There's a theme here (bright music) - All right, another year, another version of iOS coming to an iPhone near you. It seems like usually these updates get smaller and smaller and less and less crazy but it feels like this year, for whatever reason, Apple has packed a ton of stuff into iOS 17. This is gonna be launching In September when the new iPhone comes out on everybody's iPhone, but it's in beta now And I've been using it and there's a lot of stuff here. I'm gonna try to pack it into a top five, but it was kind of hard. I've been using this iOS 17 beta for a few weeks now. The public beta is out, so if you wanna try it before the new iPhone even comes out, you can do that. But let's take a look at the five most impressive new things that are coming to the iPhone. But as we go through this, I do want you to keep something in the back of your head. Just just keep this in mind. A lot of times in the past, Those features that we'd get were big because they were new capabilities. Most if not all of these features depend on having another iPhone in the mix. Whether your friend has an iPhone
or your family has an iPhone, you need two iPhones for a lot of this stuff to work. Just something to keep in the back of your head. All right, so number five, airdrop. NameDrop Airdrop is one of those things. It's one of those features that when it works It feels like it's one of the best things ever but sometimes it's glitchy and it doesn't work and it seems terrible. So I hope some stability improvements are also in the works here. But Apple is expanding Airdrop to be more capable and easier to use. The big one is that If you meet another person who also has an iPhone, You can walk up to them and bump your phones together. You hold your phones up next to each other an inch or two apart and it'll play this sweet animation as the phones talk to each other and transfer a contact poster with your name and contact info to that other person in a single touch. It's called name drop. It's pretty cool. A couple of things about this. One is it lets you choose which info you wanna share. So you do that phone bump thing and then it goes, oh, you wanna share something?
Do you wanna share just your phone number? Okay, cool. Do you wanna share your email address and not your phone number? You can switch it over to that. Wanna share a fake number? Sure. Program that in too. This will all come from my card at the top of contact settings that you can customize with whatever photo you want, whatever fonts you want, et cetera. And everything you change will show up in people that have you in their contacts. What's cooler though is you can now bump to share photos or video content, links, or even start a share-play session. It's making it easier to find a certain iPhone on airplay by getting it roughly within NFC distance of another iPhone. And then you can share stuff. And then another cool thing Typically Airdrop is a Wi-Fi direct connection between two iPhones. But if you leave each other, if you walk away down the street and you wanna continue This file transfer hasn't been finished yet It will resume over cellular. So it'll start uploading to cellular
and their phone will download and you can just walk away and the airdrop should finish. I dunno if you remember an app from a while back called Bump. This was in like 2009. It was just an app to bump phones together to share contact information. Google ended up buying them. But I do have a feeling that if they still existed now This would be a sort of Sherlock situation. Just another example of the Remora Fish to Apples Shark. If that reference doesn't make any sense I'll leave a video link below to the video that I did comparing apples to sharks. It makes sense when you watch the video, I promise. Personal Voice So anyway, number four is a feature called personal voice. So this one's an accessibility setting. It's not even something that they talked about on stage. This is something that is not meant for most people to use, but it's pretty cool. Anyway, so in settings then accessibility. You scroll down to the speech section that's new here and there's something called personal voice. And you'll see a button that says Create a personal voice. What's gonna happen is your phone's gonna ask you to take it to a quiet place, and then it's going to display several phrases on the screen and it'll ask you to say those phrases into the microphone.
It's 150 phrases. They're pretty random. It'll be like, Sally sold seashells in 1979 and the president of Morocco is very tall. And you just go through the list and you say a bunch of these phrases and when it's done, it compiles all of your voice and will stitch together a new synthesized voice that can say whatever you wanna make it say. It does all of this locally on the device, so it has No servers are involved, it doesn't send your voice recordings everywhere. It does all of the compilation overnight. And at the end of this, you get a new voice on your phone. You can go to accessibility settings and then enable live speech so that on the triple-tap of a power button, it brings up a text block and you can type whatever you want to make the voice Say and then just hit, send. - [Phone] A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. - Eh, it's all right. Let's try another one here. A little more substance. - [Phone] 30 frames per second is the correct frame rate. And anyone who says otherwise is probably lying to you. - It kind of sounds like me and it's decently good. I wouldn't pass it off as a human If I like to play this recording for you You wouldn't think it's a person
But it kind of sounds like I'm talking on the phone to someone and it kind of has a poor connection, you know? But this isn't some mainstream feature. Like I said, it's an accessibility setting. So the reason, this is designed for people who may know that they're at risk of losing their voice at some point Or maybe they're vocal cords fatigued after a long time. There are conditions like that. MTD is a common one. And so they can sort of go through this process and create a voice on their phone so that they can continue to interact with the world without using some generic Siri voice And it actually kind of still sounds like them. - [Phone] All right, let's move on to the next bullet point number three. The Little Things The little things. - The little things. Apple's always tweaking and adding little features here and there to their stock apps especially. There's a bunch of those this time around. And in total, you could say they add up to a welcome refinement. You probably heard about the new keyboard which looks the same but should be way smarter with transformer-based auto-correct and improved dictation.
