Or they have only recently upgraded. (FWIW, I’m still running Big Sur. I’ll probably upgrade to Monterey some time before Ventura is released. 
)
1 Like
Or…I’ve been on the platform barely a month. Many of us are reticent now to apply a major upgrade as soon as it releases, thanks in part to friendly advice from TidBITs. If I wait until I think it’s safe, and I never hear unqualified “everyone jump in now” advice, it will be the following summer before I disrupt my machines.
My current rule of thumb is to wait until the WWDC that announces the next version.
I’ve been much less conservative about my xOS devices, so I tend to run into the new features more quickly.
Agree completely! Often by the time we “normals” upgrade to a new device or version, all the articles about how to use and integrate the “great new features” were written a year ago and arguably lost to history. Those with rich benefactors, or who can’t help immediately buying “the newest greatest thing” no matter what, have then moved on to issues that the rest of us won’t encounter until we’re well again into the future, and the cycle continues.
Although there were only about 3 features which I use occasionally I am just about to set up legacy contacts (so will be occasionally by your instructions) & now that I know about System Wide Translation I’m sure I’ll use it occasionally, so that’ll be about 5.
One thing I do when a new operating system arrives is purchase the ‘Take Control of [operating system]’ ebook. These are well-organized and easy to read and thoroughly discuss features introduced or modified by the new system. Right now, the catalog goes back to Mojave.
When a new operating system is released, publications covering the Mac (MacWorld, The Verge, Ars Technica, etc.) usually release summary reviews that cover the new release in depth. The Ars Technica one, while not the encyclopedia it used to be, is still quite comprehensive. If you think you will eventually want to reference this information, bookmark these articles or put them on your reading list.
Oh, we know about all these features–that’s what we do. And quite a few of them have been discussed in TidBITS.
The information is out there but as others have said, there are a lot of reasons why people may not have internalized either the existence of any given feature or what it could do for them. What that means is another question.
When I read about new features I’m interested in, but I know I won’t be updating or buying new hardware quite yet, I usually drop that article in a bookmark folder for future reference. When I finally get around to updating or when I eventually buy new hardware, I know to look up that folder and check out stuff I marked interesting enough to try out.
Simple fix. Costs nothing. And I don’t need to rely on my memory—it’s not getting any better with age. 
Now you can create a tab group instead!
2 Likes
Thinking about it some more, I’d appreciate it if Apple would concentrate on making what we have more reliable and resilient. Just make it work so EtreCheckPro doesn’t keep telling me about OS processes that are crashing repeatedly. Give us a mail client that doesn’t corrupt mailboxes and loses mail. Or a functional web browser that allows us to customize it with extensions, and maybe works with most web pages instead of not showing half the elements on the page. It’s all very well saying Safari respects HTML5 standards properly when many websites don’t. I used to tell patients we must deal with the world as we find it, not as we would like it to be. A web browser must do the same if it is to be useful!
I’m aware that since Apple has now sold everyone every device they are going to purchase, they must concentrate on selling services. My next suggestion is antithetical to that kind of marketing situation: how about making your OS so efficient, streamlined and functional that we can spend less time staring at it instead of even more? That is a selling point too, you know, Apple!
I’m with Peter here - I mean, quite a few look useful, but I am not sure I have the time to understand and really get used to them, so they lie there unused. Like Peter, I’m retired, but there are still time pressures. I also find that if a new feature is hard to get started with, or hard to remember how to use, I will drop it even if I’ve tried it a little.
I use Focus every day (though have never figured out how to say that I want NO time-sensitive notifications to pop up while I’m asleep), and I have used Live Text and benefitted a lot from it, but a lot remains untried, like say System-Wide Translation, which I could certainly use, and Visual Lookup, which sounds amazing. I’m sure my nearest and dearest would like me to learn Legacy Contacts before it’s too late, and maybe I will.
On a negative note, I found Hide My Email really annoying: it hides my principal email for no apparent reason, so I have to begin typing it rather than picking it from a field. If I chose it as an option then I don’t know how I did it.
All in all, the survey makes me think of looking harder at the things I don’t use, and I will try to do that over the next few weeks and months.
Okay, tell me where ordinary, everyday people will likely encounter information about the features listed in the survey. Let’s pick one of them: “FaceTime links”. Where are ordinary people like my siblings going to hear about that? They use iPads, iPhones and some of them use Macs, but they aren’t computer geeks. Like 99.9999% of the population, they don’t read TidBITS—nor any other computer-oriented publications. They don’t watch Apple keynote presentations.
