As this will inevitably come up! What do you think is good, what do you think is bad, and what cool hidden features have you found?
I like the new groceries feature.
I don’t like that the lock screen can still only have one row of widgets.
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I thought you’d never ask!
My top 3:
- Voice control finally works for me.
- Simultaneous dictation and keyboard editing hits the iPad, yay!
- Autocorrection is far more help than hindrance.
I also like how I can change the volume using Siri on my AirPods Pro and it doesn’t go silent.
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I turned that off a while ago.
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Finding my apple TV remote is the best feature 
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Had been eagerly waiting Pets being part of the people identification and it just works!
A feature I was surprised by was suddenly getting dynamic island notifications for when my Apple Watch unlocks my phone.
Also pleasantly surprised by the UI tweaks in spotlight
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Passkey support for third-party vendors, like 1Password 
(I don’t like that my perfectly fine iPhone X does not get iOS 17, forcing me to buy new hardware)
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I agree regarding the widgets. Give me two rows! But - I like StandBy mode (currently vacillating between old-school alarm clock look and the widgets. I do wish that I could delete the photos piece in the middle). Siri seems to finally “get” what I am saying, and that is a huge win right there. Additionally, the fact that I can run Shortcuts on the iPad and iPhone Lock Screen (I have iA Writer launch into a new document using Shortcuts there). This is a quality of life and improvement year, and I will take it.
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I didn’t run the beta so the first thing I tried was Health on the iPad. +1
I’ll probably never use contact posters or namedrop. And I immediately turned off the option to say just say “Siri” - I get plenty of false activations from my HomePods that still require “Hey Siri”, thank you very much.
I plan to spend the next few days watching videos and deciding what new features might be useful.
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The new Standby function is a pure bit of Apple genius. The level of care and execution they’ve taken for something seemingly so simple is worthy of the name Apple.
For example: in night mode, text messages show up in dark mode and in a large font so you can read them when you’re in bed without moving. Genius.
I’m very intrigued by “iPhone widgets on your Mac desktop” but haven’t tried it yet. Have Apple finally provided a weird convoluted solution to my desire to have a permanent notification panel on Mac??
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I’ve been using the new widgets for Fantastical and Things, and I’m really enjoying the experience.
I’m also really impressed with the autocorrect. I know some don’t like it but it really helps me type on iPadOS.
Upgraded my iPhone 14 to iOS 17 this morning. Can’t say I’ve noticed a lot of difference other than a “Recents” section in the Clock app’s Timer section and greater mental health items in the Health App.
All my regular apps work but that’s really only a bunch of weather apps — OpenWeather, Apple Weather, MetOffice, and BBC Weather —, a third-party GPS tracker. which will be replaced when my Wacth 9 arrives over the weekend, Dropbox as I use it for the GPS tracker and Scrivener, and therefore Scrivener.
No games, precious few other apps because as a general rule I do not use app-ified web sites; other than the weather ones mentioned above.
So far the bad for me is that the Calendars app doesn’t have access to calendars and doesn’t show up as an app that requested access to calendars so I can’t approve it. Means I have no events on my phone anymore.
If you should ever need one more, try my favorite weather app/website (free or paid) https://www.windy.com/
I want to like it, but the fact that the phone needs to be on its side makes it unusable for me with a normal wire charger.
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Well after restarting a few times and removing/adding accounts again the calendars are back. Everything else seems to work fine.
One thing I have now noticed having upgraded my iPad to iPadOS 17 (principally to have an alternate view on the Health App’s data) is how abominably slow the propagation of data between iPhone to iPad Health apps. It can take iOS’s versin several minutes to add “Flights Climbed” data to its own database let along squirt it across ti the iPad copy.
EDIT: Took the iPhone over 10 minutes to post the flights climbed data to itself. 20 minutes on the iPad version still has not been updated though it claims that an earlier entry for today was posted to the iPad at the same time as the iPhone version; clearly was not.
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The Standby feature would be much more useful on an iPad IMO. Why limit it to the smallest screen most of us possess?
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I agree. But the iPad always seems to get hand-me-down features.
So far I am happiest with the addition of “toggle cell plan” action in shortcuts. It’s only a minor inconvenience to have to be alerted by due to turn on/off my business line during business hours, but nice to have one less thing to have to think about.
I have also set up an automation to toggle cellular data on/off when connected to WiFi to save battery usage.
Well I updated and the cell connection won’t work. Apple support were more interested that I not leave a bad review of them than helping me beyond some scripted set of answers they had. I don’t believe it is a hardware issue but the best I could achieve was a apple store appointment. Will let you guys know the upshot.
Frankly at the moment I am on Apple because the devices are robust and work well mostly. I grant that, otherwise though it is because of DEVONthink 3 and one or two other apps. I was really interested in any new feature on ios17 or recent Mac updates, I update because of security and stability issues. I would be quite happy myself had Apple still been on the os systems they were 3 years ago. I could do everything I really need back then with no IT bottlenecks. I appreciate other people have more power hungry jobs than mine, which is nearly all text based. Well I could actually still run the math crunching I used to do on a quite low grade Mac now.
My wife and I estimated that maybe over the last three years I spent 4000 $ more than I really needed on hard ware. It is too much, even for a Mac fanboi. I can afford it but it could have gone elsewhere, St Jude’s even? or to a campaign for universal helath care of the standard St Jude’s supplies…