After two months of using all of Apple’s betas, this is what I like least about each of them.

During the very week of WWDC 2022, I decided, without surprise or disappointment from my past warnings, install some betas of the new operating systems presented by Apple. I started with “only iPadOS 16, the rest is better not…” and ended up with a poker beta: watchOS 9, iOS 16, macOS Ventura and the aforementioned iPadOS 16.

More than two months later, I was able to discover, in the absence of tweaking of the official versions and updates of applications exploiting the possibilities offered by the new systems, the best and the worst of each of them. I’m not talking about scratches when opening certain applications or breakdowns attributable to a beta, but about new features as such which, in my opinion, do not represent an improvement over what we already had.. In some cases, it even makes it worse. Let’s go.

watchOS 9: in-band notifications

This is surely an attempt by Apple to standardize the style and experience across all of its devices, but the new watchOS 9 notifications, which appear as strips at the top of the screen when we use the watch, are not quite tools.

We assume that in this way they do not hide the information on the screen that we have in front of us, but… is it relevant? Notifications are one of the reasons we get an Apple Watch. Receiving one, so far, with the screen activated, made us see it in full screen. Now, shrinking it to a higher band on a screen under two inches, the beginning of the text is barely visible.

On an Apple Watch, we also don’t do anything worth keeping at the expense of full notifications: we don’t watch videos, we don’t play games, we don’t make video calls, we does not read articles or books. These are mostly transient requests. These new notifications simply force us to take an extra step to find out what they wrote to us. There’s worse in life, but it’s a step backwards.

iPadOS 16: scene manager

Or its name in Spanish, Visual Organizer. Both give: it does not improve the experience. This is not the case on a Mac (not massively at least) and even less so on an iPad, where window management and resizing possibilities have less freedom, and where the main idea of ​​Stage Manager (single-tasking approach without the low distraction) has been part of the iPad since its first release.

Visually, it looks fantastic, but when you try to work with it and give continuity to that use, its charm fades.

. bonus track: the external monitor mode that this new iPadOS allows does not facilitate the use of Stage Manager, since by default it duplicates the screen and we have to activate ourselves the mode in which we can use the external monitor independently, without the bars black sides by the 4:3 ratio, and with the iPad screen itself as an auxiliary panel. This whole problem was brilliantly explained by Guille Lomener on his YouTube channel.

macOS Ventura: the Settings menu

Apple explained that it completely redesigned the Settings app using SwiftUI. I don’t know if it’s partly to blame for this end result (surely not), but what happened to macOS Ventura is a very unconvincing result: hierarchies sometimes don’t make sense, it’s not clear at all what’s inside each section or why certain elements have theirs, and any external news that comes in, even from Apple itself- even (shortcuts, for example) looks awful, as Apple didn’t seem to consider this possibility when designing.

a fantastic Twitter thread posted by programmer Niki Tonsky Explained the problem well. From details that can be considered minor (right-aligned texts in a menu that move to the left when displayed) to meaningless pop-up windows, missing or resized confirmation buttons, options impossible to activate … the list is very long.

It wouldn’t be surprising if the final version (we’re almost September) of Ventura returns to the Settings menu we knew until Monterey, and Apple is leaving that for later. It wouldn’t be worse than going out with the menu as is. And that’s not a beta issue: it’s from the pillars.

iOS 16: unresolved issues

I couldn’t find any major issues attributable to a specific new feature in iOS 16, which I think is a fantastic update. So the biggest drawback may be in what did not happen. Long-awaited, much-needed implementations that haven’t made it onto the news priority list we have.

An example is hover widgets. With iOS 14 we thought they would surely arrive with iOS 15. We now know that at least until iOS 17 they will not arrive. If they come. Being able to cross off an item from a shopping list, being able to drop an email from its inbox… Apple clarified at WWDC 2020 that widgets could not be “miniapps”, and thus deprived us of using them home screen, which previously we could use on the widget screen, the one to the left of the main screen.

Nor has the complexity of setting up hotkeys, automations or focus modes (or a mixture of these) for anyone been reduced, it’s still a daunting process for the non-enthusiast. There’s also no iMessage or Apple Music that seems as smooth in its operation as WhatsApp or Spotify. Improvements that we continue to expect, at least another year.