During the past week with Apple Watch Series 5, I’ve been testing the device. Once again, I took a new watch on my family vacation to Disney World, using it whenever possible to make my life easier.
So does the Series 5, with its always-on display, live up to the hype? And is it worth the upgrade if you’re on an older version? Watch our video review, or read our full Apple Watch Series 5 review, to find out if the new watch is right for you.
Night Mode is one of the iPhone 11’s two big new camera features (the other is the Ultra Wide lens). Night Mode captures lots and lots of images, and then uses the iPhone’s A13 Bionic processor to combine them, pulling out details not available in a single low-light shot.
It’s the computational-photography mad science equivalent of putting your regular camera on a tripod and opening up the shutter for a few seconds to let more light in. Only you don’t need the tripod, and the images should almost always end up sharp.
Here’s how to use iPhone 11’s Night Mode.
WatchOS 6 introduces a new Compass app (only for the Apple Watch Series 5), along with a couple of Compass complications. It works pretty much exactly like you’d expect, only with a few neat extras. You can access it from the All Apps screen, or by tapping the Compass complication on one of your Apple Watch faces. Let’s take a look.
If you want to stand out in a darkened classroom, Inateck has the iPad keyboard case for you. The outside is professional-looking, and there’s an Apple Pencil slot. But the standout feature is the keyboard backlights, which can be set to more than 100 color combinations.
This affordable case believes in business on the outside and party on the inside. Is it right for you? Find out in our Inateck Stellarie KB02006 review.
Apple’s new 10.2-inch iPad only arrived in stores yesterday, and already the good folks at iFixit have gotten hold of the device and cracked it open for a teardown.
Here’s what they found. (Hint: a lot of things stay the same, but there are a couple of neat touches!)
This week on The CultCast: We just completed our first week with iPhone 11 Pro, and it’s even better than we hoped. We’ll dive into all the features we love most. Plus: Details are emerging about iPhone 12, and we like what we’re seeing! And is Apple Watch Series 5 worth the upgrade? We discuss …
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iOS 13 did away with the old Updates tab in the App Store, and replaced it with Apple Arcade. That’s pretty bad news if you don’t want to use Apple Arcade. But on the plus side, you can access your app updates from the Home screen using 3D Touch. And the good news is that, in iOS 13, you can also use this trick on the iPad.
In iPadOS, the old Today View has shuffled over a little, and now lives right on the Home screen. You can pin widgets there, and they will be permanently shown on the left edge of the Home screen (in landscape, at least — in portrait they will act more like a temporary Slide Over panel).
This changes how we use widgets. Instead of being temporary, quick-info panels, or shortcuts for app functions, widgets are now always visible, and always available to tap. A weather widget can be checked with a single glance, for instance. Ditto countdown timers. And — best of all — Shortcuts can be triggered with a single tap.
Let’s take a look at some great widgets for the iPadOS Home screen.
Adam Rosen was happiest standing over an old Mac computer, all pulled apart with wires sticking out and components scattered across his kitchen table.
Rosen knew this part of him might never land him a wife. Who could appreciate a home where each room was a gallery of old working Apple computers?
This private Vintage Mac Museum lost its devoted docent on Aug. 31 when Rosen, 53, died from pancreatic cancer.
This thing is a beauty. The first thing you notice is the glass back. The frosted matte finish makes it semi-translucent, giving it a weirdly illusory depth. It looks great. Not even the controversial, compound-eye camera bump can spoil its good looks. The iPhone 11 Pro Max is the best-looking iPhone to date, and I love it.
But don’t be fooled by the familiar design. This year’s refresh makes almost everything about Apple’s most expensive handset better than ever.
It’s faster, stronger and more water-resistant. It packs the best display you’ll find in a phone, and the best camera you’ve ever used. The battery lasts forever. Is it worth its hefty price tag? Absolutely.
Find out more in our full iPhone 11 Pro Max review.
There’s a lot to like in the new iPhone 11 series, but there are reasons to be disappointed, too. Some features that should be a part of any handset released in 2019 are missing, and a few rumored improvements didn’t appear.
Here are four ways the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro models fell short of the mark.
Amazon is ready to push Alexa into every single corner of your life with a new wave of Echo products unveiled this morning.
Armed with 15 new products, Amazon is ready to challenge Apple like never before. The company even introduced some bold new products, like new smart glasses and a smart ring — wearables that give you 24/7 access to Alexa wherever you go. While Apple’s iPhone 11 keynote featured zero mentions of Siri, Amazon’s yearly product keynote put Alexa’s might on full display.
Apple Arcade’s slate of more than 100 games for $4.99 a month looks like one of the best deals in gaming at first glance. But Apple’s new game subscription service fails to live up to the expectations of many iPhone and iPad owners.
That’s not because the games are bad. Or because there are hidden fees we weren’t expecting. It’s because Cupertino billed Apple Arcade as something special … and it just isn’t.
