iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 preview: the good, the bad, and the weird

ios 15 and ipad os 15 are apple's latest and greatest new operating systems they'll be out in the fall but the companies already released the public beta so that anyone or at least anyone willing to risk the stability of their iphone or ipad can dive in and check out all the new features now so let's dive right in with the biggest change that's right after years of waiting you can finally change the outfit on your moji avatar [Music] okay but seriously ios 15 is a weird update even by apple standards there's just not a lot of big new flashy features here and what is there is tucked away in the margins and behind the scenes offering you more flexibility in how and when you use your phone and there's a pretty simple reason for why the new software is like this the two updates were clearly born in 2020's norm shattering pandemic and features where last year's remote first influences firmly on their sleeve remember all those watch with friends apps that were really popular last year when everyone was stuck at home share plays like that but better letting you share movies tv shows podcasts music and more with friends and family through facetime hey it's cameron what it'll work across all of apple's devices not just the iphone and ipad so you can do some neat tricks like watch a movie together in perfect sync on your respective apple tvs while facetiming through an iphone or ipad anyone watching can control so you can pause or get up to get snacks or whatever but it also means that whoever you're watching with can keep rewinding to watch the same three seconds over and over again cameron sorry it's certainly a cool feature at least technically speaking but it feels about a year out of date apple's really betting that folks will still be trying to watch things together remotely in the future but it feels like a poor substitute for actually getting together on a couch and watching a movie with friends there are of course caveats shareplay only works with apple devices so if your friend has a chromecast or an android phone well they can't watch with you streaming services also need to choose to support shareplay while there's some big names on the list like disney plus and hbo max there's some noticeably missing companies specifically netflix and youtube neither of which is supporting it at least for now and lastly everyone needs to have access to the content so if your buddy doesn't subscribe to disney plus well you can't watch loki together and unless everyone owns the movie you're trying to watch you can't watch it apple's also finally fixing facetime or at least most of the most annoying things about facetime which have started to become glaringly obvious over the past year and a half as everyone's been forced to use it a whole lot more to make basic human contact with friends and loved ones so we're finally getting a normal grid view screen sharing a portrait mode to blur your messy background and most importantly the ability to facetime with windows and android users using web browsers thanks to shareable links of course it would have been even nicer to have these features months ago instead of having to wait for apple's usual regimented full release but better late than never on the more noticeable side of things is the new safari which i suspect is going to be controversial it's the biggest change in ios 15 by far and part of a broader change to safari that apple's rolling out across mac os ipad os and the iphone but the ios version in particular is a bit funky the biggest change is immediately noticeable the url bar which used to live at the top of the screen has been moved to the bottom so that you can more easily reach it especially on bigger screens unfortunately it's just a weird place to put the url bar after all these years of expecting it to be on the top of the device it also changes constantly when you tap on it it flips back to the top of the phone so that the keyboard can be at the bottom of your screen so there's just a lot of disconnect here there's also new multitasking gestures you can swipe back and forth to get between tabs just like you would swipe back and forth between apps on the rest of the iphone which is actually quite clever there's also a new tab view which lets you see all your tabs in this new window pane style which is nice but a lot of the functionality is just harder to find there's no refresh button on the url bar anymore you have to swipe down to refresh a lot of major functions have also been hidden away in this tiny little three dot menu which i also don't love and being a beta just sometimes things are funky when we were filming this earlier my url bar just disappeared i've been using ios 15 for weeks and it is still deeply disorienting and while i suspect i'll eventually get used to it right now it's still the roughest part of the update for me now as is traditional for an ios update apple has done some tinkering with notifications on ios 15. smaller notifications are bigger now and some of them feature contact images which might be a helpful push to get people to actually add photos to their contact but the biggest and at least to me best new feature here is focus modes at first these just kind of look like an expansion of apple's old do not disturb feature but they're much more powerful letting you select specific apps and contacts to be able to notify you at specific times and places apple offers a few suggestions for focus modes to get you started a work focus for example can be set to activate when you're working either say at a specific time in the morning or when you physically pull up to the office and then it can mute all your notifications except for those from work your email your slack and your calendar apps focus modes can be triggered by times locations or even when opening a specific app so if you just want to shut down instagram notifications when your kindle apps open to focus on reading you can do that too one of the things i like most about focus is it doesn't completely hide those notifications it just filters them away and they're still accessible in their own little fields in the notification window so you can quickly flip through and see if anyone really needs you but your phone won't be buzzing the whole night with every single email and slackping that comes in i've mostly been focusing on ios 15 here because the new features coming to the ipad and ipad os 15 are largely the same that said there are a couple big changes that are coming to the ipad that we should mention first off are two features from ios 14 that apple didn't include on the ipad widgets and the app library both of which are great here and widgets in particular look really good on the big ipad screen there's also some changes to how multitasking works on the ipad and i've got good news and bad news here the good news is that it is definitely better than it was before but the bad news is that ipad os is still ipad os so if you were hoping that the announcement of the ipad pro earlier this year with its m1 chip the same as the macbooks was going to be the you know predecessor to some big change in how apple thought about ipad software well not in this update ipad multitasking still works largely the same as it did when apple first introduced it in ipad os it's still heavily based on split view and slide over windows and while there are some quality of life changes here apple really hasn't radically rethought how it's going to handle this there is one more big update coming to the ipad and also the mac called universal control which is apple's new drag-and-drop system that lets you use your ipad and your mac together we haven't actually been able to test it yet but for a whole bunch more on that check out duder's video he's got a lot of thoughts on it and it could be a really interesting part of the update and now for the smaller stuff let's start with live text which is probably the most technically impressive thing added in ios 15. you've probably seen something similar to it in google lens it lets you point your camera at any text whether it's handwritten or typed up and it can pull that text into virtually any text field on your phone apple's also updated the weather app there's a new vertical dark sky style 10 day forecast and new dark sky style maps for precipitation and temperature all of which is probably because apple bought dark sky a year ago and well now they're in ios 15. apple maps is also getting a bunch of interesting new features including 3d maps ar walking directions better transit features unfortunately these features are going to be rolling out over the betas in the summer and we haven't been able to test them just yet lastly there's the usual slate of privacy features which most notably include local on-device processing for siri so that data doesn't get sent to the cloud anymore and a new icloud plus service which adds several interesting features including a vpn style internet relay to mask your traffic and burner email addresses the new updates are in the same vein as a lot of apple's other privacy updates from the last few years which focus on limiting tracking and moving as much stuff out of the cloud as possible and onto user's device but the most interesting thing about ios 15 is how easy it is to miss a lot of these features sure you'll notice the new safari design but big features like focus modes or even shareplay are mostly hidden behind menus and buttons apple's not shoving these into your face and if you don't already know that they're there they're pretty easy to miss and that speaks to me of a little more of a mature design that apple's taking here not always focusing on big flashy things that it's forcing everyone to use but more customization more control something which apple has historically been loath to give to users it's a good trend to see with ios 15 and while there's still a long way to go when it comes to letting users completely customize their devices it's good to see that apple's starting to take some steps in that direction hey it's client from the verge we are back here in the office in the studio in this floating black abyss we've actually been here the whole time that's the secret to the verge it's our office is just a pit of darkness now uh it's going great