Simply put, you cannot use the iPad as a
computer replacement.
Well, at least that's why I would've told you last year
going into WWDC with iPadOS 16 on the horizon.
But now a year later, Apple has seemingly addressed all the
concerns that I had in iPads 17 or have they?
Well, today we're talking about everything that Apple addressed
in iPadOS 17, including all the features that are brand new,
some of the features that are still not working, like kind of
a gross oversight if you ask me, and how Apple can
address those features before the fall when iPadOS
17 comes out.
My name is Mike.
Let's get started.
Starting with number one, FaceTime.
Now FaceTime gets four new features in iPadOS 17, all of
which are really quality of life improvements.
The first feature coming to FaceTime in iPadOS 17 is the
ability to leave a voicemail when making either a voice or a
video call with FaceTime, I know voicemail.
Hey listen, it's the future.
Now on the receiving end, if you're someone who gets a
FaceTime voicemail, I'm able to view that message from my
device in the FaceTime app and then give you a call back
from there, I can even save the message.
Now the second feature coming to FaceTime in iPadOS 17 is the
ability to make FaceTime calls using an external USB camera.
Now, I think this is a great improvement coming
to FaceTime because, really, that camera on the iPad
looks like a potato cam.
You can use a USB webcam or it could even be a mirrorless
camera like I'm using here to record this video and connect
it directly to your iPad via USB-C or USB-A.
And not that everyone has a mirrorless camera, but you
might even have a webcam that you can pick up for 60, 80,
a hundred dollars and get better quality out of it than
you do with your iPad FaceTime camera.
Now the third and final feature coming to the iPad in iPadOS 17
is messaging effects.
This allows you to convey extra context while on a
FaceTime call, just like how you do in the Messages app.
These effects include hearts, storms, excitement,
laser beams, and there's a couple other ones.
Now I've tried it with an iPad Pro and iPad Mini and an
iPad Air, and it does work on all of those.
If you have a device that's not working, let me know in
the comments below.
Now, the second group of features coming to the iPad and
iPadOS 17 are improvements to Stage Manager,
which many people, including myself, are excited
because it greatly improves usability.
Many of you who are watching this video really want to use
your iPad as a computer replacement because not only is
it thin, light, and portable, it also is highly conformable,
and it really makes the iPad a, I think very easy
default choice to pull up and start using.
So first, there is significantly better window
management in iPadOS 17 with Stage Manager.
This feature is a big improvement because windows
can be moved around freely without conforming to
any special sizing.
It's almost as good as the Mac, not like for like,
but in a way, it's certainly far better than the
first iteration, which was iPadOS 16.
Now the second feature coming to Stage Manager in iPadOS 17
is the ability to add apps to an existing stage with just a
click of the mouse.
This can be done in one of two different ways.
If you're in tablet mode, so you're holding the tablet,
you can hold your finger on the top bar where the
hamburger menu is, and then you can choose the app with your
other hand that you want to go ahead and open.
Or if you are in keyboard mode, you can hold on
to the command key, alright?
And use your mouse or the trackpad to click and open
the other app.
Those apps can be anywhere that you find them,
including whether they're on the dock,
Whether they're in the app library or on the home screen.
Now the third feature coming to Stage Manager is the ability to
configure Stage Manager in the preferences and settings and
have it apply to new Windows.
Now the setting itself isn't new because it was there
last year, but how it reacts is a little bit different.
So if you open up settings, navigate to multitasking,
and you go to where you select one of the three different
multitasking modes, the first option is gonna be single app.
The second option is gonna be split view, and the third
option is going to be Stage Manager.
If you choose Stage Manager mode, anytime that you
add an app, whether it's from the dock or from the
app library, it automatically enables Stage Manager, so you
don't have to actually turn it on.
You don't have to go to control center and hit the toggle to
do so, which it just cuts down on the number of keystrokes,
which is just a, again, it's a benefit, quality of
life benefit, quality of improvement,
quality of life, quality of experience.
There you go.
Now the next set of features I want to discuss is coming to
notes in iPadOS 17 covering again three core improvements.
First is the ability to add a link to an existing note.
This will be done one of three different ways.
I can long press on the screen and choose link to note.
I can use a keyboard shortcut, which is command K, or I can
input a right facing Chevron to get the context menu and link
to a note.
Second, the notes app, much improved PDF handling,
allowing me to add several PDFs to a single note and seamlessly
scroll through them.
Adding PDFs was new last year, a single pdf, but now you can
have multiple PDFs in the same note and it just handles it.
It's a little bit more graceful.
I've had instances where it crashes the notes app,
so this year, it's doing a little bit better than that.
And then third and finally, it's the ability to add a
new font, which they're calling mono styled or mono style.
