- [Anthony] I went on vacation,
like an actual out of country vacation.
I packed my iPad,
strapped on my watch,
pocketed my iPhone
and took no other devices.
While I'd use the iOS 15 beta,
since our video talking about it,
on this trip I was about to be fully immersed
in the iOS 15 ecosystem
for about a week and a half.
Which included being fully immersed in rage
for 15 minutes on my flights.
Thanks to one of Apple's innovations.
But now, now I'm on the other side of the official release.
And I think I'm ready to talk about it.
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(electronic music)
IOS 15,
which we're going to use to refer to
both the iPhone and iPad versions for now,
has a lot of good things going for it.
Safari in particular, it became a lot more useful for me,
thanks to the new UI. Although from everything I've seen,
that's clearly not a universal opinion.
While I appreciate the easier access to tabs
and the better tab overview,
Mac address host, Jonathan Horst
disagrees and hates the new UI.
See,
he's something of a tab fiend,
while I'm more conservative
with how many tabs I open on my mobile devices.
So it really seems to depend on how
efficient you are.
To Apple's credit.
They seem to have taken this dichotomy seriously
and had been tinkering nonstop over the course of the beta,
which originally didn't even have a refresh button.
The idea being that you'd simply use
the new pull to refresh function,
but that didn't work on every website.
User outcry about it was, rightly, swift and loud,
so Apple just put the fricking button back in.
They also let you toggle the position of the tab bar
from the bottom to the top,
although they apparently didn't care whether
you'd like to change the new flat UI.
The biggest improvement to Safari by far
is extension support.
Safari previously had limited support for things like
content blockers and advanced sharing options,
but now it supports full fledged desktop style,
browser extensions.
Nawara and Dark Reader can do dark mode for any webpage.
HyperWeb can run custom user styles and scripts.
And 1Password can actually show pop-ins to fill forms.
Plus, many more.
Steve Jobs said Safari on iPhone
was just like the desktop.
And now, for the first time, that's kind of true.
Of course, if you're deep into Apple's ecosystem,
you already have your own password manager,
which has gotten a big upgrade in the form of a built-in
two-factor authenticator.
It's a nice touch that helps simplify the experience,
similar to how Apple Pay's changes
have simplified the checkout process.
I brought it up during the beta video,
but the new sheet for choosing a payment card
saves so much time when you're trying
to check out quickly online.
And you can do that without
revealing your email address now,
thanks to hide my email,
which works surprisingly well.
I've only used it a couple of times,
but what it does is set up
a randomly generated burner email.
You could use this, for example,
to set up filters to automatically
soar through your junk mail and keep
your primary email inbox spam free.
Or as spam free as it can be these days,
huh? (laughing track) uhhh....
Speaking of spam free,
turns out Focus in the new notification summary are
serious time savers, as long as you dial it in just right.
See the Focuses let you choose which apps,
or people,
get to bug you at any given time.
But that can lead to missing important phone calls,
when you get to work and your phone automatically enables
the work focus, and you get a call from the doctor's office,
but they use a private number. And your phone is like
"Nah uh Mr. Doctor. (voice effect)
Anthony has got something much more important to do."
like admiring the Ltt water bottles new colors,
and updated motherboard design at lttstore.com.
So what I'd really like to see is both a white list
and a black list in Focus.
So I could mute teams or my work email when I'm at home,
but still get those important calls.
Thankfully notification summary shows silence notifications
when I check it.
So maybe this is by design.
One feature I wouldn't make any changes to
is spatialization for stereo music,
which makes it sound like audio is coming from
a speaker in front of you
instead of directly from your headphones.
I mean, yeah, it seems pointless,
but it can actually help with listening fatigue,
which can affect some people who listen to music
or other audio for long periods of time.
Like yours truly. Apparently.
I thought this was the thing that everybody had.
Anyway.
There've been plugins that do the same thing
on desktop media player since the 90s
and Apple's tweak on it here is tracking
your iDevices position as the virtual speaker,
which thankfully you can turn it off,
If you think that's goofy.
iOS 15 has a few other features that might make you think.
