Apple’s public betas: all the news on iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and more

The new Calculator app in iPadOS 18 is, at first glance, wildly unimpressive. When I installed the new operating system, which is now in public beta, I tapped the Calculator icon expecting something that felt uniquely tablet-focused and powerful. I got, well, the iPhone’s Calculator app — only slightly larger. It’s a nice addition to the iPad, sure, but there’s nothing here that took 14 years to make.

The Calculator app doesn’t really matter, though. I suspect you’ll hardly ever use it. What’s actually extremely cool and innovative about iPadOS 18 and iOS 18 is that there is a calculator baked into the operating system itself. Tap in the text box in Messages and type “225/4=” and it’ll automatically tell you that your friend owes you $56.25. You can type out your equation in the body of an email, then tap to replace it with just the final answer. So far, this works in basically any text box but only in Apple’s built-in apps; I suspect we’ll see it everywhere as apps update. It’s the kind of feature that immediately becomes second nature.  

One of the surprise hits of Apple’s WWDC 2024 was a new feature for desktops and laptops. In Sequoia, the new operating system due this fall and now in public beta, you can mirror your phone to your Mac. 

I’ve been testing the new feature for a bit, and it really is what it sounds like. You open up the phone mirroring app, and it presents you to… your iPhone. Rounded corners and everything. You click on the bottom bar to go home and click and drag to go between apps, click with your mouse, and type with your keyboard. The only chrome in the app appears when you hover your mouse up at the top; there’s a button for going home and a button for opening the app switcher. You can’t even resize the window, which is currently way too small on my 4K monitor. It’s just your iPhone. On your Mac. 

The photos aren’t blurry! As a longtime iPhone user married to a longtime Android user, I’ve spent years sending and receiving photos that come through both postage-stamp small and about as sharp as a pointillist painting. But a few minutes after I installed the iOS 18 beta on my iPhone 15 Pro, I asked Anna to send me a photo, and what came through was the blissfully high-res photo I’d hoped for. That, right there, is what I call an upgrade.

RCS support is just one of the new things coming in iOS 18, of course. At WWDC a few weeks ago, Apple talked a lot about homescreen customization, improvements to Siri, a revamped Photos app, and more. The company seems to have added support for RCS, a more modern and powerful messaging protocol that Google and others have adopted on Android, only as a begrudging gesture to regulators — it only mentioned the feature in passing, at the very end of its iOS announcements. But for many iPhone users, and certainly for the billions of Android users who interact with those iPhone users, RCS is a big deal.

For years, I’ve kept a pretty spare iOS homescreen. Two or three rows of icons on the top of the screen, sometimes arranged in such a way that the app icon colors complement each other, and three apps in the dock. Because of Apple’s resistance to letting its users muck with the homescreen’s look and feel, I haven’t been able to make things quite as simple as I would like.

I’ve looked at more customizable Android homescreens with jealousy. I’ve had an iPhone since the day the first one came out, and while Apple’s smartphones have since become wildly more powerful, capable, and larger, the company has forced me to organize my apps starting from the top of the screen for 17 years.

Apple’s next major iOS, iPadOS, and macOS updates will add a new “Recovered” album in the Photos app to help you find photos and videos on your device that may have been lost or damaged, according to 9to5Mac.

When you update to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, your device will scan for potential photos or videos that could appear in the Recovered album, 9to5Mac reports. If there are, the Recovered album will show up in the Utilities section of the app.

One thing always irked me about the Apple Watch. Rain or shine, in sickness and in health, it pushed me to close my rings. Never mind if I had covid-19, shin splints, or was mentally in a dark place. It nudged me to be a “better” version of myself, so long as better didn’t involve a day off. But with watchOS 11 — the public beta of which arrives today — it feels like my Apple Watch is finally cutting me some slack.

This is largely due to a trio of new features: the new Vitals app, Training Load feature, and the ability to pause your Activity Rings. I waxed lyrical about the latter right after WWDC, but after spending some time with the developer beta, I’m convinced these are the smartest fitness updates Apple’s rolled out in years.

You can now download the public betas for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, and tvOS 18. Apple’s updated iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems will eventually include Apple Intelligence AI features and a better Siri — if you have the right device, that is. For now, the betas will bring less exciting but still useful features to the various Apple devices.

The public iOS 18 beta will bring with it key updates to the way the iPhone software works, including support for RCS messaging and new customization options that let users put apps wherever they want to on the homescreen (finally) or apply a tint to the icons and widgets. It also comes with a new layout for the Photos app, a redesigned, more customizable Control Center, and dark mode icons. Similar updates are in the iPadOS 18 public beta, which also brings a native Calculator app to the iPad.