WWDC 2019 Recap: iOS 13, iPadOS, watchOS 6, macOS Catalina & More

By Sarah Kingsbury Updated 11/29/2023

In the special 112th episode of the iPhone Life Podcast, Sarah, Donna, and David sit down to analyze everything Apple announced at today's Worldwide Developers Conference. They analyze the event and explain all the coolest features of the forthcoming iOS 13, watchOS 6, tvOS 13, macOS Catalina, as well as the introduction of a new iPadOS and the death of iTunes.

Click here to listen and subscribe. If you like what you hear, be sure to leave a review. And remember to tune in every other week to hear our editors share with you the latest Apple news, best apps, iPhone tricks, and coolest accessories.

This episode was brought to you by Gobudi and Nomodo. The future is here with the wireless Qi-certified mug warmer and phone charger by Nomodo. Keep your coffee hot and charge your phone fast with this bold new charger. If you need an easier way for your cat, then Sand Dipper from Gobudi is the perfect scoop! This litter scoop's adjustable handle snaps into place anywhere from 21 to 41 inches. The aluminum mesh basket is great for all styles of litter and is easy to clean.

Discover your iPhone's hidden features

Get a daily tip (with screenshots and clear instructions) so you can master your iPhone in just one minute a day.

Special Discount for Podcast Listeners!

Want more iOS how-to content that's designed to make your life easier and more productive? Visit iPhoneLife.com/PodcastDiscount and get $5 off our premium subscription to iPhone Life Insider.

Question of the week:

Which new software features are you most excited about? What did you think about the event? Email podcasts@iphonelife.com to let us know.

Articles referred to in this episode:

Useful links:

Transcript of episode 112:

Donna Cleveland: Hi, and welcome to episode 112 of the iPhone Life Podcast. I'm Donna Cleveland, editor in chief at iPhone Life.

David Averbach: I'm David Averbach, CEO and publisher at iPhone Life.

Sarah Kingsbury: And, I'm Sarah Kingsbury, senior web editor at iPhone Life.

Donna Cleveland: Today we have a special episode for you just following Apples worldwide developer's conference. Where Apple just unveiled a lot of new software updates and a hardware update as well that will be telling you about. Before we jump into the episode and give you our take on everything Apple announced, we have a couple of sponsors to tell you about. David will take over.

David Averbach: Yeah. So we've been telling you about GO BUDDY for a couple of years now. I always mention how they have a wide range of products and their really innovative products. Today I'm going to tell you about a new product of theirs that's not iPhone related but still very practical like all their products are. And that is the Sand Dipper Jr and that is for Kitty Litter. And how it works is it has an extendable long arm so that you don't have to get close to the Kitty Litter. And you don't get the dust on you. And it makes it easy to clean from a distance. It's a high quality like all their products. They have a long warranty, very affordable. So make sure you check it out if you have a cat world dog people here.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

David Averbach: So I had to interview Ray Anna, our cat person before this episode to find out why I'd be useful. But it is useful we have now learned. So make sure you go check it out. You can look on Amazon, it's called the Sand Dipper Jr or we'll link to it. If you go to iPhonelife.com/podcast. And our second product is another new product that you guys have not heard about that you don't have to be a cat person for. I'm really excited about it. It's from a company called Nomodo. It's a Qi wireless charger that also has a cup holder that will keep your cup warm or cold.

David Averbach: Perfect for your desk, either the office or if you have a home office. And you have a cup. It comes with the cup. You can put your coffee in there and keep it warm or if you have an ice drink you can use that. You can put a can on it. If you like to drink sodas at the office or energy drinks. So one half is the cup holder and the other half is oh certified Qi wireless charger. Super practical and I'm very excited to have them. So again, this is a product on Amazon. You can look for it. It's no Nomodo wireless charger or we will make to it if that is complicated to spell. So go to iphonelife.com/podcast and thank you so much to our sponsors.

Donna Cleveland: I also wanted to take a minute to tell you about our daily tips newsletter. If you go to iphonelife.com/dailytips, you can sign up to learn how to master your iPhone in less than a minute a day. We send you something that's really easy to follow and it's the easy free, effortless way to get more out of your iPhone. Which we can all use. I also wanted to tell you about our insider program. This is our premium service. It's our paid subscription that really helps you get the most out of your device. Takes you're learning to the next level. It includes things like video versions of all of the daily tips so you can follow along, hold your iPhone while you're watching it and follow along as you go.

Donna Cleveland: We have in depth video guides, for instance, with iOS 13 coming out really soon. Which we're about to tell you all about what iOS 13 is going to include. We'll have a guide as soon as it's available, that will walk you through all of the new features to make sure that you're among the first people who can master all of the new exciting features. You'll get a digital subscription to iPhone Life magazine and full access to our archive of issues, which we've more than 30 issues available to you. You also get the premium version of this podcast. So that means you get none of the ads that we're including right now. And also you get an a special insight or only premium version.

Donna Cleveland: There's more features too, but you can get a special discount for your insider subscription for listening to this podcast by going to iphonelife.com/podcastdiscount. So we like to treat our podcast listeners, give them something special. You'll get $5 off your annual subscription.

David Averbach: Yes. And before we dive into it, just a quick warning, Donna and I are both recovering from the plague. So if we have occasional fits of coughing, you'll know why, but we'll do our best to keep it together. Those of you who are-

Donna Cleveland: It's so much better than last week.

David Averbach: ... yeah. Those of you who were in our class, we're doing a beginners class right now. Donna and I were both just coughing up a storm throughout the whole thing. So we'll do our best, but we apologize for any coughing we have.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: So glad to be sitting next to both of you.

David Averbach: Yes.

Donna Cleveland: I swear it's not contagious. Before we jump into everything that happened today, we wanted to read a couple of comments from our listeners last week, especially because it'll be fun. They're going to be happy about what ended up happening with iOS 13 because listeners were excited about dark mode. And that was one of the big iOS 13 features. So here Dave Roaden saying, "I've been using the dark mode on my Mac since it became available and love it. Can't wait for it on my iPhone." Garth says, "You ask about dark mode. No, I don't use dark mode, but I would like to be able to change the color of the paper of mail and other stuff."

Donna Cleveland: Well, I think in order to do that, you're going to use dark mode. But it does change the look of the mail app. So that will be cool. Steve says, "I've used dark mode occasionally on my Mac, but not so much on my iPhone." Well not on your iPhone yet. I have to say that when I have tried it on my iPhone, it seems to be too dark as in some of the applications it appears to blend in with the background.

David Averbach: Just to clarify that one-

Sarah Kingsbury: He's talking about smart invert colors.