"Huh? Okay."
The quick notes feature on iPad seems like a great idea
that I usually remember is there
only because I activate it by accident.
And I never remember the new car keys feature for
Apple Wallet, as cool as that may be,
because it's useless for anyone
who doesn't own a 2020 or newer model BMW.
Same deal with state ID cards and 3D maps,
which aren't widely available just yet.
But, if you live where they are
oh man, that will be so cool for you.
The Shared with You section, in Apple's first party apps,
would be a cool way to keep on top of things
that are, well, shared with you.
Provided that you, unlike me,
have many friends that are A. iPhone users
and B. sharing things with you.
Similarly,
FaceTime enhancements like portrait mode and grid view
would be great if I did more telecommuting.
And if spatial audio worked on AirPods,
instead of only your device's speakers,
seriously,
every other spacial audio enabled thing
only works on AirPods.
So I don't know what Craig Federighi was smoking
when he approved this feature,
but I do not want some.
Then there's some stuff that sounded cool on paper.
Like on-device Siri processing? Awesome.
Except only language processing gets done locally.
So you can't actually do much without an internet connection
other than set some timers and alarms,
launch apps and control media playback.
Unfortunately, you can't even have Siri
take a note while offline,
even if your default save location is on this iPhone.
And there's no clear reason why Apple
wouldn't let you do that.
Other than to assert dominance.
iCloud private relay sounded like a decent VPN alternative
for non-techies,
until I tried to use it at the airport.
Leading to 15 or 20 minutes spent wrangling
to try and get some kind of connection on my iDevices,
whether that be actual internet access
or just seeing the freaking in-flight menu.
Well, as it turns out,
when private relay is on,
you can connect to the in-flight wifi,
but you can't access anything
because private relay has to route through
Apple's servers first.
But private relay can't reach Apple's servers
without internet access.
Oh, okay,
so you just have to turn private relay off.
Uh uh uhu,
You can't turn private relay off
unless you have internet access already,
because if you don't have it,
the private relay options, in iCloud Settings
simply disappears.
This is literally a Catch 22.
Great, great book. Just pick it up sometime.
You can disable private relay on a per network basis
by going to the network properties,
but it doesn't always seem to remember this setting.
I eventually managed to get online
by mashing the wifi button
until private relay somehow stayed off.
To be fair to Apple, this feature is still in beta,
but, I didn't know that it meant
putting a strain on my sanity.
I was willing to forgive Apple though,
until I learned that while your watch
can now let you know if you've left your phone behind,
your phone can't let you know if you've
left your watch behind, for some reason.
And that was the last straw.
At this point,
it became clear to me that this whole thing feels
half-baked.
Even after factory resetting all my iDevices,
there are still a number of bugs and jang
things that just aren't Apple.
For all the good that I had to say about Safari,
for example,
I'm getting frequent crashes on iPad OS,
and while I'd love to pin an extension,
like One Password,
to the URL bar, I can't.
In fact, if I have more than two active extensions,
it hides them all behind this extension icon
with a number showing you how many you have.
This wouldn't be so bad,
if not for the fact that touching this,
doesn't give you the extensions menu.
It just gives you the standard page menu,
which you also get by pressing the menu button
right next to it.
Like why? Are you ready for another one?
The home screen on iPad
gets the same widget support as on iPhones,
but there's a cost, adding a widget,
no matter where or what size,
takes away a row from the grid.
Now this is presumably because on iPhone,
a widget starts at four icons worth of space
and the iPad has different spacing,
but Apple, was there no way, really, no way
to adjust the size of widgets on an iPad?
You can perfectly emulate x86 apps on arm,
but you got stumped by widgets?
I've also had some difficulty realizing
when I'm using multiple instances of an app
on the app shelf.
There are times when third-party apps open a new window,
without my realizing it.
And, it's not immediately obvious while using the app,
nor is it on the dock, nor even in the command tab switcher,
that this is the case.
At one point, I had about half a dozen
Safari windows open without realizing it,
which is just weird.
