Episode 714: iOS 14: A look at 5 major features of the new iPhone operating system
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iOS 14 became available last week. We'll talk about our experiences with five of the major features of the new iPhone operating system. That's in this episode of the Macworld Podcast. Welcome to the Macworld Podcast. I'm Roman Loyola here with Jason Cross. Hello. And Michael Simon. How come I always get second billing, Roman? What's going on? Yeah. Is it alphabetical order? It's alphabetical order.

I'm going to have to change my name to Michael Byman so I can get one week I can get a Valve JV. There are a ton of new features that I'm sure people would like to hear about. We're going to talk about five of them because otherwise the podcast will never end. It was kind of a surprise. They just said like they were having this event to announce new hardware and they're like, oh yeah, iOS comes out tomorrow. And everybody's like, wait, wait, tomorrow?

All the app developers were mad because they were like, wait, we're supposed to submit our apps and stuff, you know. It was a surprise. But if you look at the history of iOS releases over the last, like, I don't know, eight or so, it's been remarkably consistent. It's always in like the mid teens. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think everybody kind of expected it to be delayed the way iPhones and stuff are being delayed this year, kind of. Right, right.

But based on the development and based on the release of the beta, like it's all been kind of on schedule. The beta was late because WWDC was late. Well, yeah, okay, fine. So it was late like three weeks or something. I think it's more a commentary on how secretive Apple is. Yeah, that's a better look at it. Yeah, and developers would like a little bit more...

you know yeah that was the main thing is is i mean consumers don't care because it's just one day you just get up and your phone tells you you know hey give it get the new update but for developers they were like well we we're working on our app we we need to submit it to the store we have one day there didn't seem to be a major issue i i haven't come across any apps that don't work perfectly fine whether they're updated or not

And, you know, so I don't think it was anything that anyone noticed, but it was just more of the same developers just saying, you know, what the hell? Like, we're supposed to be working with you, and it doesn't feel that way. Oh, I had a problem actually with Pokemon Go. Uh-oh. It wouldn't launch, and then I looked in my updates, and there was an update available, so then it worked. That must have been a rough five minutes, right? Imagine all the Pokemon that you couldn't catch.

I nearly had a heart attack. I think that for developers, the biggest deal was not that it wouldn't work, but that they wanted to take it. They wanted to, when people updated their phones, they wanted to have their widgets and stuff like that available. Some of these new features, uh,

already taken advantage of. The most upfront or most obvious change to iOS 14 has to do with the home screen. There are a couple of new features. There's the app library and then there are the widgets. And the home screen. Like it's three kind of separate things that all work together. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you guys think about

the app library and the widgets and, you know, and the home screen in general. The thing for me is that I already kind of organized my apps in a way that the app library works.

My homepage is all my most frequently used apps. Then my second screen are my own libraries that I've made already. Yeah, folders full of apps by category or whatever, right? Yeah, so I made my own categories and stuff. And app library, for me, is kind of redundant in that aspect. Yeah, me too, very much. I love the concept, right? I really love the idea that Apple, like...

When you remove an app from your home screen, it asks you, do you want to remove this from your phone? You want to delete this app or just leave it in the app library? And there's this idea that the app library is everything on your phone and your home screen is just for it's like your Mac desktop or something. Put icons that you use the most. Right. I love that idea. I was already doing that.

So, yeah, it's really redundant to me and I kind of undid all that. But I look at anybody's phone whenever I help my neighbors, their phone, my mom, anybody. Nobody uses folders. Nobody organizes anything. It's they're all in just whatever order they downloaded. They don't move anything around the little bottom.

uh doc has the exact same four apps that is default all the time people don't know they can change those or anything i don't know what the percentage is between like the hardcore people who organize all their apps and everybody else but i think that there's this massive bulk of people who just don't do any organization at all

So having something that kind of does it for you and forces it in this way, I think is probably a good thing for most people. Yeah, I agree. I think you're right about that. And I think a lot of people just have been, they have pages and pages and pages of icons.

most of which they don't really ever get to because they don't need them anymore, but they don't want to delete them or they don't even really know they can delete them or whatever it is. So Apple has made it really easy to hide them. I think it's a real slick implementation of it. It took a couple, 10 generations too long, but it's really nice. I use Android a lot, as you guys know, and compared to that, I mean, it's just a smarter way to do it.

