iOS and iPadOS 17: The MacStories Review

In the year when the vision is elsewhere, what do you get the OS that has everything?

Credits

My annual iOS and iPadOS reviews are a labor of passion, curiosity, and – to an extent – endurance. I write them because I love the whole process – from WWDC all the way to September. The review wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the following humans and dogs:

  • My girlfriend Silvia, for her wisdom, support, love, and patience. I hope I’ve found the better work-life balance I promised you. I love you.
  • John Voorhees, a friend and amazing business partner. Running MacStories with you gets better every day.
  • Zelda and Ginger, my two girls and the love of my life. Thank you for making me happier every day.
  • Michael Steeber, for outdoing himself with this year’s intro animation and graphics.
  • Finn Voorhees, who listens to my Obsidian-related ideas and turns them into reality.
  • Alex Guyot, for putting his magic web development skills to good use with MacStories and the Club.
  • Lachlan Campbell, for their invaluable feedback and kind encouragement.
  • Jonathan Reed, for his help with editing and useful notes.
  • Myke Hurley
  • Stephen Hackett
  • Basic Apple Guy, for putting together some fantastic wallpapers I used throughout the review.
  • Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer. Your work is appreciated.
  • Obsidian, Working Copy, iA Writer, Timery, and Lire – incredible iPad productivity apps that helped me put together this review.
  • Every engineer at Apple who always makes reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun. Especially the ones who listened to Stage Manager feedback.
  • Every Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and Club Premier member for directly supporting us and being an awesome community.
  • Our Discord members, for always pushing me to do my best, within healthy limits.

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to do what I love every single day. Thank you.

I’ll see you next year, for my tenth annual iOS review.

    The Dirty Secret of OS Updates [Sponsor]

    Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy. After all, it’s one of the simplest yet most impactful ways that every employee can practice good security. 

    On top of that, every MDM solution promises that it will automate the process and install updates with no user interaction needed.

    Yet in the real world, it doesn’t play out like that. Users don’t install updates and IT admins won’t force installs via forced restart.

    Let’s talk about the second problem first. Sure, you could simply schedule updates for all your users, and have them restart during non-work hours. But this inevitably leads to disruptions and lost work. This, in turn, leads to users (especially executives) who simply demand to be left out of your update policy. The bottom line is: any forced restarts without user approval will lead to data loss events, and that makes them so unpopular that they are functionally unusable.

    There is another class of tools that claim to get users to install updates themselves, through “nudges.” These reminders pop up with increasing frequency until users relent or the timer runs out. This is an improvement, since it involves users in the process, but users still tend to delay updating as long as possible (which for some tools can be indefinitely).

    At Kolide, OS updates are the single most common issue customers want us to solve. They come to us because we have a unique (and uniquely effective) approach to device compliance.

    With Kolide, when a user’s device–be it Mac, Windows, Linux, or mobile–is out of compliance, we reach out to them with instructions on how to fix it.

    The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta. (At present, Kolide is exclusive to Okta customers, but we plan to integrate with more SSO providers soon.)

    If your fleet is littered with devices that stubbornly refuse to update, then consider these two principles:

    1. You can’t have a successful patch management policy without involving users.
    2. You can’t get users to install patches unless you give them both clear instructions and real consequences.

    Installing OS updates is a top priority for both security and IT, and when you make it part of conditional access, you can finally get it done without massive lists of exemptions or massive piles of support tickets.

    To learn more about how Kolide enforces device compliance for companies with Okta, click here to watch an on-demand demo.

    Our thank to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

    The Weather App Adds More Detailed Data in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma

    Apple’s Weather app is packing more data than ever before on iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. The thing about weather is that beyond the basics, everyone cares about different things, and some people care about it all. With Apple’s latest version of Weather, there’s more weather to nerd out on than ever before.

    Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

    Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

    The Weather app includes hourly precipitation predictions in its 10-day forecast detail view. Is there really a 45% chance of rain in Nashville a week from Monday? Probably not, but if that sort of precision is what you’re looking for in a weather app, Weather has it.

    The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

    The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

    Wind map overlays have been added to Weather, too. The overlay looks excellent and animates to show you which way the wind will blow over the next 24 hours. It’s a great addition if you’re going out to fly a kite or a drone, sail a boat, and more.

    Read more

    iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma Expand Password Management and Access System-Wide

    Passwords permeate our lives. With an ever-growing number of sites, services, and apps to log into, people need help generating, managing, and accessing them. There are excellent third-party apps that can help, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to download a third-party app, and even fewer are likely to pay for one. That’s why Apple’s work with passwords is so important.

    However, what makes that work impressive is the lengths to which the company has gone to make good password practices easy for users. The password updates to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma are fantastic examples, making it easier than ever to share passwords and for users to begin adopting passkeys, a superior method of authentication compared to traditional passwords.

    Read more

    MacStories Unwind: Our All-Time Favorite Movies

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    On this week’s special AV Club edition of MacStories Unwind, John and Jonathan share their all-time favorite movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Memento.

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    • John’s Pick
      • Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark:
      • Watch the Trailer
      • Watch in the Apple TV App
    • Jonathan’s Pick
      • Memento:
        • Watch the Trailer
        • Watch in the Apple TV App
        • Read Memento Mori (Short Story written by Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan, upon which the film was based.)

