In this episode of the AppleVis Extra podcast, host David Mason is joined by Thomas Domville, Tyler Stephen, and newcomer Levi Gobin to unpack everything announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The team dives deep into the new features coming to iOS, watchOS, macOS, and iPadOS, sharing their first impressions and early experiences with the latest developer betas.
Highlights from the Episode:
1. Unified OS Versions:
- Apple aligns iOS, watchOS, and macOS under version 26, marking a more cohesive update cycle across platforms. The panel discusses the reasoning behind this and what it might mean for users and developers.
2. iOS 26 Key Features:
- A bold new “liquid glass” aesthetic refreshes the visual design.
- Versioning now reflects the year, simplifying future updates.
- Groundbreaking features like Hold Assist and on-device live translation redefine accessibility and daily use.
- Shortcuts receive a major boost from Apple Intelligence, making automations more powerful and customizable.
3. Beta Testing Stories & Insights:
- Thomas recounts a rocky iOS 26 beta install on the iPhone 15 Pro and the steps it took to recover.
- The team examines current beta performance—discussing AI-driven screenshot analysis, enhanced screen calling, and improved battery status alerts.
4. watchOS 26 Updates:
- Smart Stack and Workout Buddy add new layers of personalization to workouts.
- Lively debate ensues on the practicality of motivational workout prompts.
5. macOS 26 "Tahoe":
- Spotlight becomes smarter with Quick Key integration.
- More control for users through revamped menu bar and control center customization.
- Discussion around Rosetta’s eventual phase-out and what it means for app compatibility.
- Subtle but meaningful accessibility improvements, including customizable toolbars via the Actions menu.
6. iPadOS 26 Enhancements:
- Continues its convergence with macOS, introducing menu customizations and better file handling.
- A new Phone app brings calling functionality to non-iPhone devices.
7. VoiceOver Improvements:
- Notable accessibility gains, including enhanced Braille input and toolbar customization for VoiceOver users.
8. Looking Ahead:
- The team reflects on the implications of Apple’s AI roadmap and the growing synergy across platforms.
- They offer thoughts on what this year’s updates signal about Apple’s broader strategy moving forward.
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Dave: Hello there and welcome to another episode of the Apple Viz Extra podcast. My name is David Mason and really exciting time of year. It is WWDC. We had all of the announcements on Monday and we are gathered to chat through them. what Apple told us, what's coming up, and a few little extras that we've been digging around and finding in the betas early on as well. So lots to chat through. Delighted to be joined here by three fellow members of the team, the ever-present Thomas Domville. How are you, Thomas?
Thomas: Hey, I'm doing wonderful, Dave. Thank you for that and excited to be here.
Dave: You had a wonderful day, but maybe we'll talk also about a slightly stressful day. You had. But we could go back to that. Tyler, great to have you back as well. How are you?
Tyler: I'm good.
Dave: Great stuff. And making his AppleVis Extra debut, it is our newest team member, Levi Gobin. Levi, how's it going?
Levi: Hello, it's going good today.
Dave: Great stuff. How are you liking life on the team so far?
Levi: Yeah, pretty awesome.
Dave: great stuff. So we will dive in. There was a lot, it was about an hour and a half long keynote yesterday. About 32 minutes. There you go. So start off with Formula One promos and all sorts of stuff.
Thomas: That was pretty hysterical, wasn't it? I thought it was kind of cute. I know some people probably thought that was cheesy, but the audio description was great. The water glass was shaking and everybody was putting their AirPods on to put the active cancellation on. I thought that was really cute. That was nice.
Levi: I was watching it in spatial audio from the Apple TV app on my phone last night, and I thought the spatial audio for the Dolby Atmos on the Apple TV app for that section was really cool. You could hear things zooming all around the stereo, so it was pretty cool.
Dave: Yeah, I'm an F1 fan as well, so I enjoyed seeing that. I think this is as well, we saw from the very start, this is different this year. There really are bringing the operating systems together more and more, symbolized by the fact that it's not iOS 19, watchOS 12, macOS 16. It is everything 26. So the year that we're going into, I guess. Yeah. How do we feel about that very quickly?
Thomas: Nice. I mean, we all kind of suspect that. I mean, it's been in the news, and so it wasn't a surprise. I think it's great. Because it was getting too confusing, as you say. I was getting confused. What was what? What version? I mean, I just can't remember all the numbers. So to start over from scratch, I think that was great. And to associate it with a year, I think that was perfect. I love that. Now, making it 26, that was a little bit odd. I would have called it Iowa's 25 just because it really came out in 25. But other than that, I'm happy with that. Now, they just... It would be cool to do the devices that way, and I don't know if they will. It'll be interesting to see if it's really iPhone 17 or if they're really going to go with everybody doing the same devices, 26. I don't know. We'll see.
Dave: Yeah, I agree completely. And I suppose it's It's also that there's a lot of now shared more as there is every year, but I think even more shared experiences across all of them. I mean, there's the new liquid glass visual design. I don't we probably as all voiceover users here aren't too worried about that. But I think our low vision friends in the community are. we'll be curious to see how this works out and hopeful that there'll be no options as well. I would think. Yeah.
Thomas: I think that's going to be a nightmare situation for low vision. Um, especially what it sounds like when they start to tinker with the font and the spacing and the colors. I'm like, oh, man. I don't know what to think. It's too early to say. Unfortunately, none of us are low vision to be able to let you guys know what kind of impact that's going to be. But thankfully for us that are blind, we won't have that issue. From what I understand, it's not going to sound any different to us.
Dave: Yeah, I agree. I do wonder about when they're talking about floating controls in Safari and things like that. I wonder, does that mean it's going to be harder to find the address bar at times or anything like that? But yeah, I don't know yet.
