 I went on vacation, like an actual out of country vacation. I packed my iPad, strapped on my watch, pocketed my iPhone, and took no other devices. While I'd used the iOS 15 beta since our video talking about it, on this trip, I was about to be fully immersed in the iOS 15 ecosystem for about a week and a half, which included being fully immersed in rage for 15 minutes on my flights thanks to one of Apple's innovations. But now, now I'm on the other side of the official release, and I think I'm ready to talk about it. But first, I'll talk about our sponsor, Antline Audio. Thanks to Antline Audio for sponsoring this video. The ModMic wireless microphone delivers best in class audio quality, 12 plus hours of battery life, and can magnetically mount to almost any headphone. Get 15% off the ModMic wireless and other ModMic products at the link below. iOS 15, which we're going to use to refer to both the iPhone and iPad versions for now, has a lot of good things going for it. Safari, in particular, became a lot more useful for me thanks to the new UI, although from everything I've seen, that's clearly not a universal opinion. While I appreciate the easier access to tabs and the better tab overview, Mac address host Jonathan Hors disagrees and hates the new UI. See, he's something of a tab fiend, while I'm more conservative with how many tabs I open on my mobile devices. So it really seems to depend on how efficient you are. To Apple's credit, they seem to have taken this dichotomy seriously and have been tinkering nonstop over the course of the beta, which originally didn't even have a refresh button. The idea being that you'd simply use the new pull to refresh function, but that didn't work on every website. User outcry about it was brightly, swift and loud, so Apple just put the frickin' button back in. They also let you toggle the position of the tab bar from the bottom to the top, although they apparently didn't care whether you'd like to change the new flat UI. The biggest improvement to Safari by far is extension support. Safari previously had limited support for things like content blockers and advanced sharing options, but now it supports full-fledged desktop-style browser extensions. Noir and Dark Reader can do dark mode for any web page. Hyper Web can run custom user styles and scripts. And one password can actually show pop-ins to fill forms, plus many more. Steve Jobs said Safari on iPhone was just like the desktop, and now, for the first time, that's kinda true. Of course, if you're deep into Apple's ecosystem, you already have your own password manager, which has gotten a big upgrade in the form of a built-in two-factor authenticator. It's a nice touch that helps simplify the experience, similar to how Apple Pay's changes have simplified the checkout process. I brought it up during the beta video, but the new sheet for choosing a payment card saves so much time when you're trying to check out quickly online. And you can do that without revealing your email address now, thanks to Hide My Email, which works surprisingly well. I've only used it a couple of times, but what it does is set up a randomly generated burner email. You could use this, for example, to set up filters to automatically sort through your junk mail and keep your primary email inbox spam-free. Or as spam-free as it can be these days. Ah, ah. Speaking of spam-free, turns out Focus and the new notification summary are serious time savers, as long as you dial it in just right. See, Focus is let you choose which apps or people get to bug you at any given time. But that can lead to missing important phone calls when you get to work and your phone automatically enables the work Focus and you get a call from the doctor's office, but they use a private number and your phone is like, Nuh-uh, Mr. Doctor, Anthony's got something much more important to do. Like admiring the LTT water bottles, new colors, and updated motherboard design at LTTstore.com. So what I'd really like to see is both a whitelist and a blacklist in Focus, so I could mute Teams or my work email when I'm at home, but still get those important calls. Thankfully, notification summary shows silence notifications when I check it, so maybe this is by design. One feature I wouldn't make any changes to is spatialization for stereo music, which makes it sound like audio is coming from a speaker in front of you instead of directly from your headphones. I mean, yeah, it seems pointless, but it can actually help with listening fatigue, which can affect some people who listen to music or other audio for long periods of time. Like yours truly, apparently. I thought this was the thing that everybody had. Anyway, there have been plugins that do the same thing on desktop media players since the 90s, and Apple's tweak on it here is tracking your iDevice's position as the virtual speaker, which thankfully you can turn it off if you think that's goofy. iOS 15 has a