iOS 12’s best new feature may be Do Not Disturb at Bedtime. That sounds boring, but ask anyone who has been using it and they’ll tell you that it rocks. Apart from being active overnight, the main difference between regular Do Not Disturb and the new “at Bedtime” flavor is that all notifications are hidden from the lock screen until you deliberately swipe up on the screen to reveal them.

Regular Do Not Disturb suppresses audio and vibrating alerts, but the notifications still appear on the lock screen. You’ll see them any time you pick up your iPhone or unlock your iPad. This can make the difference between enjoying your hooky afternoon at the beach in peace or worrying the whole time because you accidentally saw that Slack message from your boss.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the regular Do Not Disturb and make it hide your alerts all day long? The good news is that you totally can.

“Instant Tuning” is the rather odd name that Apple gave an excellent new iOS 12 feature. You know how some apps on your iPhone keep popping up notifications you never want or need? And you keep telling yourself that you will dig into the Settings app and switch them off? Only you never, ever get around to this annoying busywork? Instant Tuning is for you.

Now, when a notification comes in, you can access the notifications settings for that app right there in the notification itself. This is huge, and makes culling your notifications way easier. Which in turn makes your most important notifications, like text messages or that sweet eBay auction you’re following, stand out more.

iOS 12 gives your favorite apps access to some amazing new abilities. One is integration with the brand-new Siri Shortcuts, which lets you automate your apps, or to interact with them by talking to Siri. But that’s not all. Camera apps now have access to the the depth information from Portrait Mode, so they can do some pretty special effects.

Safari’s password autofill has also been opened up, so apps like Dashlane and 1Password are now available with a single tap. Let’s take a look at the best new iOS 12-ready apps already available.

It’s irritating when your iPhone runs out of battery. But it can actually be life threatening if you depend on your phone’s NFC feature to get into your dorm room or onto a train. 

That’s why the iPhone XS and the other 2018 models still offer some NFC transactions even when down to the power reserve.

Apple is not wasting any time making improvements to the huge iOS 12 update that was just released to the public yesterday.

Developers received the first beta for iOS 12.1 this morning along with new betas for watchOS 5 and tvOS 12, bring a host of changes to the software update that already made iOS devices faster and more efficient.

The official way to type the names of the 2018 iPhone lineup have finally been confirmed by Apple nearly a week after the company revealed the phones at its Gather Round keynote.

All three of the new iPhones have a letter suffix attached to an X which has been downright confusing for most fans. In some instances, it seemed like all uppercase letters were called for, while some people were only using lower case suffixes. The confusion has been cleared up though and the names are actually pretty simple.

When you compare the iPhone 4 to the iPhone XS, virtually everything has changed. All except the script Apple uses when introducing its new handsets to the public.

This is the tongue-in-cheek observation of James Brown, a YouTuber and Reddit user who posted a video comparing the use of adjectives from Steve Jobs in 2010 with Apple executives talking about the iPhones XS and XS Max at last week’s new product showcase.

The new iOS 12 Battery information section brings a massive improvement over the previous version. Whereas before you could see which apps used how much battery, and for how long, now you can see the charts that look like the Tim Cook section of an Apple Keynote. You can see your battery use in incredible detail, broken down by such categories as Screen On Usage and Screen Off Usage.

But that’s not all. You can see how fast the battery ran down, how the levels were at any time during the last 24 hours, and also a longer-term overview that shows your usage over time.

It’s so detailed that it can be a bit intimidating, so today we’ll take a look at how to read those charts, and how to get the best out of them.

Early reviews for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max have already come in and while most of the people that have tested the new device are impresssed, this years models aren’t as big a leap as the iPhone X.

Testers are raving about the camera, A12 processor, big display and faster LTE. The new phones are truly impressive, but if you have an iPhone that came out in the last two years, you might want to see what the experts are saying first.

The average joe won’t get their hands on the new iPhone XS until Friday, but a fortunate few got early access. That’s led to the first unboxing videos of Apple’s new flagship smartphone.

These offer quick, hands-on overviews of the iPhone XS Max and the smaller iPhone XS for people who just can’t wait until they get one themselves.

iOS 12 was clearly designed for an iPad where Face ID replaces the Home button. Apple has revamped the tablet’s gestures for iOS 12, bringing us an easy way to return to the Home screen, and an iPhone X-style gesture to access the Control Center.

If you’re a long-time iPad users, these changes will seem a little jarring at first. You’ll soon get used to them, though, and even learn to love them. The new Control Center gesture, in fact, is a lot better than the old one.

Apple’s latest iPhone lineup is its most expensive yet, with prices starting at $999 for the iPhone XS and $1,099 for the iPhone XS Max. But Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t see a problem with that.

