iOS 17, coming soon to an iPhone near you

When Apple is a shark: https://youtu.be/qNAo0UdYF6g

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0:00 There's a theme here
1:18 NameDrop
3:42 Personal Voice
6:00 The Little Things
7:38 Standby Mode
9:48 The Phone

Alright, another year, another version of iOS coming

It seems like usually these updates get smaller and smaller and less and less crazy, but it feels like this year, for whatever reason, Apple has packed a ton of stuff into iOS 17.

This is gonna be launching in September when the new iPhone comes out on everybody's iPhone, but it's in beta now and I've been using it.

I'm gonna try to pack it into a top 5, but it was kind of hard.

I've been using this iOS 17 beta for a few weeks now.

So if you wanna try it before the new iPhone even comes out, you can do that.

But let's take a look at the 5 most impressive new things that

But as we go through this, I do want you to keep something in the back of your head.

A lot of times in the past, those features that we'd get were really, really big because there were new capabilities.

Most, if not all of these features, depend on having another iPhone in the mix whether your friend has an iPhone or your family has an iPhone you need 2 iPhones for a lot of this stuff to work just something to keep in the back of your head.

AirDrop is 1 of those things, it's 1 of those features that when it works, it feels like it's 1 of the best things ever, but sometimes it's glitchy and it doesn't work and it seems terrible.

So I hope some Stability improvements are also in the works here But basically Apple is expanding airdrop to be more capable and easier to use the big 1 is that if you meet another person?

You can walk up to them and Bump your phones together You literally hold your phones up next to each other at an inch or 2 apart, and it'll play this sweet animation as the phones talk to each other and transfer a contact poster with your name and contact info to that other person in a single touch.

1 is it lets you actually choose which info you want to share.

Do you want to share your email address and not your phone number?

This will all come from the My Card at the top of contact settings that you can customize with whatever photo you want, whatever fonts you want, et cetera.

And everything you change will show up to people that have you in their contacts.

What's cooler though is you can actually now bump to share photos or videos or content links or even start a share play session.

Basically it's making it easier to find a certain iPhone on AirPlay by getting it roughly within NFC distance of another iPhone, and then you can share stuff.

And then another cool thing, typically AirDrop is a wifi direct connection between 2 iPhones.

But if you leave each other, if you walk away down the street and you wanna continue this file transfer that hasn't finished yet, it will resume over cellular.

So it'll start uploading to cellular and their phone will download and you can just walk away and the AirDrop should finish.

you remember an app from a while back called Bump.

It was literally just an app to bump phones together to share contact information.

Google ended up buying them, but I do have a feeling that if they still existed now, this would be a sort of a Sherlock situation.

Just another example of the remora fish to Apple's shark.

If that reference doesn't make any sense, I'll leave a video link below to the video that I did comparing Apple to sharks.

So anyway, number 4 is a feature called Personal voice.

It's not even something that they talked about on stage.

This is something that is not meant for most people to use, but it's pretty cool anyway.

So in settings, then accessibility, you scroll down to the speech section that's new here, and there's something called personal voice.

And you'll see a button that says create a personal voice.

your phone's going to ask you to take it to a quiet place and then it's going to display a number of phrases on the screen and it'll ask you to say those phrases into the microphone.

It'll be like Sally sold seashells in 1979 and the president of Morocco is very tall It's and you just go through the list and you say a bunch of these phrases and when it's done It compiles all of your voice and will stitch together a new synthesized voice that can say whatever you want to make it say.

It does all of this locally on device so it has no servers involved, it doesn't send your voice recordings everywhere, it does all of the compilation overnight, and at the end of this you basically get a new voice on your phone.

You can go to accessibility settings and then enable live speech so that on the triple tap of a power button it brings up a text block and you can type whatever you want to make the voice say.

A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

frames per second is the correct frame rate and anyone who says otherwise is probably lying to you

It kind of sounds like me it's decently good I wouldn't I wouldn't pass it off as human if I like played this recording to you You wouldn't think it's a

person but it kind of sounds like I'm talking on the phone to someone and

it kind of has a poor connection, you know?

