It's that time of year when all your Apple devices get the notification.
There's a new OS!
It is exciting because every year Apple adds handy features to their apps and services
to make the devices more useful. And there are quite a few announced at WWDC this year.
But it is also scary because what if you're on the tail end of that OS support, running
the oldest and slowest devices? Will the update make them worse?
To find out, I downgraded.
Yes, I'm going to be switching to Apple's slowest supported devices, not the oldest.
So that means I'm using the Core i5-powered Mac Mini with only 8GB of memory, rather than
a still quite powerful iMac Pro, which is getting the update and technically older.
I'm also switching to the 2020 i5 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, the 7th generation iPad
and the iPhone XR. This should be interesting.
Here's a list of all the new features that Apple is promoting in their new OS updates.
The biggest one, of course, is their Apple Intelligence AI features.
They won't be available when these operating systems roll out, but that doesn't matter
because Apple Intelligence won't work on any of these older devices anyway.
Neither will any of these features, like live audio transcription in phone call recordings.
Then there are a few more announced features that are coming eventually but won't be
arriving at launch either, like mail categorization.
And finally, there's the region lock features. There are still a lot of features left, but they really don't deserve equal billing.
Safari video picture in picture, so what? And so, I updated.
Using the iPhone XR with iOS 18 Public Beta 5, after a few weeks with previous reversion
installed, I can't say that I noticed it worked any slower than before.
Every life still seems to be the same, too, which is bad because this iPhone is 6 years
old now. As for new features, the most important, in my opinion, is RCS support.
Even if Apple spent so little time announcing this back in June, I almost missed it.
In case you're wondering, RCS stands for Rich Communications Standard, and it basically
brings green bubbles into the 21st century. So all of the features you're used to with blue bubbles, read receipts, typing indicators,
reliable group chats, are available, except encryption.
You can see if a chat is in RCS in the typing box, though I kind of wish they made RCS have
teal bubbles. It really is exciting, but I have one group of friends that all use Android phones.
RCS means we should finally be able to set up a reliable group chat.
Yet, two of them don't have RCS working properly, which is surprising to me because I thought
Google was advocating so hard for RCS adoption.
And even when everyone gets it set up, the experience is inconsistent in terms of what
the iPhone user sees and what the Android user sees.
RCS isn't the only thing Android users have that is finally coming to the iPhone.
There's also T9 dialing, and the ability to not only place Apple icons anywhere on the
home screen, but recolor them as well. I don't mind the dark mode icons, but I really find the app icon tinting unacceptable.
Ugh. Hideous. So should you update your iPhone?
Yes. But I'll explain more a bit later.
Alright, now to the iPad. The slowest supporting iPad contains an A10 chip.
This chip is two generations older than the iPhone XR's.
In fact, it's from the iPhone 7.
Surprisingly, despite this, I found the iPad to be perhaps the least impacted by updating.
Maybe I'm less demanding of my iPad than of the other devices, but I kind of find it
amusing that the oldest chip-wise is the most robust.
So no downsides. So what are the upsides of updating?
A calculator app. I love how the basic calculator looks like those giant calculators you'd buy your parents
as a gag gift. And this even gets math notes too, though I'm going to need some help to figure that out.
You guys do math, right? Yes. So there's a new math feature on iPadOS where you can just write out math problems and calculate
them. Just put in a formula, a problem you're working on, you just write it out.
Unknown symbol. What's the unknown symbol? I don't know.
Maybe my writing's too bad. Do I have to tell it to factor it?
No, but it did it right, though, right? Well, it tells me that's the equation, but I want it to factor it into...
That is the symbol. It's getting it right. Why is it saying it's unknown?
I don't know. I don't use Apple products.
Ty didn't come help me. Is that even graphable?
Yeah. Of course it is.
It's probably... Wow! That's actually pretty cool.
Would this be useful? I mean, look, it's cool, but I would never use this.
No way. I would never use this. Well, thank you.
Sorry. Thanks for the adventure.
Thank you for helping.
Without the new fancy chips to power the new fancy features, there's not a lot more to
report about on the iPad. It gets a lot of the same buffs the iPhone gets, like a more informative and better-organized
settings app. But how about a real computer?
The slowest MacBook that will get macOS Sequoia is this 2020 MacBook Air that was released
a mere 8 months before the Apple Silicon transition to M1.
If you bought one of these, I am truly sorry.
The space gray Intel Mac mini has had a bit more longevity, but let me tell you, even
on the current OS Sonoma, these devices are showing their age.
They get warm enough to keep me comfortable in the winter.
And this Mac mini cannot even play back the aerial wallpaper without stuttering because
the Intel graphics are at 100% utilization.
There is less to report when it comes to updating macOS this time around.
The two big additions are Windows style, Windows management, and iPhone mirroring.
Dragging your window to the top or side corners of the screen to get it to fit within a predetermined
area is great and was someone's idea for Windows 7.
And 15 years later, it's finally on the Mac.
It works just as you'd expect it would. Dragging to the top fills the screen, to the side splits the screen, and to the corner
quarters the window. Holding the option key will get you to those things more quickly, and holding the window
on the edge will move you to the next desktop, which can be a bit annoying if you're slow
like me. I also don't know how to feel about the margin it creates between the Windows.
Feels like a waste of space. iPhone mirroring is very useful though.
It basically turns your iPhone into a Mac app no matter where it is in a house.
It's pretty neat to be able to control your iPhone with a mouse, clicking and scrolling.
So you'll need a trackpad if you want to pinch to zoom.
Notifications for your iPhone appear like other Mac ones too.
I got a signal notification and thought for a second that I installed the app on my Mac,
but nope, iPhone mirroring booted up. Apple is pretty good at making sure you get notifications on the devices that you're using.
So even though I have teams on both my Mac and iPhone, so far every time I've received
the team's notification, it's opened on my Mac app instead of the iPhone mirroring.
Great. Which is merciful too because it does take a while to reconnect if the connection has
dropped. There are other oddities. It floats on your desktop as a full screen feed, but if you want to move it, you'll have
to move your mouse above it and wait for the border to appear.
It's also not resizable, which is annoying because text is a little small.
These Macs are the most negatively impacted by the update. I mean, they were slow before, but now, ugh.
For example, when I'm going between a lot of tabs on the Mac Mini, the computer just
can't manage all of it in memory. Everything just stutters and it really feels like I'm trying to run through water.
Because this MacBook Air has 16GB of memory, it's not as annoying.
If you have the Mac Mini with only 8GB, I recommend spending the 50-ish dollars to upgrade
it because you actually can. I'm curious how much longer Intel Macs will be supported.
Power PC support was removed with the release of Snow Leopard, four years after the Intel
transition started. So it's nice that Apple is giving these Macs some extra legs.
So overall, do I recommend updating?
Yes. Even with these hardware limitations, Apple is providing the most useful features for
us all. With RCS support and iPhone mirroring, the integration between these devices is tighter
and more convenient. But let me tell you, if there's anything I've learned from this exercise is that
downgrading devices is not fun at all.
So when the time comes to upgrade to new hardware, you most definitely will feel a difference.
I can't wait to go back to my old setup. Thanks for letting this Mac Address last for so long.
I'm curious in the comments below what the oldest Apple device you have that supports
this year's operating system is and how you feel about updating it.
And if you want to watch another video we did, check out the one where I gave a Mac
studio to a fashion designer to see how well it works with their 3D rendering software.