For example, Android, you swipe up from the bottom, you have your app library, and there's a couple different ways depending on your phone. You can do it alphabetically. You can do it custom. But you're still scrolling through a lot of stuff to get to the app that you want to get to most times if it's not on your home screen. Apple's kind of smart folder stuff works remarkably well for apps that I don't use and don't necessarily want front and center all the time. I swipe over to the library, and I'll get to, I don't know,

I don't know, my 1Password app or my Peloton app, something that I use regularly enough where it'll be higher in that pseudo folder hierarchy thing that they've made. And it makes it real easy. And if not, I just swipe down and search real quick, which is also very visible and very obvious. And the whole thing is just, it's very smart. It's very well thought out and calculated. I'm not a huge fan of the...

the actual sort of folders themselves, the way that there's three large icons that work like regular app icons. And then there's a little four square that you tap to like open up and see all the rest. And it's, I don't think it's going to be immediately obvious to everybody that those things work differently.

And that you and they don't show you what else is in that folder very well. If you can see those four little icons, you get those four. But if there's 20 things in that folder, you don't really know what else is in there. You just have to guess, is this the right category? And you can't change the categories. The categories are automatic.

They're mostly good, but there can be a lot of weird overlap between like social and news readers and stuff like that, information and reading category and social stuff. So it can be a little hard to find sometimes. And you could already always ever search just on the home screen, just pull it down and get that spotlight.

and go. So I think there's a little work that needs to be done there. And I think there will be, they'll refine this and retool this over the course of the next couple of generations. What I want is when you hit the search at the top of that app library, you get an alphabetical list of screen wide, one line at a time, icons and stuff. I would love to have the same option I have on the Apple Watch to like press and hold and say, make that my default view and

When I go over to my app library, just give me that alphabetical list all the time. Just a list. Yeah, I can see that happening. And the other thing I think they probably should do in some update down the road as people get used to this is start to suggest you get things off your home screen and into the app library. Like you haven't opened this app in two months.

Maybe you should put it in the app library. Yeah, they could use that machine learning series stuff to do that for sure. Yeah, exactly. They could do all that on device. It would not be difficult. You know, we fully expected this, but Apple has this unique ability to come out with a feature that someone has been doing for, I don't know, 10 years and make it seem like it's this brand new thing that everyone has to try. And all over Twitter is people sharing their home screens and their widgets, and it's just hilarious because, like, hello, Android has had it forever.

But they don't get that type of people getting excited over the home screen at all. Nobody shares their Android home screen ever. I think in part because it's so different. Like every Android device, there are way more Android devices, but it's spread along so many different brands with different UI and different like theming and all that other stuff. And, you know, every widget you download is just its own kind of interface feature.

with fonts. Like if somebody shared an Android home screen, it would be so hard to replicate that or duplicate that. And they wouldn't all match. Like all these widgets wouldn't fit together holistically and stuff. Apple's widgets, I think. They're very nice. Yeah, and I think they've constrained people's sort of like font choices and all this other stuff to make them all kind of look like they belong together. And I think it works. Yeah, they really look like big icons.

with information in them, which is what we've wanted for... I mean, I remember concepts going back to iOS 7 that was pretty much this. It was close. And, you know, we finally have it, and it really makes the iPhone... It brings it into that kind of modern era. Not that it wasn't modern, but it feels like a newer device than it did, you know, two weeks ago. Yeah, and speaking of widgets, I guess that's the...