David Averbach: Yes. So there was sort of a hack that you could do that would invert the colors. As in the accessibility section settings and it wasn't a full dark mode, but it did make screens dark. And in what didn't look good. So I think if you do like a darker screen to look at, this'll be way better.

Donna Cleveland: Way better.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Okay, cool. So should we jump into... I think it's time to jump into our WWDC covers.

David Averbach: Yes, let's do it.

Donna Cleveland: So first of all, we just thought we'd tell you what all Apple announced. Then we're going to go through each of those announcements. Give you an overview of what it will include and then give you our take on it. So today we learned about iOS 13, which of course we expected iPadOS because Apple is now splitting those operating systems. They each have their own features now, which was something that's pretty exciting. CarPlay got an update. Apple Watch software got update watchOS 6. We got TBOS. We have some AirPods updates. Also a new macOS. And then we have a new Mac as well, which I don't know if we're going to get into talking about much today.

David Averbach: That will be our insider section. So for the extended episode for you insiders, we will talk about Mac. Everyone else, you will have to subscribe to hear it.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

David Averbach: But just to take one step farther back, WWDC or Worldwide Developer Conference happens every year in the beginning of the conference as a keynote. That's what were to happen today. This is where they announce all the software updates. So when Donna's saying, "Oh, we got iOS 13, we got this." It was announced. Most of these things are coming out in the fall. It will not be available to you yet. But every year, this time of year in June, this is when Apple announces the changes to other operating systems. So we're just going to go rolling.

Donna Cleveland: Cool. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying. Just to give you guys the dates on those things. As David said, September is when the official releases of all these softwares, but there's developer Betas available today. But that doesn't really apply to most of us. And then there's public beta versions for iOS, I believe, iPadOS and macOS starting in July. Each year most of the people at our office try out the public betas that's available to anyone. But of usually we recommend using that on a secondary device. You wouldn't want to download it on your primary device in case it's buggy.

Sarah Kingsbury: I've done it.

Donna Cleveland: That's [crosstalk 00:08:18]. I've also done it on my primary device and everything's turned out fine, but I don't know if I , feel comfortable with telling people they should.

David Averbach: Yeah. It comes out we probably have a whole episode on it, but yeah.

Donna Cleveland: That's about how well it didn't work for me.

David Averbach: And I had someone in the office who really had a hard time with it, so it can go wrong.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yes. I just couldn't access apps that I use a lot because they, it just wasn't working well with the beta.

Donna Cleveland: Okay. Apple started out the announcement talking about Apple Services, and we just had the services announcement a couple months ago and we didn't get specific dates of when they'd come out. We thought maybe today we'd find out when we would actually be able to try out Apple Arcade, Apple News+ or... not Apple News+, sorry, Apple TV+ and Apple Card. We didn't find out, they just said, "Apple Arcade coming later this year." That was as specific as it got. Apple TV+ coming this fall. So presumably when the iPhone announcement is in the fall, in September and then Apple Card this summer, which I don't know.

David Averbach: In summers it's pretty soon. [crosstalk 00:09:26] You would think they have a date for it.

Sarah Kingsbury: I just thought it was interesting because it was like, "Hey, we just announced this stuff and we want you to remember that we just announced this stuff." That was basically all that that was.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

David Averbach: Yeah. And it was also like, "We still don't have any details for you."

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I thought we were definitely in to get some more details.

Sarah Kingsbury: And then they made us watch a preview of some show, which could be very cool, but it's like, "Why am I watching this?"

David Averbach: It looked okay.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I mean that I thought made a little more... I thought that the services announcement, they should have shown us some clues of the shows and said they just had some of the actors that were in these shows kind of awkwardly talk about the shows for a little while, which I didn't think works out well.

Sarah Kingsbury: They had a little bit of preview. This was a much longer preview. It was more like a trailer.

Donna Cleveland: Right. That's the update we have for the services. For iOS 13, we have a bunch of stuff to tell you about. First of all as usual, there's usually performance updates. Face ID is going to be 30% faster. Apps will launch twice as fast. I don't know if you remember any of the other performance updates, but they went through some things like that.

David Averbach: Those were the two big ones.

Sarah Kingsbury: Oh, downloads will be smaller, that's why they'll launch faster.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, okay.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think downloads will be 50% smaller and updates will be 60% smaller.

David Averbach: I didn't understand that.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. What does that mean?

David Averbach: I don't know how they're controlling the size of third party Apps.

Sarah Kingsbury: I really don't understand programming at all. So this is like a complete guess. It could be completely wrong and I'm sure someone will write it and tell me. Because of the new SwiftUI, which we'll talk about later. There's a lot less code in all these apps.

David Averbach: Yeah. But that assumes the most people using Swift and I don't think they are. But I think you're right in the big picture that I think they must've done something behind the scenes that just made it so that files are just inherently smaller.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's basically what they said. We did something and this is the result.

David Averbach: We waved a wand and it's smaller. Yeah I agree. That's probably what's happening. My heart take for this whole podcast is that, that right here, the performance upgrades are the most important thing.

Donna Cleveland: Oh really?

David Averbach: I think so because it's a type of thing that never gets top dealing. People don't talk about it. Everyone wants to talk about dark mode, which is the big new feature. But having your phone unlock faster, having the apps open faster is something that's going to affect your day to day use more than anything else was announced today. I'm excited because they do usually talk about performance upgrades but often those come with hardware. In the fall when they announced a new phone, they say, well our phones faster using new processor. But this is software. So that means even older phones should work faster presumably, unless they mess it up. I think that's really exciting.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I was going to say my overall feeling on iOS 13 was that dark mode was the big feature that seems exciting, and it is. I'm looking forward to it. But besides that they had a lot... they kind of just had a bunch of random features thrown in there, but a lot of them were cool. I think their performance updates were cool. There were some privacy features that are really significant. There were sort of privacy gaps that you didn't even know that you had before those so you're like, "Oh, I didn't know that I was vulnerable in all these ways and now I'm not. I guess yay." Sarah made a comment before. You tell them.

Sarah Kingsbury: Oh, I was basically saying this is like the casserole that you make out of all the leftovers because there were a lot of features that Apple didn't include. Or at least was rumored to had not have included in iOS 12 because they ended up just basically having to fix all the bugs from iOS 11 until it was the stability update. All of those things, rather than being cohesive, they usually have a sort of like, "Here's our sort of theme around this release." It was just, "Here's all the leftovers and we're just going to throw them at you."

David Averbach: If I were to summarize, I would say though, because there was some of it kind of got pit fit into clean boxes. One of that, we talked about privacy. Apple's going huge into privacy. We started with services, they talked about a lot of privacy stuff and now they're doubling down. That makes sense from a big picture perspective because their biggest competitor, Google is not known for privacy. Google is of course trying to monetize. They give android away and they try to monetize through selling ads. So Apple has a huge competitive advantage by emphasizing privacy and building these privacy devices. The other thing, yeah, go ahead.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, no. It's fine. Go ahead.

