If you were looking for a radical new feature that just wows you, you won't find it in iOS 12. Nor will you find reinventions of some parts of the iOS experience that are aging quite poorly, like the home screen as we know it today. Apple postponed efforts on those fronts to make less flashy improvements to the experience and to lay the groundwork for experiences to come.
What iOS 12 really does is make older devices more usable. And it deploys an array of tools that developers might use to create much more impressive and powerful apps in the future.
App developers can now expose their apps to Siri in new ways, they can create their own machine learning models more easily and run them locally on users' devices, and their augmented reality projects can be made much more compelling and realistic. That might pay off eventually. In the meantime, users get better performance and unprecedented control over everything from how and when their kids can use the family's iOS devices to how personal data is shared and tracked by apps and websites.
None of this is sexy, but it's almost all good.
The work Apple put into improving iOS 12's performance and stability is important; like most software optimizations though, such major undertakings often go uncelebrated, as their under-the-hood nature takes the backseat compared to shiny new apps and consumer features. Nowadays, great performance and battery life are taken for granted on Apple devices. And I should add, rightfully so: people expect their expensive mobile computers to be as fast, reliable, and durable as possible. Once the initial surprise of a noticeably faster and more efficient device subsides, iOS 12 will likely be regarded as a healthy "more of the same" package – a solid release that largely plays it safe without taking any major risks. Perhaps for the first time in years, the latest version of iOS is not a polarizing update. There's nothing wrong with this strategy; in fact, I think it's exactly what iOS needed before the next revolution occurs.
In this scenario, it's also possible that iOS 12's defining developer feature, Siri shortcuts, and its associated power-user utility, the new Shortcuts app, will be initially overlooked and fail to be appreciated for the milestones they are. Personally, I believe these are the two features with the most untapped potential for the future; if Apple's bet is successful in the long run, iOS 12 will eventually be remembered as the debut of the all-encompassing Shortcuts initiative.
iOS 12 has a long-awaited "Digital Health" suite of enhancements, which along with other tweaks will greatly help users live a less stressful digital life. AppleInsider delves into all of iOS 12's quality of life improvements, and talks about how they'll help the iPhone-addicted.
Anyone using an older device can safely upgrade to iOS 12 without worrying about speed, and that’s a big deal. You’ll notice an improvement most of the time, even on newer devices (my iPad Air 2, which had started to feel its age running iOS 11, feels great with iOS 12).
Among the actions that didn't make the transition from Workflow to the new Shortcuts app for iOS 12, built-in support for triggering IFTTT applets (formerly known as "recipes") is perhaps the most annoying one. With just a few taps, Workflow's old 'Trigger IFTTT Applet' action allowed you to assemble workflows that combined the power of iOS integrations with IFTTT's hundreds of supported services. The IFTTT action acted as a bridge between Workflow and services that didn't offer native support for the app, such as Google Sheets, Spotify, and several smart home devices.
Fortunately, there's still a way to integrate the just-released Shortcuts app with IFTTT. The method I'm going to describe below involves a bit more manual setup because it's not as nicely integrated with Shortcuts as the old action might have been. In return however, you'll unlock the ability to enable IFTTT triggers using Siri on your iOS devices, Apple Watch, and HomePod – something that was never possible with Workflow's original IFTTT support. Let's take a look.
My takeaway is that the Neural Engine really is a big fucking deal for photography and video. Supposedly, it’s just as big a deal for AR, but the camera has been my obsessive focus this past week. For users, it’s a big fucking deal because it has a dramatic, practical, real-time effect on the quality of the photos and videos they can shoot. None of this happens in post; all of it is visible live, as you shoot. And for Apple, it’s a big fucking deal because I don’t think any of their competitors have something like this. Support for the Neural Engine permeates iOS and the entire A12 I/O system. Android handset makers can’t just buy a “neural engine” chip and stick it in a phone. Google does advanced machine learning — including for photos — but they do it in the cloud. You shoot a photo, upload it to Google’s servers, and they analyze the dumb photo to make it better. Their input is a JPEG file.
For a company as prone to hyperbole and Maximum Force Enthusiasm about its products, I think that they have dramatically undersold how much improved photos are from the iPhone X to the iPhone XS. It’s extreme, and it has to do with a technique Apple calls Smart HDR.
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The results for me have been massively improved quick snaps with no thought given to exposure or adjustments due to poor lighting. Your camera roll as a whole will just suddenly start looking like you’re a better picture taker, with no intervention from you. All of this is capped off by the fact that the OLED screens in the iPhone XS and XS Max have a significantly improved ability to display a range of color and brightness. So images will just plain look better on the wider gamut screen, which can display more of the P3 color space.
As it does almost every year, Apple granted a pair of professional photographers early access to iPhone XS ahead of its release to show off the handset's capabilities. Prior to launch this Friday, travel photographer Austin Mann and former White House photographer Pete Souza on Monday shared images pulled from Apple's flagship smartphone.
After three days, I was surprised by how good it felt to use the XS Max with one hand. A key factor was how Apple had managed to cram a bigger screen into a slightly smaller body. [...]
These changes amounted to meaningful improvements in ergonomics and overall convenience. I was able to hold the XS Max in one hand and type messages easily. In contrast, my thumb could not reach keys on the sides of the older iPhone 8 Plus, like the shift key or the backspace key, because of the space taken up by the bezel.
tvOS releases are never as significant as those found on Apple's other platforms, and that remains true this year; however, tvOS 12 does include a handful of new features that have the potential to truly improve the Apple TV experience on a daily basis. Improvements include upgrades to aerial screensavers, Dolby Atmos support, an easier way to enter passwords, and more. Let's dive in.
With Password AutoFill, logins and passwords stored in third-party password management apps will be available throughout the iOS 12 operating system right alongside iCloud Keychain, letting you log into websites, apps, and more much more quickly.
1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, Keeper, and Remembear all now support Password AutoFill features.
With iOS 12, app developers can integrate an “Add to Siri” button right in their app’s interface for common tasks that their app can perform – like playing a favorite playlist, for instance.
When a user taps this button, they’ll be directed to a screen where they can record their own custom voice command to launch whatever task or action the developer is suggesting.
In time, a number of apps will roll out this functionality.
But if you’re keen to play with it today, on day one, here are some of the early adopters of this feature.
A few years ago—the company won’t say exactly when—some engineers at Apple began to think the iPhone’s camera could be made smarter using newly powerful machine learning algorithms known as neural networks. Before long, they were talking with a lean vice president named Tim Millet.
Millet leads a team of chip architects, who got to work. When the iPhone X was unveiled last fall, Apple’s camera team had added a slick new portrait mode that can digitally adjust the lighting on subjects’ faces, and artfully blur the background. It took advantage of a new module added to the iPhone’s main chip called the neural engine, customized to run machine learning code. The same specialized new silicon enabled the iPhone X’s novel face-recognition unlock system, Face ID. “We couldn’t have done that properly without the neural engine,” says Millet.
"The iPhone is assembled in China, but the parts come from everywhere, including the United States. The glass comes from Kentucky, there are chips that come from the US, and of course the research and development is all done in the United States."
"I don’t want to speak for [the Trump administration], but I think they’ve looked at this and said that it’s not really great for the United States to put a tariff on those type of products …"
Both of my alarm clocks have been updated to iOS 12. Let's all wish that there are no alarm-clock bugs tomorrow morning.
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Thanks for reading.