That's the other big thing. That's the reason you want to get all this stuff off your home screen is to make room for these widgets. You're going to have to update your apps, you know, to get a widget, get widget support, and then launch them. That's something I didn't realize. You download an app and it has, you know, the update has widgets. When you go to add that widget to your home screen, it's not going to show up in the list until you've launched that app at least once. That's a curious thing. Yeah, I mean, I just think the system doesn't,

read the app and and know that it's read the api know that it has widgets and stuff until it's launched once or whatever so yeah launch your app once and then the widgets will be like it has to be triggered or something yeah exactly it has to create an awareness in the os or something um but i like it ios has had widgets in that leftmost screen that spotlight screen and they were different they

They were more interactive, but they couldn't get as much information from apps, and they didn't look the same. They were hidden, kind of. They were hidden. I don't know anyone who goes to that screen with any regularity. Now you can put them out on your home screen. You can put them all over. There's three sizes. They can get a lot more data from apps. They can configure them. You can do things like put multiple of the same widget together.

which can be really useful because you're, you have them set differently. Like, you know, weather for different weather widgets for two different places or different stock widgets to show different stocks and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. There's a lot of,

Yeah, there's all different sizes. Most have different sizes. They really thought about how people will use these things and why they would want to, and there's not as many restrictions as you would think there would be for this type of thing. Apple's really giving you the creativity to make your home screen truly unique. Yeah, there's three sizes. You have a 2x2 square, a 2x4 rectangle, basically the whole width, and two icons high, and then a 4x4. So the one thing that I used to use a lot

on Android that they don't have here is a full width but one icon high. A search bar, weather widgets, stuff like that I used to use that were just one icon high and I could have two or three of them on my screen and not take up too much space. But yeah, generally I like them. I bet they'll add something like that in the future. Maybe, I don't know.

I've thought that they were going to do this stuff for so many years. I haven't added any widgets to my home screen yet, only because I haven't found... Roman, you're not a true American. It's not that... And I use that widget screen all the time. I just haven't found something that I wanted to go, oh, that needs to be on my home screen now. Because it is just simple enough to just swipe to the left or swipe to the right. Yeah.

You swipe right to the left. From the left. Yeah, it's just easy. And then a scroller. But they're cool. I like it. I put my weather one on there out on my home screen. Yeah, weather was the first one I did too because I've always wanted that. And I have a little news block. Do either of you use the smart stack? I tried it once. I didn't love it because I like the widgets to be less interactive. So I like to just kind of glance at them and then move on.

But I can appreciate how, you know, like it's slick. You know, you can cycle through them, get a bunch of different things in one without cluttering up your screen. Yeah, I found that the smart part of the smart stack wasn't smart enough for me. Like the idea is it's supposed to use a bunch of intelligence to say this is the one you want to see right now. You know, it's you always...

check the weather first thing in the morning and then you always check your calendar at the end of that, whatever. And it wasn't like that at all. And I found myself having to swipe to the one I wanted to see. And then why am I even doing this? It's a cool idea and you can make your own. You can drag any same size widget. You can drag on top of each other and make it into a stack.

and turn on the smart feature on it. That's kind of cool, but I don't find it personally useful. So we also have some new features in messages. I know it's a simple feature. This might be my favorite feature is just pinning a thread. It's so simple. Yeah, it's so simple and it's so useful. Like I coach my son's little league team

And on weekends, we have games and parents are constantly asking me questions. And I have to scroll down and just throw it up there for two days while I need it and then get rid of it when I don't. It's so nice. And that doesn't even require iMessage per se. You can pin any thread you have. And certainly, I...

I get a lot of use out of it because I think like a lot of people, I get so many different like two factor authentication codes and stuff like that, that even though these are the messages, message threads and people I go back to all the time, they get bumped down by a bunch of nonsense and delivery confirmations and all this other stuff.

So it gets all that out of the way. Speaking of machine learning for the home screen, I'm on the ad library. I'm waiting for the day when Siri can suggest or just know, I don't want, I use this and now you can just delete it or archive it or whatever you're going to do with it. Those OTPs.

text that clutter. I know I'm not supposed to use that. Some don't offer any other option. Some don't. Well, there is something that might help you. If you go to, if you're in iMessage, up at the top left, you'll see a button that says Filters. And then if you hit left, you'll get an option. You'll see options for All Messages, Known Senders, or Unknown Senders. And it defaults to All Messages, and you can set it to Known Senders.

