Apple unveils iOS 18 with new home screen & Control Center
9to5mac.com> Game Mode is coming to iPhone, minimizing background activity to ensure the highest frame rates.
This might just be me, but this thing doesn’t feel very Apple-like to me. I always liked how a MacBook would run exactly the same whether connected to the wall or on battery power. There were no modes, no management, no battery strategies to choose from like on Windows, the machine was just powerful when needed and efficient when idle.
Now we have both High power and Low power modes on MacBooks and we’re getting “gaming mode” on iPhone? Like, can’t the latest flagship phone just tell? This thing can decide whether to show me my boarding pass, if I’m driving home or to work, but I need to put it in “gaming mode” manually?
> I always liked how a MacBook would run exactly the same whether connected to the wall or on battery power. There were no modes, no management, no battery strategies to choose from like on Windows
macOS has had power management settings for years and years - used to be branded "Energy Saver"
I’m almost sure that the first actual energy saving (i.e. affecting the CPU) mode was introduced in 2021 with Monterey.
Intel Macbooks throttled the CPU with SpeedStep since at least i5, maybe earlier.
Yes, but SpeedStep isn’t an optional power-saving mode that you can enable or disable, or that is enabled automatically on battery power.
> but I need to put it in “gaming mode” manually?
No, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure the point is that the phone does it automatically when you're playing a full screen game.
That's how it works on macOS, so I also expect iOS to do the same.
> I always liked how a MacBook would run exactly the same whether connected to the wall or on battery power.
Is this true of Apple Silicon Macs? From my memory, Intel Macs did the normal Intel frequency scaling stuff, but perhaps I've got that wrong.
There is manual low power mode, which slows the machine.
But if you don't not enable it, you don't see the difference.
Yes, but at least on my last Intel MacBook (2013) this didn’t depend on the battery source.
When I plug in my work MacBook Pro it is noticeable faster and the screen brightens. There are definitely some kinds of battery modes.
Modern Apple Silicon macbooks have an optional "Low Power Mode" that reduces CPU speed and screen brightness and can be set to apply under different conditions as desired, such as battery only.
Mac’s have had “game mode” for a while already. https://support.apple.com/en-us/105118
It turns on pretty much automatically but you can turn it off.
Many of these look like solid feature updates, but I'm waiting to hear about a native keyboard that doesn't pick the dumbest, most context-free possible word from the smear of letters I've fat-fingered into it.
Can it get “it’s” vs “its” predictively correct more than 50% of the time?
That would be a huge improvement.
I do wonder when we're finally going to get LLM-level accuracy applied to text input (both keyboard and dictation).
Not to try to do anything predictive, but just to get words right when it would be clear to any human what the intended word would be in context, both gramatically as well as in subject matter.
I have to assume you could do this pretty well with a vastly smaller model that would run on an iPhone.
I mean, dictation on my iPhone is vastly better than it was 10 years ago -- it's usable for a lot of stuff that it simply wasn't usable for previously (dictating brainstorming ideas while lying on the couch, for example). But it still makes a lot of mistakes and just skips far too many words it can't seem to figure out.
I just wish the systems exposed the confidence of their guesses to the user. Should be a big heat map and some drop-downs to focus your review once you’re done. Instead you just see the final results of its guesses (or gaps).
Seems to be an issue across commercial dictation systems, not just iOS.
Really impacts their usage in a hands-off and eyes-off manner.
My favorite peeve is when I want to place the text caret at some point, and instead iOS refuses to do anything other than autoselect a whole word, forcing me to select somewhere far away first, then finally long press where I want.
I really fucking wish I could turn off auto selection.
I only use this damned thing because work pays for it.
Press space on the onscreen keyboard for ~2 secs and you can move the caret like a cursor. Not many people know that trick, but it totally solves what you're describing.
Which I think is utterly dumb, because the intuitive action to correct a mistake is moving the cursor to the mistake, not select a word (or a random number of words, it does that too).
The space cursor trick is an hidden feature users have no way of visually discovering unless by typing accident, or when someone tells them. It only exists because the cursor behaves unexpectedly.
This has been the bane of my existence since switching from android. Even using the google keyboard doesn't seem to help. I have no idea how the text input is so bad on iphone--maybe it's my own fault for not being familiar with the device (though i generally don't have his issue moving between pixel devices).
It's so bad I often wonder if I've done something to inadvertently screw up whatever vector database is used to weight the guesses on my particular phone. It's just hard to imagine having this bad of a user experience of a fundamental function be widespread.
The most annoying thing for me is the lack of completion of swear words. This results in lots of gucking and shut.
Still waiting on the ability to set a custom alert tone for group messages. I'm in a couple that occasionally will just go off. The alert is the standard one that also sounds for regular (direct to me) messages, so I either have to mute that group chat for an hour—and hope it settles down within that timeframe—or mute it entirely, and risk forgetting to unmute it later.
If I could just set the alert to something different and minimal, I'd let it run. Bonus if the alert could be one thing for the first message sent, and a simpler thing for the ongoing chatter.