Levi: What I've noticed, I believe they mentioned the floating tab bar or whatever. I have noticed that the tab bar does kind of seem to disappear unless you focus on it, and then it sort of comes back again. The one thing I will say about the visual redesign is although the mail app is the same, things have moved. The search fields and apps are now at the bottom of the screen. Instead of at the top it being select or edit, whatever it is, all inboxes, search, dictate, now you have all that in your mail and at the bottom you have composed, updated just now, whatever. search dictate. So all that stuff has been moved to the bottom, which I don't know how I feel about that yet. So I'm used to search fields being at the top.
Tyler: Yeah, I don't like that. Just in my early experimentation, like I'm used to, for example, in the settings app, the apps button, if I perform a four finger tap near the bottom of the screen, I expect to jump to the apps button. Now I'm jumped to the dictate button after the search field and settings. I am not crazy about that. I know what they're doing. But, yeah, again, I don't prefer that behavior, at least not as of now. But, yeah, they did change it up a little bit. And I don't mind change for the sake of change. I know things get moved around. I just want it to be consistent.
Dave: Yes. Yeah. I guess it's similar to what they did with Safari where they moved the address bar a couple of years ago. Although in that case, you could switch it back if you wanted, but I suppose it's... That's what I do. Yeah, I don't bother. With phones getting bigger, that's the idea, isn't it?
Levi: Yeah, I got used to the address bar at the bottom actually pretty quickly. Yeah.
Dave: No, actually, I refused it for about a year, and then I tried it again and realized I actually like it.
Levi: Yeah, me too.
Dave: There's also improvements across all the OSs to things like messages, with group messaging and translations. What stands out to you there? I bet you like it, Levi.
Levi: Yeah, I was just thinking the live translation seems pretty... Pretty cool, in my opinion. I've not messed with it just because I've had nobody text me in a different language, but one thing I did, one thing I was curious about this morning was I had to make a phone call early this morning, and I was placed on hold, and my first thought was, okay, is hold assist the thing that lets you basically wait without having to listen to the music or whatever, and it lets them know when they're when you're going to come back. I was wondering, okay, is hold assist going to jump into action here and say, oh, this sounds like hold music or whatever. I don't know how it works, but I don't think that is in the first beta, or at least voiceover didn't make any audible, like, hold assist dialogue or whatever, or alert or whatever. It didn't make anything like that. So maybe that's going to come in a future beta.
Dave: Is that supposed to be automatics?
Levi: So from what I got from the WWDC was if the phone detects hold music, it will offer to let you wait there or whatever and it lets you remain on the call or whatever. And then when it When it hears that somebody's picked up, it will basically alert you to the fact and tell the agent that, hold on, basically, let me put the agent on hold. Hold on while other person answers. And I'm sure some customer service reps... are at first going to never know about the feature until suddenly people will start using it. They're going to be like, huh? What? Yeah. I had that thought. Yeah, me too. Like, huh? What do you mean? Someone's going to be back with me. I'm just going to hang up. I'm sure that's going to happen.
Dave: Why put them on hold? Why are they? And live translations, they're in a few other places. There's actually live audio translations, I think, as well. It's one of those things that it feels like every year all of the big tech companies promise live translations. Am I wrong? Yeah, that's an interesting thing.
Levi: Like the Ray-Ban metas have it, supposedly, but again, I've not talked to people in other languages, so I've not gotten the chance to try it, whether that be on the metas or...
Thomas: now on the iphone yeah i think that's huge um i'll just mention briefly about the live translation is that um i think this is this is awesome because one it's all done on your device there is no cloud reaching out so that's what's the most impressive thing is is that that translation is done on your device and um You know, I feel terrible because I do have friends that do translation on a company basis. So usually customers support, they'll have to call the translator to help with people with different language they have to speak with for customer support. I mean, my God, this just like eliminated all those people's job because it does that. But it's a pretty cool technology, but all done on your device. That's pretty impressive.
Levi: Yeah, I guess you could argue how accurate are those translations. I guess for anybody who doesn't speak both languages and can't test it, I guess we're never going to know how accurate the translations actually are.
Dave: That's true. And I think, like, you know, if you're purchasing something, say, over the phone, and there's contract involved and stuff they're not going to... They probably still would require human translation because they have to know the legal language is being translated. But for a lot of stuff, I think you're right, Thomas. It could be a big difference maker.
Tyler: I was just going to say on translation, one thing that I don't think has been added to iOS, but it's been in macOS for, I believe, since 2020, is The ability to select text and translate on the fly. You don't have to go into a translate app. You don't have to switch up your environment. That's in Iowa. Is it in Iowa?
Levi: Yeah, I think it's in the edit. Or it's one of those things where you double tap and hold or tap and hold on the text field and you get those options.
Tyler: So like on Safari, every once in a while I'll come up on something in Safari. So I'll be on YouTube, for example. And I'll come up on a comment in a different language. I can select the text and choose translate from the context menu. I've not found, I can look again, but I've not found that on iOS. I know there's a translate app, but yeah. Um, so that's what I would like to, I guess I'll check again. Um, but that was what I would like to see on iOS where like in Safari, for example, if I come up on something, I can just, um, I don't know. I don't have to download any other languages if I don't want, I can, I can, um, you know, translate online. Um, But, yeah, I've not found that in iOS, but maybe it has been added. I'll check again.
Dave: It's early days, too, so it may just not be there yet. And then Apple Intelligence more broadly, Thomas, did they have anything new to tell us?
