Gadgetory

- Hey, it's Chaim with The Verge and we're here with an early first look at iOS 13, Apple's latest new software for the iPhone. Now, this year Apple's doing something a little differently with its software. It's actually splitting it into two. We have iOS, which is coming to the iPhone and an iPod Touch if you still have one, and a new one called iPadOS, which will be coming to the iPad. Dieter's gonna be covering iPadOS in another video. You should definitely go and check that out and see what's new there. But this is iOS 13 for the iPhone and it's actually available now as a beta today that you can download on your device, if you want to. But if you don't want to risk your phone just yet, here's everything that's new. First off, dark mode. It's here, it makes everything dark. Or rather, it makes Apple's pre-installed apps and the operating system look dark, because third party apps haven't really been updated yet. Apple's taking a similar approach to Google here with Android Q. It's introducing an API for developers to add to their apps so that they'll work with dark mode. When you hit that toggle, they'll all flip at the same time. But that's just not here yet. Apple's also being pretty smart about this, it's not just a light switch, you'll be able to schedule it up, you can time it to the sunrise and sunset so that it automatically goes on. It's good, it's dark, it'll probably save you some battery life on an OLED iPhone. Next, Apple Maps. And I know what you're thinking, who uses Apple Maps? Well, Apple's hoping the answer is you with these changes it's making in iOS 13. Specifically, Apple's looking to fix the maps part. They're ruling out a whole new map for Apple Maps that adds a lot more detail. More detailed roads, buildings, parks, et cetera. The company's also adding a new Google Street View-like feature that'll let you look around the actual street. And yeah, a lot of this is playing catch-up to Google, but it's catch-up that Apple really needs to make here. There's also some new features with favorites and collections. You can now set different locations or your home or office's favorites, which will show up right when you open the apps. You can just tap on them and get directions. You can make collections of your favorite places, like your favorite bars or your favorite restaurants. You can put those all in a list, they're in a folder, and you can even share that so you can send them to friends or family. Now, is all the enough to overcome Google Maps', quite frankly, ridiculous lead? We'll have to wait and see. Especially because Apple's rolling this out gradually. The new maps are only gonna be available across the United States by the end of 2019 and internationally won't even be available until 2020. Next up is privacy, which Apple's putting a big push on in iOS 13. Apple's making it harder for apps to continuously ping your location in the background with some new permissions that let you just grant permission for a single location ping or require that the app ask every time. There's also a huge new sign in with Apple feature that, in theory, will let you sign up for services without giving them your personal information. It sounds pretty neat, but until apps update to support it, there's no way to know how well it will work just yet. Apple is pushing this pretty hard, though. It's gonna require that developers offer this as an option if they offer any third party login thing, like Facebook or Google, on their apps. So it has the potential to be a really big deal. Next up is Reminders, which Apple has really given a big update to in iOS 13. The old Reminders app was really a bare bones kind of thing. It was basically only useful for asking Siri to remind you about something, and the only reason it was useful for that was because it was the default option. But Apple's overhauled it to try and turn it into a real, full-fledged reminders app and there's some really nice stuff here. First of all, there's some new group filtering, which will let you by everything that's due today, everything that you have scheduled up for the future, or any reminders from across all your lists that you've flagged as important. There's also some new smart features when you're typing out a reminder. So you can type out to be reminded about something every week and the app will know that you want to be reminded about something every week. There's also a smart toolbar that'll pop up when you're typing things out that'll let you add things like due dates, locations, geo fences, et cetera. There's also a neat new feature where you can actually tag contacts on your reminders. So say, if you need to reminded about your Fourth of July plans with your brother, you can tag him to your reminder, and then the next time you message him in iMessage, that reminder will pop down on the screen that you need to bother him about that. There's a new Health app, which Apple's redesigned to try and be a little smarter. So instead of just shoving all your metrics at you at once, Apple's adding