As a regular Mac iOS user,
I'd love to use the same command plus tilde shortcut
for switching between apps open windows here.
But no,
you simply have to interact with the shell for or use
the multitasking menu,
both of which do, thankfully, have keyboard shortcuts.
This seems, kind of boneheaded and really makes you wish
they'd give us proper window management on the iPad already.
I mean, heck,
there's no reason why Mac OS can't run right now
on M1 iPads. Right?
Right? Apple, please?
While we're talking about iPad OS,
there are still a number of bugs related to
Apple's wonderful $400 add-on,
the magic keyboard.
Let's open a new tab and start typing right away.
Wait, what? There are search results,
but what I typed isn't in the search bar.
If I keep typing now,
it just completely forgets whatever was there
and brings up new search results,
based on the most recent letters I typed,
this doesn't happen if I wait
until the new tab animation is finished,
but I am a busy man.
This is the kind of silly oversight that I expect
in beta software.
Not in a final release,
and especially not for hardware
that I spent
far too much money on.
There's more of that jank to be found on iPhone.
If a webpage supports reader mode,
it'll show a button on the address bar,
then fade out after a couple of seconds, if that,
I'm just going to enable a reader mode here and oop,
well, (beep) me, I guess.
And hey,
remember how Safari ships with a bottom bar by default now?
Well watch what happens when you rotate.
Excuse me, what?
This is on the final release of iOS 15.
Does this seem like Apple's usual level of polished to you?
And it's not even bringing up all the major features
that were promised,
but not finished in time for the release,
like Share Play watch together.
There seems to be a running theme with recent iOS releases
and indeed Microsoft's got their own share of things that
weren't done in time for Windows 11 either.
It really feels like the
release it now and patch it later mentality
is getting pushed to new extremes every year.
as many issues as there are though,
there are a ton of tiny little quality of life improvements
under the hood.
And we shouldn't forget about those.
Like there's an a magnification loop
when selecting texts now,
that's so natural that I forgot it wasn't a thing
in iOS 14.
There's the ability to transcribe text from
photos you've already taken,
which became super helpful for managing travel documents
with the Arrive Can App, on the way back to Canada.
The extra contexts to spotlight searches
means you can search for even vague subjects and photos
and it'll intelligently pull relevant results.
The magnifier app, once hidden behind accessibility options,
works great, and has come in handy already.
I mean, how often have you tried zooming in
on your phone's camera to read something really small
or at a weird angle.
You can quickly mute notifications from certain apps,
either temporarily or permanently
from the notifications shade,
and time-sensitive notifications like delivery
and ride sharing apps come through,
regardless of what focus you're on.
Safari automatically uses HTTPS whenever it can.
And background sounds can be used to maintain focus
or promote rest.
Oh, and watch OS, which I haven't even touched on at all,
because it hasn't changed that much,
does have a few quality of life features
of its own that I've used,
like being able to run multiple timers and label them.
They even show up on the always on display.
It'll be usually a couple of seconds off.
It's still useful for determining
roughly how far away a timer is though.
It also supports the new focus settings
and mirrors what you've set on your phone.
Can't say I'm a huge fan of the photo's watch face though.
I like to be able to tell what time it is on my watch,
not look at a pocket size photo whenever I raised my wrist,
but maybe I'm in the minority there.
I mean, I don't see a reason to upgrade
from the iPhone 11 series to the 13 series,
but I'm sure plenty of people will do it anyway.
Get subscribed, by the way,
because there's plenty more to say about that too.
And you won't want to miss it.
At the end of the day,
the iOS 15 series of mobile operating systems
has made my mobile experience
much more like the desktop one,
particularly on the iPad,
which is something I never thought I'd be able to say.
Is it perfect? Hell no.
But on the whole, is it good?
Yeah, I think it is.
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Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our video on the iOS 15 beta,
where I go over the features more generally, you know,
I had more that I was going to write here,
but that's kind of the end of the thought,
it's more general.
This is more of a,
I used it for a while and this is how I feel.