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macduke

macrumors G5
Original poster
Jun 27, 2007
13,484
20,592
My hot take about iOS 17 is that Standby mode is bad in it's current state.

This weekend I 3D printed a MagSafe stand for my desk. Been using it all day with my new 15 Pro Max.

The photos it displays aren't very customizable. I can't seem to find a way to just pick my family's shared photo album which mostly has photos of my kids. It keeps showing me photos of myself for some reason, which I don't want to see on my phone during the day. With no option that I can see to just choose what people I want to show up there, which is unlike how the lock screen wallpaper settings work. They've built this into the OS and yet it still seems so basic and lacking. You should also be able to edit the clock on this view and show basic things like the temperature and/or your next meeting on the overlay.

A lot of the widgets are way too big. I have the Pro Max which is huge, came from using the regular Pro. For some reason it uses text and truncates most things so you can't even see much of anything about upcoming meetings or appointments. And the news one just shows one item in huge text at the top. The reminders widget is essentially useless, as I just counted and it shows about 12 characters across the width of the widget.

One bright spot is that I like when I've got my Watch Ultra 2 charging next to it, it pops up noticeably on the screen to tell me it is charged. This is useful as with the Ultra, the battery life lasts me multiple days coming from my Series 4 so I didn't even have to plug it in for the first time until today and I no longer charge while sleeping so I can use the sleep tracking stuff.

All this being said, my overall impression is that the feature feels a bit unfinished and rushed to make it into iOS 17. Hopefully Apple makes some significant improvements to it in point updates soon. I get if the feeling they were maybe going for was being able to read this huge text from across a room, but won't most people use this on their desk during the day? And at night it will be in sleep mode when it's charging on your nightstand. So I don't get it. Hopefully they allow us to set a "desk" mode that either allows more than two widgets or allows widgets to be a bit more information dense themselves so that you can actually read an entire calendar meeting title or reminder item. As it stands now it's barely more than a glorified clock or stripped down photo viewer.
 
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