Like I said, it's an accessibility setting.

So a reason this is designed for people who may know that they are at risk of losing their voice at some point, or maybe their vocal cords fatigue after a long time.

And so they can sort of go through this process and create a voice on their phone so that they can continue to interact with the world without using some generic Siri voice.

And it actually kind of still sounds like them.

All right, let's move on to the next bullet point, number 3, the little things.

Apple is always tweaking and adding little features here and there to their stock apps, especially.

There's a bunch of those this time around.

And in total, you could say they add up to a welcome refinement.

You probably heard about the new keyboard, which looks the same, but should be way smarter with transformer-based autocorrect and improved dictation.

Oh, and also that thing where you're typing a word and then you spell it a little bit different and then you hit space and it corrects you, and then you hit backspace and type it the way you want again and hit space and it corrects you again and it doesn't seem to learn, they fixed that.

Also widgets are thankfully interactive now.

The whole point of a widget I always thought was to be able to view and interact with information without jumping into the app, which is trying to suck you in.

I'm surprised it took this long, but I am happy to finally see that here.

of new messages features, including 1 called check-in.

This is good for, I think either kids or maybe significant others or friends.

You know, the dance you do where someone's gone somewhere and you're like, all right, text me when you get there.

And then you wait for them to text you back or you can share location or you just have them text you when they arrive.

You just hit the plus button, you go to check in.

Whoever is going to be checked in on can decide who to share their location with, how much data they wanna share.

And then there's this nice little tracker that updates you and lets them know when they've arrived where they're supposed to.

And there's a bunch of other little stuff like that sort

No doubt you've noticed still a lot of these depend on also having a friend with an iPhone.

But, you know, if you do have that ecosystem in your life, then yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff that adds up to a good welcome improvement.

So, all right, number 2 is called standby mode.

So, when I first saw this feature, I thought it was really interesting, but now I've thought about this a lot.

The more I think about it, I have this so high on the list because I think genuinely this is better than a HomePod for most people who already have an iPhone.

So Anytime your iPhone is both charging and horizontal, it triggers the standby mode, which is basically a clock and then whatever useful widgets or photos you want to have in the background.

It kind of has a bunch of these preset layouts and then you can literally swipe between These 3 faces to find the 1 you like and then swipe vertically to go through the different styles So a lot of these yeah will look just like an Apple watch face, but yeah to be honest very useful So that's already pretty convenient You can kind of just have it display information ambiently to you, whether it's on a nightstand or in your kitchen, whatever.

But then on top of that, what makes it much more HomePod like is the fact that Siri is better in 2 ways.

So you don't have to keep hitting the button over and over again to keep asking questions or follow-ups.

You can just keep talking and it keeps listening, which is great.

And then the other is you don't have to say, Hey, her name, You can just say, Siri, what's the weather in Manchester on Saturday?

But the idea is it's just gonna keep listening and talking

Also that weather is not great for golf, but I don't know, we'll make it work.

Either way, big improvements to Siri there.

That's what makes it feel kind of like a, you know, a smart home display.

Now, if only they could make Siri actually good at other things.

So then, number 1, the top new feature in iOS 17, I think we forget our phones are still phones sometimes, but it's the phone app.

Actually, I'm combining the phone app and FaceTime, but generally there's a lot of nice features that sort of just make it easy to clean up and have a better phone experience.

First of all are the contact posters like I mentioned earlier.

You set up your own contact poster and then everyone else who has you in their contacts gets that updated in their phone, at least if they have an iPhone.

But then yeah, whenever you call someone, that's what they see.

And this sort of automatically cleans up everyone's contacts with a nice photo.

I know for 1, I basically have no photos for anyone in my contacts list outside of my family.

So this is a nice effortless improvement for that.

And then another fun piece is if someone calls you and you don't pick up and it starts going to voicemail, you will actually get a live transcription of the voicemail as they're leaving it.

And if you wanna interrupt and pick it up at any time, you still can.

Some of you are too young to know that that's actually a throwback to physical answering machines that were in people's houses, where you could actually hear someone leaving you a voicemail and then pick up the phone and interrupt it and actually talk to them.

old now, so I get to say stuff like that.

