A new Training Load app analyzes how hard you exercise during workouts, and tracks your workout duration and how your effort changes over time. The new Vitals app passively monitors your health throughout the day and may even suggest you’ve been drinking too much.
What’s the Password?
On the security front, Apple is also creating its own dedicated passwords app across its OS platforms. It works like many other password managers, in that it allows you to generate strong passwords for all your logins. It keeps all your credentials in order by storing logins, passwords, and verification codes, and by flagging potential password leaks and security breaches. It’s also available to Windows users on the iCloud for Windows app.
Tap It to Me
Apple’s payments app has a new feature that lets users transfer money far more easily than before. With Tap to Cash, you can initiate a mobile payment and then just hold two iPhones together to transfer the money from one user to another. It’ll make paying back friends for a round of drinks much easier. (Sorry Venmo, you had a good run.)
Smarter AirPods
Apple’s in-ear headphones will gain new gesture controls that let you nod your head to answer an incoming phone call, or shake your head to decline it. They’re also getting better noise isolation and canceling capabilities, so you can have more easily understandable conversations at your local jackhammer conventions.
Prime Time TV+
Apple will add a few software features to its streaming TV platform. There are some accessibility updates, like better subtitles that appear when you mute right when the dialog is spoken, or pop up if you rewind a segment to play it again.
There’s also a new “In Sights” banner that pops up when you pause what you’re watching. It shows you the names and faces of the onscreen actors, as well as the characters they’re playing. It can also identify any of the songs that are playing in the scene. (Amazon Prime Video does this too through a feature called X-Ray.)
Face the Future
Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset just came out in February, and Apple has already announced the first substantial update to the face computer’s operating system. The Vision Pro didn’t get great reviews at launch, and so visionOS needs some enhancements to keep pushing the conversation forward.
The biggest update for the VisionPro will be coming to Spatial Photos, which will include a feature that makes ordinary pictures look like Spatial photos by giving them stereoscopic depth and movement.
Apple is also enhancing spatial video, partnering with companies like Vimeo, which has a player available as a new app on the VisionPro. Still no YouTube though. (Apple says the Vision Pro can run 1.5 million compatible iPhone apps.)
Apple is adding better hand gesture recognition to visionOS, and offering something called Train Support, which is meant to make the Vision Pro work better for people while they’re traveling by rail.
In the coming months, Apple says it is also making Vision Pro available to more countries like China, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.