The Apple iOS 9 Review
by Brandon Chester on September 16, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple
- Mobile
- Tablets
- iOS 9
2015 has been a pretty big year for Apple as a company. Product launches this year included the Apple Watch, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the iPad Mini 4, the iPad Pro, and the new Apple TV. This month is a big month for their software launches, with today marking the release of iOS 9 as well as watchOS 2, and OS X El Capitan launching at the very end of the month. In time I hope to do some sort of review of the new features in watchOS 2, but today's article focuses strictly on iOS 9 and everything new that Apple is bringing to their biggest operating system for both users and developers.
What's interesting about iOS 9 is how Apple has involved their community of users in the development process by creating a public beta program. OS X Yosemite famously was the first version of OS X to have a public beta (with the exception of the OS X 10.1 Kodiak beta 15 years ago), but Apple had never done anything like it for their mobile devices until now. However, many users found ways to install the developer betas of iOS on their devices by bypassing the activation or having a service register their UDID for beta installation. With more and more features being added to iOS, and more and more users adopting devices that run it, it appears that Apple felt that expanding their beta user base beyond developers would be a good way to collect information on bugs and stability, as well as general feedback about what does and doesn't work well.
Opening up iOS 9 with a public beta also plays into the focus of the new release. iOS 7 was an enormous release that redesigned the entire operating system, and iOS 8 added features like continuity and extensibility to improve how apps communicated on iOS, and how iOS devices and Macs communicate with each other. With all those changes there has been concern that there hasn't been enough attention to polish and eliminating bugs in iOS. While it's not something explicitly stated, it's clear that iOS 9 does go back to basics in some ways, and focuses on improving performance and stability. There are still new features, and some of them are very integral to keeping iOS competitive as a mobile platform, but the key focus is on solidifying the existing foundations.
The polish and improvements that will be most obvious to the end user are those that involve visual or functional changes to the apps they use on a daily basis. With that in mind, it makes most sense to start off the review by taking a look at some of the general changes made to the UI and the system in iOS 9, so let's dive in.
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ama3654 - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
" In my view, the addition of multitasking just puts the iPad experience even farther ahead of other tablets. Obviously Windows has a similar implementation, but the unfortunate truth is that the Windows tablet market is almost non-existent at this point outside of the Surface lineup"I wonder why Samsung TouchWiz was not mentioned there as it has a much better multitasking multi-split implementation together with the S-Pen, and Samsung tablets represent a majority of Android tablets.
Morawka - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
The windows tablet market is the surface market. Surface is a billion dollar a year business now, and apple obviously is taking it personal because surface was able to grab so much attention. It is a huge threat to iPad, because of it's versatility. It makes iPad's look like $600 facebook/email machines when you have competitors running full blow photoshop and illustrator in a similar form factor. Display out, USB drive support, SD Camera Card Support, A File System so people can download and move around files between any machine, these are all things iOS can't do in it's current form, meanwhile android and windows can and will take all the prosumer market.Think of what it will look like in 5-6 years with intel core i7's are running at 5w TDP and can do without a fan. Apple devices are about to hit a brick wall in performance improvements because new nodes are 2-3 years away. I would say that this is the last 90% performance gain year over year generation claims. Apple so far has been lucky and has been getting a new node every year for the past 3 years.
next year ipads/iphones will maybe get 10-15% gains in Cpu/gpu unless they make the silicon really big which has lower yields. meanwhile intel surface will have skylake and kabylake and Nvidia might be able to do something incredible once it finally gets access to 16nm FF on their 5w K lineup
jmnugent - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
It's humorous how you believe Chip/Hardware advancements will benefit only 1 company (Microsoft). As if Apple,.. a company with such a respected history of hardware-design and innovation.. will just let itself fall behind on Chip-design. Hilarious.kspirit - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
They'll still use iOS on the iPad and not OSX so... yeah, Microsoft wins out on usability. Unless Apple outs a full-on laptop replacement. So until then your comment makes no sense.Matthmaroo - Wednesday, September 16, 2015 - link
Man you have totally missed his point.Chip design and os choice are totally different
OCedHrt - Thursday, September 17, 2015 - link
Considering that OS X runs on x86 and iOS doesn't, chip design and os chioce are not totally different. Of course they can port iOS to x86, but they have their work cut out for them.JeremyInNZ - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
porting iOS to x86 is simple. considering both OSX and iOS run on Darwin. In fact I suspect the iOS simulator that comes with XCode is running natively on x86.beggerking@yahoo.com - Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - link
Trust me, it's not simple nor efficient to emulate from risc To cisc or likewise.Not happening.period.
Kalpesh78 - Friday, September 25, 2015 - link
As usual, Apple will be late to that party as well.xype - Saturday, September 26, 2015 - link
If you think Apple doesn’t have iOS compiling and running on x86 I have a bridge to sell you. Big, red one, in San Francisco.You should read up on OS X, its transition to x86 and where iOS came from.