David Averbach: Okay. The second thing I think clean box from today's announcement is Apple is slowly and methodically updating their built-in apps. We saw this earlier when they updated news and they update finance. This time they updated we'll get into more, but they updated reminders and maps-

Donna Cleveland: Mail.

David Averbach: ... mail. I think that's the other one, which make sense. I think some of these updates are a little bit over do. They have these built-in apps and they need to be updating them regularly, adding new features. And they did that this time.

Donna Cleveland: So should we talk about dark mode?

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

David Averbach: We've been alluding to it.

Sarah Kingsbury: I don't know what really there is to say. If you're familiar with the color inversion feature in iOS. There is the classic color and version which basically everything just got inverted and so it looked weird. And then they had smart color invert, which supposedly, your images and media and things like that, app icons we're not supposed to be inverted. But that only worked some of the time. So it ended up looking weird. So now it should actually work in a consistent good way.

David Averbach: I think a really good comp is of course the Mac operating system, which got dark mode last year. So if you use a Mac you might be used to it. The basic idea is when you think about it, most apps have a white background right now. The mail app does. The notes app does. Almost every built an app has a white background. The idea is taking all calendar app, taking all of those and having them have dark backgrounds instead. Some of that's a preference. Some people just like it better. Some people claim it's easier on the eyes. Some people claim it has better battery life.

David Averbach: It's one of those things that a lot of people been asking for for years and everybody has a strong opinion on it. But that's the basic ideas. Those apps will now have backgrounds be dark and then of course you need to change the colors of the text and the fonts and things like that to have contrast. So then you end up with kind of white text on black background.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Apple really created redesigns for a lot of their main apps for dark mode. They showed demos of the photos app and how that incorporated dark mode. What were some of the other ones?

David Averbach: Calendar mail.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I think it'll apply to most of them. Reminders, all of that. I've been using it on with macOS Mojave for awhile now ended up liking it.

David Averbach: I was going to ask. Okay.

Donna Cleveland: I wonder if they're going to do it some third party apps on the iPhone already support dark mode. They are the only versions of dark mode. Day one is a journaling app I use that has dark mode and it will automatically switch it's color profiles at nighttime. Dark mode turns on at night. I think it is more for the that reason, if that is supposed to be more relaxing for the eyes like less blue light. Although it's not like... We already have night shift which creates a more orange light at night, but it still is there's something more soothing about using it I have found.

Donna Cleveland: And a lot of times it's like the menu in the apps are darker and then the workspace will still seems be a lot brighter colors. So it kind of just draws your attention to where it's supposed to be. Which I like. And with the photos I think it makes the photos pop more because it just has a really neutral background. But it's mainly just... it's like visually something different. And so it made the demos of iOS 13 look significantly different. But it's not actually functionally different.

David Averbach: So have you found that it's easier on your eyes? Is that part of why you're using it?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. It's part of the reason I've stuck with it is I do feel it's more soothing.

David Averbach: I think for me, I tried it out on Mac for a while but I end up going back.

Donna Cleveland: Oh really?

David Averbach: Yeah. It's going to sound weird, but I felt like the normal mode, the not dark mode, was a little more cheerful. I like looking at a white screen, having everything be dark felt like, I don't know.

Sarah Kingsbury: Oppressive.

David Averbach: Yeah. It's depressing or something.

Donna Cleveland: I think a lot of it depends how it's done. Which I feel like they did it well in a way that felt more like soothing than depressing. But I could understand where you're coming from.

David Averbach: I do agree. I thought they did a very good job with it. I thought it looked good. I also have a tendency to use my phone in darker places in my computer. I tend to use my computer for work. I'm in a well lit office. Hopefully kind of will lit. But I found when I was at a conference and I was taking notes, I switched a dark mode and I liked it a lot better because I was in a dark room and there's everybody around me. And it felt like glaring screen to have the weight background on everything. I think I'm more likely to use it on the iPhone for that reason is I'm often not... I think when you're in public it's a little bit less... your screen's a little bit less visible. I think if you're in low light it's easier. So I'm going to try it out. And I think they did a good job with it. But in general, I haven't done it on Mac.

Donna Cleveland: You have an interesting-

David Averbach: No. How about you Sarah? I know you don't haven't tested out on Mac, but are you excited about it? You're going to use it?

Sarah Kingsbury: I would probably use it at night or I feel it would make my screen less visible to other people. So definitely.

Donna Cleveland: I feel in public with the white screen can be very glaring.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. I was actually in public the other day and my daughter texted me and wanted me to log into her bank account to check her balance because it wouldn't load for her. I was at a baseball game. So I was sitting in a seat with people above me and I was like, "I'm not going to log into the bank account if everyone is watching."

David Averbach: Especially it's your daughters bank account and everyone's going to be like, "You have $13 in your savings [crosstalk 00:19:58] me I swear."

Donna Cleveland: Could at least 50.

Sarah Kingsbury: Oh, yeah. So we'll see. I'll probably try it out in certain circumstances. I don't think that I would use it all the time. I'll probably use it actually at night when I'm walking my dogs.

Donna Cleveland: I wonder if they'll have an option just to automatically turn it on and off at night.

Sarah Kingsbury: I'd be more likely to use it then.

David Averbach: I would like that. Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Hopefully you can set it on the schedule.

David Averbach: I think of the most random features from this announcement, I'm looking and listening comes next was swiped a text.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. There is someone who mentioned it during the dark mode announcement too.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: What does that have to do with dark mode?

David Averbach: It's weird because Android has had that feature for literally like five years.

Donna Cleveland: At least.

David Averbach: So swipe to txt is like on your keyboard. Typically, the keyboard now is designed to replicate a physical keyboard where each key you have to tap. But what Android has is called swipe to text. Where you take your finger, you don't even have to lift it up, you just swipe from letter to letter and it uses AI to figure out what words your spelling.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Back when I was an android user, I used it all the time.

David Averbach: There's some third party keyboards that have had it for a while. For a long time I used it on a third party keyboards. I ended up moving away from it in part just because of third party keyboards I find to be hassled that you're always kind of flipping back-

Donna Cleveland: And switching.

David Averbach: ... and yeah. But I liked it and I found it to be faster typing. You can do it one handed easier, which is really nice for the kind of bigger phones. Especially if you have a Max. It's a nice addition, but why did they decide to do it five years after android did it? And everybody had been talking about it for years. It was bizarre. I mean I'm happy about it, but it was weird.