Thomas: You know, actually, there's a lot that was mentioned about Apple Intelligence that were used across all the different OSs and devices. You know, to me, this is like, OK, The uses of an iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices now got all these cool new features. So a lot of people need to understand this, and this is going to be the bummer part. A lot of people are going to kind of be upset is that, unfortunately, most of the new things you heard in the keynote will only be available on those devices. So if you have an iPhone 14 and less, you're not. So we're talking about that live translation that we've been talking about. And we're talking about what they talked about, the demoji and being able to swap it together and create new emojis with that. And the new image playground that they mentioned that now tied in with the chat GPT, which we'll be talking soon here, is the new visual screenshot Apple intelligence that they mentioned. Any third-party apps that decide to tap into the AI to use with their app is included. And of course, the AI power shortcuts we'll be talking as well. So it's kind of sad because you think about it. Those are some of the major things I thought we heard in that. And if you don't have the newer devices, you're not going to be able to take advantage of it. So last year, we were kind of on the borderline, rewriting tools. But it seems like this is starting to show you, okay, they're starting to introduce more things. It just shows to me by the time next year comes along, I think it's going to be all but AI stuff. And I think a lot of people are going to miss out on that. And you really aren't going to see a whole lot of new things. So that's what I got out of the whole Apple intelligence discussion in the keynote. Yeah, I think this AI power shortcut is one of the biggest thing I am going to love because we all know how horrible shortcuts is and it's so complicated to create your own. Now you just prompt what you want that shortcut to do. Holy smokes, guys, this is impressive.
Dave: Yeah, very helpful for that one. And I think as well, the fact that developers can plug into Apple Intelligence, as you described, Thomas, could be very powerful. I mean, if you have to create a shortcut to do that, that would be amazing. It would be even more amazing if Apple will just build it.
Thomas: But we're starting to see more separation, right, Dave? Is that... I kind of feel bad because if you don't have a 15 and newer, you're starting to feel that separation to occur.
Dave: It's true because like you say, like last year, the body and intelligence. I mean, I have not used writing tools a single time for real life. Not once. I have not used Genmoji. I have not used image playground because you get much better images from like chat GPT. You know what I mean? Yeah. These things haven't been successful over the last year. It wouldn't have mattered for the last year. Well, actually, I'm in Europe, so I didn't have it for most of the year. And when I did get it, it didn't matter. So this year, though, we're starting to see real beginnings of real things.
Levi: Yeah, I actually use the proofreading. I don't use the rewriting and all that. I use the proofreading when I'm writing guides or whatever. I tend to throw it through the proofreading thing just to catch anything that I might have missed, and it does a pretty good job once you teach it the meaning of the word Applefish because it will like to correct it. When you first try to correct it, then you've got to go into the spelling and grammar window. When it selects it, hit learn, and then it knows that's a correct word. I do that too.
Dave: Yeah. Okay, very good. So yeah, hopefully that's getting better. We can dive in then to a bit more of what's new specifically in iOS. Have you guys, I think you guys have all downloaded the betas. Yeah. Thomas, you had an adventure doing so.
Thomas: Oh, yeah. I did. In short, it seems to be just the iPhone 15 Pro folks, like myself, that when I installed the iOS 26 beta 1, It totally bricked my device, totally bricked it. And it was so bad that I had to take it to the Apple store because none of the mode was working. So the gestures for the recovery mode or the DFU mode, the typical gestures that we typically do, didn't work. It did not work. It would not respond. It was like a hard lock. And weirdly, it kept showing the status that the battery was low and you need to plug it in. And I started with 70%, so I knew I had juice in there. Short story is that there's other people in the store that were there with the same similar issue, with the same phone. I looked on Reddit. Other iPhone 15 Pro users were having the same problems. And so I ended up coming home with my device that wasn't working because the Genius Bar could not figure it out. And funny enough, my daughter said she got the news that I bricked my phone and they can't fix it. She goes, what? She looked on Reddit and within minutes she had a solution and she got it up and running within probably five minutes. And thankfully she did that because it was a nightmare situation for me without being a phone and totally bricked. And nobody had any solution to it. But it turns out there's a new mode for DFU mode, and I didn't realize there's a new different mode that you can do. And I'm just puzzled that the Apple Store didn't know about the new mode. So I'm at a loss. But anyway, I got it back up, and apparently other users that do have the iPhone 15 Pro tried it three times in a row, and it kept bombing. So it has something to do. with the beta and the download. So that was my story. I spent, I would say, all afternoon and all night just dealing with that. So big deal.
Dave: Did it end up on iOS 26? No. Or did you have to put that on a different device?
Thomas: I had to put that on a different device. I cannot get 26 to work on my 15 Pro at all. So it's back to 18.5. So, yeah.
Dave: Levi, you braved it on your 16 Mac Pro Mac, didn't you? Yes, I did.
Levi: And yesterday, the betas had just come out, and I couldn't find the release notes, and I had already downloaded it, and then I realized, well, I've been taking some classes, so I was like, I better not install this before I get out of class just in case something does go wrong, and if I had a 15 Pro, that would have been...
Thomas: terrible if i had installed it and i couldn't contact anybody that would have been terrible but um but yeah yeah you have to have a um and that was another thing i had to tell you you have to have to use a usbc to usbc um adapter the usb a to usbc does not work It's something to do with that cable, which I was like, what? And that was true. So I had to get a USB-C to USB-C. And thankfully, my daughter had a Mac, so I was able to get out of it. Now, I don't know if that would work on Windows, but I do know that you have to have the C to C on those newer phones to get out of that DFP mode.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. So lucky you got out of that. And Tyler, you have it on a 12, I think, don't you? So you're running it on a backup device. Yeah. Great stuff. So I'm the only one not... Yes, I was on the fence deciding, will I put it on my 12 mini or will I put it on my actual 15 Pro? And, well, I think we have an answer to that question.
Levi: Yeah. Yeah, thank goodness you didn't put it on your 15 Pro.
Thomas: I know. That's why you have us to test it, and that way the listeners didn't have to... They can just laugh at us for going through all that.
Dave: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So health warnings apply, but it's good that we're on the beta. And is it feeling fairly stable so far as beta ones go?
Thomas: From what I've seen and from what other people say, it is incredibly stable from what I've seen. Yeah, there's a few quirks here and there, but really... I mean, really, I mean, I'm not trying to be mean, but we really didn't get a whole, like, major shakeup. I mean, there's some design changes, like in the phone app, like we mentioned in the mail app. But I haven't seen that much of a problem.
Dave: And on the iOS side, like, Tyler, is there anything that jumps out to you that you like beyond the features we've already spoken about?