But also, FaceTime gets voicemail too, which you might be thinking, wait, it's FaceTime, it's a video, so what is a FaceTime voicemail?

So like, if you're about to FaceTime someone and show them something, but then they don't pick up You'll just you know record your video and then send them the voicemail and then it shows up inside the FaceTime Inbox, which is cool, but there you go that is it that's that is the iOS 17 biggest stuff Honestly, I think this is 1 of the biggest, best updates to iOS in a long time.

And somehow there's still a bunch of little stuff I didn't even mention from camera effects to stickers all over iMessage and stuff to Safari getting profiles now.

But again, now that we've gone through all of it, don't forget about how many of these things are intentionally just for people with another iPhone in their life.

Whether it's a friend with an iPhone or a family member with an iPhone, or you just met someone with an iPhone.

From NameDrop to SharePlay to all the iMessage features, the contact cards, the FaceTime features, that's the ecosystem at work.

That's them going, hey, this is a cool new feature, but it'll only work if your friend also has an iPhone.

So maybe you pressure them into getting an iPhone too.

Feel free to share this video with others who will probably have this software update on their phone sometime soon


Speaker 0: Alright, another year, another version of iOS coming

Speaker 1: to an iPhone near you. It seems like usually these updates get smaller and smaller and less and less crazy, but it feels like this year, for whatever reason, Apple has packed a ton of stuff into iOS 17. This is gonna be launching in September when the new iPhone comes out on everybody's iPhone, but it's in beta now and I've been using it. And there's a lot of stuff here. I'm gonna try to pack it into a top 5, but it was kind of hard.

I've been using this iOS 17 beta for a few weeks now. The public beta is out. So if you wanna try it before the new iPhone even comes out, you can do that. But let's take a look at the 5 most impressive new things that

Speaker 0: are coming to the iPhone.

Speaker 1: But as we go through this, I do want you to keep something in the back of your head. Just keep this in mind. A lot of times in the past, those features that we'd get were really, really big because there were new capabilities. Most, if not all of these features, depend on having another iPhone in the mix whether your friend has an iPhone or your family has an iPhone you need 2 iPhones for a lot of this stuff to work just something to keep in the back of your head. All right, so number 5, AirDrop.

AirDrop is 1 of those things, it's 1 of those features that when it works, it feels like it's 1 of the best things ever, but sometimes it's glitchy and it doesn't work and it seems terrible. So I hope some Stability improvements are also in the works here But basically Apple is expanding airdrop to be more capable and easier to use the big 1 is that if you meet another person? Who also has an iPhone? You can walk up to them and Bump your phones together You literally hold your phones up next to each other at an inch or 2 apart, and it'll play this sweet animation as the phones talk to each other and transfer a contact poster with your name and contact info to that other person in a single touch. It's called Name Drop.

It's pretty cool. A couple things about this. 1 is it lets you actually choose which info you want to share. So you you do that phone bump thing and

Speaker 0: it goes, oh you want to share something? Do you want

Speaker 1: to share just your phone number? Okay cool. Do you want to share your email address and not your phone number? You can switch it over to that. Want to share a fake number?

Sure. Program that in too. This will all come from the My Card at the top of contact settings that you can customize with whatever photo you want, whatever fonts you want, et cetera. And everything you change will show up to people that have you in their contacts. What's cooler though is you can actually now bump to share photos or videos or content links or even start a share play session.

Basically it's making it easier to find a certain iPhone on AirPlay by getting it roughly within NFC distance of another iPhone, and then you can share stuff. And then another cool thing, typically AirDrop is a wifi direct connection between 2 iPhones. But if you leave each other, if you walk away down the street and you wanna continue this file transfer that hasn't finished yet, it will resume over cellular. So it'll start uploading to cellular and their phone will download and you can just walk away and the AirDrop should finish.

Speaker 0: I don't know if

Speaker 1: you remember an app from a while back called Bump. This was in like

Speaker 0: 2009.

