Charged with making this year’s Apple Watch irresistible, the company made a bunch of upgrades. The Series 10 now comes in a polished jet black finish that is indeed very shiny. The watch's case is also much thinner and lighter, with a new S10 chip that is single-sided to be flatter, and a brighter, bigger, wide-angle display. The Series 10 now tracks your breathing disturbances while you sleep and can tell you if you might have sleep apnea. It charges faster, has a new speaker, a new depth gauge, and a new water temperature sensor. And watchOS 11 is still the best watch OS. It just is.
The Watch Series 10 might not deserve breathless adulation, and I'm pretty sure Beyoncé isn't going to release pap photos of herself wearing it (unless she does, in which case, my bad), but this is still just the best smartwatch for iPhone users. The absence of blood oxygen sensing is a significant obstacle, but at the end of the day, it’s still the watch that’s the hardest for me to take off.
Between a big display, comfort, and great battery life, you only get to pick two with most smartwatches. The Series 10 is the closest Apple’s gotten to nailing all three. On top of having the biggest display of any Apple Watch ever, the Series 10 is the thinnest, lightest, and fastest-charging. watchOS 11 also brings several training-focused fitness features to the device. The end result is the Ultrafication of the Series 10. It may not be the splashiest update, but if you can’t wow’em, you might as well make smart refinements. And that’s the Series 10 to a tee.
With iOS and iPadOS 18, Apple is entering a second phase of customization for its modern platforms: after widgets and Lock Screens, the company is now turning its attention to icon customization, Home Screen layouts, and functional customization of Control Center. And as expected, there’s a whole developer narrative to unpack here.
Perhaps more than any of Apple’s other operating systems, iOS is about balance. For many people, their iPhone is their primary computer—in some cases, their only computer. Every year, Apple rolls out new features to the platform, but it wants to do so in such a way that it enhances the experience of using its phones without getting in the way of users who rely on the device.
This year’s update, iOS 18, walks that line carefully. There are new improvements that range from those that won’t really affect you unless you seek them out (big changes to home screen customization, for one) to those that will impact every single person who uses a phone (a brand new interface for Photos). The good news is that most of these features also come to the iPad too.
I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.
For the first time, Apple is taking your phone’s ability to save login details and putting them in a standalone app. It could help improve millions of people’s terrible passwords.
The New tab includes sections like Latest Songs, New Releases, and Updated Playlists. All of these sections will now be curated based on the individual’s music tastes, rather than everyone seeing the same page of content.
Does a macOS update without a headlining feature still feel like a macOS update? The answer is: mostly yes! Which should encourage even those of you who are deeply skeptical of Apple Intelligence and other generative AI features that it's an update worth installing.
I do often find that I take a shine to the new flagship features of a given macOS update—I don't use a ton of the widgets from Sonoma, but the ones I do use are always present and quietly useful; I use Dark Mode from Mojave basically by default; I have a couple of Shortcuts from Monterey that I would hate to give up. But by and large I find my favorite macOS additions are off to the side of the flagship additions, or buried in some obscure corner. Sequoia has just as much of those features as any other macOS release in the last 15 years.
This release contains some classic Apple moves, like adding a feature found in third-party Mac utilities for years, but with a simplified “now it’s for everybody” feature set. It’s got some surprising (to me, anyway) and useful integrations with the rest of its ecosystem that make the Mac and iPhone work together like never before. A useful OS feature has gotten promoted to a full-fledged utility app, hopefully with the end result of more people using it. One of my favorite Messages features, left for years to dry on the vine, has finally gotten a long-deserved expansion. Safari has received a bunch of updates that should help users cut through the distractions and confusion of the Web.
And this release also features Apple’s continued ratcheting up of its macOS security and privacy procedures—which isn’t a bad thing on its own, but comes with associated degradations of the user experience that Apple doesn’t seem appropriately concerned about mitigating.
What may turn out to be one of the most useful productivity-enhancing features in Sequoia is the increased integration between the Mac and iPhone. While EU customers won’t get this feature yet, iPhone Mirroring lets you use your iPhone on your Mac in a compact mini window. This lets you interact with iPhone apps via your Mac, and also lets you drag-&-drop files between the devices (though, that feature won’t debut until later this year). I think this could get really interesting if you use an iPad and a second Mac, too, as the implication is that you’ll be able to move files and folders around between the machines to your heart’s content in a quite focused way.
Apple has just released watchOS 11, the latest version of its smartwatch operating system, alongside iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. The update, available for the Apple Watch Series 6 and later models, will finally allow users to take rest days without breaking their activity streak and introduces FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection.