Tyler: Yeah. Well, on iOS, to quote Craig Federighi, we really are in a world of wonders. I discovered that you can now change the snooze duration of a watch. Yay! From 1 to 15 minutes. Yeah, and what struck me about that is that when I switched from a Symbian phone to an iPhone, I remember thinking, you can't change the snooze time on the native alarm app on the iPhone? I can do that on my Symbian, my Nokia phone running Symbian. And I remember that was one of the things I transitioned to when I learned iOS. It was like, that's weird, you can't do that. I mean, yeah, there are third-party apps if I wanted to do that, but still I thought it was funny. And like now in 2025, with iOS version 26, they add the ability to change the snooze duration. And that's what you could say, That's a feature that Symbian's had for as long as I can remember. So I guess it's good to have that. There are other features, like you can change the double tap, the behavior of the magic tap, so that if you find you inadvertently press it and start playing music when you don't want to, you can turn that off so that won't So it won't do that.
Dave: Is that just the default? Sorry, Tyler, is that just the default behavior? So it will still work in specific apps and situations, but it's just the default behavior?
Tyler: Yeah, so like in media, normally the default is media playback. So even if you're on the lock screen or on the home screen, not in any app, if you perform a magic tap, it will play or pause media, but you can now disable that in the iOS 26 beta. But you're not disabling the overall feature, is that right? No, my understanding is you're just the default behavior. If you're on a phone call, for example, I believe, and I haven't tested this, but my understanding is that if you're in an app specifically, you can perform a magic tap and use some of that function. but I don't know exactly where the line is. So those are some of the iOS changes. There are a couple of voiceover enhancements. It's not the update to voiceover that last year's update brought. But yeah, there are a few new quality of life enhancements.
Dave: Yeah, there's improvements to things like maps. The camera app has a new design. The phone app has a new design. Safari, as we mentioned earlier. So any of those kind of jump out as good, bad, or indifferent?
Tyler: Most of the designs for me are indifferent because I am totally blind. I can't see the designs to begin with. And normally when they do visual overhauls, it doesn't really affect my experience as a voiceover user. From a few quick tests of Safari, it seems like I can tap where I'd expect the tab bar to be at the bottom, and it's been there. So I like that because I don't think I would like if it was relocating on its own or in a popover form.
Dave: The phone and the camera are probably a bit more noticeable, aren't they? Because that's actual buttons and tabs have been moved around.
Levi: The camera app, but I did tell my phone, I looked at the new UI, I looked at it before I went to sleep, but I told my phone to use the classic Layout, just because that's what I'm used to.
Dave: Any of you guys gamers?
Thomas: Oh, boy. I knew you were going to come down to that, right? You know, that standalone game app sounds amazing from what they said on paper, especially... You know, Dave, is that I am curious because it says it's going to base games on recommendation on what you play. And I'm thinking, hmm, I wonder how that's going to work on games that I do play like Dice World, Land of Libya, and things like that. I wonder how the recommendation is going to work on that. And if it does give me other accessible games, then we're talking. But I got a funny feeling it's not. But we'll see. Mm-hmm.
Levi: Yeah, that's what I was kind of thinking too. It reminds me so much of the old Game Center app from iOS 9 and before. I mean, in my mind, why not just say we're bringing back the Game Center app with a fresh new design? Why call it games when they're still telling the developers... Do this with Game Center. In my mind, it seems now like, okay, we have the games app and we have Game Center, which is these leaderboards and stuff. Why not just call it Game Center and bring back the Game Center app? Because that's what they did in iOS 9 before.
Dave: I guess they like a rebrand.
Levi: I guess so.
Dave: What I like about that though as well is, correct me if I'm wrong, but it means I can have one icon on my screen called games and I can get into all my games through that and I don't have to have all of them on my home screen then. I can just open that app and all the games I'm currently playing will just be displayed in that app.
Thomas: It's got to be interesting if that holds true and yeah i i i just i it's one of those i'm going to have to wait and see because the games i have none of them supports game center so i mean it's not going to really make any difference to me i mean obviously they're really pushing you to use your devices gaming because everybody's coming out with a handheld device so let's make the iphone the new handheld even though it has been but I get what they're doing, and I think it's great. I just don't know how this is going to play out for those that are completely blind. We'll just have to see.
Dave: Yeah, definitely. There's some improvements as well to the wallet app. I don't know if that's significant to any of you guys. I think it's probably more of a U.S. thing.
Thomas: The wallet thing? Definitely. So I'm one of those states that have been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting for digital wallet for my license. Never comes because my state doesn't support that. However, on the federal level, I am very ecstatic with the digital passport. Now I can put my passport on that baby, and now I go to the airport and show my digital passport. That's huge to me. So if you're not a travel person, I can get that. But the digital passport was kind of a huge thing for me when it came to the wallet.
Levi: Yeah. The one thing I liked – well, this is another Apple intelligence feature. Here we go. But the thing where it basically takes notifications and puts all your order history into one thing, I use a delivery tracking app called Parcel, which you can give it UPS or Amazon or any sort of those tracking links, and it'll show you your deliveries. And I like that app. It's pretty cheap. I think like $5 a year or something. for all the premium features, so I like that it's fully accessible, has a Mac app, all that. But I think having it in the wallet, also, you know, like getting notifications from maybe Parcel or maybe from Amazon or who knows, maybe even from Walmart for all the groceries, that seems like something that, you know, I've not tested it yet, but if it works the way I think it does where it says, like, you know, Your Walmart delivery is expected to arrive at this, or your UPS package is leaving our UPS facility, or, I don't know, your Amazon package has been delayed. I don't know. You know, stuff like that would be fun. It would be nice to see that in all one place without having to go in there and add, okay, here's this delivery and here's that delivery. It just pulls it automatically. That is going to be really useful if they can do that.
