Mmm, it's Pumpkin Spice Latte and Apple Operating System update season.
Every fall, Apple delivers to us an aromatic array of new features that should make using
their devices better and easier.
Should. What we're getting is iOS and iPadOS 16, macOS 13, Ventura and watchOS 9.
They all include a lot of new features and revisions, but what I'm noticing this time
around is not just the features each platform gets, but also the features they all share.
What does this mean for the whole concept of the operating system for Apple going forward?
If you look at some sections of Apple's all-new features pages on their website, you can see
that many of the updates are exactly the same, verbatim between all the operating systems.
Messages, Safari, Mail, iCloud Photo Sharing, Home, Photos, Reminders, Live Text and a bunch
of others. The new features added to these apps are doled out to all devices equally.
This is a good thing as it means you won't lose out on functionality using the same app
between different devices. You can undo, send and edit iMessages and emails no matter what keyboard you wrote them on.
How you surf in Safari won't have to be limited by your screen size.
The way you organize your reminders on your Mac won't be any different than on your iPhone.
But are these updates really worthy of WWDC?
Would they have even been noticed on previous releases like Panthers, Snow Lappered or Lion?
I don't think so. Photos is a stand-alone cross-platform app, Safari is a stand-alone cross-platform app.
Photos is a stand-alone cross-platform service.
And yet, their updates are arbitrarily tied to the broader operating system update.
This can be really annoying too. Take Maps for instance.
You can finally make a multi-stop route no matter which device you're using.
This is an easy feature that should have been added years ago, yet to get it you have to
update each device's entire operating system.
You might think that this means the operating systems are converging all into one harmonious
whole, with only but a screen size to differentiate them.
If Apple was doing that, future parity like we're seeing would be a necessary step.
So is this preparation for one Apple OS to rule them all?
Touchscreens on the Mac? I'd argue no, because these changes to the cross-platform apps just increase usability
across the ecosystem. And if you take a close look beyond them, you'll find that these OS's are as different
from each other as ever. Despite the fact that it's going to be a little delayed, iPad OS looks to be the most transformed
this year. After all our dogged complaining, Apple is really bringing the iPad into its more capable
own. Toolbars are customizable now, allowing developers and power users to personalize and optimize
their app's functions. It looks like a promising step forward, as the iPad moves further away from the iPhone
and closer in capability to the Mac. The biggest demonstration of this is Stage Manager.
It's a new app windowing feature available only to M1-powered iPads.
Instead of being limited to two full-screen apps side-by-side with a slide-over floater
for good measure, you can now pile and resize groups of windowed apps together on the screen,
and then switch between those piles based on what you're working on.
This improved since I first tried it earlier this summer, but despite these soft round
corners, there are still rough edges.
Apps aren't freely movable and resizable, they kind of just snap into set sizes and
positions. It's quite interesting that you cannot completely cover app Windows over one another.
These behaviors will require getting used to, and developers are going to have to put in
a lot of work to support all these new layouts, as you can see.
Even on this big iPad Pro screen, I don't think I'd use Stage Manager, but hooked up
to an external monitor, it's a game changer.
Now the iPad really is a tangible computer replacement for those who can work within
the platform's bumper guards. Though, if you're used to a desktop operating system, don't forget that you will probably
run into mouse interactions that won't work like you're expecting.
Touch first, everyone. Also, on a Mac, you can close, minimize, and maximize Windows with the traffic lights
on the top corner of a window. Here, those options are buried under an annoying submenu.
Now, while your Mac is charging, you'll be interested in knowing that Stage Manager
is here too. And because the operating system was engineered from the ground up to support resizable windowing,
it works much better. Here think about it as an alternative way to organize tasks in Windows, compared to
mission control. Next, we have something that works great on the iPad, but not so much on the Mac.
They have replaced the system preferences with the system settings app.
Same stovetop logo, though. It's adopted the sidebar format found on Apple's mobile devices.
That makes it easier to find the section you're looking for at a glance, but I'm not bold
over by the controls and layout once you're in there.
Everything feels more complex. Look at how these alignments have changed, creating redundant space between the options
and the selections. It's very hard to see things at a glance.
The screens are so much bigger, and I'm really not convinced that mobile UI paradigms should
be in desktop operating systems. Wait, macOS has a noise machine?
An accessibility? Well, that's hard to find. And why is this a toggle switch?
Why is this a window? What? Why did it shoot?
Developer Nicky Tonsky posted a thread on Twitter showing just how rough the early beta
versions of this app are, and showcased some of the questionable UI choices Apple has made
with it. I find it so unrelentingly grey, like this list of toggles that look greyed out as if
you can't use them, but oh, you can.
Also, these were the gesture videos to show you how to use your magic mouse and trackpad
before. These are the new ones.
This is what software feels like these days in microcosm. We've gone from a rich, beautiful, understandable video to an uninspiring, abstract, boring
animation bound to peak the curiosity of exactly no one.
Because everything has moved around so much, I'm going to recommend that you only update
to Ventura when you're mentally prepared to. But don't worry, like iPadOS, this update will be coming a bit later.
Now the update worth installing is iOS.
I absolutely love the look of the new lock screen. It makes the phone so much more useful at a glance, something my Apple Watch is great
at. You can now add simple widgets and set your wallpaper to shuffle photos from your library.
And if you don't have widgets enabled, the clock can now be cleverly placed behind your
photo subject. You can even change the clock's font.
Notifications are piled up at the bottom now, out of the way.
And finally, as your mood changes, you can swipe between all your multiple themes, which
can also be tied to different focus modes. I do have some niggles.
On some wallpapers, the widgets can become completely illegible because there's no contrast.
Disappointingly, all the options and freedom we get on the lock screen comes with a commensurate
removal of options for the home screen. Apple's default wallpaper options are all but gone unless you use the same background
as the lock screen. Oh, and check this out in the Photos app.
That's cool. I've always hated doing that on Photoshop.
Apple's finally showing us what capabilities the neural engine can bring to software, adding
to live text to video and dictation improvements.
Other than these main highlights, you're really not going to notice the improvements
in day-to-day use, unless you really dig deep.
Adam Angst at Tidbit did a survey asking people what features from last year's releases
people were using, and the results showed that a wide majority of users didn't use
any of the new features, save for live text.
It makes me wish for a release that has no new features and is just bug fixes and refinements.
A year-long feature moratorium, wouldn't that be great?
Thanks for worsening the UI of this Mac Address. Now, if you are going to update your devices right away, give this video a like, and if
you're going to hold off, you might as well subscribe. Now, comment below, I'm curious what you think about a feature moratorium.
Now, new features just fixes.
You agree?