And it will filter out all these phone numbers from just random delivery confirmations and a lot of the two-factor authentication codes and stuff. If you don't see it, go into settings, messages, and I believe it's in there. And I think there is a message filtering option.

toggle filter and known senders. When I hit known senders, it doesn't get rid of all of those two-factor authentication codes, especially if I've gotten them before, I think. But it gets rid of a lot of that stuff.

Any other messages, things you've noticed about messages? I actually was looking at my messages. I haven't been using a lot of messages recently, so I haven't had a chance to try the new features. Yeah, I tried the inline stuff, and it just doesn't really – I don't love it.

Maybe I'm just using it wrong or something, but it's just as easy just to start my own message if I want to send something outside of the group. Yeah, there's some stuff like that that are just for iMessages that message threads and stuff, which don't work in regular SMS texts. And I don't use messages the way I think 15-year-olds do. They're in all these group texts with eight or more people in them.

having these big conversations. And I think stuff like that might be much more useful for them. And I just don't work that way. I mean, I do have a couple of group threads that are ongoing, but I just, I tried it once and like the person didn't know what I was doing and didn't get it. And I was like, you know what, forget it. It's too high tech, I guess, for lack of a better word. It's just not something that I'm going to be using very often, at least not right now.

You bring up a good point. The way I use messages is more like brief update kind of things. I don't have long conversations like my kids probably do. Yeah, and I also don't make Memojis. Right, there's some new Memoji stuff a little bit, and that's not really... I don't. I have never made one. I tried Animoji once for an article. That was it. This is not something that I do. I don't know if anyone does. I mean, I made mine. It's a good icon.

And then it has the little stickers that are automatically made, the little emoji stickers with your face and stuff. And I'll like use those sometimes, but I don't send the actual video, like have a video chat thing where animates and stuff like that. That's cool, but I don't, yeah, it's not for me.

Kind of a related topic, but not related. So like, is it the Emoji Consortium came out with their new emojis? Unicode. Last week, Unicode? The Unicode, yeah, Consortium. How many of these do we need? Oh, so many more. It's so... Oh, we need all of them, Roman. It's so funny because I feel like, oh, there's so many. And then every time there's a new set...

I'm like, oh, I'll use that all the time. Like there's something in there that I'll use all the time or I'll look for something. I'll be typing, especially in Slack or something. For sure. Look for one. And I'll be like, how is there not an emoji for this? Like how is there not a taco emoji? There probably is, but just I'll always just, there's always something that I'm just like,

done there's not an emoji for it yet so we also have some new privacy features there's a bunch of them my kind of experience was this was like mac world uses a vpn and it logs us out automatically like every week or something like that so i had to log back into it and i got the

the usual screens. But when I was doing it, I'm sorry, it wasn't the VPN, it was email. So I was used to the screens that I got and I, you know, the typical procedures of getting the authentication code, putting it in. But then a new pop-up came up and I was a little confused. And then I remembered I was on iOS 14 as part of the new features. And I kept reading the pop-up and I couldn't

and I couldn't understand what it was telling me. It was kind of one of these things where it was written in sort of engineering speak. What was the pop-up? I've been using VPNs on my... I didn't take a screenshot of it because I was so perplexed. I logged into our email, re-authenticated, but I didn't see a weird screen. Yeah, so I was kind of like, okay, that needs to be done in better plain English. Yeah. I know logging into our Exchange server for stuff like that, it just...

The language is a little different, but it's the same thing. They're just saying, hey, do you want Apple services to be able to log into this, access your Microsoft account? And I'm like, yeah, but that's what I'm doing here. So I think that there's basically three things that people are really going to notice privacy-wise, see all the time, and they're all really good. You'll see a microphone or camera access light up in the toolbar where your wireless signal and stuff is.