I agree the information is out there. It’s in places where very few people are going to look, unless they happen to be computer geeks. Apple’s keynotes introducing new hardware and software usually get a reasonable amount of press, but it’s not in the local newspapers in cities/towns all over the country and certainly not on the nightly local TV news. Just how do you suppose people like my siblings are supposed to hear about new features.
The problem is not that people have heard about all the features and “may not have internalized either the existence of any given feature or what it could do for them.” The fact is that for the vast majority of users they have never heard about most of those survey features at all and likely never will, because they have other things on their minds than wondering what Apple has been doing.
Let me be clear: what I’m questioning about the survey is what valid inferences could possibly be drawn from it? We know it’s a survey of a highly unrepresentative population, which is why I’ve been stressing the difference between people like me and people like my siblings. It’s obviously very simplistic to compare features based on the frequency of use. Frequency of use doesn’t necessarily relate to importance or value. (Consider the piece of software that let’s me renew my support for TidBITS. I only use it once a year. Does that mean it’s not valuable?)
Well of course one of the first things that pops up on an iPhone or iPad after a major update is the Tips app. I believe all of these features (except the one you picked, FaceTime links) are shown in “whats new in iOS 15”. I suppose many people just ignore it (just last week I watched as my mother-in law, who rarely uses her iPhone but uses her iPad a lot, opened Photos and saw the “what’s new in photos” splash, said “gah” and closed it, spent a lot of time trying to find a photo; I gently suggested she watch those from now on), but too bad more people don’t at least look.
I believe that there’s also a similar notification after every MacOS major update.
Exactly what I would expect. 
I agree with you about the unrepresentativeness of the population, but that doesn’t mean valid and useful conclusions can’t be drawn. Eg, if the TidBITS population has not heard of/used a certain feature, I’d draw the conclusion that it is even more likely that the general population hasn’t. It’s a form of the “best case” analysis in social science.
(In a larger sense, I also trust the TidBITS folks to treat this thoughtfully and with care and so I’m not getting locked into worries over representativeness).
1 Like
I’m with Duane. I think the survey would have been much improved by a “didn’t know about it” option. Personally, I didn’t complete the survey because I looked over the list, realized I hadn’t even heard of the majority of these features, and felt that my responses of “never” on those items would have been meaningless.
That is an interesting point. I think I would agree with you in a certain respect: if people like Adam and Josh haven’t heard of a certain feature, then something is definitely wrong, because they are the types of people who seek out new features. On the other hand, there could certainly be TidBITS readers who have a more casual relationship with Apple’s announcements and presentations. I have no idea what portion of this group is more like Adam and what portion is interested, but less so, in Apple news.
Conrad calls attention to another problem with surveys like this: participants are self-selected. So it would be problematic to conclude that the results are representative of the TidBITS readers.
Nobody is like Adam, but just the act of reading TidBITS differentiates readers from ~95% of Apple users and that’s useful from which to draw conclusions.
Again, even if they’re useful only as themselves rather than being a representative sample, you can draw valid conclusions – as you yourself pointed out above, if Adam doesn’t know about something, then something is wrong.
We know all the features because it’s our job, but when Adam and I devised this list we realized we only use a handful, and there were many features we’d forgotten about. SharePlay is a great example of a feature I used extensively for testing but have never used in a real-life situation. I bet teenagers love it, though. Maybe our survey will inspire other surveys to reach different markets.
1 Like
Well…as one data point, I saw an issue of MacWEEK in 1986 while I was working a freelance typesetting gig in Boston, and made up some qualifying stats to get a free sub sent to my home each week until they went out of print. Ric Ford’s MacInTouch column ran there every week, and between that and the ton of press releases that ran as news stories I was aware of many, many developments in the Macintosh market segment. Add trips to MacWorld Boston, sometimes from distant parts of New England, and the debut of this strangely formatted email newsletter called (I think) “TidBITs”, and I was probably more like Adam in some ways than a group just somewhat interested in Apple news.
But also, not. Because Adam and the TidBITs staff all have “living with it” interests in Apple technology, but their publishing business is more about the core technology. I’ve been crazy-involved with leveraging the tech more than analyzing it. I find it of passing interest to hear about Apple’s business results, but I don’t strictly need to know them the way this publication’s staff does.
When I see a list of 20 new features from 2021, I might recall the names, but unless the feature was something I had been missing, or unless it’s something I can leverage, I pretty much tuck away its label but throw out its description to make room for stuff I can use.
All of that is to say, I don’t know where I would land in a taxonomy of relative interest in Apple news.
It’s a fascinating question, @duanewilliams, and perhaps the value for Apple is found in each user grabbing onto one or two of those 20 features, but different ones.