Sarah Kingsbury: There's a bunch of features that are like that. I was just looking this Share Sheets. When in any app when you go to share something, they updated it. I can't remember. I was just looking at it in my notes and now I can't find it. So you get sort of smart sharing suggestions. The people you usually share things with will pop up and also the way you usually share with them we'll be there.

David Averbach: I didn't even catch that. That's cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: I was excited about that. But it was so random. It was not like, "We've redesigned the message app. Here's all the features." It was like, "And here's one just random feature." And that's what I meant by leftover casserole.

David Averbach: Yeah, totally.

Sarah Kingsbury: Do you guys want to talk about-

Donna Cleveland: It will also give you people to share it with?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. They're like an icon of their face assuming you have their face there.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. That's cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: Kind of in your favorites, you can designate a way that you would be your default way to contact them except for, I guess your iPhone will be choosing based on how you usually share things with them. And I can see finding that very useful.

Donna Cleveland: Other random feature was music now has a time synced lyrics lyric. They showed that also during the dark mode demo, which would be nice for Karaoke.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's what I was thinking.

Donna Cleveland: Lyrics are scrolling for you. But I was like, "Hmm, cool."

David Averbach: Whatever. You were so excited about it. I was sitting next to you. You were like, "Wow."

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Karaoke is important.

David Averbach: But like Karaoke you need the special Karaoke versions of the songs where the vocals aren't there, right?

Donna Cleveland: Well, yeah, that's true. I think I was more caffeinated during the announcement. I was like, "Cool."

Sarah Kingsbury: Can we talk about something that's not random but then I'm very excited about it.

Donna Cleveland: Yes.

David Averbach: Yes.

Sarah Kingsbury: I don't know if you guys ever use the photos app, but it is a freaking mess.

David Averbach: I use it all the time [crosstalk 00:23:28].

Sarah Kingsbury: It's just so complicated. All the different tabs and how you navigate. We just recently did a tip on how to navigate the photos tab because getting back and forth between the day view and the year view and the month view and the place view. There's just these teeny little thumbnails and it's just the more I sort of looked into how you navigate the photos out, the more I realize it's just a mess. They've really kind of simplified it and made the UI much better. I'm using my own notes and I keep forgetting where I am. Basically they've redone the photos.

Sarah Kingsbury: All photos are in the photos tab and you can zoom in and out on the screen to see if you with more pictures or fewer pictures. And you can tap days or months or years. And also, you know how I take a lot of screenshots or you might take a picture of your receipt. Those things are just going to be through. I guess like AI or just hidden from you so you're not cluttered with that. Which would really-

Donna Cleveland: That's nice since we take so many screenshots at work.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: I take so many. Also Pokémon GO.

David Averbach: It looked really clean. It was really well done. It seemed like it could be... I mean it's hard to tell taking your hands on the operating system, but it looked easy to navigate. The videos would kind of auto play as you're scrolling, which I thought was cool. It didn't have as much weird random white spaces and sorted.

Donna Cleveland: It was like all photos.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: And you swiped right now there is a month... well there's a year view and then what is it? Collections and the way they have it organized in different groups it's kind of odd, but this was you swipe right and left between month, day and year view. And that just seemed like it made way more sense.

David Averbach: Yeah. Looking at it now, it's totally mess. I have no idea how to navigate this.

Sarah Kingsbury: Also for photo editing, you can now sort of instead of having to go into multiple menus to see your different settings and adjust them, they're sort of a scrolling bar of all the different things you can just tap on them in and slide on them right there.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, nice.

Sarah Kingsbury: And editing, which I find really helpful.

Donna Cleveland: And they added more editing tools.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right. They're bringing them to video for the first time and also so you can apply filters, and are you guys really excited about this? You can rotate videos.

David Averbach: Rotate. I totally had to have it in the other day where I had, I did the classic thing where you start recording a video in portrait mode and then instantly decide to switch it over. I had to go through so much trouble to rotate it.

Donna Cleveland: It's such a pain. You've got third party apps to do it, right?

David Averbach: iMovie does it. That's the way to do it. Before iOS 13 comes out. You have a video that needs you rotate it, you can download iMovie. It's an Apple app. And do it in iMovie, but it was a hassle.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. So this is like one of those glaring things [crosstalk 00:26:32] thought about it. Oh, one other thing too is portrait lighting, that's a feature that came out I believe last year. And that lets you apply lighting effects to portrait mode photos, but they now added the ability to... After you've taken the photo I think, or before you can tailor the amount of light that's applied that would simulate basically moving lights closer to the subject or further away.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right. There's some more lighting effects. One was called High-Key Mono, whatever that means. And there's some other ones. So that should be fun to play with.

Donna Cleveland: I'm glad they're improving it because I haven't found a portrait lighting so far to be that great.

David Averbach: Yeah. And in general though, editing photos in the Apple's app is pretty difficult. If you use Instagram, it's super easy to... I'm not talking about applying the filters. But actually going and editing saturation and brightness and contrast is really easy in Snapseed and Instagram. And then Apple's app is really hard. They changed the UI and I'm hoping it makes a lot better.

Sarah Kingsbury: So should we talk about the new privacy features and insecurity features now?

David Averbach: Yes.

Donna Cleveland: Yes.

Sarah Kingsbury: So there are a few. One that I thought was really cool is Apple login. You know how when you're logging into certain apps you can log in with Facebook or log in with Google. But that makes it so that you can be tracked. Whereas if you do it with Apple, then they won't track you. And also if the app requires an email address and you don't want to share it with them, Apple will generate a unique random email to share with them. It will be different for each app and it will be forwarded to your usual address. That's available also I guess on the web as well as on all the apps.

David Averbach: I thought this was really cool. I tend to use the sign up with Facebook feature because I hate creating separate accounts with separate passwords for each app and I have to... especially if I'm on my phone, I have to then go manually load them in by password manager.

Donna Cleveland: I know David. I feel like you and I are both suckers for convenience. Whenever privacy comes up we're like, "Oh yep, I do that." Obviously things that are stupid to be doing.

David Averbach: And I feel particularly weird about Facebook. I feel like Facebook is sharing more data with them than they should. And Facebook I feel are using the data themselves and know what apps I'm using.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I'm actually not cool with it. Basically my understanding is anytime you download a new app that requires some sort of account, it'll just have a sign in with Apple option. And it's not actually sharing any personal data with that company, right?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

David Averbach: No. The apps themselves will have to integrate. It's an option that Apple's offering. And so people have take them up on it. But yeah. That would be a really good feature.

Donna Cleveland: Hopefully lots of them will.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. I hope so.

David Averbach: Yeah. Especially because if you're in... I mean it's tricky because you have to be in Apple ecosystem, but if you have a Mac and you have an iPhone, you can effectively use us to eliminate passwords. Which would be really cool.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I know.