few other features that might make you think, huh, OK. The Quick Notes feature on iPad seems like a great idea that I usually remember is there only because I activate it by accident. And I never remember the new Car Keys feature for Apple Wallet, as cool as that may be, because it's useless for anyone who doesn't own a 2020 or newer model BMW. Same deal with state ID cards and 3D maps, which aren't widely available just yet. But if you live where they are, oh, man, that will be so cool for you. The Shared with You section in Apple's first party apps would be a cool way to keep on top of things that are, well, shared with you, provided that you, unlike me, have many friends that are, A, iPhone users and B, sharing things with you. Similarly, FaceTime enhancements like Portrait Mode and GridView would be great if I did more telecommuting and if Spatial Audio worked on AirPods instead of only your device's speakers. Seriously, every other Spatial Audio enabled thing only works on AirPods. So I don't know what Craig Federighi was smoking when he approved this feature. But I do not want some. Then there's some stuff that sounded cool on paper, like on-device Siri processing. Awesome, except only language processing gets done locally. So you can't actually do much without an internet connection other than set some timers and alarms, launch apps and control media playback. Unfortunately, you can't even have Siri take a note while offline, even if your default save location is on this iPhone. And there's no clear reason why Apple wouldn't let you do that. Other than to assert dominance. iCloud Private Relay sounded like a decent VPN alternative for non techies. Until I tried to use it at the airport, leading to 15 or 20 minutes spent wrangling to try and get some kind of connection on my iDevices, whether that be actual internet access or just seeing the freaking in-flight menu. Well, as it turns out, when Private Relay is on, you can connect to the in-flight Wi-Fi, but you can't access anything because Private Relay has to route through Apple's servers first. But Private Relay can't reach Apple's servers without internet access. OK, so you just have to turn Private Relay off. Ah, ah, ah, ah, you can't turn Private Relay off unless you have internet access already, because if you don't have it, the Private Relay option in iCloud settings simply disappears. This is literally a catch 22. Great, great book. Just pick it up sometime. You can disable Private Relay on a per network basis by going to the network properties, but it doesn't always seem to remember this setting. I eventually managed to get online by mashing the Wi-Fi button until Private Relay somehow stayed off. To be fair to Apple, this feature is still in beta, but I didn't know that it meant putting a strain on my sanity. I was willing to forgive Apple, though, until I learned that while your watch can now let you know if you've left your phone behind, your phone can't let you know if you've left your watch behind for some reason. And that was the last straw. At this point, it became clear to me that this whole thing feels half-baked. Even after factory resetting all my iDevices, there are still a number of bugs and jank, things that just aren't Apple. For all the good that I had to say about Safari, for example, I'm getting frequent crashes on iPadOS. And while I'd love to pin an extension like one password to the URL bar, I can't. In fact, if I have more than two active extensions, it hides them all behind this extension icon with a number showing you how many you have. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that touching this doesn't give you the extensions menu. It just gives you the standard page menu, which you also get by pressing the menu button right next to it. Like, why? You want... You ready for another one? The home screen on iPad gets the same widget support as on iPhones. But there's a cost. Adding a widget, no matter where or what size, takes away a row from the grid. Now, this is presumably because on iPhone, a widget starts at four icons worth of space and the iPad has different spacing. But Apple, was there no way, really no way to adjust the size of widgets on the iPad? You can perfectly emulate x86 apps on ARM, but you got stumped by widgets? I've also had some difficulty realizing when I'm using multiple instances of an app on the app shelf, there are times when third party apps open a new window without my realizing it. And it's not immediately obvious while using the app, nor is it on the dock, nor even in the command tab switcher that this is the case. At one point, I had about half a dozen Safari windows open without realizing it, which is just weird. As a regular Mac OS user, I'd love to use the same command plus tilde shortcut for switching between an app's open windows here, but no. You simply have to interact with the shelf or abuse the multitasking menu, both of which do thankfully