iOS 18 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Final leaks and rumors.
Some more rumors/leaks out this morning. MacRumors has them on the home page if you’re interested - We may get a few more rumors today and, more likely, tomorrow morning. I suspect most of the big stuff is out there already (sadly). I hope to be pleasantly surprised.
Paid vs Unpaid Developer Accounts.
We don’t know if Apple will continue to allow unpaid developer accounts to participate in the Developer Preview. They will probably, but anything can happen, particularly if they have concerns about the stability of the software in the first few betas.
Don’t Install the Beta unless you know how to get back to iOS 17.5.1
Every year, we get several users here who, in the excitement of the moment, install the Developer Preview only to discover that it breaks something they need, like banking apps, or it’s simply crashing too much. And some people have no idea how to get back on the current public release. They post here asking for help and frequently badmouthing Apple. Don’t be one of these people. If you don’t know how to return to “safety,” don’t install the beta.
And I prefer not to hear complaints about the stability of early betas from people who have no business being on them. Apple says every year that the previews should only be installed on devices intended for development. We all know that many (most?) people ignore that, some to their detriment. But that’s on them, not Apple.
Backup your devices before installing the beta
Going along with the previous point, make an encrypted, archived backup of your device before installing the beta. The backup needs to be encrypted to preserve sensitive data like health records from the Health app. It also needs to be archived so that it won’t be overwritten by your phone’s first backup in iOS 18. You can only restore to iOS 17 with an iOS 17 backup, not an iOS 18 backup. Instructions on how to do that are an easy Google search away.
My own final thoughts on what we’ll see
I think it will be much along the lines Gurman has reported from his sources. We’ll get a lot of AI baked-in stuff, much like we see in other apps now (e.g., Spark’s AI-generated email responses).
I do think we will have some pleasant surprises that were either too “insignificant” for Gurman to post or that were not known to his leakers or just things that show up in the "word cloud" put up after each segment wraps up.
I really hope some of that extends to Apple’s own apps. Better backlinking in Notes, for example, would be good.
People are going to be disappointed to learn that some of the more advanced AI features will not work on their phones. Who knows if they will even work well on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which is the only current phone they will all work on at all, apparently. This will spark a lot of talk of Apple intentionally obsoleting its own hardware. On one level, that may be true (Apple does sell hardware, not software, after all). On the other hand, the memory requirements of AI are very high and it may be that anything with less than 8 GB of RAM is simply not enough.
appleinsider.com