Sarah Kingsbury: Because you're logging in with your Face ID.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Another-

Donna Cleveland: What if you don't have Face ID. How does it work?

Sarah Kingsbury: Touch ID and I guess assuming you have a really old phone, your passcode. Well, I mean would it be your passcode or it'd be your Apple ID password? I'm not sure.

Donna Cleveland: Okay. Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Another cool thing is with location sharing. There's not going to be this sort of just like this app wants to track your location and you say yes because you need it to have your location at that time. Then it's not just blanket forever permission. They have to ask you again when they... so that they can't just continue tracking your location. Also they're not going to allow apps to scan nearby WiFi and Bluetooth to infer your location, which they can do if you don't allow them to track your location explicitly. So that is very cool.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, that was really cool.

David Averbach: It felt like Apple was, I mean, kind of what Donna said earlier. Proactively finding the ways that people are violating your privacy that a lot of them didn't even know about and stopping them.

Donna Cleveland: I know. Which was really a little disturbing.

David Averbach: Yeah. You know that's happening.

Donna Cleveland: I'm being way too trusting. But I feel like Apple actually do trust that they seem way better than other companies in this department.

David Averbach: I agree.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Apple is a corporation, so be cynical about it, but they definitely have decided that this is their business model. They're going to be... set themselves apart by caring about our security and privacy. As I said, your privacy is a human right. Another cool thing to say a home kit update. If you have smart security cameras, I guess the way security cameras work is they upload that video to the cloud because it needs to be analyzed to tell what the movement is. Is it a person? Is it a little animal going by? But that's just one more way and that can be vulnerable.

Sarah Kingsbury: They have set up home kit so that the video can be analyzed directly on your device. And of course Apple is not going to share that or look at it. Then they'll encrypt it and send it to iCloud where no one can see it. So you'd still there if you need to review it. And I guess you can have up to 10 day storage for it. It won't count against your iCloud storage, which is important. Another cool home get thing is firewalls for your smart devices in your home. To protect them from malicious attacks but also if one is firewalled from each other too so that if one of them is attacked it's not going to spread to all your other smart devices.

David Averbach: Yeah. I was really excited by the security updates.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, me too. I think those are the main iOS 13 features.

David Averbach: Maps and reminders.

Donna Cleveland: Maps and reminders. So the reminders app is when I... it's like a favorite app of mine. I use it all the time but it is pretty simplistic and there are a lot of to do apps there that are way more robust. With this update the Apple is taking a step closer to a lot of those apps. They now have a different view for your scheduled reminders. Where you can see ones... it was much more visual ones that have a time or location based reminders setting with it. Also did anyone understand what the tags were? I didn't totally get that.

David Averbach: They went so fast through the reminder section that I had a hard time falling [crosstalk 00:33:12].

Sarah Kingsbury: I don't know if they were talking about... because you can have shared reminders lists. I was wondering if that's what it was but I really should've gone to the Apple site and looked at what they had because-

Donna Cleveland: I can look it up right now but they said something about [crosstalk 00:33:26] if you mention that person in a reminder then when you're messaging that person, anything tagged with that person may show up as an option to send to that person.

Sarah Kingsbury: That makes a lot more sense.

Donna Cleveland: So I think what it is is just if you probably like you said, if it's associated with a person that reminder then you can more easily message it to them. The other thing is they had smart entry. And that's something that fantastic other app that does this. As you type it starts guessing what you might want to say and entering that in as a possibility. Like what time it thinks you would want to set that reminder for. Like finishing your sentence for you and see you can enter your reminders faster. I've tried Fantastical and I really liked that feature.

David Averbach: Okay. Because I was about to say, one of the things I love about reminders is how simplistic it is. And I've actually steered clear of some of the other reminders apps because they're too complicated.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know what you mean.

David Averbach: So I'm a little nervous about this update. He went so fast, I had a hard time telling and until you start trying it, it's hard to know, did they do it right. But the whole Apple when I'm texting someone will tell me that I have an appointment with them later. That sort of thing can... Apple hasn't always gotten right and so I'm nervous about it.

Sarah Kingsbury: That serious suggestions are so bizarre to me.

David Averbach: Exactly.

Sarah Kingsbury: It never makes sense.

David Averbach: So we'll see. But that I'm nervous about. Maps was another one that they did a good job updating it, but I'm a bit jaded with it. So it sounded like what they did is basically they added Google Street View, except for, of course they're not Google. So now it's their own proprietary version of street view. Which is great because Google Street view is great. When Google came out with it in 2000, we're all super impressed. But it's so far down the road for Apple to be adding this and it's hard to applaud them too much.

Donna Cleveland: I know.

David Averbach: You know what I mean?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Averbach: They did not add feature-

Donna Cleveland: Also featuring Google maps that I never use.

David Averbach: Yeah, it's true. I'll use it sometimes because if I'm trying to find say house. It's nice to go on the street view and see what that looks like instead of just the address. The other thing they did, they'd added favorites, which I thought was cool because oftentimes you end up using maps to navigate to the same five places 90% of the time. I like the favorites. What they didn't add, which we were all asking for was multi-stop. Which seems like such a no brainer important feature for them to add.

Donna Cleveland: So the favorites was that sort of you can create lists of locations for instance. Google maps lets you create what's the favorite location. So for instance, I was just in Portland and a friend of mine had a Google Maps list of all the coolest spots in Portland. You could really easily do that in Google Maps but not in Apple Maps. So I'm wondering if you use this new feature would let you do that.

David Averbach: I think so. Yes.

Donna Cleveland: That would be nice.

David Averbach: Yeah, that'd be cool.

Donna Cleveland: All right, cool. Should we move on to iPadOS?

Sarah Kingsbury: I think we need to talk about Siri first.

Donna Cleveland: Okay.

Sarah Kingsbury: So there's a number of Siri updates across different things. So for the AirPods, Siri can now announce and read your incoming messages. Then you can then just reply and send it without stopping what you're doing. You can share audio kind of AirPlay. You guys can be listening to the audio of one of your devices if you want to watch a movie together or a video or something, which is nice. Because remember we were talking about the iPhone speakers and how you have to use them sometimes when you're sharing a video with friends.

David Averbach: No. I thought that was really... I mean it's a very defined use case, but if you're traveling in two people are trying to watch a movie together, there's no easy way to do it. You have to get a splitter and have wired headphones. And so now it'd be cool, but I was a little unclear. Do you have to have AirPods for that to work?

Sarah Kingsbury: I believe so.

David Averbach: So you'd have to have everybody having AirPods. Which is everybody should have AirPods. They're great, but they're also pretty expensive.

