 Before the first iPhone, it was expected that maybe you'd get bug fix updates from your carrier if you were lucky. Now, Apple users statistically update within one to five weeks of a new release. Amazing how things change so quickly, isn't it? And so many things have changed in the latest iPhone update that they might change the way that you use your iPhone. So what has changed in the 15th major release of iPhone OS? What? If they're not going to call it iOS on iPads, they might as well call it the old name. And I might as well tell you about our sponsor, Honey. Honey is the free to use shopping tool that helps search for some of the best promo codes on lots of your favorite sites. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. I've been using the iOS 15 beta for a little while now, and unlike Android 12, Apple is bringing big changes not to the overall look and feel, but to new features and usability improvements that might end up making you more productive, starting with notifications. Notifications now feature bigger icons and you now have a configurable notification summary panel. This makes it easier to distinguish messages and actionables from news updates and other things that you'll want to look at later. What's more, you can schedule that summary to be delivered at a time when you can sift through it at your own pace. You can even mute individual notifications for an hour, a whole day, or eternally banish them to the shadow realm right from your notification center. This goes hand in hand with Apple's new focus setting, which only allows notifications through from apps or people that you specify. It's a legitimately useful feature that lets you, well, focus on what you're doing, be it working or exercising, gaming, driving, or spelunking. Summaries will show up silently in the notification shade and notifications will come through when focus mode is disabled, so no need to worry about missing something. Focus status is shown in iMessage so your contacts know you won't be able to see their text right away, but they can also mark it as urgent, which will send you a notification anyway. Great news for both those who respect your personal space and those who don't. Notifications aren't all it's good for, though. You'll also get to control which home screens are shown for each focus. That means I can have a focus that has all the apps I use for work front and center when I arrive at the office. No need for work folders or anything like that. Then when I get home, I can make it automatically switch over to personal so Linus can't pester me about how the server room has caught fire again. It's your problem this time, Linus. Anyway, you can also set a focus to activate at certain times or during certain activities like workouts. It's all surprisingly useful. Also useful? The slick updates to FindMy. Not only can you creepily track family members in real time now, actually a thing that I do because I don't drive and I need to know where my ride is, you can now be notified whenever you leave something behind, be it an iDevice or a compatible tracker like AirTags. As Jonathan over at Mac address showed, this tracking network is legitimately robust enough to handle such a task. iMessage, which has been called messages for a while now, is getting more robust, too. There's the questionable stuff like new Memoji. Am I the only one who's creeped out by those things? Anyway, the big thing is much deeper integration with apps, including the ability to share specific articles, web pages, TV shows, photos and more directly through a message. And you'll also get those shared items inside the appropriate apps. This makes so much sense, and I'm looking forward to seeing if this integration can be done with third party apps as well, or if it's just an Apple only thing for now. I haven't looked at the dev articles. Speaking of Apple only, though, Facetime is no longer Apple only. Sort of. You can schedule and share links so anyone can join the call through a browser on a PC or Android. Frankly, this is such an Apple thing to do. Give the non-believers a taste of the experience, but don't give them the real thing until they prove their dedication by purchasing a high quality Apple product. Yeah, it's kind of annoying, but it sort of makes sense because Facetime is also picking up new features like spatial audio that makes people appear to be speaking from where they are on screen and a new grid view that gives you more of an organized view of everyone in the call at a glance. Add to that a new voice isolation mode for busy environments. And look at the video content tonight. But that's not all it can do. SharePlay gives you a way of watching TV shows and movies together, as well as sharing your screen for remote support or for just showing off those photos or apps. Basically, Apple's focus seems to be on making Facetime accessible and useful for far more than just video calls. The wider web is also a focus for Apple and iOS 15, with significant updates to Safari that make it a bit easier to navigate, although I am finding my muscle memory keeps trying to hit the top bar in order to get to the address bar that's now at the bottom. That's going to take some getting used to, but swiping left and right between tabs makes me far more likely to actually use multiple tabs on my phone and brings a feature to Safari that has existed on other web browsers for quite a while. With that in mind, I'm probably not who tab groups are meant for, and I've got