- The public betas for IOS 14 on the iPhone

and iPadOS 14 on the iPad

are available to download today.

Now, I have been using the developer betas up to now,

so I wanted to go over some of the big features

that you can expect and also some of the little things

that you might have missed, but first,

should you install it?

I would wait.

I would wait to see what people are saying

about its stability.

Some years, those betas, they feel basically done

and other years they're kind of a mess.

Based on the developer beta so far,

this seems like a good year, but honestly,

you should never put a beta on your main phone

if you can help it.

So, each platform, IOS and iPadOS,

are gonna get a flagship feature

and then there's all those little tweaks

and changes that I mentioned.

Regardless of whether you're being responsible

and waiting for the official release

or if you're being irresponsible

and you're installing it today, here's what you can expect.

(mellow music)

Now, on the iPhone, the big flagship feature on IOS 14

is the new home screen.

You are now able to take widgets

and put them on your home screen

on any screen that you want interspersed

with your other icons.

Apple has also made a new section called the App Library

that has all of your apps,

it's just like an app drawer on Android

and Apple categorizes them for you,

that means you don't have to have like a junk folder anymore

which is really great.

Last but not least, you can also hide entire app pages,

which means you can have a page that's there

for the weekends if you wanna

and then it's gone when you're just going to work everyday.

Now, I've already made a full video

about all of the features on the new home screen in IOS 14,

so I'll have a link down there in the show notes,

tell you everything I think about it,

but I wanna focus right now on the flagship feature

on iPadOS, and weirdly, it's not the home screen,

because then iPhone gets it and the iPad

has to stay with the old home screen for a dumb reason.

I don't know, whatever.

The main new flagship feature on iPadOS 14

is this Apple Pencil, and specifically it's that you're

gonna have to put this thing down a lot less often.

Now, the first major new feature for the Apple Pencil

on iPadOS is called Scribble.

This let's you write text with your handwriting

in any arbitrary text field,

so you just go to a text field and start writing

in that text field.

And the nice thing about this is you can sort of

let your handwriting roam all over the entire iPad

and it'll still work, as long as you start

inside that text field.

Now, you'll also notice here

that it didn't get my handwriting exactly right,

which is a little bit annoying,

but you can do a couple of other things with that.

You can circle some text and that will select it.

You can also just scratch some text out

and it will delete it.

That all seems great, but this isn't really

a full-featured, write however you want sort of system,

because it does take that second for it to resolve

into some sort of text that you can actually work with

and you won't see right away whether or not it was accurate.

So Scribble is great for short notes,

but it is not great for taking a lot of notes long form

if you're sitting in a class or something,

but there is something that is very good

for taking a lot of notes if you're sitting in class

or something and that is Apple's Notes app.

So I've got Apple Notes here open

and you've been able to do handwriting

in Apple Notes for quite a while now,

but what's new is you can actually long-press that word

and then you get these little selector bars here

and then you can copy as text.

You could also paste it then as text,

so you can get the plain text out of

your handwritten notes, which makes Apple Notes

a much more convenient way to do note taking,

because you can actually search for stuff

and then copy it out and paste it into,

you know, something that you can actually share around.

The other thing you can do in Apple Notes

is if you draw a shape and hold the pencil down at the end,

you get a mice clean version of that shape,

which is really nice.

Basically, the combination of Scribble

plus the ability to get plain text out of your handwriting

in Apple Notes means that you can leave this pencil

in your hand instead of constantly setting it down

to like pull up the keyboard or use the, you know,

the Apple keyboard or whatever,

you could just use this.

Now, it's not perfect.

Like I said, I think that Scribble has a little bit

too much of a delay, so it's too slow,

but on the whole, the new features on iPadOS 14

make me feel like I actually wanna use the Apple Pencil

instead of feeling bad that I bought it and never use it,

'cause I'm not an artist.

Actually, I wanna sneak in one more flagship feature

and that is the Translate app that Apple has made.

Unfortunately it's not available on the iPad,

I don't know why, but I wanna compare it real quick

to Google Translate, because I think Apple's done

a pretty good job for a first effort.

They both do the same thing by tapping

the microphone button here.

I'm speaking in English, please translate this into Spanish.

