Blog

In this article, I give you my Apple iOS 12 and WatchOS 5 review with specs included. iOS 12 is on the iPhone and the iPad. I’m gonna cover what’s new and if you should upgrade today. Also, Apple Watch OS 5 is on watches.

Right now, I can tell you that, yes, you should upgrade. Because several months ago, Apple said instead of focusing on whiz-bang G’s new features, they were going to focus on stability and performance improvements.

Sort of like Microsoft did when they went to Windows 10, which you might have discovered if you actually do use Windows occasionally, before better on weaker hardware. The same thing is true here. I’m testing on the iPhone 8 Plus as well as the iPhone 10, and in our office, some older iPhone models.

When they said 40% faster launching apps, 70% faster swiping to get to the cameras, like, yeah, you have never seen that slow. But I did notice some apps, like, if for those who use OneNote, it always launched my grocery shopping list app solely; always launched salty anyway, suddenly it was like, wow, boom, it was right there.

That’s nice to see, especially for those of you who are keeping your phone so you don’t upgrade every year, which a lot of people don’t, especially because iPhones are expensive.

So, on that premise alone, before we even tell you about what else is new performance-wise and stability-wise, this is a go. Even in the betas, it was very stable because they wanted to make a point of making it stable. With iOS 1, the previous year, it was a rocky start; there were bugs.

Now, to be fair, in part because there were a lot of fundamental changes to support the whole new hardware design that they were doing with the iPhone 1,0, the edge station displayed the whole notch, supported the new kinds of cameras they were using. So, this year,r there’s less of that going on; they could focus on that good stuff,uff, so let’s talk about the other stuff now.

First, turnt up something that touches all of us, the notifications. Even if you’re an iOS fanboy or fangirl,ngirl you have to admit tha’iOS is handling of notifications is just not all there and awesome, especially compared to something like Android. Well, they have done some improvements here, including grouped notifications.

For example, I have a Ring doorbell, though if you follow me on Twitter know that because we have problems with things like the lizards crawling around on the walls and setting off the Ring doorbell.

I might get like three notifications pretty much rapid-fire: his Stenberg swipe and swipe and swi. Now they’re grouped, so you can remove the whole group of them together,r which is fantastic because a swipe itis was a disease for iOS.

Also, now that you’re right there in the notification shade, you can manage a little third option that says manage your notifications here. So if you decide that this is just too darned annoying, you can do something about it.

The next thing is FaceTime. You can now FaceTime with up to 32 people. Are you that popular? Even I’m not that popular. But I think it’s probably more family reunion business, es and probably still you won’t hit 32 people, but group FaceTime is now a thing.

Last year, we had emojis, so here we have me emo, j, i, so what is that? Because of the processing power on these phones and the fancy-pants camera that’s on the iPhone 10, th10s10,s and the 10s Max, those million phones will support this. You can do basically constant animated emoji use, a carrot cartoon character version of you if you wish to be a koala bear or a tiger, er, while you’re doing FaceTime,ime you can do it.

So the whole time that you’re facetiming its the emoji version of you, okay.

For those of you who are students,s you can now use basically the wallet app to carry a digital version of your student ID card, and there are several universities that are supporting that already.

The Photos app has been revamped; it now supports raw editing on the iPhone and the iPad. And speaking of a premium, some of them have gotten more full-featured and more modern-looking, like the stocks app that pretty much just showed the stocks and nothing else. Well, now it actually shows you lots of information about what’s going on in the world today of business, and if you tap on a particular stock, you’ll see a new list where you can get up-to-date information more quickly and more easily. And on the iPad, it’s kind of like a mini Bloomberg presentation, and it’s very nice.

iBooks is now called Apple Books; it’s got a redesign as well, and probably the most interesting thing there is that the store application functionality within that now looks more like the App Store, so it’s more consistent. It does look better, too.

For those who have our cameras supporting your phones, well,l it can now measure things. This is not exactitude; this is not you just bought a fine art painting, ng and you want to measure the canvas to get a frame made for it. This is pretty close enough, like you want to look at that couch there,e an Ikea, and see if that’s basically gonna fit in your big room,m that sort of thing. So it’s pretty neat that you can do that, and it’s pretty easy to do.

For those of you who have DND mode (Do Not Disturb), but you’re information junkies, and you can’t stop yourself from waking up and looking at your phone screen,n there’s an option, so don’t have a panic attack. There’s an option to really put it in super DND mode, which means it’s not going to show any notifications on screen until it’s time for you to get up.