Sleep apnea is a condition that can cause a person to stop breathing during sleep and can lead to an increased risk of hypertension and Type 2 diabetes if left untreated. Apple’s sleep apnea detection feature, which uses the accelerometer to monitor for small wrist movements associated with sleep interruptions, was announced alongside the new Apple Watch Series 10 and is now available for both the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. If sleep apnea is detected, the Apple Watch will alert the user and provide additional information that can be shared with a doctor, who can make a formal diagnosis.
Apple's visionOS 2 update allows users to create 3D spatial photos from 2D images, taking advantage of depth information and machine learning to add natural-looking depth and dimension.
The code refers to an unreleased Mac mini model with an Apple silicon chip and five ports, which lines up with a previous report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman that said the next Mac mini will be equipped with five USB-C ports. Similar to the Mac Studio, Gurman said two of the ports will be located on the front of the new Mac mini.
Alongside the major updates to its new operating systems for 2024, Apple has released security fixes for the current versions of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS macOS. The release notes for macOS 14.7 Sonoma, macOS 13.7 Ventura, iOS 17.7, and iPadOS 17.7—to the extent that they’re updated—say only that they provide important security fixes and are recommended for all users.
The latest version of the Apple Sports app on iOS 18 and watchOS 11 introduces Live Activities support for all teams and leagues available within the app. This feature enables live scores and play-by-play information on the iPhone's Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island on newer models, and on the Apple Watch starting with watchOS 11.
Customization is one of the big themes of iOS 18, ranging from new Home Screen options to a completely revamped Control Center design. Widgetsmith taps into all of that with this new system of Actions. These widgets allow you to “quickly launch an app, run a Shortcut, make a call, send a text, or play music.”
adoc Studio is an environment for creating and previewing text written in AsciiDoc, a plain text markup language aimed at technical content. AsciiDoc is extremely similar to Markdown but focuses more on the semantic elements of a text—items like headings, sidebars, blockquotes, references, admonitions, equations, and comments. It also boasts powerful features for modularizing and reusing text with includes, conditionals, substitutions, and passthroughs.
MacStadium has officially released Orka Desktop 3.0, an enterprise-grade macOS virtualization tool that is free for developers, testers, and IT administrators. This tool offers easy macOS virtualization on Apple Silicon devices, supporting macOS 15 Sequoia from day one.
Setapp Mobile, a third-party iOS app store offering multiple apps for a single monthly subscription, is now available to anyone in the EU. It follows an invitation-only beta that launched back in May.
After the initial round of the streaming wars where gaining market share was the sole objective, streamers have been applying a more disciplined approach in their shift to profitability, with big-budget scripted series like Time Bandits under particular scrutiny, tasked with clearing a higher viewership bar in order to continue.
But the biggest difference is that Apple, under Jobs, was quirky, and I think would have remained noticeably more quirky than it has been under Cook. You’d be wrong, I say, to argue that Cook has drained the fun out of Apple. But I do think he’s eliminated quirkiness. Cook’s Apple takes too few risks. Jobs’s Apple took too many risks.
Tim Cook is no mere beancounter. Far from it. He shares with Jobs a driving ambition to change the world. Cook, just like Jobs, surely relates deeply to this quip from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.” But the ways Cook is driven to change the world are different.
Somewhere underneath that processed clamor and yearning desire for relevance lies a modest, moving account of an artist attempting to come to terms with their fate by questioning their beginnings. The contours of that album are interesting but they’re lost through U2’s quest to remain the biggest band in the world, a desire that culminated in the group forcing its music on every Apple user on the planet—a move that ironically finally brought the band back down to earth. Streaming still hasn’t fully reconciled the opposing forces of digital privacy and music accessibility, but it’s a lot better than the grim future predicted by Songs Of Innocence‘s rollout.
Helicopter parenting often doesn’t end when a child graduates from high school. Today’s parents have more tools than ever at their disposal to stay involved (or overinvolved) in their children’s lives and keep track of their whereabouts, habits, and activities, from tracking services like Life360 to Facebook groups specifically for parents of college students. If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes, an increasing number of parents seem to be attempting to curtail that growth.
Today, at long last, I have one regular devices that I am continuing to use that will no longer be on the latest operating system: my good old iPad Pro. (This is the one and only 10.5-inch version.)
But, so long as I can still watch television, read e-books, and play Apple Arcade games, I'm fine.
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Thanks for reading.