my own VPN account, so the new private relay, which serves as a sort of VPN light within Safari, doesn't really mean much for me either, although it's a nice privacy bonus if you've got iPod Plus. There are other features that are pretty useful though, like pull down to refresh and the new startup page with quick access to your cloud tabs, favorites and frequent sites. It's a pretty nice touch. If people share websites with you on iMessage, they also show up here, even if it's questionable links from your relatives who still don't know what a meme is, although you can turn this off. But Anthony, you say, these are all iOS 15 features you already told us about. You're right, voices in my head. Let's talk about the things I haven't told you about. There's a dedicated magnifier app that used to be an accessibility feature. It uses the camera to take a temporary photo that can be manipulated directly in the app with helpful filters, brightness and contrast controls. It'll be a huge blessing for anyone who's ever tried to read the fine print in the app store terms of service. Another accessibility tool that's going to be legitimately useful for a lot of people is per app accessibility options. So now you can increase the font size on apps with tiny text, enable or disable auto playing video for misbehaving apps, or do smart color inverts specifically for apps that don't normally have a dark mode, just to name a few examples. Another really cool thing, text from images, and it's not just scanning from the camera app like they showed on stage. Any text input field is able to scan directly, meaning you can scan, say a URL on a sign or a sheet of paper. It works ridiculously well. And I mean, I can even open URLs from a PC just by pointing the camera at the address bar. LTT store.com, by the way. Not enough? In many Apple apps, including Safari and photos, text and images can be highlighted directly so you can copy or translate it on the fly. Do you understand how big that is for reading and getting information out of those terrible image only product pages? What, that's just a me thing? That's not even the only thing you can do with it. Drag and drop is now possible with files, text and images, so you don't even need to manually copy and paste anymore. And there's multi-touch support, so you can awkwardly take a text blurb through a swipe tour of your open apps. They love that. There's some new stuff for AirPods, too. It's not available yet, but Conversation Boost promises to help with hearing conversations over background noise. It's something that I've struggled with for most of my life. What is available right now, though, is a neat new control center icon called Hearing that lets you play back different kinds of noise, which can be helpful for focus, sleep, and probably other things I'm not even aware of. It's kind of fun, actually. Turning up the volume makes water sounds feel more turbulent, and dark noise kind of feels like the interior of a plane in flight. This works with regular headphones, too. Notes and reminders can now have tags associated with them for easy organization and search. And speaking of, Spotlight is more useful pretty much across the board, including results from the web, definitions, photos, messages, and more. Although fresh off upgrading, you'll probably need to wait a while before photos are indexed. Also, apparently these are hot dogs. Nobody said it was perfect. Actually, maybe they are hot dogs. A bunch of little quality of life improvements really add up here, like a streamlined interface for in-app Apple Pay using multiple cards. And there's a built-in authenticator for two-factor codes with support for autofill, and they brought back dial controls for setting alarms, something I've missed since they removed it in iOS 14. It's enough to make Android diehards consider switching sides. They get subscribed, by the way, so you don't miss a review when the iPhone 13 arrives. And if you do join the dark side, Apple's got you covered with temporary iCloud storage space for handling the backup and transfer of your old phone, which is pretty sweet if you're not into the whole cloud storage racket. iOS now moves photo albums, files and folders, and accessibility settings from Android devices, too. If none of that impressed you, there's even more new features we didn't even have time to cover. Even though this is just a beta, it's clear that iOS 15 is going to be a significant improvement for pretty much everyone. It might not have many headliner features. I mean, Memoji is the second thing on the page here. But the experience that I've had so far has been much more streamlined and obtrusive. And at the end of the day, that's what you want from your phone, isn't it? And if it's not, maybe it's our sponsor, Build Redux. Build Redux offers hardware with no markup pricing, only a $75 build fee. What you'd pay to buy the parts yourself would be the same price you pay with Redux, with expertly built PCs. Plus, you can use the online PC builder to customize what's going on inside based on the games you want to play. Redux believes in bringing PC gaming to the masses. That's why they only charge a small build fee and won't cut coders on quality. Click the link in the description and create your dream PC today. Thanks for watching, guys. Go check out our recent video on Android 12 for a bit more on the direction Google's been pushing things. It really feels like it's becoming a same-thing-only-different situation. Thanks. Bye.