Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
iOS twelve is available as a free download today and
it will make your phone run faster.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
What's going on? I'm rich Demiro. This is Rich on Tech.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
iOS twelve was previewed back in June at Apple's Worldwide
Developers Conference, and now it is ready for prime time.
The new software is scheduled to launch today for iPhones, iPads,
and other iOS devices.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
I've been using the.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Beta version of it and it's pretty cool. It does
bring some new changes. But first things first, who can
actually get this? Well, if you have an iPhone, you
can get this. If you have an iPhone all the
way back to the iPhone five S, so five S
and above you will get access to iOS twelve. With iPads,
it goes all the way back to the iPad Mini two,
iPad Air, iPad, fifth generation iPad pros, so you've got
(00:51):
a lot there. And with the iPod Touch only the
latest sixth generation iPod Touch will be getting the update
to iOS twelve. Now, the thing about this release is
that Apple made it a point to tell us that
this will actually make your old iPhones and old devices
run faster. They made it a priority to make it
so that this software runs speedier on even old devices.
(01:14):
So that's some good news if you have an old phone.
If you have an old device you want to breathe
some new life into it. I think you can probably
squeeze an extra six months or a year out of
your device if Apple's claims are true, and that's a
good thing because it'll save you money. Apple says app's
launch up to twice as fast, the camera launches up
to seventy percent faster, and even the lowly keyboard will
(01:34):
appear faster on your screen and feel more responsive. Now,
I've been running the beta on my device, which is
an iPhone ten, and this is a new device, so
clearly it has the best processor, or well, it used
to have the best processor until the new A twelve
Bionic came out in the new phone. But it does
seem snappier, and although this version of iOS doesn't bring
a huge visible change, there are a lot of nice
(01:56):
little touches and especially things under the hood. The first
thing you'll probably notice is how it handles your notifications.
They are now grouped together by default, so they're much
easier to manage, especially if you get a bunch of
notifications all from one app like Instagram. You can see
them all kind of like in a little stack, and
then you can tap to expand them to see them
all one by one. Now, if you don't like them
(02:17):
grouped together, and for certain apps you might like to
have them stay one by one, you can go into
the notification settings for that individual app and change it,
or you can turn off grouping all together.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
The other new big thing is a revamp of Do
not Disturb and the introduction of screen time. These are
two items that should help with our digital wellness, but
that remains to be seen.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Who knows.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
So with do not Disturb, the big difference here is
that you can now choose a bedtime option, so your
phone will not show you a whole screen full of
notifications when you're trying to sleep at night.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Come on, you know you've done it.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
You kind of like wake up in the middle of
the night and you take a little sneak peek at
your phone and you see.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
All those notifications and you're like, oh my gosh, now
I'm stressed.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Out because I want to reply or look at all
those Well, that will no longer happen if you turn
this feature on. It's a new toggle under your do
not Disturb settings, it says bedtime and basically so there's
two different things you've got do not disturb, which kind
of like doesn't ring your phone unless it's important. But
now if you add the bedtime option in, it actually
won't even show you anything on your screen when it's bedtime.
(03:18):
I highly recommend doing that because we need some digital
wellness in our lives, so do that. And you can
also have this turn on with the bedtime feature, So
if you're not using this, I highly recommend you use it.
If you're using a standard alarm to wake you up,
you probably want to switch to bedtime. It's a little
bit trickier to set up because you kind of have
to use a slider to set your alarm, but it's
so much better because bedtime alarms actually wake you up gently.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Their audio slowly gets louder in the morning.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
So if you're familiar with the standard iPhone alarm, there's
only one setting. It's basically really loud, really blaring, all
in your face all at once, and for me, I
can't deal with that early in the morning, So I
love the bedtime feature because it slowly gets louder. Screen
Time is also fascinating because now you can see how
long you spend in each app and on your phone
in general. And more importantly, you can now set limits
(04:04):
on yourself and your kids.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
So there's a feature called downtime. This is new.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
It's sort of like do not Disturb, but it's for apps.
And once you turn it on, you only have access
to certain apps of your choice. So some apps you
can say you always have access to, like your phone
and your camera, but you can turn off access to
these other apps on your phone if you have downtime
turned on. And you can also turn this on for
your kids devices, which will really come in handy. And
you can also have it turn on automatically and off
(04:30):
at certain times of the day. Like let's say you
want them to read in bed for an hour before
they go to sleep. You can have this downtime feature
turn on at let's say seven pm if they're supposed
to go to bed at eight pm. Basically it renders
their I devices useless, so hopefully they read the book.