    MacStories Unwind+

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    To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.

    iOS 17’s Check In Feature Simplifies Making Sure Friends and Family Get Home Safely

    We’ve all been there. You say goodbye to a friend or family member after a late evening and then begin to worry if they’ll make it home safely. You ask them to share their location and text you when they get home, but it’s late, and you know they’ll probably forget to text, so you finish your fun evening together, anxiously checking Find My Friends over and over.

    Check In is a new iOS 17 feature that helps eliminate that anxiety by automating the process of letting your family or friends know when you arrive somewhere safely. I finally had the chance to try Check In recently with my son Finn, who’s the only other person in my family who is currently on the iOS 17 beta. The testing conditions were a bit contrived, but what I found was that Check In is fast and easy to use and does an excellent job of explaining the information you’re sharing and how it works before you leave for your destination.

    Read more

    These Are the iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma Features Coming Later This Year

    Next week, Apple will begin releasing its new OSes, which are packed with a lot of new features. However, those updates won’t include everything you may have heard about over the summer. For the past few years, OS features that are announced at WWDC have been increasingly released after the fall release of major OS revisions. Sometimes, those later releases are signaled at WWDC, but often they’re not, so we’ve compiled a list of features that won’t be available in Apple’s fall OS updates but have been promised to come in a later release. Unless otherwise indicated, the following features will be coming later to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma:

    • One of the tentpole features of Messages this year is the ability to create stickers using every OSes’ ability to lift subjects from a photo. The option to share stickers from Messages’ ‘Plus’ menu is already in this fall’s updates, but later, you’ll also be able to send stickers using the Tapback menu, too.
    • Messages will also sync settings, like text message forwarding, SMS filters, and send and receive accounts, via iCloud in a later release.
    • The ‘catch up’ arrow button found now on iOS 17 that takes users to the top of new messages in a busy thread will come to iPadOS 17.
    • The News widget will add playback controls for Apple News podcasts and News+ audio stories on iOS and iPadOS 17.
    • AirDrop will add the ability to finish a file transfer using the Internet if a local peer-to-peer connection drops.
    • A lot of Music’s promised updates are coming later, including:
      • Collaborative playlists that will allow a group to add, rearrange, and remove songs.
      • Emoji reactions to song collaborative playlist song choices in the Now Playing view.
      • A new Favorite Songs playlist, something which I’ve maintained as a smart playlist forever, will be available automatically in your Library and via Siri.
      • Marking items as favorites is expanding to include songs, albums, playlists, and artists. Favorites will automatically be added to your Library, eliminating what is now a two-step process, and will be used to improve your recommendations.
      • Also, Music will add a macOS Sonoma widget to allow users to play or pause a song or album or see a list of top charts and, for Apple Music subscribers, recommendations.
    • Intelligent PDF form detection with enhanced AutoFill will be available systemwide in apps like Files and Mail, as well as for scanned documents.
    • The Fitness app will allow you to prioritize the volume of trainers’ voices or the training session’s music on iOS and iPadOS 17.
    • Proximity sign-in using the particle cloud used by devices like the HomePod and Apple Watch will be expanded to make it easier to use a signed-in, trusted iPhone or iPad to sign in to other devices.
    • Your iPhone will add the ability to tap to unlock Matter-enabled smart locks with a home key or set up a PIN code in the Home app on iOS 17.
    • Finally, there’s no word yet on when Journal, Apple’s journaling app, will make its debut.

    Of these features, I’m especially looking forward to the updates to Music, checking what Journal is capable of, and sending stickers using Tapback, which I expect will increase my use of them a lot. There’s no word yet when these features debut, but I expect we’ll see them trickle out starting later this year.

    AppStories, Episode 350 – Apple’s Wonderlust Event→

    This week on AppStories, we are joined by Alex live in the Club MacStories+ Discord community for a special episode covering our initial impressions of Apple’s Wonderlust media event, which introduced new iPhones, Apple Watches, and more.

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    [Subscribe here.](https://appstories.net/plans)

    Subscribe here.

    On AppStories+, we answer Club MacStories member questions about Apple’s fall media event.

    We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

    To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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    Apple’s September 2023 Event: All The Small Things

    Source: Apple.

    Source: Apple.

    Apple covered a lot of ground today, and since the event concluded, more details have emerged about everything announced. We’ve been combing Apple’s product pages, social media, and other sources to learn more about the new iPhones, Apple Watches, and services, which we’ve collected below:

    iPhones

    Source: Apple.

    Source: Apple.

    Source: Apple.

    Source: Apple.

    AirPods Pro

    Source: Apple.

    Source: Apple.

    • The new AirPods Pro (2nd generation) include a USB-C port for charging and can be charged by connecting the earbuds directly to an iPhone with a USB-C port
    • The AirPods Pro case is now IP54-rated for added dust protection.
    • The AirPods Pro update supports Lossless Audio at low latency for use with the Apple Vision Pro.
    • An eagle-eyed person on Mastodon spotted an iPod HiFi in the keynote.
    • The AirPods Pro and Apple Watch can be charged by plugging their charger into an iPhone 15, 15 Plus, 15 Pro, or 15 Pro Max phone.

    You can follow all of our September 2023 Apple event coverage through our September 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated September 2023 Apple event RSS feed.