OTHER COOL FEATURES

Little changes that make a big difference

There’s lots more to love in iPadOS 15. Messages now has Shared With You, which takes content other people have sent to you and makes it available in the appropriate app – such as Safari for web pages, or Photos for images. You can tap on that shared content, see who sent it and continue the conversation from inside that app without having to return to Messages.

Apple has also put a lot of work into iPadOS’s Notifications. In addition to Focus Mode, you can now mute notifications for specific apps or Messages threads for an hour or day, and if a thread is really busy without you you’ll be asked if you want to mute it. Your iPad can now differentiate between general notifications and time-sensitive ones that need to be delivered immediately, and Notifications are now grouped to make them easier to work with and clear.

Siri is smarter than before, with on-device speech processing, smart automatic personalisation and the ability to share content, for example by saying “Send this to Louise”.

Spotlight is even smarter too. It has ‘rich results’ when you search for contacts, movies, TV shows, musicians and actors, an image search for the web, Photos search and App Clips support. When you search for something like a restaurant and they use App Clips, you’ll see an action button enabling you to see the menu, book a table or order a takeaway.

Last but not least, there are some important changes to your privacy. The App Privacy Report in Settings enables you to see exactly what data your apps have been using, and both Mail and Safari can protect you from many kinds of online tracking. And, as we’ll discover, iCloud+ then adds even more protection.

> It wasn’t quite ready for the iPadOS 15 launch, but Universal Control is coming this autumn – most likely when or shortly after macOS Monterey drops, because Universal Control won’t work with Macs running older versions of macOS. Universal Control enables you to share things across Macs and iPads, for example by using your Mac’s trackpad or mouse to drag a file from Mac to iPad or vice versa or by using the same input devices on iPad and Mac so you can switch from device to device. It’s clever, works without significant lag, and is a lot of fun.