Like if there's an amber light if your microphone is being accessed and a green light if your camera is being accessed. And that's pretty huge because you can give an app, an app will ask, hey, do you want to let me access your camera? And you can say yes because I'm doing something with the camera in this app right now. But that doesn't, once it has permission, it can just use that. Even if you're like, yeah, I'm trying to take a picture of my credit card right now. I'm trying to take a picture of this thing.

If it accesses your camera or mic later, when you're not expecting it to be looking or listening, you have no way of knowing. And iOS 14 really fixes that. You can be like, hey, why is there brown light on my tool tray? What's listening to me? What's accessing my microphone right now? I think that's a huge step forward. I think that's a big deal. The other one is whenever an app asks to get at your photos, you can tell it,

Yes, you can look at all my photos or you can pick specific photos for it to access. And that was never true before. It used to be if you were trying to upload a photo in an app or use it for your picture icon or something like that, you just had to give it access to your whole photo library. And then who knows what it's doing? So now you can say, okay, you can see this picture. That's the only thing this app can see, just my photo for my icon and that's it.

So that's a big deal. And you'll see that every time an app asks for photos, you'll see you'll get that option to select photos. And the other one that everyone will see all the time is anytime you paste with your clipboard, they'll be able to pop up at the top of the screen saying where it's pasting from. Like this, this app accessed your clipboard for this.

Initially with the beta, all these apps got totally busted accessing your clipboard all the time. Now it's very clear. Yeah, I mean, it's just more of Apple being really on the forefront of keeping your phone as private as it can be. I mean, people will call them out and say, well, what about Blasebook? Listen, we're connected to the internet. It's a mobile device. Some stuff's going to get out and around and everything else, but

Apple, with each release, it looks at privacy, looks at what people want to do, looks at how they could possibly make mistakes, so to speak, along the way, and makes an effort to alert them when things are going wrong or could be going wrong and keep stuff strictly on your phone as much as possible. There was a change that you wouldn't see, but it's probably the biggest privacy thing in iOS is that by default...

will block trackers that track across websites or across apps. And the advertising industry had a cow about it. So Apple's still going to do it, but they are going to give all the app developers a little more time to update before they start enforcing it in their rules and their app review system. So they'll have until this spring to get on board with that.

But it's, that's a huge deal because I don't think nobody has any clue just how bad it is, just how much apps are looking at every other app you use, taking data from them, looking at the websites that you go to, just everything and building a profile of you that is so extensive. And the advertisers say they use it to target ads and it's true, but it's

used for so much more than that and can be used for such bad things and people just don't even know what's going on it needs to be something where people go yeah i know you're i know you're doing this and i choose to let you do this and that's never happened yeah every now and again you'll see one of those reports that look at like the top websites and it'll be like you know 57 trackers 83 trackers like it's just you know it's it's they're they're yeah they're they're

They're numerous and they're everywhere. And yeah, Apple is doing what it can. And it's so beyond websites. People, you can get something that tells you the trackers on a website or blocks the trackers on a website when an app does it.

Any app that doesn't have anything to do with the web, per se, just can still do the same thing. It can track all the other apps you're using. So it's way out of control. I really applaud Apple for putting their foot down on this. And I have no sympathy for the ad industry who has been taking all of this and building all this personal information on this forever without notifying us and now is...

crying foul that it's going to destroy their industry. You built an industry on stealing private information. Like, sorry. Sell ads another way. I don't care. No one's going to shed it. No one's going to shed it to you. They also are going a little bit harder with signing with Apple where they're making it where they're suggesting and making it easier to switch from like Google or some other email sign into Apple to make it more. Yeah, they're making it easier for you to switch. Yeah.

To make all your stuff. To keep everything. It's still not quite cross-platform. There's some websites that use it, but it's still mainly an iOS, iPhone, Mac thing.