Thomas: Right. So the wallet is starting to expand some more because, you know, the flight, you know, we already were able to put our boarding pass onto the wallet, but now we'll expand it some more. Like it tells you, is it on time? Is it, it gives you more expansion to the wallet. I think it's great. The only problem is, is that again, the third party apps will have to make changes to make it work in the wallet to be all in one place. So again, That is, I don't know, Dave, I think that's kind of a huge thing for anyone. I hope that people in international like Ireland would be able to take advantage of the digital passport stuff.
Dave: Yeah, I don't think immediately on the passport, but a lot of the other stuff, the order tracking, hopefully the border passes. I already use boarding passes, of course, in the wallet app. And that's great because usually the airline apps are not so accessible. Right. Hopefully this will be an improvement. Yeah, definitely. Was there anything else in iOS that you guys have discovered or want to talk about?
Thomas: Oh, man, you just opened up a can of worms. So the one thing we didn't talk about, Dave, is that for those that are wanting, is this going to work on my device? And as I mentioned before, a lot of the Apple intelligence items, you have to have an iPhone 15 Pro and newer. But the other thing to notice, if you have the older iPhone, uh 10r 10s 10s max so you need a iphone 11 and newer to be able to uh use the ios 26 um yeah i'll kind of run through my list and then we'll see what other people um The screen calling, I think this is amazing. Now I can say anybody that's not on my contact list has to go through the screen calling process, so they have to leave some sort of a message, why you want to get a hold of me and ring me, and I can see, okay, it's from that. Yeah. We didn't really talk about the screenshot with Apple intelligence. I think that is a big thing. Um, I think the, I, we really haven't had the option to really play with it, but being able to send the screenshot automatically to chat GPT was kind of a thing that kind of perked my interest in, um, um, Some of the things I noticed that was not mentioned, okay, on the live screen, if you have your phone charging on a charger, now at the top where it says your battery percent, it will tell you what percent is that and how much time is left until you get a full charge. I thought, oh, my gosh, that is awesome. So you can see a new charging time. The battery adaptive power, which is kind of a cool thing too. If you're a low battery person, they have a new adaptive power thing. So you can get more concise control. Like I want this app to calm its butts down. So if it's hogging up, you can tell it to pull it less often and things like that. I did get a notice, and this was crazy. At first, I didn't know what was going on, but I read about it. It will detect if you're in camera mode and your lens is dirty, it will tell you your lens is dirty. It needs to be clean, so you have to.
Levi: There's a setting for that in the camera settings towards the bottom. I forget what it's called, but it's there.
Thomas: Yeah, the dirty lenses. Some voiceover stuff. Let's talk about that. People ask, are there any new voices? Yes and no. No, in a sense, what you think, there are some new languages. So Pan India, there's two new voices for that country in that language. As you guys talked about the magic tap thing, we discuss about not activating. So when you hang up on a phone, it doesn't start playing the media. I really like the new voiceover reset. Did you guys see that at the bottom? Yeah. The voiceover settings at the very bottom, there's a reset button. You can reset the entire voiceover settings. I was like, that's pretty slick because time after time when I go to clients, I don't know what the heck they've done or changed. I can just say, we're going to reset your voiceover, whatever you guys did to it. Yeah. Have you tried that?
Levi: It might have been helpful when a little kid in me didn't know what he was doing and put a language no one could understand as a voiceover voice. Even I couldn't understand it. I did that once when I was little. It might have been helpful back then.
Thomas: Right? Maps. You guys know when we have the maps and the center is all this gibberish of what's around and it's just worthless, right? Now there's a new option. Just three fingers, single tap on that will now tell you POIs in and around your area without you having to swipe, swipe, swipe. So that is sweet. One more thing and then I'll be done. We'll also do that in the Maps app on the Mac, by the way. That's right. Is it VOH or something? VOH. There you go. One last thing I think a lot of you are going to be really happy is that Raise your hand if you ever got PDFs and you have to sign something and you can't find it as a pane above the voiceover. There's now a signature widget that's when they create the PDF that will, if they assign it to the signature line, voiceover will now go directly to the signature line and it will prompt you right there where your signature needs to go. So those are the things I found. Yeah.
Levi: Yeah. A couple other cool audio things I found were, if you guys remember, in settings, music EQ, there was an EQ mode called Late Night, which compressed the audio and made it sound a bit louder. That's now moved into sounds and haptics. At the very bottom, under the built-in speaker heading, there's now a Late Night mode toggle switch. And I have not tried it yet, but according to a friend who did try it, it no longer affects – or it doesn't affect air pause or anything like that now. So the late-night EQ has been removed, but the big thing for me – is you can now select what microphone you want to use, meaning, like, for me, if I have my AirPods Max connected, there is a bug with it, which I'll mention in a minute, but if I have my AirPods Max connected, I always find the iPhone mic has a better sound quality for the stuff I like to do. Like, if I'm recording a voice memo, I don't want it to use my AirPods Max microphone, so I can go in there, and the sounds and haptics go on your microphone, change it from automatic to iPhone microphone, and it will always use the iPhone microphone. So now I don't have to take my AirPods Max off if I suddenly want to record a voice memo, because there's been times where I want to record a cool sound or something I'm hearing, and I've got my action button such as a voice memo, so I click it, and then it goes to my AirPods Max microphone because the voice gets lower quality. I then have to stop recording, take off the headphones, then re-record, and that's a few seconds I'll save. so that's nice and plus you can now record spatial audio in the voice memos app so with the 16 last year the 16 series last year Apple introduced spatial audio recording where it can record in a 3D audio format but up until iOS 26 that was only in videos if you wanted to take advantage of that you had to record a video but not anymore you can now record spatial audio voice memos which is really amazing
Dave: And on the microphone thing, is that app by app? Or, you know, for example, if you wanted to use it the way you described for voice memos, but you still want phone calls to be coming through your AirPods, can you do that?
