.
I know for one, I basically have no photos
for anyone in my contacts list outside of my family.
So this is a nice effortless improvement for that.
And then another fun piece is if someone calls you
and you don't pick up and it starts going to voicemail,
you'll actually get a live transcription
of the voicemail as they're leaving it.
And if you want to interrupt
and pick it up at any time, you still can.
Some of you are too young to know that that's actually
a throwback to physical answering machines that were
in people's houses where you could actually
hear someone leaving you a voicemail
and then pick up the phone and interrupt it
and actually talk to them.
Just, I'm old now, so I get to say stuff like that.
But also, FaceTime gets voicemail too
which you might be thinking, wait, it's FaceTime
it's a video.
So what is a FaceTime voicemail?
And it's literally just a video message.
So like if you're about
to FaceTime someone and show them something
but then they don't pick up, you'll just, you know
record your video and then send them the voicemail
and then it shows up
inside the FaceTime inbox, which is cool, but there you go.
That is it.
That is the iOS 17 biggest stuff.
Honestly, I think this is one of the biggest,
best updates to iOS in a long time.
And somehow there's still a bunch
of little stuff I didn't even mention
from camera effects to, you know, stickers all
over iMessage and stuff to Safari getting profiles now.
There's a lot of stuff, but again,
now that we've gone through all of it, don't forget
about how many of these things are intentionally just
for people with another iPhone in their life
whether it's a friend with an iPhone
or a family member with an iPhone, or you just met someone
with an iPhone from name drop to share play,
to all the iMessage features, the contact cards,
the FaceTime features, that's the ecosystem at work.
That's them going, hey, this is a cool new feature
but it'll only work if your friend also has an iPhone.
So maybe you pressure them into getting an iPhone too.
Either way, that's it.
Feel free to share this video
with others who will probably have this software update
on their phone sometime soon.
And until the next one, catch you guys later.
Peace.
(upbeat music)