In an interview with Good Morning America this week, Cook again defended Apple’s price tags, talked about Apple Watch Series 4, and explained why some devices have avoided price hikes amidst America’s trade war with China.

It’s way too easy to lose control of your inbox. Even if you practice good email hygiene, all the updates from work, friends, and advertisers makes for a constant struggle to stay on top, so many people just give up.

Twitter’s chronological timeline is back.

The algorithmic timeline that was first introduced in 2016 remains the default, but users can now revert to the non-algorithm sorting method that Twitter originally offered for years.

September 18, 1989: Steve Jobs’ company NeXT Inc. ships version 1.0 of NeXTStep, its object-oriented, multitasking operating system.

Incredibly advanced for its time, NeXTStep is described by The New York Times as “Macintosh on steroids.” In an ironic twist, the operating system Jobs plans to use to compete with Cupertino turns out to be one of the things that saves Apple a decade later.

Since the day Apple first unveiled iOS 12 back in June the company has been saying that this new version of its mobile operating system be faster than any of its predecessors. Now that it’s out, we can test that promise.

We put a iPhone X running iOS 12 through benchmark tests and compared the results to this device running iOS 11. Spoiler: you’re going to like the results.

If you watched last week’s Apple Watch Series 4 unveiling and are dying for those new animated watch faces — but don’t want to buy a new watch — you’ll be happy to know that watchOS 5 brings the best of them to Apple Watch Series 1 and up.

They’re not quite as nice as what you’ll get with the new larger Series 4 watches coming Friday, but they’re still pretty great. Here’s a hands-on look at the new Apple Watch faces.

Shortcuts is Apple’s new automation app for iOS 12. It integrates with Siri and lets you build all kinds of amazing automated workflows, from shutting your house down when you go to sleep, to downloading videos from YouTube and saving the them to iCloud.

Shortcuts is really just the new name for Workflow, an iOS automation app that Apple bought a year or so back. Let’s take a look at what Apple has put in Shortcuts.

Shopping is about to become an even biggest focus on Instagram with a new update coming out today that makes it easier to find what your favorite accounts are peddling.

The photo-sharing app revealed that it is rolling out its Shopping in Stories feature to businesses in 46 countries today, allowing users to tap on an item to quickly learn about it and possibly purchase it through the business’ website.

This is what it will look like:

iOS 12 adds a great new feature in the Photos app. Now, when you share a photo, you can choose to copy a link to that photo, and share that instead. This is a lot like sharing a file from Dropbox. You can even copy a link to a whole slew of files and share them by sending a single URL.

Shared photos are stored in iCloud, and the link is accessible to anyone that has it, for up to a month. Let’s see how it works.

The Trump administration is expected to spare three Apple products from the next round of tariffs, but escalating conflicts with China could still be a costly problem for the tech giant should a full-blown trade war ensue.

Bloomberg news, siting five unidentified sources, said a product code that covers the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePod smart speaker, is not listed among some $200 billion in Chinese products subject to a new 10 percent tariff expected to be announced later this week.

Turns out you don’t have to upgrade to macOS Mojave to enjoy the benefits of Safari 12. Apple just released it for two earlier versions: High Sierra and Sierra.

This browser update works hard to protect your privacy, and offers plenty of other improvements too.

Photos already has a pretty decent search function on iOS 11. Thanks to Apple’s machine-learning tech, and AI categorization, you can search for thousands of “scenes.” These include the places you took the photo, but also anything from abacus to zucchini, people in the images, and times the images were taken.

This has gotten even better in iOS 12. You can still search on many thousands of categories and keywords, but now you can combine searches. For instance, you could search for several different people, and see photos only containing them all. OR you can combine search terms like Christmas, Food, and 2015, for instance. Let’s take a look.

iOS 12 launches today, and there are a whole bunch of updates to apps that take advantage of the new features available in iOS 12. If you visit the App Store’s updates page, you’ll see that many apps are adding support for Siri Shortcuts. Shortcuts in iOS 12 can refer to several related new things, but in this case, Siri Shortcuts lets you interact with, and control apps just by talking.

For instance, say “Hey Siri, check my commute” to get a report of the disruptions, departures, and your ETA at work from Citymapper, or say “Show today,” and see a list of today’s tasks in Things app.

The full version of iOS 12 is now available for everyone. One of its cool new features is Siri Shortcuts, but those who want to automate functions on their iPhone also need to download a separate application from the App Store.

The new utility lets people create scripts that collect several actions together, then launch them with a voice command. The idea is to let you automate actions that you perform regularly.