By Jason Snell
September 19, 2017 9:15 AM PT
It’s iOS 11 and watchOS 4 day!
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Hello, readers. It’s that day. The day when you finally get your hands on iOS 11 after…
Let’s be real. You’re a Six Colors reader. You probably installed the first developer beta. Or the second. Or maybe you waited until the public beta. But you’ve probably been using iOS 11 all summer.
Even if you have, though, this is the day when our loved ones—the less technologically focused in our lives—will be getting the new operating system. So it still feels like a milestone, even if it’s hard for some of us to even remember what it was like to run iOS 10.
I wrote a review of iOS 11 for Macworld, which just posted this morning, that breaks down the highlights. If you want more, I’ll just wave the Italian flag and tell you to have at it.
The short version is: iPad users should update to iOS 11, because the multitasking changes and addition of drag-and-drop are awesome. iPhone users, well, there’s still great stuff there—Do Not Disturb When Driving is going to make the world safer—but it’s a bit less of a world-shaker. Still, Apple makes it awfully hard not to update your devices, and there are lots of good reasons—compatibility, security, and functionality—to make the move. If you pay for iCloud storage space, for example, you should get your family on iOS 11 so you can share that space and they can stop bugging you about why their iOS backups fail because they’ve run out of Apple’s laughably small 5GB of free iCloud space.
On the Apple Watch side, it’s watchOS 4 today. It’s a relatively subtle update, but there are still some nice features, as Serenity Caldwell details in her review at iMore. You probably haven’t installed this one yet, since Apple limits distribution of watchOS betas since there’s no way to reset the device at home if something goes horribly wrong. I installed the final version last week and while it took forever, it’s been running smoothly ever since.
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