Donna Cleveland: Yes.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yep. So, and then HomePod there's handoff, which is actually like it's a thing that annoys me. I'll be listening to a podcast on my phone and then I'll walk into my bedroom and I'd rather just continue listening to it on my HomePod, but I haven't been able to, so I'm excited for that. But even more exciting is Siri will be able to recognize different voices. On the HomePod and personalize the response. So if you wanna play music, it'll recognize your voice and play music from your Apple music. Or if you want to send a message, it'll be your messages account. So I'm excited about that.

Donna Cleveland: That's a feature you guys have been wanting for a while.

David Averbach: I have been asking for it for awhile and I'm really excited that they did it. Handoffs sounds cool too. And how it works is you basically just hold your phone near the HomePod and it'll just, I guess it'll automatically switch it over.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, that was cool.

David Averbach: I don't know that I find AirPlay to be that big of a hassle though. So I don't know. It was cool, but it was AirPlay is not that hard.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right. The Shortcuts app which I like it, but I think complaining a lot because it's so difficult I think to really figure out how to set up a good shortcut. And I guess Apple noticed that because now Siri will notice your habits and suggest automation. Give you a template for setting up shortcuts for certain things that you do frequently. And there's a gallery redesign which looks nice and useful. That's very cool. Also Siri sounds different.

Donna Cleveland: You heard Siri had better intonation or whatever.

David Averbach: Yeah. I mean it's hard to tell, but it sounded impressive from the demo.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yep. So that's all I have to say about iOS 13 I guess.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, cool. Let's move on to iPadOS. So Apple has decided that the iPad needs... has enough of its own unique features that it should have its own operating system. Now they're coming out with iPadOS. The big things that I really noticed that were different about it was that they had more multiscreen features. It was still called split view and slide over. Which are features we've had on the iPad for a while. But you could just do more with them. You could even within Microsoft Word for example, you could split that into two screens and have a two word documents side by side. Which is something you couldn't do before. Or now the widgets you can just swipe over and the widgets come on to your display. That was kind of cool.

David Averbach: That was cool.

Donna Cleveland: I was like I in general, my iPhone get annoyed that you have to go to this special today view to see or widgets. I wish you could get them on your phone screen.

David Averbach: Yeah. Totally.

Donna Cleveland: So that was kind of nice. Safari, they've made more of a desktop class version of Safari that has a download manager, which is cool. And also a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that you can use with Safari. There were other things about it too that made it more desktop.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. You're going to get the desktop version of the websites instead of the iPhone version.

Donna Cleveland: I thought that was already the case.

David Averbach: It depends on the website.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, okay.

David Averbach: I guess it's just optimized to better display desktop and be more likely to display the desktop now.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right.

David Averbach: I think the big thing was what you talked about the multitasking, but Donna and I both were sitting there. We both have pretty new iPads and we're following along. And we had a hard time parsing through what was new and what wasn't new.

Donna Cleveland: I know. Except some of this stuff and dragging things across from different apps and that looks like similar stuff you could do before.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think the difference is that you've never been able to say have two notes windows open and drag things from one note to another. Then move over and then open up another notes window and drag something into a different app. I think you've been able to do that. Then also with the slide over, you can have multiple slide over windows open and you'll just see one. But then you can kind of like on the apps which are on an iPhone 10 or later, you swipe up from the bottom and all of a sudden you've got all your open little slider windows. And you can switch through and switch back and forth between them.

Donna Cleveland: Cool. Yeah. I guess a lot of it just is some of it's very unintuitive to you. Now they added more gestures to iPad. You can do a special copy paste in undue gesture that was a three finger pinch and spread and then three finger swipe. Some of it is I think it is making the iPad a lot more useful but there's more of a learning curve. You're going to have to invest more time if you really want to use your iPad as a productivity device. More like a computer. I still don't think it really makes it like a computer. And so, I don't know, I guess just my experience on the iPad is that I don't use a lot of those things already. I don't use a lot of the split screen stuff or picture in picture as much as I probably could just because it's not obvious.

Sarah Kingsbury: I used to forget they're there but I couldn't actually really use them.

David Averbach: That's what I was getting ready to ask because I'm the same way. Every time I see these announce in operating system and WWDC, I think, "Wow, that is useful. I should use it more." And then I don't, and I have a feeling that's going to be the same here where it's like there's something a little bit unintuitive and clunky about the way Apple handles multitasking for iPad. That just makes me not use it.

Donna Cleveland: It reminds me of 3D touch.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think I will use multitasking more now that I can have multiple windows open from the same app. Because that's my thing with like I use Google docs a lot on my iPad and I can't... if I have to just go back to my main menu and open the other one. And then because it's touching between apps you can just swipe along the bottom of your screen and switching between apps. So it's not really hard. I am pretty excited at the way the files are going to be organized. There's going to be more of a view you'd get on your Mac.

Donna Cleveland: More like the Finder and the Mac it has that same left hand menu.

Sarah Kingsbury: Left view. And file preview and quick actions. That'll be cool.

David Averbach: I like that, but we were talking about this the other day. I think it was Donna and I were talking about the classes. I never used the files app. Do you guys use the files app very often?

Donna Cleveland: I use it some, but I was saying I haven't mastered it or really organized it. Sometimes I'll just throw stuff in there. I can put stuff on my desktop on my Mac and it'll just show up in there. Sometimes I'll use that for file transfer but not for a while.

Sarah Kingsbury: I save things there that I want to be able to say see on other devices or that I want to only save on that device. But I mean I really feel like there's potential there that I'm not using because I'm kind of already in the Google ecosystem.

Donna Cleveland: I know. I use Google Docs and my drive-

David Averbach: I think my big picture take away for the iPad is... I like that Apple separated out into its own operating systems. It feels like it's been trending that way for a while and it'll give it probably more freedom to develop these features. All the features announced today seem like they'd be helpful for productivity, but nonetheless, it's the same point that I'm making for a while. And I feel like I'm a little bit cynical or something. But it hasn't reached the critical mass of ease of use to make me put the time and effort into all of these features. In other words, it's not easy enough to be productive on it to let me not use my computer and use my iPad instead. And so then I don't bother with all these power use features of the side by side screen of the same apps. I do that on my computer because it's easier.

Donna Cleveland: Crazy swiping [crosstalk 00:44:57].

Sarah Kingsbury: Actually because I've been doing a lot of basically word processing on my iPad, I'm pretty excited to be able to more easily select and copy and paste things. Although the cutting and pasting, I just use my keyboard. I have a little foldable keyboard that I can stick in my purse. But being able to just drag the cursor to where I want it. Since I can't have a mouse that's really great.

Donna Cleveland: That did seem cool.

David Averbach: Yeah, that is nice.

Donna Cleveland: Some of it will be like once we get hands on with it, it'll be interesting to see how well these things work. If it's really precise and easy, the new copy paste stuff like that might be really awesome.

