The new Apple OS Betas have been out in the wild for just over a week as I make this video,
I’ve been playing around with all 4 of them, and in this video I’m looking specifically
at the changes that are coming for the iPad. A theme in this year’s updates is that a lot
of changes are coming across the board to iPhone, iPad and Mac, and as I’ve already made videos for
iPhone and Mac, link to those in the description of this video by the way, I decided that in this
video I wouldn’t repeat myself, I’ll just focus instead on what’s coming specifically to the iPad.
iPadOS17 isn’t exactly flush with new features this year, but there’s definitely a few gems
in here, stick with me until the end of the video to see them all. I am as ever using the
developer Beta here, this is just a preview of what’s coming rather than a tutorial,
and just so we’re all clear, I’ve put the compatibility requirements for iPadOS17
onscreen now, hopefully your iPad model is included here, meaning you’ll be able to take
full advantage of all these new features, when they arrive most likely in September of 2023.
OK, let’s get into it.
**Lock Screen**
The Lock Screen on your iPad now looks like the Lock Screen on your iPhone and your Mac,
Apple are definitely bringing their design language together on these latest OS updates. That
means that you get the familiar date and time at the top, complete with the depth effect in photos,
but it also means that you get widgets that you can drag across to the Lock Screen. I must admit,
I’ve found app developers a bit slow to make really useful Lock Screen widgets on the iPhone,
but I have found a few this past year, and so I’m hoping that the same will be
true over the next few months, as developers start producing them for the iPad as well.
**Live Video Wallpapers**
So, a little while back on the iPhone, you could use a Live Photo as your Lock Screen and see a
little video of the Live Photo each time you viewed your phone’s Lock Screen. I loved it
as a feature, I talked about it here on the channel, and then Apple took it away for some
reason. But now they’ve brought it back, on both the iPhone and here on the iPad.
So when I change my Wallpaper, I can then go into my photo library, and choose a Live Photo,
I’ve found that this only works with some Live Photos at the moment, I don’t know if
that’s a glitch in the developer beta or whether there’s a rule about the type you can select,
but I tried it with a few and found this one, and you can see that when you go to
your iPad’s Lock Screen, it does this really cool little video animation with a slow-down effect.
**Live Activities**
This is a feature that I can’t help but feel has been put here in preparation of a future
iPad model, you can view live activities on your Lock Screen on iPad now, just like you
can on the iPhone. So for example, if you’ve ordered food or if you’re tracking a flight,
you can see that information and it will update in real time on your Lock Screen, or the example
that I’ve got here is creating Timers, which you can create multiples of now by the way,
thanks finally Apple. When you go to your Lock Screen, everything is there, as you’d expect.
The problem is, your iPad is designed to have your screen go to sleep when you’re not using it. Live
Activities, if I’m honest, make the most sense on a device like the iPhone 14 Pro, with it’s
always on display. And it does make sense here, the one I use all the time on my iPhone is RingGo
for parking, I don’t have to wake my iPhone up to see how long I’ve got left on my parking session,
it’s there right away on the screen. This, to me at least, suggests that an upcoming
iPad is going to have an always-on display, because I could absolutely see live activities
making a LOT of sense in that situation, perhaps we’ll see something in September.
**The Proper Weekly**
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the proper weekly. I include some tech news from the week, a behind the scenes of what’s happening
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each Friday, it’s free to join, and I’ll include a signup link in the description of this video.
**USB C Webcam Compatibility**
This was a change that I really didn’t see coming, you can now use external webcams with your iPad.
The example that Apple show in the preview documentation on their website is connecting
an iPad to a Studio Display and using the in-built camera, but I think a more practical example of
this for most of us is going to be plugging in a USB C webcam like this, the Insta360 Link webcam
which I did a review of a while back by the way, I’ll link to it in the description of the video
if you’d like to check it out. Even here on my iPad mini, where the built in webcam is
already pretty good, the Link is much better and really portable, so I can see this being a major
productivity feature for people travelling on business for example. I also wonder if this means
the same functionality will come to the iPhone 15, as we’re expecting that to be a USB C phone.
**PDF Improvements**
Working with PDFs was honestly pretty good already on the iPad, but it’s now even better, thanks to
the inclusion of a couple of key features. You no longer have to tap into PDFs to view them in
a separate window, you can scroll through them right in the Note itself, and by tapping on the
markup icon, you can then use your finger or your Apple Pencil to quickly annotate PDFs right from
within the Notes app. You can select and highlight text all from within Notes, and your iPad will
even establish whether the PDF you’re viewing has editable fields, and allow you to autofill
those fields from your stored information, and Apple claim that this will work for scanned PDFs
as well. If you’re collaborating on a Note with someone, you can jump onto a FaceTime or Audio
Call with them right from within the note, so if you’ve got a document that you need to review with
someone and you’re struggling to do it face to face, with iPad OS 17 you’ll be able to.
**Health app comes to iPad**
I’ve wanted this for a while now, the Health app is great,
but it’s been an exclusive to iPhone feature ever since its conception. That now changes,
with the Health app featuring in full on your iPad. Now for most people, I’m guessing
that you’re going to be creating most of your data on your associated iPhone or Apple Watch,
things like step-tracking etc are just going to log automatically when you move around,
and iCloud then pulls all of that data together, but I think being able to view
it here on the iPad is a much better experience than trying to view it on a tiny screen. You
can really dig into the individual information categories using the familiar sidebar navigation.
**Autofill Verifications**
We all understandably get excited about the big, obvious, glitzy changes in new operating systems,
but sometimes it’s the small changes, that actually have a meaningful impact on how you
use your device, and I think that this is one of those changes. If you’ve ever browsed a website
where you have to input a code sent to your email, in order to login, in iPadOS 17 your iPad
will identify that code in your inbox and input it for you right away, saving you an annoying step.
**Stage Manager is better**
I think Stage Manager is one of those ‘love it or hate it’ functions on the iPad,
I used it quite a lot in the beginning, but then found myself switching it off,
and I think Apple know that people have been doing this, because they’ve made some key
improvements to Stage Manager in iPadOS17. There’s now an entire section in Settings
all related to multitasking and gestures. And as you can see, you do now have quite
a bit more control over how you position and resize windows within Stage Manager,
which is useful I guess, although I honestly feel that the experience should have been
like this when Stage Manager was launched. I’ve got the 11 inch iPad Pro to work on with this,
where I kind of find the screen a bit too small to make full use of Stage Manager, let me know
in the comments if you use this on the larger iPad Pro, or if you don’t bother with it at all.
**End**
So there you go, that’s 8 new features coming to iPadOS this year which I think are worth
knowing about. There are others, like I said at the start of this video, some are coming
across the board to iPhone and Mac also, and some are pretty minor updates that I didn’t
think were worth talking about here. What do you think, are you looking forward to iPadOS17? Or,
do you think it’s a lot of unwarranted hype? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.