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 used 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 but first i'll talk about our sponsor
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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 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 tap 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 have been tinkering non-stop of of course 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 brightly swift and loud so apple just put the freaking
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
noir and dark reader can do dark mode for any web page hyperweb can run custom
user styles and scripts and one password 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 pays 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 sort through your junk mail and keep your primary email inbox
spam free or as spam free as it can be these days
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
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 mr doctor i think he's 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 blacklist 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 have been plugins that do the same thing on desktop media players
since the 90s and apple's tweak on it here is tracking your idevice's 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 activated 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 spatial 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 inflight wi-fi 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 ok so you just have to turn private
relay off you can't turn private relay off unless
you have internet access already because if you don't have it the private relay
option 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
wi-fi 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 i
devices there are still a number of bugs and jank 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
you want 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 macOS user i'd love to use the same command plus tilde shortcut for
switching between adap's open Windows here but no
you simply have to interact with the shelf or use the multitasking menu both
of which do thankfully have keyboard shortcuts this seems
kind of bone-headed and really makes you wish they'd give us proper window
management on the ipad already i mean heck there's 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's 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 web page 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 reader mode
here and oop well 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 polish to you and that'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 this 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 a magnification loop when selecting text 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 arrivecan app on the way back to canada the extra
context 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 and you can quickly remove notifications
from certain apps either temporarily or permanently from the notification 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 it 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 albeit usually a
couple of seconds off still useful for determining roughly how far away a timer
is though it also supports the new focus settings and mirrors what you've said 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-sized photo whenever i
raise 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
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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