It's much faster dictation. Oh, and also that thing where you're typing a word And then you spell it a little bit different And then you hit space and it corrects you and then you hit backspace and type it the way you want again and hit space and it corrects you again and it doesn't seem to learn. They fixed that. Also, widgets are thankfully interactive now. The whole point of a widget I always thought was to be able to view and interact with information without jumping into the app which is trying to suck you in. I'm surprised it took this long but I am happy to finally see that here. And there's also now a bunch of new message features including one called check-in. This is good for I think either kids or maybe significant others or friends. You know the dance you do where someone's going somewhere and you're like, all right, text me when you get there. And then you wait for them to text you back or you can share the location or you just have them text you when they arrive. Now there's just a feature built in. You just hit the plus button, you go to check-in Whoever is going to be checked in on can decide who to share their location with, How much data they wanna share?
And then there's this nice little tracker that updates you and lets them know when they've arrived where They're supposed to. And there's a bunch of other little stuff like that sort of sprinkled around the OS. No doubt you've noticed still a lot of these depend on also having a friend with an iPhone. That's how most of this works. But you know, if you do have that ecosystem In your life, then yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff That adds up to a good welcome improvement. Standby Mode Good little stuff. So, all right, number two is called standby mode. So when I first saw this feature I thought it was really interesting but now I've thought about this a lot. The more I think about it, I have this so high on the list because I think genuinely this is better than a home pod for most people who already have an iPhone. It's a smart home display so anytime your iPhone is both charging and horizontal, It triggers the standby mode, which is a clock. And then whatever useful widgets or photos you want to have In the background, it reminds me of the Apple Watch. It kind of has a bunch of these preset layouts And then you can swipe between these three faces to find the one you like and then swipe vertically to go
through the different styles. So a lot of these, yeah will look just like an Apple watch face. But yeah, to be honest, very useful. So that's already pretty convenient. You can kind of just have it display information ambiently to you, whether it's on a nightstand or in your kitchen, whatever. But then on top of that, What makes it much more home-pod-like is the fact that Siri is better in two ways. First of all, it's conversational so you don't have to keep hitting the button over and over again to keep asking questions or follow-ups. You can just keep talking and it keeps listening, which is great. The other's been doing that forever. And then the other is you don't have to say, hey, her name. You can just say, Siri what's the weather in Manchester on Saturday? - [Siri] Expect rain in Manchester, United Kingdom on Saturday. Daytime temperatures will hover around 67 degrees with overnight lows around 57. - What about Sunday? - [Sir] Expect rain in Manchester, United Kingdom on Sunday. - Thank you. - [Sir] You're welcome.
- And then it sort of stops listening but the idea is it's just gonna keep listening and talking to you, and that's better than before. Also, the weather is not great for golf, but I don't know We'll make it work either way. Big improvements to Siri there. That's what makes it feel kind of like a, you know a smart home display. Now if only they could make Siri good The Phone at other things. So then number one, the top new feature in iOS 17. I think we forget, that our phones are still phones sometimes but it's the phone app I'm combining combining the phone app and FaceTime. But generally, there are a lot of nice features that sort of just make it easy to clean up and have a better phone experience. First of all, are the contact posters. As I mentioned earlier, you set up your contact poster And then everyone else who has you in their contacts gets that updated in their phone, at least if they have an iPhone. But then, yeah, whenever you call someone That's what they see. And this sort of automatically cleans up everyone's contacts with a nice photo. I know for one, I have no photos of anyone in my contacts list outside of my family.
So this is a nice effortless improvement for that. And then another fun piece is if someone calls you and you don't pick up and it starts going to voicemail, you'll get a live transcription of the voicemail as they're leaving it. And if you want to interrupt and pick it up at any time, you still can. Some of you are too young to know that that's actually a throwback to physical answering machines that were in people's houses where you could actually hear someone leaving you a voicemail and then pick up the phone and interrupt it and talk to them. Just, I'm old now, so I get to say stuff like that. But also, FaceTime gets voicemail too which you might be thinking, wait, it's FaceTime it's a video. So what is a FaceTime voicemail? And it's just a video message. So like if you're about to FaceTime someone and show them something but then they don't pick up, you'll just, you know Record your video and then send them the voicemail And then it shows up inside the FaceTime inbox, which is cool, but there you go. That is it. That is the iOS 17 biggest stuff. Honestly, I think this is one of the biggest, best updates to iOS in a long time.
And somehow there's still a bunch of little stuff, I didn't even mention from camera effects to, you know, stickers all over iMessage and stuff to Safari getting profiles now. There's a lot of stuff, but again, Now that we've gone through all of it, don't forget about how many of these things are intentionally just for people with another iPhone in their life Whether it's a friend with an iPhone or a family member with an iPhone, or you just met someone with an iPhone from name drop to share play, to all the iMessage features, the contact cards, the FaceTime features, that's the ecosystem at work. That's them going, hey, this is a cool new feature but it'll only work if your friend also has an iPhone. So maybe you pressure them into getting an iPhone too. Either way, that's it. Feel free to share this video with others who will probably have this software update on their phone sometime soon. And until the next one, catch you guys later. Peace.