Levi: That's one thing I was going to mention about that is I don't think you can. But one thing I wish you could do is, so I like the iPhone microphone, especially for like FaceTime calls, because it's got a slightly higher sample rate than the AirPods mic. So that's one thing I wish I could do is use the iPhone mic for voice memos or anything like that. But if I want to use a phone call right now and I do it, the audio comes out of the phone. And even though I want to still use the iPhone mic, I wish the audio would come out of the AirPods. This is developer beta 1, so who knows? Maybe by the RC that will be fixed or changed or something like that. Yeah.
Dave: A nice little control center widget or something that would let you just easily swap these things around. Just like on the Mac, yeah. Would be good, yeah. And one last thing on iOS, have you guys tried, I know it's from May rather than WTC, but the voiceover sharing settings with somebody else's iPhone, have you tried it?
Levi: I had no one else to try it with, but I wanted to try it. I have no one else whose phone runs the beta. Oh, and another thing I saw in that setting, and you can have them sync across devices, but... So I turned it on, and once I update my iPad, hopefully all my voice recordings will sync. So if you change voices in your voice rotor, you don't have to go changing them on all your devices. Well, you probably still will have to on your Mac. But for your iOS and iPadOS devices, if I change it on my phone, it's going to change on the iPad, which is really, really nice.
Dave: Very nice, very nice. Great stuff. So shall we move on to watch or was there anything else on the iOS side that we wanted to talk about? I will take silence as golden. So watch again, a lot of some of the same things, I guess, but design wise. But the new things I think are probably smart stack improvements and also. workout improvements as well we've got this workout buddy and some improvements around music um tyler you're not a watch guy i'm pretty sure uh levi i'm not sure if you are thomas you are so the smart stack that's incredible i think that improvement is going to be worth it i love the smart stack a lot so i'm anxious to see how that uh it will affect me and how that's going to work for me for the workout buddy you know i had to laugh when they did that i Do I really?
Thomas: I'm never going to use it because I don't need encouragement like, go, Tom, go. You did a great mile. You know, and I think that's great for people that like to enjoy that. And, you know, there are some say to it. It gives you some interesting facts like, you know, you walked faster than ever and stuff like that. I think for those that want encouragement or they enjoy that, I think it could be great. I don't know about you, Dave, but I know you and I work out. I'm not sure if I would ever use that.
Dave: No, I won't. I have a funny image of me, though. I'll use it once because I run with a guide. So just to entertain that person, just without telling them, I'll just suddenly have my watch going, good going. But I think you need headphones to do it. What are you going to do when I have a bad day? Other guides would be like, what is that?
Thomas: What's it going to do when I have a bad day? It's like, oh, you didn't quite walk as great as today as you did yesterday. I'm curious what it's going to do on that. It's like, you've had an off day. I don't need to be reminded. To me, that's just... Kind of discouraged my workout.
Levi: Because you're thinking, ah, I could have done better today. You had an off day. You could have done better. Okay, thank you. I didn't need to know that.
Dave: Yeah, yeah. The smart stack, it's interesting you say that, Tom. You like it, Tom, because I've never really used it because I was saying this to Michael yesterday that I kind of like just knowing where things are. I'm not a huge fan of like press the smart stack and hope the thing I'm looking for is the one that pops up. But maybe I just need to learn to trust it more.
Levi: Yeah, I don't like the whole turn the crown and the widgets come up, because I've accidentally unlocked my thing and had the widgets come up, and my watch was like, widgets, whatever degrees, and I'm like, I didn't ask for that, thank you. Maybe you can, but I don't think you can turn off that, rotate the crown up on the face to have the smart stack come up.
Thomas: I like it because it's convenient in one stack. So it isn't I have to swipe, swipe, swipe. So that's what I like about it.
Dave: Fair, fair. Okay, was there anything else on watch that anyone has come across? I don't think any of us are beta testing it yet, but any other nuggets or shall we move on to the iPad or to the Mac?
Thomas: To the Mac.
Dave: Back to the Mac. Back to the Mac. That used to be a thing. Back to the Mac. I remember that. I remember that. And this is where probably myself and Tom sit back a little bit and let Tyler and Levi tell us what's coming in Mac OS 26 Tahoe. Is that correct? Yeah. Supercharged Spotlight is the first one on my list. What's this all about?
Tyler: So this is a way, to my understanding, is this is a way for Spotlight to effectively integrate with App Intents, which is the same framework that Shortcuts uses, like the Shortcuts app. So rather than simply being a search tool to find things, it can better serve as a productivity tool. So, for example, you can have what's called Quick Keys, which... you can create a shortcut, for example, to send an email to someone. And rather than open the mail app, go to new message, you can just go into spotlight, type whatever you assign, say new message and M or whatever, and then type the message or type something. Then it will take, it will, um, perform that action right from within spotlight. Um, so it's a little like what, or similar concept to what Alfred does. It's supercharged search, um, I have to say it's a little awkward between Siri and Spotlight because on one hand we have Siri doing some of this stuff, and then we have Spotlight doing some of this stuff. And I know they both, if you're using shortcuts, they're obviously both based on app intents. But beyond that, I don't know. It's harder to see the line of differentiation between the two because I don't know if it's because of the reliability issues with Siri or other baggage that they're putting a lot of stock into Spotlight rather than Siri. I don't know what that means, especially because both of them are cross-platform, but on iOS and iPadOS, Siri definitely gets more Spotlight than Spotlight does on those. More limelight, whereas on macOS, Siri is also there, but it seems like Spotlight's getting a lot of the, dare I say it, Spotlight. So there's that. But I'll have to see how this pans out. I'm hoping that with all this new functionality that you can still just press Command Space and type the name of an app rather than having to go into a folder. I think you can still do that, but I need to explore it further. But yeah, so it's definitely interesting. I think particularly for power users, this will be a boom to their productivity.