Speaker 1: It was literally just an app to bump phones together to share contact information. Google ended up buying them, but I do have a feeling that if they still existed now, this would be a sort of a Sherlock situation. Just another example of the remora fish to Apple's shark. If that reference doesn't make any sense, I'll leave a video link below to the video that I did comparing Apple to sharks. It makes sense when

Speaker 0: you watch the video, I promise.

Speaker 1: So anyway, number 4 is a feature called Personal voice. So this one's an accessibility setting. It's not even something that they talked about on stage. This is something that is not meant for most people to use, but it's pretty cool anyway. So in settings, then accessibility, you scroll down to the speech section that's new here, and there's something called personal voice.

And you'll see a button that says create a personal voice.

Speaker 0: Basically what's going to happen is

Speaker 1: your phone's going to ask you to take it to a quiet place and then it's going to display a number of phrases on the screen and it'll ask you to say those phrases into the microphone. It's 150 phrases. They're pretty random. It'll be like Sally sold seashells in 1979 and the president of Morocco is very tall It's and you just go through the list and you say a bunch of these phrases and when it's done It compiles all of your voice and will stitch together a new synthesized voice that can say whatever you want to make it say. It does all of this locally on device so it has no servers involved, it doesn't send your voice recordings everywhere, it does all of the compilation overnight, and at the end of this you basically get a new voice on your phone.

You can go to accessibility settings and then enable live speech so that on the triple tap of a power button it brings up a text block and you can type whatever you want to make the voice say. And then just hit send.

Speaker 2: A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Speaker 0: All right, let's try another 1 here. A little more substance. 30

Speaker 2: frames per second is the correct frame rate and anyone who says otherwise is probably lying to you

Speaker 1: It kind of sounds like me it's decently good I wouldn't I wouldn't pass it off as human if I like played this recording to you You wouldn't think it's a

Speaker 0: person but it kind of sounds like I'm talking on the phone to someone and

Speaker 1: it kind of has a poor connection, you know? But this isn't some mainstream feature. Like I said, it's an accessibility setting. So a reason this is designed for people who may know that they are at risk of losing their voice at some point, or maybe their vocal cords fatigue after a long time. There are conditions like that.

MTD is a common 1. And so they can sort of go through this process and create a voice on their phone so that they can continue to interact with the world without using some generic Siri voice. And it actually kind of still sounds like them.

Speaker 2: All right, let's move on to the next bullet point, number 3, the little things.

Speaker 1: The little things. Apple is always tweaking and adding little features here and there to their stock apps, especially. There's a bunch of those this time around. And in total, you could say they add up to a welcome refinement. You probably heard about the new keyboard, which looks the same, but should be way smarter with transformer-based autocorrect and improved dictation.

It's much faster dictation, actually. Oh, and also that thing where you're typing a word and then you spell it a little bit different and then you hit space and it corrects you, and then you hit backspace and type it the way you want again and hit space and it corrects you again and it doesn't seem to learn, they fixed that. Also widgets are thankfully interactive now. The whole point of a widget I always thought was to be able to view and interact with information without jumping into the app, which is trying to suck you in. I'm surprised it took this long, but I am happy to finally see that here.

Speaker 0: There's also now a bunch

Speaker 1: of new messages features, including 1 called check-in. This is good for, I think either kids or maybe significant others or friends. You know, the dance you do where someone's gone somewhere and you're like, all right, text me when you get there. And then you wait for them to text you back or you can share location or you just have them text you when they arrive. Now there's just a feature built in.

You just hit the plus button, you go to check in. Whoever is going to be checked in on can decide who to share their location with, how much data they wanna share. And then there's this nice little tracker that updates you and lets them know when they've arrived where they're supposed to.

Speaker 0: And there's a bunch of other little stuff like that sort

Speaker 1: of sprinkled around the OS. No doubt you've noticed still a lot of these depend on also having a friend with an iPhone. That's how most of this works. But, you know, if you do have that ecosystem in your life, then yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff that adds up to a good welcome improvement. Good little stuff.