Nice but the thing they said that interested me was iMessage via satellite. Now that is impressive for a minor feature.
They didn't talk at all about costs which is odd for such a feature.
I think it's free (for now) like the emergency SOS. Well not free, you pay for it when you buy the phone.
the emergency SOS was only promised to be free for two years, which is coming to an end soon for iPhone 14.
i suspect adding iMessage to the service is an effort to make it valuable enough to start charging for it.
That sounds like a feature that will have major, lifesaving impacts for 0.01% of users but will not matter at all to most folks(cue the replies from the 10 HN users who need to tell me how important this is to them).
Also, wasn't this already announced?
It's a cool feature. I'm just not sure how impactful it will be. You could argue it's important in less connected areas of the world but are folks there using iPhones or are they using a cheap phone provided by Facebook or something?
> impacts for 0.01% of users but will not matter at all to most folks(cue the replies from the 10 HN users who need to tell me how important this is to them).
It seems like this impacts the millions of people who visit the National Parks in the US?
There is essentially no cellular service anywhere in the parks because the Park Service thinks people should put down their phones and enjoy nature. Wifi is only for guests of the in-park hotels, and is barely adequate for sending short text messages. I actually can't remember that last time I saw a payphone, but they are everywhere in the parks (and people use them) because of the lack of cellular coverage.
> Also, wasn't this already announced?
You're thinking of emergency SOS. This is for chatting to your friends.
Most people exist in the long tail of some distribution or another. The more features that exist which stay out of most people's way, but solve a problem on some long tail, the more the iPhone ecosystem will feel tailored to everyone.
I think super basic SMS or SOS of some kind was announced? Full imessage support is new.
> That sounds like a feature that will have major, lifesaving impacts for 0.01% of users but will not matter at all to most folks
Apple's "Emergency SOS" feature launched back in November 2022 (in the U.S., on iPhone 14 and up).
Normal texting via satellite will be subtle, perhaps, but it will be one of those things where we will look back and thing "huh, wasn't that weird when we could message people almost everywhere instead of everywhere?"
Plenty of people live, travel or recreate in places in the US with non-existent cell reception. Rivers, lakes, mountains etc are full of cell dead spots.
I hang around in the middle of nowhere in dangerous and stupid places a lot for days. It'd be nice to bounce the odd message to family to inform them that I'm not dead.
Get a Garmin InReach Mini 2, they're best-in-class for this purpose.
There's no denying that smartphone messaging via satellite is game-changing in this space (and I hope my Garmin Fenix watch will one day have 2-way SOS messaging capability integrated into it) but I wouldn't trust a smartphone for this.
We have a pool one for expeditions. But it's not reliable. The one time we needed it, the thing was on the fritz so we had to carry a guy with a broken leg 10km.
I would like 2 completely different channels to communicate over.
>major, lifesaving impacts for 0.01% of users
people who drive through areas where there's no cell coverage is certainly a larger demographic than 0.01%. having coverage to contact a friend or family member if you get in an accident or your car breaks down on 100% of your route instead of 99% of your route would be a big peace of mind upgrade for me.
I've dumbed down my phones main screen so much to turn it into less of a distraction machine that I just don't care.
I've also simplified my home screen more than it used to be in the beginning. With the App Library page and the global search feature I never need much just right there as an app icon.
> With the App Library page
...a very cheeky "Welcome to 2007", from Android-land! =D
The biggest single thing I found for reducing screen time is to set the screen to grayscale. It just makes everything so less engaging
Did not even realize that was an option!
On my iPhone SE 3:
- Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Colour Filters -> Greyscale switches it on. It also sets the default colour filter which is helpful because ...
- Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut -> Colour Filters means you can then triple-press the Home button (on an SE) to toggle that setting at any time
As various studies have suggested in the past, I do find I use it less in greyscale.
I moved from Android to iOS last year and am excited to see many of the features I had mourned losing now available in iOS.
Surprisingly, they're adding RCS Messaging support!
Didn't expect that.
Not super surprising, they announced it months ago when the EU's antitrust pressure was maxed-out: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/apple-announces-rcs-...
They announced that last year, it's not really surprising anymore.
Finally. Icons don’t have to be stuck in the top left corner of the screen.
Not that this will ever be available on the 6s I’m still using.
How did it take them 17 years to figure out how to not shove icons into one corner??
Congratulations to iPhone users on the ability to "place app icons anywhere", a true innovation.
Took them seventeen years to figure out the technology
Apple is like a bully who is not gonna stop unless a bigger bully (EU) forces him to. I'm glad about RCS addition, it was long over due.
I wish they would provide useful customization features, such as adjusting the drop shadow on the app names that appear under the icons. Look at those images in the article; the "News" text is way less legible because it's over the highlight of the dog's ear. This has been an issue for years.
It's funny to observe the trends over the year. An Apple event is just meh. A single entry on the OpenAI blog cause excitement, hundreds of comments and speculations.
Cydia had this 10 years ago xD