In what can only be described as a bold and revolutionary move by a $3 trillion company that has famously never copied anyone in its entire history, Apple announced iOS 18 during this year’s WWDC keynote. The update introduces a suite of “new” features that users of other mobile operating systems have been enjoying since Barack Obama was still in office.
Chief among the updates is a long overdue ability to customize your iPhone’s home screen. No longer shackled to the strict icon grid of Steve Jobs’ minimalist dreams, users can now place app icons pretty much wherever they like, a feature Android has had since the concept of customizable home screens was invented approximately two dozen iPhones ago.
Also arriving fashionably late is a more open Control Center, which users can now configure to their hearts’ content. Music controls can be shifted. Widgets can be arranged. You can even change the flashlight toggle. Nothing says technological innovation quite like the power to decide which corner of the screen glows when you inevitably drop your phone under the couch.
Then there is Apple Intelligence, the company’s slightly overconfident attempt to slap a top hat and monocle on Siri and call her an AI. With ChatGPT lurking quietly in the software underpinnings (but not without your permission, Apple assures us with all the gravity of a Supreme Court ruling), your iPhone can now help summarize notifications, rewrite your texts and generate images, all so that you may save precious seconds while crafting the perfect birthday message to your second cousin.
Of course, rather than announce any of these upgrades as features users have long clamored for, Apple presented them as the natural, inevitable products of innovation and pure genius, like Edison inventing the lightbulb or Tim Cook discovering that people really like USB-C.
Privacy, the ever-marketable virtue, remains Apple’s shining armor. Your data, we are promised, will stay safely locked away on your device unless you quite literally tell it otherwise, at which point Apple will generously hand things over to OpenAI, but only with your express consent and a wink.
iOS 18 is expected to launch in the fall, just in time for you to finally move your calendar app to the bottom right corner of your screen and feel something that vaguely resembles freedom.
Apple may be late to the party but, as always, it arrived with champagne, custom lighting and a $1,199 entry fee.