some new intelligent trend analysis, so it'll show you trends in your health and fitness over time, which just seems more useful than hard numbers. Apple's also finally added a period tracker directly to the health app, which will let you track cycles and it'll sync with the upcoming Apple Watch app that it's launched for this too. It's really great that Apple's build this right into the Health app, instead of requiring that users have to turn to third party solutions for it. The next update is kind of interesting because I think it means Apple's trying to make its own tile tracker. Okay, so hear me out. There's a new app called Find My, which combines the old Find My Friends and Find My iPhone app into one app. So you can track your phone and you can weirdly track your friends all in one place. But it's the technology behind the new app that's interesting, because Apple's using Bluetooth technology to find your missing devices. When you lose your phone now, instead of just pinging the phone for its location, it'll ping all the nearby iPhones to help you pinpoint it and track it down. Which works because, and this is true, there's a lot of iPhones out there. And it's that same technology and all the effort that Apple put into here that kind of makes me think that they'd use it for a tile tracker too. Plus there's a whole bunch of hardware rumors that Apple's working on exactly that. But we'll have to wait and see until the fall if that actually happens. In both iOS 13 and iPadOS, the Photos app is getting a big update. Apple's really overhauling how you view photos, how you manage photos, and honestly, if you want to learn more about this, again, check out Dieter's video. He's gonna do a much deeper dive here. But, safe to say just quickly, they're adding a really deep photo editor, some new management tools, and it all looks great. Now, none of this matters if iOS 13 just doesn't run well, which historically speaking, has been a bit of an issue for iOS updates. Last year's iOS 12 mostly broke that trend. It ran really well, especially on older devices. And Apple's looking to keep that momentum forward with additional performance improvements. Says that apps should launch faster, that downloads should take up less space, things like Face ID should launch up to twice as fast. But it's kind of hard to see that right now. Again, this is beta software, and I've been testing on Apple's latest XS hardware, so any speed improvements are just really hard to tell. Okay, some small stuff. There's a new volume indicator. If you've used iOS you know the old volume indicator sucked. I can go into a lot more detail about why that is, I've been told that I cannot do that so here's a quick one. It's smaller, it's better, it's good. There's a new keyboard, keyboard finally has an update for the first time in a few years and Apple's adding a swiping gesture mechanic, which has been on basically every other third party keyboard for years. Now it's on the Apple one. Siri has a new voice that's less robotic, which is great for Siri. Why aren't you helpful, Siri? - [Siri] I don't know what that means. If you like, I can search the web for why aren't you helpful, Siri. - Well, that kind of says it all, actually. Also Memoji are getting an update. There's a lot more customization options now, which is great if you wanted to customize your Memoji more, make them look more like you. There's new piercing options, et cetera, it's great. And you can also now automatically turn them into sticker packs, kind of like custom emojis. So now you can send those to your friends. So that's iOS 13. It's not the biggest update ever, although the stuff that is here is pretty nice. Dark mode looks great, Reminders looks surprisingly good, even Apple Maps, I'm shocked to say, is something I might consider using in the future. But none of this is gonna really dramatically change how you use your iPhone in the way some of the stuff we had last year, like screen time or new notifications, will. But that's not inherently a bad things. Apple's been refining the iOS formula for the last, you know, decade. And the fact that it just has run out of things to improve on in huge ways is not the worst place to be in. Now, you really should check out Dieter's video, too. He's looking at the iPad stuff. And Apple's taking a lot bigger changes with iPadOS, with things like multitasking and a new home screen, and there's some really fascinating stuff going on there. So definitely make sure to check that out. And both iOS 13 and iPadOS will be out in the fall for most devices, so you won't have to wait long to try it on your phone, too. I'm just gonna say this again as a reminder. This is beta software. It's a public beta, so Apple's pretty confident. The version I used is pretty stable. But again, beta, that means that stuff can go wrong, you could lose your data. Make sure to back up all your stuff, follow all of Apple's directions, and think really hard about whether it's worth risking your phone just to get dark mode a few weeks early.