It would be cool if next year they opened it up like Google does, like Facebook does across the web, across the different platforms. It's possible. Yeah, absolutely it is. They already – Possible and I would say even probable that at some point they'll do that. There's no reason not to. No, I mean they already – It's good for everything. They already do have the hooks where like if you have an Android app – I have an app.

And I use sign in with Apple to log into that app. And then I go to Android and I want to access that app. I can have sign in with Apple on that essentially calls out to a web, one of those like lockdown web pages for you to sign in with your Apple ID. But it does work the same way. You just don't, you can't automatically log in with a face ID or any of that kind of stuff. You have to type it into the website, but yeah.

It does work. There are some major changes to Siri that doesn't have the takeover full screen anymore. And I have to admit, I'm still adjusting to that.

Every time I use Siri, I expect that black screen to come up and it doesn't. I'm like, how come Siri's not working? It's a lot nicer when I accidentally activate Siri, which is often. I'm using the iPhone SE as my iPhone because I'm too lazy to switch to something else. So I often hit that home button a little bit too much.

and it comes up, but I don't have it. It's like, I can still see what I'm doing and it doesn't take me out of my work, which is nice.

My biggest, the biggest, you know, they call it the compact UI. The best is phone calls. Like that's just, I mean, talk about overdue, my God. Yeah. But it's so nice. When a phone call comes in, you just get a little banner at the top and you can swipe it away. You can hit accept. Right. And the little phone, the little phone icon animates, of course, because Apple is Apple. But it's very nice. And then some of the answers to Siri questions and stuff pop down that same way.

Instead of taking over the whole screen, you just get a little banner. Those are all good. This stuff's been a long time coming. But I also think that, like, Siri's not any better. Not at all. It looks better, but they haven't changed anything. I haven't noticed that at all. I haven't.

Notice any content. They didn't even, I mean, it's not like they tell us it was. No, they tried to. It looks nicer and it has more languages. They tried to like pull an over on us by saying it has like 20 times more answers than it did a few years ago. I'm like, but that's not new to iOS 14. That's just where Siri's at today. Right.

And that's not a high bar to clear. Like a few years ago, the answers, direct answers that we give you is really bad. There's still just like two or three things that are complete head scratchers to me. And I can't understand why they don't do them with Siri. Like, I don't understand why there's information that works in spotlight search that doesn't work in Siri.

Like if I, if I looked up United flight 300 in spotlight search, drag down and type United flight 300, I get an awesome card or any flight number, any airline and flight number. I get an awesome card showing like it's departure and arrival time and where the plane is and stuff like in this awesome, beautiful card. I can't ask Siri about the status of a flight. It just gives me it with just as a web search and I end up,

having to click and go to flight aware or something. I'm like, it's in there. It's iOS does this already. Why is it not? Why can't it? Maybe Siri was ahead of the time and knew we wouldn't be actually be flying anymore. I've always heard stories that Apple is notorious for having compartmentalized departments, meaning that departments don't necessarily talk to each other a lot. Right.

And I don't know if this is a case of like the spotlight and Siri people not talking to each other. Do you know what I mean? I don't know if it's that. To be fair, Google Assistant is different on home speakers and the Android phone and the watch. Like it's not, this isn't a unique to Apple thing. Like they develop these things. I mean, the thing that Jason's describing is ridiculous. I haven't tried either one, but to have...

a a ui for something here and then nothing over here on the same device is crazy like siri on the watch is different than siri on the mac is different than siri on the phone that's that's that's a similar issue and equally compounding because they're all capable of doing all the same things but they don't and google assists the same the only place that works well for me the only place i like that is on apple tv where yeah right that's that's a good point siri uh

is really tailored to TV stuff and it will start to contextually understand when you're asking about actors and stuff like that based on what you're watching and all that. And it works super well. It's way better than any voice thing on any other smart TV thing I've used. But yeah, yeah, I don't understand that. Even that, it's limited in what it can do. Like you can't like say put on

I mean, you can, you can't, it doesn't like deep dive into, into apps the way, the way other, the other service, some other services do. Yes. There's, there's shortcomings all over the place, but you're right. The way Apple TV works, they sat down and said, okay, how are people going to use this here? It doesn't seem that way with, with everything else. Like,

Maybe in Big Sur you can, but you couldn't do like timers and alarms on Siri. Yeah, on Mac. Until recently, yeah. Yeah, where was that? You just triggered Siri, didn't you? I heard it. That's my home pod, which never does anything until now.