Levi: Yeah. One thing that I did want to add, which I have not heard anybody else talk about, except I kind of... I think I heard one person mention it, but I can't remember who it was. I think Apple Insider or something. But if you use Launchpad on Mac OS 15 and below, it is no more. It has been replaced with the app library, which... It's exactly what you think it is. It's basically the app library on iOS or iPadOS, but right now it's got some accessibility problems. But if you go to your dock, it won't say Launchpad. It'll just say Apps now, and it brings up the Spotlight interface, but to a different thing because you can hear voiceover go Spotlight, app library, whatever. So it uses Spotlight. So Spotlight has definitely gotten some big upgrades this year. Can't wait to try out QuickKeys.
Dave: Yeah, it will be interesting. We've just had a series of podcasts on the website about Alfred, so it's interesting. Has Alfred just been Sherlocked? We'll see, I guess. Yeah, there you go.
Levi: Oh, and Clipboard History, now on the Mac. I've not used it yet. I think Alfred's got a feature, but I've never used Alfred's Clipboard History. But Native Clipboard Manager. Hope you guys who wanted it are super happy.
Dave: Yeah, that's a long time coming, isn't it? And definitely welcome.
Levi: Somebody's asking plot sounds right here, like, yay, Clipboard Manager.
Dave: Can we have it on iOS, too? We're never happy. That's our problem as well. Bring it to the Mac, and my first question is, can I have it on iOS, too?
Levi: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, Clipboard Manager on iOS, please.
Dave: Yeah, that is a good one. There's a lot of customization and things like that on Mac, I think, as well now, isn't there?
Tyler: Yeah. Yeah. You can customize what appears. You have more customization options for what appears in the menu bar on the control center. Um, there's a new edit controls interface. Um, so it used to be in versions prior to Mac OS Tahoe. You had only limited customization of the control center, which you do in system settings. Now you can actually from within control center, it's a little closer to what it is on iOS and iPad OS. Um, where it's a little quirky now, but just being a beta, that's to be expected. You can go in and you can choose, for example, home kit controls, a lot of other different things. You have that. You can change some of the stuff that appears. You have more control over what appears in your menu bar. I haven't looked too deeply into that.
Levi: Yeah, that's what I liked. One of the things I saw was like, If apps add things to your menu bar, like Alfred has a menu bar icon, I went into the menu bar things, and you can turn on and off the individual applications now, and I don't think there was previously a way to do it. If an app added something to the menu bar, I think it was on, actually, because I remember one time I was looking through the system, and I saw some menu extra plug-ins that were made by the system, and if you opened them, they'd be in your menu bar forever, and you couldn't get rid of them, but I'm assuming now you probably can. That was something I did a long, long time ago.
Dave: A lot of people used apps like Bartender to take over that area, didn't they, before? I think that's what it's called.
Levi: Yeah, Bartender. And there was another one. I can't remember what it was. I can't remember what it is.
Dave: Yeah, so that will definitely be good. And I love Control Center on iOS, the improvements they made. Was it last year or two years ago? I think it was last year where they let us really customize the Control Center. I massively took advantage of that on iOS and I've done a lot of tweaking with it over the years. So, yeah, it'd be good to bring that to the Mac. There's also, where I am, even though we've got Apple Intelligence, we, to my knowledge, have yet to get the iPhone mirroring piece. So can you guys talk about that? And it looks like they've, well, supercharged that a little bit as well.
Levi: Supercharged it, if you're sighted. But when I tried it yesterday, it was inaccessible. I couldn't navigate anything when I opened iPhone mirroring. So, hooray, it's broken again. But that's a beta for you, so hopefully it gets fixed.
Tyler: It's never been great. yeah yeah I thought it was a it's been a little over engineered to begin with the way it works yeah and yeah so I just got the home screen and app switcher but nothing actually from the iPhone was navigable yeah okay that's a shame because it's got such potential doesn't it you're sitting at your Mac and you've got live activities and yeah pop something up yeah and you don't have to take your phone out it's just there on your Mac screen theoretically yeah And then I should stress that this is all, everything we're reporting as far as experiences are being reported as of June 10th, 2025 in developer beta one. So don't take this as...
Dave: fact when it gets public i just thought i'd mention that yeah that's why we're here to talk i suppose as well just about the announcements and about what you know what they're supposed to do we're not just not just our experiences on day one so yeah you're absolutely right um was there anything else in mac that you guys have dug out either that we haven't talked about yet either that you've discovered or that you've read about anything like that
Thomas: The only thing I have to add, David, to that, and I'm not a Mac person myself, but I thought it was a point of interest for people out there, is that it was interesting that Apple announced that starting in Mac OS 27. So that's not this 26, but next year, they're going to drop all Intel base, meaning that this was interesting. They're going to drop Rosetta. I was like, whoa, that's like the next big step. I was like, oh my gosh. So that's the only thing I have to say. Do you guys know, are there any Macs that were dropped for those that are able to get Tahoe? I think the 2020 MacBook or the,
Levi: Intel 2020. Yeah, it's dropping support.
Dave: That was my Mac until two months ago. Yeah, there you go.
Levi: Funding for the future, I see.
Dave: Yeah. The Rosetta thing is interesting as well. I have two apps, I believe, on my Mac here now that are running via Rosetta.
Levi: I forget. I don't even know which apps are using Rosetta because once it's installed... The Rosetta apps don't really say anything, so who knows which apps are using Rosetta or not.
Dave: Yeah, Amadeus Pro, that was one, which is one that would be quite a popular app, so it would be interesting to see, does that ever get updated?
Tyler: Yeah, there are little quality of life improvements for voiceover on macOS. Like, for example, there's something that Should have been there for a long time, but is now just being added. New toolbar customization options for voiceover. So you can now use the actions menu to, if you're in a toolbar, you can press view command space and choose to move something right or left. Or in a toolbar customization panel, you can add things, remove things. And I like that it uses the Actions menu because I've always pictured the Actions menu on macOS as sort of a parody of the Actions rotor on iOS and iPadOS. And I've always noticed how the rotor on iOS and iPadOS is used for dragging. And I've always thought that drag and drop would be a prime use for the Actions menu on macOS. So that's good to see. And I haven't checked this out yet. I don't picture this being something I'd use, but there's a new Braille keyboard input mode on macOS. If you press a V-O-Y, you can use the home row key to type as if it's a Perkins-style Braille keyboard where going from F to A, it's FDSA is .1237, and then JKL semicolon is .4568. If that's your thing, I get sort of a duck spray vibe from that. PerkyDuck, anybody? Oh, PerkyDuck, yeah. Another one that does, yeah.
