Apple’s newest OS previews include enhancements to Messages and widgets, and even brings live call screening back to iPhone.
The highlight of Apple’s keynote at the Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday was definitely Vision Pro and visionOS. However, the iPhone maker also has a whole slate of new operating systems on the horizon, and went to great trouble to demonstrate a whole host of new features. Yearly iterations are nothing new, but one change in particular has this iPhone user pretty excited.
iOS 17 – Bringing Back the 90s
Millennials and Generation Xers such as this author remember seeing an unknown number on the caller ID, letting the phone go to the machine, and listening to the message as it came in live. This was by far the best thing about the 1990s that had since disappeared. With the advent of the cellular phone, callers had to leave a voicemail with the carrier and wait for a notification to be delivered to the phone. iOS 17 will change that for iPhone users; Apple has run its own visual voicemail service for iPhones rather than relying on carriers to receive messages, and finally iPhone users get something very cool: Live Voicemail.
Using on-device machine learning and voice recognition, Live Voicemail will automatically and instantly transcribe a message as it’s being left. The recipient can decide to pick up the phone and answer mid-way through the message if it’s someone they want to talk to. This will come in handy when unknown but still important people call, since the person receiving the call might want to talk to prospective employers, doctor’s offices, and their kids’ schools. As old a feature as this is, it’s a wonder that it’s taken this long to bring it back. It’s genuinely useful, too, so we hope that other voice communication providers pick up on it.
Other communication tools get updates, too. Messages gains swipe-to-reply functionality where conversation threads can be created with a flick of the finger. Matching Google Messages’ ability to react with any emoji, iPhone users will get to do the same with stickers, and will be able to turn any image or video into a sticker as well. Messages also gets new location sharing functionality and automatic voice message transcription. FaceTime will finally allow callers to leave video messages for their recipient when there’s no answer, and the Apple-only video calling app will make its Apple TV debut this fall.
The last really useful addition to iOS 17 is StandBy mode. When an iPhone is on a MagSafe-compatible charger and oriented horizontally, full-screen widgets will appear. These widgets include an interface for controlling music apps, a calendar and event list, status updates from an upcoming delivery from services like Uber Eats, or an alarm clock to name a few. The alarm clock is particularly interesting in that it uses the on-device ambient light sensor to dim and turn red in the dark, which can evoke memories of digital alarm clocks from back in the day. 90s nostalgia abounds.
There’s a ton of other new features in iOS 17, too many to list, in fact. We will list a few, though: enhanced autocorrect in the system keyboard, auto-filled security codes sent to Mail (Messages has worked this way for a long time, incidentally), and new drawing tools for Freeform are all coming to iOS 17 this fall. The new operating system will run on basically every iPhone from the last four years, all the way back to 2019’s iPhone XS and iPhone XR and the 2020 second-generation iPhone SE and later.macOS 14 Sonoma – Widgets, Widgets everywhere
There’s a word for the new features on macOS 14 Sonoma, and that word is « widgets. » Rather than hide widgets behind the Notification Center panel, as Apple has done on macOS Ventura and earlier, widgets go right on the desktop. Users can plaster as many widgets as they want all over the screen, limited only by display real estate.