They both are successfully able to do that,

but they're supposed to be able to understand

when someone speaks back to you in Spanish

and then translate it into English in auto mode.

We're gonna give that a shot.

(speaking in foreign language)

So you can see they both successfully translated

from Spanish into English.

So those are the main flagship features,

but there's a bunch of little stuff,

actually, some of it's not that little.

That's really hard to categorize.

There are just 1,000 tiny changes,

way too many for me to get through all of them.

I sort of feel like Apple told its engineers,

"Hey, you know all those half finished projects

"that you love but we made you put in the back burner?

"Yeah, it's time to ship all of that."

Like default apps, you know that some engineer

built the ability like five years ago

for you to set Gmail or Chrome or whatever

as your main email app or browser,

but now it's finally here.

Only it only works for email and browsers,

it doesn't work for maps.

I don't know, there's always next year.

So the first big group of small changes

is it seems like Apple finally figured out

that you can show stuff on top of other stuff

without switching the whole damn screen over

to the stuff that you wanna show

and it lets you keep your contacts,

that's just a little bit more elegant.

Apple calls this Compact UI

and there's a few examples of it.

First, when someone calls you it doesn't take up

the whole screen.

When you invoke Siri, it's just this cute little bubble now

that you can see pulsing with the sound of your voice.

You can get picture in picture with a few different apps

on the iPhone or of course on the iPad.

You get much nicer search on the iPad.

It pops up over what you're doing

by just hitting Command + Space, it's less intrusive

and it let's you get to Siri Shortcuts

so you can get way faster access to your Siri Shortcuts

from anywhere.

There's just a few other little design tweaks

I wanna talk about.

They've changed up the way sidebars look in iPadOS

and I thinks it's because they know

that there's gonna be a lot more iPad apps coming to the Mac

and so they wanted the sidebars to be a little bit more

consistent between the iPad and the Mac.

There's also a new time picker

so you no longer have those weird little dials,

but you gotta be careful though,

'cause sometimes the little number paddle gets stuck

just on the hour or just on the minute.

So that's the big system wide stuff,

but there are a lot, and I mean a lot of changes

inside all of Apple's core apps.

So for example, in Messages you can pin conversations,

you can have inline reply threads

and you can have mentions,

I'm not gonna show any of this to you,

'cause I don't wanna show you my messages, whatever.

In the Home app there is now suggestions

and there's also new buttons inside the control center

from the Home app.

The Weather app will show you next hour precipitation,

RIP Dark Sky for Android.

Apple Maps actually got the biggest changes,

because I think Apple had the most work

that it had to do there.

So I've got Apple Maps open here

and you can see I've got some directions set up,

but I have them set up via bike,

which is the new feature inside Apple Maps

and one of the nice things you can see here

is that in addition to showing you how long it's gonna take,

there's also what the elevation's gonna look like,

'cause riding up to Sutro Tower is a lot of work.

It gives you a little bit of information

about what the path is gonna look like,

where you're gonna be on main roads

or are you gonna have your own bike lane?

This is all pretty nice, but it's a little bit

of a catch up to Google Maps.

I actually prefer the way Google Maps handles bike routes,

because you can see here

that it actually just has a straight up map overlay

on top of your map, showing you where all the bike lanes are

which is a lot nicer, a lot easier to plan your stuff out

before you get out on the road.

If you go in search here,

there's now this area called Guides,

which they've got some editorial content

from a bunch of other websites,

showing you, you know, trails from AllTrail or what not.

There's also enhanced maps coming to the UK, Canada,

Ireland, and there's also electrical vehicle routing

so you can find where to charge your car

and they also support congestion zones

so you know whether or not you're gonna have to pay a toll

to go into a city.

There's just a thousand other features

that we can get into and I just don't have time.

There's privacy enhancements.

Apps have to ask your permission for tracking.

There's on-device dictation, there's app clips,

there's enhancement emoji, there's Car Keys,

there's wallpapers and CarPlay now,

there's spacial audio for AirPods.

The camera app is able to shoot faster between photos.

You can get exposure lock.

There's a bedtime feature.

There's a redesigned image picker

and way, way more.

One that I wanna actually take a closer look at