have keyboard shortcuts. This seems kind of boneheaded and really makes you wish they'd give us proper window management on the iPad already. I mean, heck, there's no reason why the Mac OS can't run right now on M1 iPads, right? Right, Apple? Please? While we're talking about iPad OS, there are still a number of bugs related to Apple's wonderful $400 add-on, the Magic Keyboard. Let's open a new tab and start typing right away. Wait, what? There's search results, but what I typed isn't in the search bar. If I keep typing now, it just completely forgets whatever was there and brings up new search results based on the most recent letters I typed. This doesn't happen if I wait until the new tab animation is finished, but I am a busy man. This is the kind of silly oversight that I expect in beta software, not in a final release and especially not for hardware that I spent far too much money on. There's more of that jank to be found on iPhone. If a webpage supports reader mode, it'll show a button on the address bar, then fade out after a couple of seconds, if that. I'm just going to enable a reader mode here and, oh, well, f*** me, I guess. And hey, remember how Safari ships with a bottom bar by default now? Well, watch what happens when you rotate. Excuse me, what? This is on the final release of iOS 15. Does this seem like Apple's usual level of polish to you? And that's not even bringing up all the major features that were promised but not finished in time for the release, like SharePlay Watch together. This seems to be a running theme with recent iOS releases and indeed, Microsoft's got their own share of things that weren't done in time for Windows 11 either. It really feels like the release it now and patch it later mentality is getting pushed to new extremes every year. As many issues as there are, though, there are a ton of tiny little quality of life improvements under the hood, and we shouldn't forget about those. Like there's a magnification loop when selecting text now that's so natural that I forgot it wasn't a thing in iOS 14. There's the ability to transcribe text from photos you've already taken, which became super helpful for managing travel documents with the ArriveCAN app on the way back to Canada. The extra context to spotlight searches means you can search for even vague subjects in photos and it'll intelligently pull relevant results. The magnifier app, once hidden behind accessibility options, works great and has come in handy already. I mean, how often have you tried zooming in on your phone's camera to read something really small or at a weird angle? You can quickly mute notifications from certain apps, either temporarily or permanently from the notification shade, and time sensitive notifications like delivery and ride sharing apps come through regardless as what focus you're on. Safari automatically uses HTTPS whenever it can, and background sounds can be used to maintain focus or promote rest. Oh, and WatchOS, which I haven't even touched on at all because it hasn't changed that much, does have a few quality of life features of its own that I've used, like being able to run multiple timers and label them. They even show up on the always on display, albeit usually a couple of seconds off. Still useful for determining roughly how far away a timer is though. It also supports the new focus settings and mirrors what you've set on your phone. Can't say I'm a huge fan of the photo's watch face though. I like to be able to tell what time it is on my watch, not look at a pocket-sized photo whenever I raise my wrist, but maybe I'm in the minority there. I mean, I don't see a reason to upgrade from the iPhone 11 series to the 13 series, but I'm sure plenty of people will do it anyway. Get subscribed, by the way, because there's plenty more to say about that too, and you won't want to miss it. At the end of the day, the iOS 15 series of mobile operating systems has made my mobile experience much more like the desktop one, particularly on the iPad, which is something I never thought I'd be able to say. Is it perfect? Hell no. But on the whole, is it good? Yeah, I think it is. And so is our sponsor, Manscaped. Manscaped provides an all-in-one grooming kit that has you covered from head to toe. Their Performance Package 4.0 features their awesome Lawn Mower 4.0 Waterproof Body Trimmer, their Weed Whacker Ear and Nose Trimmer, plus a whole lot of other goodies as well. For a limited time, you get all this plus two free gifts, the Shed Travel Bag and the Manscaped Anti-Chafing Boxer Briefs. Visit manscaped.com slash tech or click the link below for 20% off and free shipping. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our video on the iOS 15 beta, where I go over the features more generally. You know, I had more that I was going to write here, but that's kind of the end of the thought. It's more general. This is more of a, I used it for a while and this is how I feel.