Now I use mono style to add a quote or draw my visual
attention to something, letting me know that something
should be important, paying attention to moving on.
The next thing Apple fixed in iPadOS 17 is the health app.
Now, I wouldn't necessarily call it a fix, and I wouldn't
say that the health app isn't particularly sexy like no one's
like batting down the door saying
"Give me the health app on the iPad"!
But still, for a certain demographic of people in
their mid-forties, like me, there's a tangible benefit to
viewing this type of information on a
larger screen.
I don't have to pull out my glasses, I don't have to
pull out my cheaters.
I can just view it on the iPad and especially on
the 12.9-inch iPad; it's great.
Now the next set of features coming to the iPad and iPadOS
17 are enhancements to your iPads home and lock screen.
Several improvements are coming this year and it really brings
the iPad to parity with the iPhone from last year's iPadOS
16 or iOS 16.
But then it also elevates both the iPhone and iPad up on that
level with new features specific to
this year's release.
First you can create a lock screen experience,
which uniquely reflects your own style.
Everything from the clock font, to the wallpaper
itself can be customized.
You can rotate your wallpapers like throughout the day every
time you wake it up, giving you several different wallpaper
options for that.
You can link your lock screen to a specific focus mode like
you can on the iPhone.
You can add blur and stylized photo effects.
It's all very well thought out, and I would
say it's probably more feature complete than it was last year
in iOS 16.
Now you can edit your lock screen in one of
two different ways.
First, if your device is locked, you can press down
on the screen while the device is locked and you'll get the
edit menu or second, you can navigate to settings,
wallpaper and choose add new wallpaper.
The second change coming to the home and lock screens is gonna
be interactive widgets.
You can have a different set of interactive widgets on the lock
screen depending on the orientation.
So whether it's in portrait mode or landscape mode, you can
have different widgets that are gonna be displayed to
you there.
Now this is really cool because it gives you the ability to
really granularly change your iPad depending on how you use
it and which orientation you're using it.
Now in the public beta release only the first party apps from
Apple are interactive and if an app has widgets that are
available on the iPhone, they're automatically available
on the iPad as well.
So you shouldn't have to like, like look for new apps.
They should be automatically available.
Now the final enhancement coming to the lock screen in
iPadOS 17 is live activities.
I don't know how much sense this makes to bring live
activities on a device that doesn't have the
dynamic island, right?
We're we're hopefully gonna get a new iPad Pro I think
this fall, but if not it would be March of next year.
But I would appreciate the iPad Pro if it had thinner bezels
because then the FaceTime camera would be recessed into
the dynamic island.
but I think kind of more broadly, it makes sense
in the context of Apple releasing an iPad like device
that is a like a home hub where you can, you know, everyone can
manage their life so to speak on the home hub that says where
I think it makes more sense and I actually did talk about that
in previous video, which I'll link in the cards above.
Moving on all the features coming to the lock screen in
iPadOS 17 in terms of customization apply to the home
screen as well.
This includes interactive widgets and the ability to
place those widgets anywhere on the screen, which is a new
feature this year in iPadO S 16, excuse me, iPadOS 17.
This means that widgets can be placed anywhere unlike iPadOS
16 where the widgets were kind of bound to predetermined
locations and they always had to be adjacent to an app
for some reason.
I have no idea, but now this year you could place
an app anywhere.
You could have one screen with one small widget and that
widget can be anywhere.
It could even be in the middle of the screen, which is a
nice enhancement because, again, you get to use the iPad
how you want to use it, and you're not bound by Apple's
quote-unquote silly logic.
Now next up, this feature I'm gonna talk about is not
specific to the iPad and iPadOS 17, but it's a really
big quality of life improvement for any of those who
are using AirTags.
Now new in iOS and iPadOS 17, this year is the ability to
share an AirTag with someone.
So whether you wanna keep track of your kid or your dog,
you can share the air tag or access to the air
tag with anyone, including your spouse or a loved one,
which makes total sense.
Previously, like my wife couldn't see my son's air tag,
and I always had to be the one that tell her, told her she
couldn't see it if I wasn't available.
It was just, again, real klugy the way that it was done,
but they share it's much more refined user experience.
Now privacy is getting several enhancements,
including calendar and photo access.
So now I can grant read or write access to my calendar
into my photos, but I'm also getting an occasional
reminder saying, "Hey listen, you've enabled this access for
this app, they have access to your metadata, they have access
to all your calendar invites.
Do you wanna go ahead and continue this?
It's almost like the location sharing that was done.
I think it's an iOS 15 or iOS 16.
They're bringing that now to more things that really hold
sensitive information, much like your calendar and
much like your photos and metadata.