Dave: Yeah, sounds good. And then, speaking of the Mac, the iPad is starting to look like a Mac, is it? Wow.
Thomas: Gosh, I... I don't have an iPad anymore, but I'll be brief on this part. But, wow. Menus. Oh, wow. It's just the tiling. I thought in the file directory and just a little bit. It's like it's almost turning to like, you know, how Android has a Chrome OS. It almost started to be like, oh, right, it's going to be kind of a hybrid to the Mac. I don't know. I think this is long overdue. And I think finally, finally, we're starting to see iPad to be a little bit more Mac-like because I think it makes more sense doing that. trying to make it more to replace your laptop, and I think they're going in the right direction. They've got a long way to go, but I think this is a huge move forward for the iPad.
Dave: I think it's something the Windows is something people have been asking for, particularly in the sighted world, anyway, for a long time. You can't completely put, I would say, like, you probably can't fully put macOS on an iPad in the sense that the touchscreen is quite a different, it's still a touch-first interface and it's hard to, like, anyone who's used Windows Touch, I think, well, I certainly haven't, didn't find it to be a particularly good experience. I used a bit of it. Yeah, so I think probably having this kind of, where they're just bringing some of the features but keeping it as iPadOS probably does make sense. But it'd be interesting to see how it all works with voiceover as well. Will Windows be useful to us or will we just stick to full screen apps?
Levi: See, that's, yeah, I'll have to update my iPad to the beta and I'll see about that. Because the one thing I didn't really like about Split view and all that was just that, you know, like the one thing I like about if I was going to use the trackpad commander, which is one thing I did when I was starting out on the Mac, I saw you could do that. I'm like, oh, I can start out with like this. One thing I liked was if you were in a certain window, even though the screen has more on it, you are limited to that window. So if you drag your finger, the whole entire trackpad becomes a full screen representation of whatever window you're in. Even if you interact with a scroll area, the trackpad will become a full screen representation of the scroll area or whatever it is you're in. I always kind of liked that when using the Trackpad Commander, so I wonder if iPad is going to do something similar, or is it going to do like what it did for Split View and all that, where you literally just have, where you can touch any window you want on the screen. I'm curious. I'll have to experiment.
Dave: Yeah, definitely. There'll be a menu bar, I think, when you're in the window view only. There'll be a menu bar like Mac as well, which would be interesting. And there's also, sorry, were you about to jump in, Levi?
Levi: I was going to say, like, what, do we have the Apple menu about this iPad? setting, force quit, restart, power off.
Dave: maybe we'll find out but they've also um improved things i think preview there's the files app is i'm guessing again they're trying to make it a bit more like finder on the mac um so yeah i think for pros and then you know not just pros but people who want to use it for productivity i mostly use my ipad for netflix and youtube But I really want to use it for work. Yeah, I can see this being useful.
Tyler: And another thing I just wanted to note, it's sort of a continuity, a shared feature set between iPadOS and macOS, is the phone app. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I always thought it was a little weird how for non-iPhone devices, the FaceTime app was used to make and receive calls, whereas now the phone app... is on iPadOS and macOS. I don't have an iPad, so I can't test on the iPad. The Mac, it feels a little, right now, it feels like the FaceTime app. It just feels like it's been transplanted from the FaceTime app into the phone app. But again, that's just early experiences.
Dave: Yeah, they're also talking about audio improvements, which will be interesting to see as well.
Thomas: Yeah. You know what's impressive, though, Dave? The journal app. Oh, my gosh. It's now on the iPad and Mac. I was like, I never understood how the journal app never made it to the Mac and iPad last in iOS 18. Isn't that strange?
Dave: It's a much more obvious place for them, isn't it, than the iPhone? Right.
Thomas: Yeah.
Dave: So that's all the devices covered. Was there anything else that you guys wanted to cover?
Thomas: Not for me. I think we did a pretty good coverage of what we've discovered and some new things that a lot of the listeners will be anxious to hear. Definitely, yeah. ** Dave **:04 I think it's... It's probably a more interesting year than I thought it was going to be. And than I thought it was going to be even from the first five minutes of the presentation. I was like, what's going on here? ** Levi **:17 I still think Apple, you know, I like this new update and I honestly don't even care that there's no new personalized series. You know, if Apple needs to take extra time, let them take extra time. I'd rather a bug-free personalized Siri than a buggy Siri that strives to be personal that gets the wrong details. You know what I mean? ** Dave **:42 I think last year we had over-promise and under-deliver, and that's the worst thing you can do. And hopefully this year, like you say, they'll correct that and they'll over-deliver. Or at least deliver. they were spooked last year by everything and they felt they had to come out and go, Oh, we're doing it. We're doing it. We promise. And then they weren't able to deliver. ** Thomas **:00 So hopefully, yeah, I think that everything was pretty well said. I don't want to beat the dead horse here, but, um, I think, um, Apple did a great job of filling the void that we all knew was going to be not there while Google is running circles around us with their AI. But I agree with everyone. I hate to say it, but it was a disappointment. ** Thomas **:28 But we just got to wait until next year. But I think next year, the 27th, is going to be the year for the AI and Apple. And I think they're going to come back and shine.
Levi:hmm. It would have been iOS 20 next year, so I could see a sort of iOS 20th anniversary edition, even though it's going to be called 27 next year. But that would have been fun to see iOS 20, though. That would have been fun. Oh, cool.
Dave:then everybody, I'm sure, is screaming, just make this thing stable and as book-free as possible. Yeah. That's it. So I think on that note, it's time we wrap up. And I just say a huge thank you to you guys, Levi, Tyler, Thomas. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Thanks.