And yes, your kids are not going to like you
for turning on this feature. I can guarantee that. Then
(04:50):
you have something called app limits. These are time limits
that you can set on individual apps or categories of
apps like social networking, entertainment, games, reading, and more. You
don't have to put the apps into these categories. Apple
automatically does it. So for me, I've been setting a
one hour time limit on all my social networking apps,
and yeah, I pretty much reached that.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Limit, like in the morning most days.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
So once you reach your limit, the app is greade
out and you see a little kind of sand timer
next to it, and that tells you, Nope, no more
time on this app. So if you want, if you
still want to use that app, you can just tap
it and it will give you a little menu to
say ignore, and you press ignore, and then you could
ignore for fifteen minutes or the full day. And once
you ignore that app, it doesn't it doesn't affect the
(05:33):
other apps. So all the other social networking apps are
still grade out, so basically you can kind of use
them on a one by one basis. Now for me personally,
in the social networking is included Facebook Messenger is included
in there, and that's kind of like an oversight.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
I got to figure out how to take that out
of the.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Social Networking bundle because I'd still like to use that
even when I'm not using Twitter or things like that.
You can also set a pass code so your kids
can't just ignore these time limits. And there's the ability
to combine you usage times across devices, So if your
kid has an iPhone and an iPad, or if you do,
you can have one timer across all your devices. So
if you use Twitter on your iPhone and your iPad,
(06:10):
you can say, look, I only want to use it
for an hour across everything. This is a pretty powerful feature.
I think Apple did a really nice job on it. Obviously,
it will evolve as people use it and as Apple
gets feedback on it, but I think it's a good
thing for us to have this. Personally, I cannot wait
to limit my kids to one hour of Netflix a day.
I will be updating their iPads with that, and yeah,
they'll probably disown me as their dad. The other thing
(06:32):
I'm super excited about in iOS twelve is Seriri shortcuts.
You can find these under settings and Siri and Search.
You'll notice there's a few suggested shortcuts already made for you.
But what's brilliant about these is that you can now
set a shortcut of your making, plus an associated SII phrase,
kind of like a keyword phrase that you come up
(06:52):
with what Siri reacts to. For instance, phone will listen
to my podcasts and navigate to work in the morning.
I could set a series shortcut that says I'm headed
to work, and when I say that, Siri would spring
into action, playing my morning podcast playlist and then navigating
to work for me. So she kind of does this
little routine of things, and you do record the serie shortcut,
So you come up with the phrase and then there's
(07:13):
a little record button and you record it, and I
guess Siri reacts to that the.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Next time, so it's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Keep in mind, individual apps do have to activate all
these shortcuts in there, so you might not have a
ton of shortcut options all on day one. But I
think this is really going to extend the functionality and
usefulness of Siri in a very big way. Another thing
I'm very excited for, and this doesn't apply to everyone,
but now CarPlay in iOS twelve has support for third
party navigation apps. So nothing against Apple Maps. It's beautiful,
(07:42):
but I'll be honest, I like to use my Google Maps,
so that will now be available in iOS twelve. Ways
will be available other third party navigation apps will be available.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
The big question is when will they be available. Now.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
If I was Google, I would have it immediately available
day one, but I don't think that's how Google works.
Hopefully we'll see Google Maps and way on CarPlay very
soon when we plug our phones in in our car.
Now for other little improvements, there are some revamped apps,
like the Voice Memo app. It's all new and now
auto titles your memos based on your GPS location. Plus
it can sync your audio files to iCloud. There's a
(08:14):
new virtual tape measuring app called Measure. This uses augmented
reality to measure things. It's kind of cool. iBooks is
now renamed Apple Books that has a whole new look
and feel, and the battery now shows a lot more information.
So the battery stats inside your settings now shows you
a whole bunch of stuff. For instance, you can now
see which one of your apps are using the most
(08:35):
battery over time. So for me, over the past ten days,
it is Google Photos twenty four percent of my battery.
But that's fine because I know I'm backing up a
lot of pictures, then Twitter, then Camera, then Instagram.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
For me.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
You can also now see your average screen time and
screen off time for your battery.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
So for me.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Today or I guess the last ten days, I got
four and a half hours on my charge and then
two hours off my charge, So I guess that means
I got six and a half hours of battery life
on a charge on my iPhone ten. That seems kind
of low, but I do do a lot of stuff
on my phone, and again that's an average. So maybe
one day I use my phone for like a Facebook
Live and I use a ton of battery in a
short amount of time. But today I'm averaging eight and
(09:14):
a half hours on my battery, so that's good. Anyway,
you can see how iOS twelve will bring a whole
bunch of new stuff to your iOS devices. I know
some of you do not like to download these things immediately.
That's fine, but I will say the beta of iOS
twelve has been rock solid, so if you want it,
you can check for it in your settings, go to
General then Software Update, or you can wait for a
notification from Apple. Usually these things hit earlier in the morning,
(09:37):
but who knows, it could happen anytime during the day.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
You can find links to everything I talk about here
at richontech dot tv, or you can check the show notes. Also,
I was up in Petaluma over the weekend, so I
filled in for Leo Laporte on his radio show, and
also did an episode of the new Screensavers on Twitter.
So if you want to see any of that stuff,
I'll put all the video and audio you in the
show notes. You can watch that, listen to that, and
(10:03):
also put it on my website as well.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I'm Rich Tomiro. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk
to you real soon.