So, all right, number 2 is called standby mode. So, when I first saw this feature, I thought it was really interesting, but now I've thought about this a lot. The more I think about it, I have this so high on the list because I think genuinely this is better than a HomePod for most people who already have an iPhone. Basically it's a smart home display. So Anytime your iPhone is both charging and horizontal, it triggers the standby mode, which is basically a clock and then whatever useful widgets or photos you want to have in the background.

It really reminds me of the Apple Watch. It kind of has a bunch of these preset layouts and then you can literally swipe between These 3 faces to find the 1 you like and then swipe vertically to go through the different styles So a lot of these yeah will look just like an Apple watch face, but yeah to be honest very useful So that's already pretty convenient You can kind of just have it display information ambiently to you, whether it's on a nightstand or in your kitchen, whatever. But then on top of that, what makes it much more HomePod like is the fact that Siri is better in 2 ways. First of all, it's conversational. So you don't have to keep hitting the button over and over again to keep asking questions or follow-ups.

You can just keep talking and it keeps listening, which is great. The other has been doing that forever. And then the other is you don't have to say, Hey, her name, You can just say, Siri, what's the weather in Manchester on Saturday?

Speaker 0: What about Sunday?

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 0: 67

Speaker 2: degrees with overnight lows around 57. What about Sunday? Expect rain in Manchester,

Speaker 0: United Kingdom

Speaker 1: on Sunday. Thank you. You're welcome.

Speaker 0: And then it sort of stops listening. But the idea is it's just gonna keep listening and talking

Speaker 1: to you and that's better than before. Also that weather is not great for golf, but I don't know, we'll make it work. Either way, big improvements to Siri there. That's what makes it feel kind of like a, you know, a smart home display. Now, if only they could make Siri actually good at other things.

So then, number 1, the top new feature in iOS 17, I think we forget our phones are still phones sometimes, but it's the phone app. Actually, I'm combining the phone app and FaceTime, but generally there's a lot of nice features that sort of just make it easy to clean up and have a better phone experience. First of all are the contact posters like I mentioned earlier. You set up your own contact poster and then everyone else who has you in their contacts gets that updated in their phone, at least if they have an iPhone. But then yeah, whenever you call someone, that's what they see.

And this sort of automatically cleans up everyone's contacts with a nice photo. I know for 1, I basically have no photos for anyone in my contacts list outside of my family. So this is a nice effortless improvement for that. And then another fun piece is if someone calls you and you don't pick up and it starts going to voicemail, you will actually get a live transcription of the voicemail as they're leaving it. And if you wanna interrupt and pick it up at any time, you still can.

Some of you are too young to know that that's actually a throwback to physical answering machines that were in people's houses, where you could actually hear someone leaving you a voicemail and then pick up the phone and interrupt it and actually talk to them. Just, I'm

Speaker 0: old now, so I get to say stuff like that.

Speaker 1: But also, FaceTime gets voicemail too, which you might be thinking, wait, it's FaceTime, it's a video, so what is a FaceTime voicemail? And it's literally just a video message. So like, if you're about to FaceTime someone and show them something, but then they don't pick up You'll just you know record your video and then send them the voicemail and then it shows up inside the FaceTime Inbox, which is cool, but there you go that is it that's that is the iOS 17 biggest stuff Honestly, I think this is 1 of the biggest, best updates to iOS in a long time. And somehow there's still a bunch of little stuff I didn't even mention from camera effects to stickers all over iMessage and stuff to Safari getting profiles now. There's a lot of stuff.

But again, now that we've gone through all of it, don't forget about how many of these things are intentionally just for people with another iPhone in their life. Whether it's a friend with an iPhone or a family member with an iPhone, or you just met someone with an iPhone. From NameDrop to SharePlay to all the iMessage features, the contact cards, the FaceTime features, that's the ecosystem at work. That's them going, hey, this is a cool new feature, but it'll only work if your friend also has an iPhone. So maybe you pressure them into getting an iPhone too.

Either way, that's it. Feel free to share this video with others who will probably have this software update on their phone sometime soon

Speaker 0: and until the next 1

Speaker 1: catch you guys later. Peace.

See all Marques Brownlee transcripts on Youtube

iOS 17 Hands-On: Top 5 Features!