The appleOS™ Update Thread (2025)

[Andrew]

Apple's version numbers aren't synced up, so what the hell. Here's a thread about all of them for this year. That includes macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, tvOS 18, watchOS 11, visionOS 2, and whatever the hell they say is on the HomePod anymore.

I updated my desktop / watch / phone / iPad and my initial impressions are that this feels like the most who-still-cares Apple update cycle in the whole time that I have cared. I'm not sure that there's any world left for Apple to conquer and I remain entirely uninterested by (and at times, detest) their "AI" features. As I sit here using my Mac, the only thing different between yesterday & today is that now I can seamlessly mirror over my iPhone & have fully synced mobile notifications. That is really cool.

As for the rest? Not a whole lot that's interesting or worth mentioning. macOS has Windows style window snapping now, which is a feature I once thought I could not live without & have since conditioned myself to living without it. It's undeniably a good feature and fixes my macOS windowing problems but they very rarely rear their heads in the first place. (DISCLAIMER: MY MONITOR IS HUGE)

On iPhone the biggest change is probably that you can darken your home screen icons (and tint them, too!).

Bizarrely, it generated a fantastic dark icon for deskGen that only shows up in the notifications & not on my actual homescreen. I don't get it either.

The rest of iOS's changes this go around seem to be about adding more user customization at any cost. You can swap out what the buttons on the lock screen do! (Yay!) You can customize the layout of the control center entirely (Yay!) The control center has way too much going on at any point in time because there's way too many buttons now! (Ya- oh.

It's a solidly 6/10 update where for every step forward there's an equal step back in another area, mostly born from this new maximalist elements-everywhere philosophy Apple seems to have gotten into. This is most obvious when you open the new photos app for the first time and think "my eyes are exploding from complete element overload". I felt that a similar feeling when I opened the new control center for the first time.

tvOS... is the same. Aside from getting a new control center last year, it's the same as it has been the near half-decade I've owned an Apple TV. Truthfully, I hope it never changes. It's like the photos app was up until this very moment: well designed to a point that changes aren't necessary.

But hey, at least we can light the Amazon on fire for some genAI features later this Fall.
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Anyways, feel free to put anything specifically about this swath of *OS releases here. It's perfectly fine to be less of a doomer than I am, believe me.

 

[ChunkOfWax]

Only apple product that I own is an iPhone, and it’s the only smartphone I’ve ever used. It’s been a long time since I’ve been enthused by an iOS update. Sometimes there’s cool features, sometimes there might be 1 or 2 things I might dislike. But in the end, if there’s anything I dislike, it’s usually too inoffensive for me to really care. As long as my phone can do phone things, I’m happy.

That being said though, this is the first update where I’ve felt even a smidge of “yeah idk maybe I could do without this feature” or just generally confused. New photos app really sucks. I actually like how customizable the new control center is, but it also just feels kinda weird and clumsy to use at times. And I don’t really know how to feel about the dark/tinted home screen icons, to be totally honest. And we don’t even have access to the new suite of gen AI features yet, which I’m reeeaallly looking forward to :DD

In other words, I pretty much agree with everything you’ve already stated lol. I haven’t been able to accurately put my thoughts into words, but “maximalist” is definitely the right word for this new design philosophy they’ve taken on. While parts of iOS are updated with this new philosophy in mind while other parts remain as is, it starts to make the rest of the user experience feel incongruent, I guess. Or at least, incongruent with what I’d expect out of the iPhone user experience. Or that’s at least how I feel, idk.

anyways i actually made my deskgen icon piss-yellow so this might actually be a 10/10 update but idk tbh that’s just me tho

 

[Andrew]

While parts of iOS are updated with this new philosophy in mind while other parts remain as is, it starts to make the rest of the user experience feel incongruent, I guess. Or at least, incongruent with what I’d expect out of the iPhone user experience.

I'm not the longest time iPhone user out there (it's been four years! Always feels shorter than that, lol) but this is the first time it's felt *really* inconsistent to me. The maximalism doesn't feel consistent with macOS, visionOS, or really... anything. It's A) new & B) out of nowhere.

 

[jadd]

it feels like apple is desperately trying to eat into the android market share (outside of the us) these last years by adding all these customization features that were already available for a long time now on the competing OS

 

[nitzukai]

It feels like I'm getting better battery life with Sequoia on my Air M2 2022, really unexpected. The overall feel of the OS is kinda the same though, same snappiness, same response times.

The only bug(?) I found is that the scrolling in the Settings app is a bit weird, it feels like its skipping frames or running at 50 Hz. This isn't the case in anywhere else in the OS though.

 

[Andrew]

Still bizarre to me that this is an accessibility option and not just... something available to you automatically when you don't have a mic connected to your Mac.

 

[Andrew]

macOS 15.1 is here and with it, Apple Intelligence. Fascinating to me to see the natural continuation of their previous existing ML work get a crazy amount of juice to please the shareholders. Instantaneous, locally run, seemingly 100% accurate audio transcription is not what I expected to get in this update but it is actually a gamechanger for me & my notes. Pleasant surprise. Less pleased with writing tools that offer rewriting in different styles - turbocharged proofreading is one thing (good!) but there is no part of me that's a-ok with handing over control of my words to something or someone else. I've already been contemplating disabling autocomplete because I noticed myself changing my writing style to match its suggestions at times. I am perhaps some brand of luddite or extremist, but idk - I view writing on the internet in the same way that I view poetic writings, there is an irregular ebb and flow to myself that will never truly fit style guidelines but is unmistakably me. I hope I never give it up.