Also, in the spirit of phone health, shall we say, where people use their phones too much, there’s a new function that allows you to keep track of what you’re doing, how much you’re using your phone, and how many times a day you use it. When you discover you picked up your phone 500 times in a day, you realize you might have a problem. Also, it’s gonna tell you how much you’re using each application.

So, for those who are addicted to the latest games, you’re gonna find out how that is, or if you spent too much time on Facebook,k whatever it is. Again, this is up to you. You don’t have to use this; it’s up to you if you do want to use it.

Hooking into that kind of functionality where the phone actually knows what you’re doing with all that sort of thing. The battery information has gotten more granular, too. So, it tells you how much screen time this is getting, a little bit more like Android, which applications you’re spending the most time in a given hour, so you can actually see 2 p.m., 3 p.,m., 4 p.m.

There’s a little graph of how much screen time, so when you’re wondering where your battery life went, it’s gonna help you figure it out a little more clearly.

Safari now has enhanced tracking protection. You know how creepy it is when you’re looking at that laptop on some website, thinking about it,t and it follows you around in every single ad for a week? The attempt here is to try to prevent that sort of tracking. So, every time you look at some kind of product, even if you went ahead and bought it, its dollar ghost tracks you everywhere, good.

Also, if you’re doing social shares that sort of thing by default,t it’s not going to share your location, which is kind of good because some of us don’t really want to be stopped.

CarPlay now supports third-party navigation because, well,l you know Apple Maps. So if you’d rather use something like Google Maps and not have it tell you to go drive in a river, you can do that.

So, Sir, i she’s still trying to get smarter, and to be fair to Appl,e part of the reason Siri isn’t seemingly as smart as Google’s assistant, sometimes even Amazon Alexa, is because Apple is very focused on privac;y they don’t want to track all that sort of data and pull it back to the service for interpretation and all that sort of thing.

But still, there are things that Siri can do on the phone to make your life easier. She can look at your habits if you haven’t done the same daily rituals, the same sort of thing. She can start to suggest automated things that she can do. You can create shortcuts on the home screen because you always do a certain set of things at a certain time every day.

She also now supports food information, so from the USDA database of food and nutrition,n you can find out just how healthy or unhealthy that thing is that you’re thinking about eating next, and she can help you find your iPhone, your iPad,d and even your AirPods.

So on the iPad, there are really only two big changes there, and finally support for gestures. And, if you’re like me and you have both an iPhone and an iPad,d you start to feel horribly stupid because you’re used to those iPhone gestures, right, where you swipe down from the right, and you’ve got Control Center, which used to do nothing on the iPad, inexplicably, ly and swiping up from the top to do multitasking likewise did nothing.

Well, now they both do something; they do the same thing as they do on your iPhone, so the swipe up is a quick way to multitask and get to your home screen, and if you want to get to Control Center without, you know, leaving an application, you can swipe down and adjust your brightness or do whatever it is you need.

For WatchO, there are several health features added. You’ve got yoga and hiking now supported for exercise apps; you have low heart rate monitoring for those who have extremely low heartbeats and that sort of thing, and also yeah,o yeah, we finally have automatic workout detection.

So, if you started running for the bus and it’s a pretty good long run, you’ll get credit for that, or if you’re like me and you go and you start a run and you forget to hit the I’m starting the exercise button on your watch,h it will figure it out and give you credit for that.

Also, another thing it’s easy to forget is that when you’re done with your workout, you go running into the shower, you have to actually tell it that you finished it also has automatic workout detection as well.

You no longer have to say ‘hey Siri’ to your watch; you can just raise your hand and do it instead. Finally, after a weird glitch and I in watch OS for podcasts, we have a dedicated podcast app now, and it supports offline podcast playback and offline playlist playing too. So third-party applications like Spotify include it as well, so yay for those of you who have a watch and don’t want to pay for streaming over LTE.

By the way, all watches except for the original 2015 model are eligible for Watch OS 5.

Let’s say there’s a walkie-talkie feature now: both you and your walkie-talkie partner have to have an Apple watch, but then you can just talk to each other in real time anytime you want. It supports voice and anything else- just voice, but it’s kind of cool. So there you have it; that’s what’s new in iOS 12 and Watch OS 5.