Sarah Kingsbury: And the three fingers left swiped to undo. I can see myself doing that by accident. But I can just do command V on my keyboard. So I don't know why I would do that.

David Averbach: If you're using a keyboard.

Sarah Kingsbury: I always use a keyboard with my iPad unless I'm doing procreate.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, iPadOS also has thumb drive support. That was something that was new.

David Averbach: Yeah. And I know a lot of third parties have had kind of clunky work arounds to be able to do that. It's nice that Apples can natively support that on the iPad.

Sarah Kingsbury: And you can import things directly into apps.

David Averbach: Cool.

Donna Cleveland: That's cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yep.

Donna Cleveland: So that's iPadOS. We have CarPlay and watchOS and tvOS still to go over. CarPlay, I wanted to ask David your opinion on CarPlay because this was the first time we got a significant update to CarPlay in years. And I know you've been wanting that. Did it satisfy your desires?

David Averbach: I think so. I love CarPlay. I think it's one of Apple's most underrated. I don't know what to call it because it's not a product. It's a software that other companies use but-

Donna Cleveland: Platform.

David Averbach: ... platform, thanks. Operating systems. I love it. I think it's really intuitive. It's easy to use. It works really well and I think the updates I have to get hands on with them but I think the updates will be cool. Because it's a pretty simplistic operating system right now. And so having kind of what I liked was instead of just having the main screen just to be a table with all of the different apps you can access, now you can have kind of... it has multiview at the same time. You can have maps open and had some apps. They went really fast again so I didn't quite get all of the like exactly what will show up and what won't.

David Averbach: But having a little bit more of a sophisticated view where you could have your map open with your turn by turn and also be able to access other things I thought was nice. Being able to use Siri but not having Siri cover up your whole screen. I thought it was great. Right now when you use Siri it takes up your whole screen. If you're trying to text somebody while navigating anyone with your map open, you kind of have to have one or the other but not both. And same thing with a lot of the features were having. Being able to have your maps open while utilizing a different feature seem nice. So I liked that.

David Averbach: My biggest complaint for CarPlay is reliability. It just sometimes doesn't quite work that well and some of this I think might be related to third party apps. But if I'm trying to open up a podcast, I often find I end up reaching for my phone instead because it just can't quite navigate it or-

Donna Cleveland: That's annoying.

David Averbach: ... Spotify won't open and play the playlist that I want sometimes. And so hopefully they made it more reliable if they put the attention on it. But that's something that you kind of have to start using it to really find out. But in general it seemed like good feature, good updates.

Donna Cleveland: With CarPlay you have to have an iPhone connected, right?

David Averbach: The newer models you don't. And that's something my model you have to, and it's a pretty annoying to have to dock it every time. And sometimes that dock doesn't quite work. You'll dock it and it won't load. You have to undock and redock and again. That becomes a pretty big deal when you're trying to just go some place quickly and you end up not using it as much as you should. So the newer models actually function via Bluetooth. Don't have to actually plug it in. And those are a lot nicer in my opinion.

Donna Cleveland: But they do require an iPhone?

David Averbach: Yes.

Donna Cleveland: It's not there standalone feature?

David Averbach: No you need to have an iPhone in the car because a lot of them is using data from your phone. It's using Siri from your phone. You want to be able send a text message, things like that.

Donna Cleveland: Right. Yeah. I guess I can't think of anything that wouldn't require any of those things.

David Averbach: Unless you had it kind of an iPad which had its own data. You could use LTE with it and stuff. But that's a whole other-

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Okay, cool. watchOS 6 had some interesting updates. Nothing too groundbreaking. The thing I was the most excited about was activity trends. So the Activity app on your Apple Watch, it's like my big complaint with it is it doesn't give you any context as it is now. It'll tell you how you're doing for the day, but you really have to go into the activity app on your iPhone to see how that stacks up to previous days. Even then you can see calendar view and how many times you've hit your move goals, but it's not really broken down into data that's really easy to assimilate. At least in my opinion.

Sarah Kingsbury: You know last night actually I was like, "When is the last time." Because I haven't been exercising as regularly lately. And I was like, when is the last time I was really on a regular exercise schedule. I was scrolling through and you can scroll through your workouts and see, but you have to tap on each month to see the workouts. Or you can scroll through an entire month and see the little green dots. But trying to figure out what exercises I did and how hard I worked out. That required so much work. If I could just see that in a quick crafted [crosstalk 00:50:29].

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Somebody is feeling like my Apple Watch has been collecting all this data on me now for years, but I don't really have any way to see it. So now-

Sarah Kingsbury: I completed my thousand smooth goal, just last week.

David Averbach: Wow. Congratulations.

Donna Cleveland: Amazing.

David Averbach: We should throw you a party.

Donna Cleveland: So with activity trends, it'll show you your overall activity for the past 90 days. I think there is also a 60 day view or something like that. I don't know exactly what data it would give you but enough so that you could see how your current activity in the last day or week it stacks up against the past 90 days. And it would give you reminders based on that or suggestions of ways that you could either... If you are on a downward trend that you could turn that around or to know like, "Oh, I'm doing awesome this week compared to my average." So I thought that seems that would be really nice.

David Averbach: Yeah. Just to echo what you guys are saying, I try to be super diligent about logging on my workouts and lately I've been having that same thought. I'm like why? I never go in and look and there's no easy way to see any trends. So that was, I thought a really nice improvement. The other thing that I think should be a big deal, but I'm finding I'm having a hard time carrying is having Apple have your Apple Watch of standalone apps. So you don't have to have a companion iPhone app and then you have an app store on your Apple Watch so you can download them directly. That's a pretty big change. But I don't use a lot of third party apps and I don't think I'm going to browse in the apps store on an Apple Watch. It feels too small. What do you guys think?

Sarah Kingsbury: I think the audio books is a big deal.

David Averbach: Yeah, that was nice. But that was one... I mean you made this comment for the podcast is when they announced it, it kind of made me annoyed. I'm like, "Why did they not already have audio books?"

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: I think to me it was a nice distinction. It makes it a little less confusing because I've found it to be odd that basically it feels like every Apple Watch app is just some weird extension of an iPhone app. That doesn't do that much. And so I guess the fact that they're now being like treated separately or at least can be separate. Hopefully it'll just make it more obvious what the Apple Watch app does and I don't know. I feel it was just maybe mentally just being... looking through the app store on my Apple Watch and seeing what it would do would make me more enticed to try a third party app. Because as it is, it's usually feels like some extra with the regular app that's not worth even trying.

Donna Cleveland: And some of that is that a lot of the Apple Watch apps aren't that compelling. The Apple built in ones I found to be the best.

