I have pass the last couple of decade write about new features in Apple ’s operating system . Tens of thou of words about newfangled particular , large and small-scale , that enhance the experience of using a Mac , iPhone , iPad , and other Apple machine . And yet this past weekend , I was prompt that most users but do n’t notice new features , even when they ’ve been available for year .
If you ’re reading this newspaper column right now , you ’re one of the most well - cultivate people on the planet about Apple stuff . But your friends , sept , atomic number 27 - actor , and friend ? They might never know about flashy new operating - system features unless you in person show them off . It ’s one of Apple ’s most maddening problem : keep machine relatively simple while also trying to make complex new feature ascertainable .
Lunch of discovery
My kinsfolk spent the last few days attend my girl ’s college graduation . After a walk around a funky Oregon neighborhood , my married woman and I dropped into a bakery restaurant for luncheon . The place was busy , and we found a tabular array and sit down , and waited for our club to make it . I fructify my iPhone 14 Pro down on the table , and she gestured at the always - on ringlet screen , gently rib me for using nature pictures on my lock screen rather of pictures of our children .
I explained that the lock screen is set to ruffle between nature photos in my depository library , free-base on machine learning , and it quickly became clear that she ’d never tried to edit her ringlet blind , a feature introduced in iOS 16 last fall . ( Also missing from her lock screen are another banner lineament of iOS 16 , lock screen thingumabob . )
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If you do n’t learn site about Apple feature article , how are exploiter suppose to intuit these changes ? To edit a lock screen , you have to lock your telephone set and then long insistence on the lock screen – a somewhat abnormal chronological succession of event .
In iOS 17 , Apple is introducinga Modern feature for app developers called TipKit , which wreak a interconnected manner for all apps to provide helpful advice about features their users may not miss . It ’s a great thought , but Apple itself seems to really fight when it comes to getting users to embrace newfangled feature .
But it gets worse .
Face the music
Once I explained to her that she could literally create a lock CRT screen that shuffled among photos of her minor , as place by machine learning – not a set of images she selected herself – she was enthusiastic . Unfortunately , my next discovery was that Apple ’s shiny unexampled lineament was backed by a clump of rickety applied science that could n’t arise to the challenge .
To do a Photo Shuffle of masses on the whorl screen , you pick their faces from your Photos Library – but my wife had never spent any time in the People album in the Photos app on her iPhone , merging faces together and assign them names . ( Why would she ? The People album is buried on iPhone . Name and face assignments do n’t sync across a shared photo library , so all of my work classifying human face on my Mac do n’t extend to her . )
bad , Photo Shuffle ’s method acting of offering masses to expose come along absolutely broken . It offer up my married woman a small number of faces , most of whom were entirely random and fairly uncommon . She ’s mystify hundreds , if not thousands , of picture of me and our kids on her phone , and yet we were n’t among the face offered . And if the faces you ’re look for are n’t in Photo Shuffle ’s very belittled list of options , there ’s no recourse . You ’re stuck .
So , off to photo to spend five minutes doing a spry pass through her photo library to identify her category members by name , mark them as favorites , and clean things up by unite duplicate entries together . unluckily , whatever outgrowth provides the list of faces in Photo Shuffle apparently does n’t get updated with any priority – when I came back to it at the end of our tiffin , none of the family member had appear in her Photo Shuffle selection . So much for that clever mind .
How many apps?
The other affair I discovered at dejeuner was that , despite Apple ’s innovations in iOS features over the last few years , my wife remained typeset in the behaviors she had learned when she start using the iPhone . In other words , Apple made changes to make the experience well – but they just never registered with her .
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have me get specific : this is about apps . My wife has pages and pages of apps on her household filmdom . We ’re at a nuptials , and there ’s an app you want to download to contribute picture to the well-chosen couple . It incur downloaded and stays forever . require to yield to commons in a new city ? Download an app and keep it forever . And they ’re all getting switch on to the ending of the last Thomas Nelson Page of her home screen , forever .
( In fact , she plain that she hat dragging apps she actually wanted all the way from the last page forward onto the first pageboy . I pointed out that she could now hold the joggle app with one finger’s breadth while rapidly abstract with another in Holy Order to quickly change pages , which go down on her mind – because she was still following the old behavior of hang back the app icon to the left side of the screen and waiting for the page to scroll . Another new feature she never knew about ! )
Turns out , she uses one or two Thomas Nelson Page of apps and hunt for everything else . She ’s got a few leaflet from back when she made an endeavour to organize her headphone , but at some point , she give up and proceed to search . I terminate up deleting several Thomas Nelson Page of her dwelling CRT screen and prove her how to expend App Library .
The truth is , her behaviour – a Thomas Nelson Page or two of key apps and then using hunt to find apps in the debris drawer – is probably the agency most multitude use their iPhones . Apple knows it , which is why they supply App Library and stopped requiring people to put every app they ’ve download somewhere on the home screen . But if my married woman is any indication , that newfangled feature just never registered .
I do n’t have any answers here . I realise how gruelling a problem it is to make newfangled iPhone features discoverable and how intemperately it is to modify ingrained user deportment . The new TipKit genus Apis intimate that Apple continues to wrestle with the issue .
In the meantime , I ’ll keep write ( and Macworld will keep publication ) article about what the new feature are . And you , dear reader , will presumptively share them with your friends and family . So far as I can tell , we may be the good fashion Apple has of getting its message out .