I would actually like to have the ability only to
view photos, not get the metadata from that.
That would be a feature that I would be looking for.
Now autocorrect is getting updated, allowing for
much better use of what I would call a customized dictionary
that is unique to you and applies to both the software
and the hardware keyboards.
So if you're writing ducking a lot for some reason,
you shouldn't have to rewrite that all the time.
It should allow you just to use the word that you want to use
without actually autocorrecting you to ducking.
Now inside of Safari there are really two changes that are
coming that are actually I think worth noting.
First is browser profiles.
Now this allows you to have one set of bookmarks,
search history, cookies, tab groups, et cetera,
associated with a personal profile and then a completely
different set of information associated with a different
profile like work or professional.
This makes the data distinct and separate.
I really like this feature and I want Apple to build this out
a little bit more so when I change my focus modes it
there's a focus filter for which browser profile are you
on?
I haven't seen that yet, but I would expect that to come to
the beta very soon, if not maybe in a future release
of iPadOS 17.
Now the second improvement locks your private browsing
tabs behind your password or biometric authentication.
So it's nice that you don't have to worry about people
creeping in on your browser tabs and seeing what
you're searching for.
Now next, there are gonna be improvements of Siri and I
apologize in advance if I activate your Siri first.
You can activate Siri just by saying Siri.
You don't need to say, Hey Siri.
Second, just like the home pod today, your IP can handle
multiple concurrent timers, which is kind of amazing that
we haven't had that seeing that it's been on the home pod for I
think maybe at least three years.
And finally you can activate Siri on a voice call and ask
her to do things which is new.
To get to this feature, you go to settings, you go to Siri and
then choose Siri on calls.
Next is airdrop and the speed and reliability of airdrop has
been greatly improved.
I dunno, it's been, it's probably about two or
three years maybe since the day of the iPhone 12 where it just
felt like airdrop is slow and sluggish constantly and I get
these timeouts when trying to send messages or trying to send
airdrop something from my phone to my Mac or vice versa and now
it's lightning fast.
I don't have those problems anymore.
There's also improved PDF support throughout the OS where
first you can autofill P information either from a phone
capture or photo capture or from a document which like
magic the way that it is.
It's a great feature.
And second, when you open up a PDF on your iPad, it actually
opens up the PDF in a separate window and that window is not
bound by the same constraints that the PDF is itself, so you
can move it around independently.
The last improvement coming to iPads that have it on one
chipper later is gonna be improved
external display support.
So there's two different aspects of that.
First, if you're using an iPad with an external display,
and let's just say that external display does not
have speakers, you can connect your iPad to a pair of
headphones like Bluetooth headphones and get the
audio that way.
Where before you could not.
Second is if you have your iPad connected to an external
display and that external display has a webcam, you can
then use that webcam for FaceTime, which is gonna be
new this year as well.
Now with all the new features and improvements in iPadOS 17,
there are still several features that do not exist.
Either they're completely just not there, or they have
yet to be fixed in iPad.
And the first one, it's so obvious to me, and it's gonna
be obvious to you once I say this, but you cannot use
your iPad in clamshell mode.
If I close the lid of my iPad while connected to the magic
keyboard and an external display, it actually
sleeps the iPad display.
This is probably the silliest thing I have ever heard because
I would think that the team who's developing these features
is saying to themselves, okay, we're gonna launch
external display support.
Like, what are the features that are kind of adjacent or
that you'd want to use to the, you know, with this?
And I would think that you know, using your iPad in
clamshell mode is right there with a feature that should
be bundled together.
Now this next one really grinds my gears on both sides because
I experience it on my iPad Pro, and I experience it
on my iPad Mini.
It is so frustrating that you cannot differentiate the app
layout or the app density per device.
It absolutely makes the iPad mini look atrocious.
There is no calculator app in 2023.
I have no idea what they're doing there.
And I would say the last feature that I'm really
surprised that Apple has not brought, even though it's
been hinted at, you could see it today if you're running an
iPad and it has at least iPadOS 15.4 if I'm not mistaken,
you cannot unlock your iPad using your Apple watch.
The feature's been available in the settings menu.
So if you go to settings, you swipe down pulse search,
and you type in unlock, it'll show unlock
with Apple Watch.
But this feature is there.
Maybe it needs more testing; maybe it needs
more refinement.
But I would love to see the unlock of my iPad with my Apple
watch just like I do with my iPhone.
Now I wanna know from those of you who are watching, is the
iPad powerful enough to replace your home computer or the
computer that you have right now?
Or are there features missing for you to make the switch?
Now, comment down below if you made it this far; drop a
dolphin emoji so I know who made it to the end.
My name is Mike.
It's been great talking to you guys, and I'll talk to
you in the next one.