Sarah Kingsbury: What I use my watch for the most besides checking the weather and tracking my activity is maybe audio things. The fact that they have their new audio API for streaming audio.

Donna Cleveland: [crosstalk 00:53:21].

Sarah Kingsbury: That means third party apps can create streaming audio apps for your Apple Watch.

David Averbach: Oh, is that what it is?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

David Averbach: Okay. Because Donna, I have good and bad news for you. They have a Spotify app.

Donna Cleveland: What?

David Averbach: Yeah. It came out like six months ago. That's the good news. The bad news is, it's terrible.

Donna Cleveland: Oh my god.

David Averbach: Yeah. You can't download any playlists. Which is the most important feature because that's the whole thing that you want with the audio app on your Apple Watch is to be able to download a playlist. So that you don't have to bring your phone with you when you go to exercise. And it doesn't let you do it. It basically looks and feels almost like the now playing app, you know?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. That's funny.

David Averbach: You can switch songs and you can-

Donna Cleveland: I thought it was the now playing app. I'd be-

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: It's like a remote for your Spotify app on your iPhone.

David Averbach: Yeah. And it does have playlists, but you have to have your iPhone with you.

Donna Cleveland: So going on a run it's not a solution.

David Averbach: No, it's not at all. It's terrible. It's not very good UI either.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Although it sounds like it says streaming audio. But maybe it will be streaming independent of your iPhone.

David Averbach: I think it's Spotify is fault, not Apples, but who knows.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Cycle Tracking.

Donna Cleveland: There's a new Apple Watch app.

Sarah Kingsbury: Which I mean yeah, welcome very late to the party.

David Averbach: Welcome to 2012.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know.

Sarah Kingsbury: I just really doubt that this is going to have any features that make it special.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I already have a fertility tracker app that I'm pretty happy with. And I know a bunch of my friends have... there are a handful of really good ones out there already. But I mean I think it's something Apple should offer. I don't know why they didn't offer it in the health app from the beginning.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:55:02] I think I read an article about that when it first came out. I was like, "What the hell?"

Donna Cleveland: You can track the most random metrics on the health app, but you can't track your cycle.

Sarah Kingsbury: I don't know. I think it's maybe changing because the Apple Watch is so popular. The majority of fitness tracker users are women. So why would you make a product that the majority of the people who might be interested in it are going to need this feature and you don't include it.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know.

Sarah Kingsbury: So should we wrap up by talking about tvOS 13.

Donna Cleveland: Yes.

David Averbach: Lets do it.

Sarah Kingsbury: So one big new feature is they've redesigned the home screen of the Apple TV to include my least favorite features of Netflix. Which is you know how you open Netflix and you're immediately assaulted by the trailer for whatever.

David Averbach: And you haven't had time to adjust the volume yet. So it's coming at you really loud.

Sarah Kingsbury: You might have kids sitting with you and they're like, "Here is this very sexy bought us ripping violent show." We're going to show you a trailer for it while you're six year old sits next to you.

David Averbach: Well and I feel like what made it particularly bad is at least with Netflix, it's all inclusive subscription. So anything that shows you a preview, you can watch it at least. Here it's literally we will bombard with advertisements for things we want you to buy. Such as movies and TV shows.

Donna Cleveland: Cool feature.

David Averbach: Yes.

Sarah Kingsbury: Plus I've basically stopped using the news app because half the content is like you can't read this. And it's annoying.

David Averbach: Really? So annoying.

Sarah Kingsbury: One thing I am very happy about multi-user support.

David Averbach: Yes.

Sarah Kingsbury: We didn't get it for the iPad.

David Averbach: No. We got for HomePod and we got it for Apple TV. So baby steps here people.

Donna Cleveland: We need to do a future episode app on Apple News+ or talk about that in hear with listeners have to say about it.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. That's really exciting. And then of course the Apple Arcade is coming for Apple TVs that have 4K. I think a lot of people who care about gaming are going to be excited to know that there will now be an Xbox controller and a PlayStation DS4 controllers.

Donna Cleveland: You seemed excited about that.

David Averbach: You know I was, but I think that was a similar maybe I just had too much caffeine.

Donna Cleveland: And now you're like, "Who cares?"

David Averbach: I'm like, "I have an Xbox." Clearly because I have an Xbox controller and Xbox is going to have a way better games than Apple TV. So that's one of those things where I'm sure there'll be select group of people who really love it, but for the most part if you have an Xbox, you're probably going to be gaming on your Xbox.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. But then there's me who's really a cruel parent and I don't care about my teenagers gaming preferences and so-

David Averbach: But are you going to buy them an Xbox controller for $50 to use with your Apple TV?

Sarah Kingsbury: That's cheaper than an Xbox.

David Averbach: Yeah. But for bad games.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's what I said. I'm a cruel mother who doesn't care about... Let her child on.

David Averbach: So you're excited about that feature then?

Sarah Kingsbury: I can see myself using it.

David Averbach: Okay. Yeah. The main thing was the multi-user. Which just to kind of clarify, allows you to switch accounts really quickly and easily. So that's really nice. In particular because it's like if you go to rent a movie right now on my Apple TV, you need to know my iTunes password. Which is my or my Apple ID password, which is my Apple ID password for everything. If you open up my photos app on the computer, on the Apple TV and now I have that turned off. But if I didn't, you would access all of my photos and everything's geared to me and instead of having each member of the family have their own.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. I've had to turn off the password for renting movies because I didn't want my daughter to know my password. I have to be really careful about any photos I don't want her to see. I mean she doesn't go through the photos app as far as I know, but I don't want them on any platform that other people can see unless they're the most benign photos.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. The multi-user you actually can currently switch accounts on your Apple TV, but it's just not very easy.

David Averbach: Yeah. I was confused by that too because I thought you could already do that.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. You can, but it must be better. And right now it sucks.

David Averbach: Yeah, it is bad now so it wouldn't be surprising for it to be better.

Donna Cleveland: It's cool. All right, so our question of the week is, what are you most excited about or what did you think of WWDC? Email us at podcast@iphonelife.com to let us know what you have to say or looking forward to hearing from you. And this wraps up episode 112 of the iPhone Life podcast. I'm Donna Cleveland, editor and chief at iPhone Life.

David Averbach: I'm David Averbach.

Sarah Kingsbury: And I'm Sarah Kingsbury.

David Averbach: And if you're an Insider stick around, we're going to talk about Mack and we're going to talk about the death of iTunes. Which has been very controversial in our Facebook group.

Donna Cleveland: I'll see you next time. Thanks everyone.

David Averbach: Thanks everyone.

Sarah Kingsbury: Thanks everyone.

Master your iPhone in one minute a day: Sign up here to get our FREE Tip of the Day delivered right to your inbox.