Quite a few useful things coming (in no particular order and mixed Mac OS/iOS) – I love the phone number exchange feature, the PDF editing update, the desktop widgets, the profiles in Safari, the stickers in Messages, the multiple timers, FaceTime on AppleTV, the Contact Posters, the Live Voicemail, and Check in.
I tend to think of the annual releases in the way that the old 0.5 releases were; important but not the massive update .0 releases were. So we get a .5 update most years and occasionally a .0 update (no matter what Apple calls them)
Isn’t the point of a Snow Leopard-like release to fix issues and smooth rough edges, none of which would warrant calling out in a highly scripted presentation designed to lure developers into writing more? If anything, the relatively few Mac features would suggest that Apple has room to focus on refinement.
Ah, but with a hot corner or key press, you can reveal your Desktop to access them. I use the right-hand Option key for that, along with the rightmost bottom corner.
I’d argue that they’ve been concentrating on getting the visionOS finished probably.
Health moving to iPad, lock screen customization to iPad and Mac, to me are examples that features like you mention will eventually make it to Mac. That seems to be the model - get it going on iPhone, clearly their biggest user base, and then eventually move them over to iPad and Mac.
Honestly I’d love to see a web component for Health in iCloud as well.
As for the Journal - I have a 1686 day streak of daily entries in DayOne. And, as you suggest, I frequently start entries on the iPhone (since it knows where I am when I start the entry) and then finish on the Mac or iPad. I’m not sure I’m just going to switch to the new Journal app. Of course, one reason I don’t enter as often on iPhone (though I do frequently make full entries with the phone) is that they keyboard entry is so imperfect, and that is supposedly improved with iOS 17.
I also have to say I’m interested in the changes to watchOS. I often choose to use watchfaces that show a few complications, just for glanceability to get the info, but maybe using the new widgets interface with the crown will allow me to use more simple watchfaces more often.
What I was really hoping to see for iOS 17 (apart from fixing bugs) is for a single icon in Control Center to connect to my AirPods Pro. These days I either have to go through Control Center with a series of tap and holds, or navigate to Settings, tap on Bluetooth, and then tap on my AirPods (which incidentally are the only BT item listed there anyway). Who knows, maybe they added an icon to Control Center and just didn’t talk it up.
My comments (based on the review, since I haven’t yet seen the keynote):
No more “Hey” with Siri
I’m a bit concerned that it is going to start popping up and listening when nobody was asking it anything (more than it already does today). If anybody talking about Siri in the room causes it to start streaming audio to Apple’s server, that’s going be annoying and it’s going to make some people very angry.
FaceTime Apple TV Support
I’m going to like this. I have Apple TVs on two of the TVs at home. I’d love to be able to use it with FaceTime, even if it means I have to put my phone on the mantle in order for the other party to see us in the room.
Mac Desktop Widgets
So they brought back the old Dashboard? Not really, but it still amuses me. Apple seems to blow hot and cold on the concept of Mac desktop widgets.
NameDrop
A useful feature, but it reminds me of the “Beam” functionality that PalmOS 3.0 introduced in 1998, in order to send objects (including contact cards) to other Palm devices via IrDA.
Some people are already talking about this as if it is a great Apple innovation, even though Palm was doing it 25 years ago and (h/t @nello) there was a third-party app (Bump) that did it for the iPhone, until they were acquired by Google.
AirTag Sharing
All I can say is that it’s about time.
Now I need to find the time to actually watch the presentation.
So many more features to increase the ability of devices and now even your Mac to distract you. Not just ring tones, now fancy pictures with calls, you can’t even ignore a call, now you have to watch it transcribe the message live. Stickers sound worse than ALLCAPS. Widgets now available to disturb you on the computer. Compelling is an excellent adjective for these features.
It would be really nice if Apple managed to fix TV in Sonoma. Haven’t heard anything at all about it nor did I find anything on the Sonoma marketing page.
The feature that sounds most interesting is sharing things directly between units (hoping that includes Macs too). Most of all one would want to shareware mail addresses – which can take a lifetime as it is now. One could hope autocorrection could improve a little so The Valley doesn’t appear with capitals for example. Improving the possibility to copy text in apps like Contacts would be welcome.
I agree that the features are boring. I do appreciate Adam’s article for pointing out those that are more useful, which I hadn’t noticed when I read the release in Macworld and Apple’s website. Hopefully they concentrated in improving under the hood.
I am too concerned about Siri dropping the hey and becoming like Alexa, meddling in all my conversations.
But what would be truly useful would be for the Messages app to allow us to “leave” an MMS group conversation, as we can iMessage groups. Really this would likely require the Messages app to automatically delete any received messages sent to the group, but that would be better than setting alerts off for the group and periodically deleting the messages.
I agree that the value of the changes is very limited.
The changes seem to do nothing to improve messages between Apple and non-Apple devices, which will apparently remain stepped down to SMS/MMS.
I’m focused on the impact of these changes on messaging among the Apple devices within a mixed group. Apparently messages among such Apple devices will not be dragged down to the lowest common denominator and will use the iMessage protocol. In my mind this is an improvement.