I think my HomePod's about 50-50 for being triggered on purpose and triggered on accident. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, it's right behind me and it really has a very good microphone. Like I could be like a room and a half away and it'll still. It's true, but you didn't say the magic word. I didn't.

But it must have whatever it heard. But that's a good example too. HomePod's different also. Like everything has its own stuff and you have to just kind of trial and error it to see what it will do and what it won't. Right. HomePod should, I mean, it should do everything that doesn't give

Give you a screen screen. And if you ask it something that does require screen, instead of saying, I can't do that, you have to do it on your phone. It should just do it and it should pop up on your phone's screen. Right. The associated screen because you've got one somewhere. Or at least that should be an option.

The other thing I really, really don't understand is, especially for Apple with their big privacy concerns and stuff, why everything that can be done without an internet connection isn't. Like you have to be online to use Siri for anything.

Like you can ask it, set a timer or set an alarm or any of these other things that are completely happening entirely on your phone. Don't require any internet information at all. And it will fail if you're not connected to the internet. I don't get that. That makes no sense to me. And that's also true of Alexa and Google Assistant. You know, those devices, when my internet goes out, I got nothing. I think it,

I think Google Assistant recently changed a thing or two ago where it does work offline for a certain number of things. I'm not sure. Not the speakers, but maybe on the phone. Could be. But just, I mean, the way Apple always talks about things staying on your phone and all this AI stuff is computed on your phone and all this other stuff. And then it's literally every Siri command has to be routed through the internet somehow.

And every iOS release are waiting for that slide that says offline Siri or whatever you're going to call it. They just never do it. It's not about recognizing your voice. I mean, I know they need more data for that, but you can use dictation for the keyboard offline. That works. So it can understand my words. That's done. Come on, Apple. Yeah.

yeah i mean we we need like a like a siri edition of ios one year just like this is all gonna be siri yeah we need that to be the big marquee thing the only marquee thing they come out listen we're not touching anything else here's all the changes oh they would never there's too many first like you said compartmentalize there's too many people working on other things that have nothing to do with siri that they'd be like what am i doing this year but yeah they need to come out craig

Frederick here, somebody needs to come out and it all starts with Siri. You know, that used to be the big thing. I always, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll coyly say, and you know, wink, wink, we know you've been waiting for this and here it is now, you know, the way they do this stuff, knowing full well that it's five years late, but we're going to spin it like it's brand new and you're going to love it. Yeah. Even the, even the stuff they did this year with putting the little,

overlay at the bottom when it's series listening and putting little things, drop down things instead of taking over your whole screen really isn't new even for Apple. Like that stuff was CarPlay worked like that. Yeah. So does the Mac. Yeah.

Yeah, and the Mac. Although that, while that's a completely different OS, CarPlay is literally running off your phone. That's true. Yeah, I mean, it's new, but it's not new. This isn't the Siri changes. I guess what we're trying to say to people is iOS 14 is not the Siri overall you're hoping for. Visually, it's very nice and we have a starting point, but there's a lot more that needs to happen under the hood. Yeah.

That does it for this week's episode of the Mackerel podcast, episode 714. Thanks to Michael Simon. Hey, thank you, Roman. And thanks to Jason Cross. Thank you. And thanks to you, the audience. Thank you for tuning in.

If you want to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that through iTunes, through SoundCloud.com, or on Spotify. If you have any comments or questions, you can send us an email at podcast at macworld.com, or you can contact us through Twitter. That's at Macworld on the Macworld Facebook page. Join us in the next episode of the Macworld Podcast as we talk about the latest news and happenings in the world of Apple. See you next time. ♪