Disassembling the latest Apple Watch doesn’t find very much that’s different from last year’s model. That doesn’t mean there aren’t improvements in the new Series 5; they’re just not visible in a teardown, even one done by the experts at iFixit.
The one huge new feature in the Apple Watch Series 5 is the always-on display. Day or night, the screen never shuts off. It dims as soon as you stop using it, and all animations stop, but the face stands ready for your curious glance at any time.
However, if you wear your Apple Watch in bed, or you don’t like the idea of the watch showing your info to anybody who cares to look at the device, then there are a few settings that can help. Let’s take a look.
The Files app is waaaaay better in iOS 13 and iPadOS. It adds external USB storage support, so you can plug in anything from a hard drive or USB-C stick to a synthesizer that can mount as a USB drive to load samples and presets.
Apple’s built-in file-management app adds column view (with a handy preview) and all the metadata you want to know about a given file. And it also benefits from a massively upgraded search feature.
The screenshot tool gets a radical makeover in iOS 13, and I’m not even talking about the fancy new toolbar for Apple Pencil markup. You can take advantage of two cool new features when you snap a screenshot in the upcoming version of iOS.
One, you can capture the entirety of a web page — not just what you can see on the screen right now, but all of it, from top to bottom, as if you’d stitched together lots of screenshots. Two, you can save these all-page screenshots as PDFs with active, selectable text and links.
Here’s how to make the most out of PDF screenshots in iOS 13.
In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Safari gets a download manager. If you tap (or click, with the new iOS mouse support) on a link to a file, that file will now get downloaded to a folder. What’s more, you can change the location of that download folder.
This is one of the small but essential new features in iPadOS that really turns the iPad into a viable MacBook replacement, even for those who aren’t yet used to the arcane ways of iOS. Let’s check it out.
The iPhone finally joined the dark side with the new Dark Mode feature introduced in iOS 13. Apple delighted fans who have been clamoring for the feature for years — and it appears the wait has been worth it.
After using Dark Mode, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the bright white iOS interface anytime soon. Apple poured a bunch of thought into Dark Mode so that it does more than just make everything black.
3D Touch is dead. Long live 3D Touch! Even though Apple removed the 3D Touch hardware from iPhone 11, the company resurrected the feature via Haptic Touch on its latest devices (just the way it mimicked it with iPhone XR). And now that iPadOS is here, that means 3D Touch is coming to iPads (in the form of a medium-long press).
In the new iPad version of iOS, you can long-ish press on an app icon, and it will pop up the same 3D Touch menu as you would find on an iPhone. Let’s see how it looks.
iPadOS 13 soups up its screenshot tool with the ability to capture an entire webpage as a PDF. That means it doesn’t just grab what you can see on the screen right now. If you’re viewing a webpage that’s really, really long, it will capture the whole thing, and turn it into a very tall PDF.
You can also mark up the resulting PDF before you save it to the Files app. This is a fantastic way to save a webpage, especially when you combine it with Reader View to remove the ads, sidebars and other junk first.
Let’s see how to use it.
In iOS 13 and iPadOS, Apple rejigged the text-selection engine and the cut/copy/paste tools. And they’re amazing. For the last 10 years, selecting and manipulating text has been a frustrating nightmare on the iPad. Try to select a couple of words in Safari, for instance — a package delivery tracking number, for instance — and the selection would bounce back and forth between a few characters and the entire page.
It was enough to drive you back to the comfort of the Mac’s mouse pointer.
In iOS 13, though, this all changes. Text selection is accurate and predictable. And the new copy/paste gesture shortcuts become second nature almost immediately.
In a head-to-head “torture test” challenge, the iPhone 11 Pro Max battery not only lasted longer than the ones in Apple’s other 2019 handsets — it beat Samsung’s new flagship model by a wide margin.
Apple put its largest battery ever in the new 6.5-inch iOS device, and it’s clearly paying off.
In the next version of iOS, the iPad will be able to open several “copies” of the same app. You can then switch between them, treating them just like any other individual apps, or you can combine these instances with other apps.
For example: You could have one “space” with your Mail app and your to-do app in a 50:50 Split View. And then you can have another space with a different instance of your Mail app and, for instance, the Notes app. Each version of the Mail app can show a different folder or message.
You can even have two versions of, say, the Maps app, sharing the same screen, showing totally different places. It’s a powerful addition to iPad multitasking. Let’s see it in action.
iOS 13 is pretty great on the iPhone, but the real deal is iPadOS 13. With the new operating system, Apple split its tablet and phone platforms for the first time since the launch of the original iPad, and the tablet went in a whole new direction. iPadOS is still iOS, but now there are contextual menus, multiple windows for apps, a home screen that isn’t just a blown-up iPhone home screen, and a proper web browser. You can even plug in mice and USB hard drives.
Apple managed a fine balancing act here. If you update to iPadOS 13 and don’t really think about it, then everything (mostly) works the same, with just extra speed and polish. But if you want to dig in, you will find a whole new computer just below the surface.