MacRumors

With iOS 15, Apple is introducing more granular control over the people and places that show up in your Photos Memories, letting you fine tune just who makes random appearances in the ‌Photos‌ app and the ‌Photos‌ widget.

You've already been able to select "Suggest Fewer Memories Like This" when viewing a memory in the "For You" section of ‌Photos‌ or remove a photo from photo suggestions entirely, but now you can choose to feature a specific person less often.

When viewing the For You section of the ‌Photos‌ app, you can long press on an image with a person and select the "Feature This Person Less," option to prevent that person from popping up as often. The Remove From Featured ‌Photos‌ option prevents a specific photo from reappearing.

These new controls for better managing what shows up as a featured image will come in handy when an unpleasant memory pops up, perhaps one featuring an ex-partner or a place that has a negative association.

Over the years, people have complained about the Memories feature in the ‌Photos‌ app and some of the people that it opts to feature.

The prior "Suggest Fewer Memories Like This" option that was available in iOS 14 for memory slideshows has been renamed "Feature Less," and you can select specific people, dates, and places to feature less often in Memories.

It's also worth noting that in a memory slideshow that Apple suggests, you can also now tap on the grid button on toolbar to enter into a view that shows you all of the photos at once. Just long press on it to get a "Hide from Memory" option that makes it disappear.

These new features are available in the ‌Photos‌ app in the current iOS 15 beta. iOS 15 will be in beta testing for several months, with a launch to come in the fall.

iPadOS 15 includes most of the new changes that were introduced in iOS 15, but there are also some iPad-specific features designed specifically for Apple's larger-screened iOS devices. One of these new features is an update to multitasking, which we've highlighted in our latest YouTube video.

Multitasking can be done the same way as it was before, but there's also a new multitasking menu that streamlines the multitasking experience, offering quick-tap options for entering into Split View or Slide Over with two apps. In the App Switcher view, you can also get into a quick Split View mode by dragging one app's window onto another, which is handy.

Apple also added a "Shelf" feature for managing multiple windows of the same app, so if you have multiple Safari windows, you can use the Shelf to swap between them for multitasking purposes.

There are multiple keyboard shortcuts that are available for multitasking to make it easier to swap between windows without your fingers having to leave the keys. Many of the shortcuts use the Globe key on an attached keyboard.

These new multitasking features will take some time to get used to, but overall this seems to make multitasking more intuitive to use. Have you tried iPadOS 15? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Additional signs of the Beats Studio Buds are continuing to pop up ahead of their release, with new images and details found in a Taiwan's NCC (National Communications Commission) database.

We've already seen multiple pictures of the Beats Studio Buds, which feature a wire-free in-ear stemless design that sets them apart from prior Beats headphones and the AirPods. The database photos give us some insight into size.

The Beats Studio Buds fit into the ear and feature silicone tips, and there's likely to be multiple size options available to ensure a snug fit. There's a small body that houses electronics, with a Beats logo visible.

For charging purposes, the Beats Studio Buds come with an oval-shaped charging case made from matching plastic material. The photos have all featured black Beats Studio Buds and a black case, but there will be white and red versions available too, presumably with matching cases.

The Beats Studio Buds use a USB-C cable for charging, according to the database, which means there's a USB-C port on the case rather than a Lightning port. So far, AirPods and past Beats headphones like the Powerbeats Pro have charged over Lightning, so this could signal a further shift to USB-C.

The design of the Beats Studio Buds has sparked interest because it is similar to the rumored design of the AirPods Pro 2, which are expected later this year. The next-generation AirPods Pro are rumored to have a compact, rounded design that's also stemless, which sounds a lot like the new Beats.

There is no word yet on when the Beats Studio Buds might launch, but they've already been spotted out in the wild in the ears of various athletes like LeBron James, so Apple may be planning to release them soon.

Apple will make Podcasts subscription options available starting on Tuesday, June 15, Apple said today in an email that was sent out to podcasters (via The Verge).

Support for Podcasts Subscriptions was introduced with the iOS 14.6 update, but in late May after releasing the update Apple said that the rollout of the feature would be delayed until June to make sure that the "best experience" is being provided to creators and listeners.

Podcast Subscriptions were first announced at Apple's April event and will see podcast creators able to offer paid subscription options with access to exclusive content, ad-free listening, and other perks.

Apple likely delayed the subscription feature because Podcast app users have been unhappy with the changes that were implemented in an iOS 14.5 update. There were multiple complaints about the usability of the app, which Apple began to address in iOS 14.6. When delaying the Podcast Subscriptions launch, Apple said that further improvements to the Podcasts app are in the works.

International Day of Yoga takes place on Monday, June 21, and Apple is celebrating with a new Activity Challenge that will let Apple Watch users earn a new yoga badge and a set of animated yoga stickers.

Earn this award inspired by the International Day of Yoga. On June 21, do a yoga workout of 20 minutes or more. Record your time with any app that adds workouts to Health.

To earn the award, Apple Watch users will need to complete a yoga workout that lasts for 20 minutes or more on June 21. The award for completing the challenge looks similar to the award provided for past Yoga Day challenges, and there are several sticker options for various yoga poses like tree pose, crow pose, and warrior 2 to side angle.

Apple holds Activity Challenges for various holidays and events throughout the year, and began offering awards for International Day of Yoga in 2019.

Any yoga workout will fulfill the requirement, so long as you select the yoga workout type from the Workout app on the Apple Watch or use an app that adds yoga workouts to the Health app. Apple's Fitness+ service, available for $9.99 per month, offers built-in yoga workouts that you can do.

While there are many great new features in macOS Monterey, several of them are not available on Intel-based Macs, according to Apple.

On the macOS Monterey features page, fine print indicates that the following features require a Mac with the M1 chip, including any MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac model released since November 2020:

• Portrait Mode blurred backgrounds in FaceTime videos
• Live Text for copying and pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos
• An interactive 3D globe of Earth in the Maps app
• More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London in the Maps app
• Text-to-speech in more languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish
• On-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline
• Unlimited keyboard dictation (previously limited to 60 seconds per instance)

Apple has not explained why any of these features are not available on Intel-based Macs. For what it's worth, Google Earth has long offered an interactive 3D globe of the Earth on Intel-based Macs both on the web and in an app.

Apple is currently in the midst of a two-year transition from Intel processors to its custom Apple silicon chips in Macs, with the changeover slated to be completed by WWDC 2022. Macs with the M1 chip have proven to be much faster than their equivalent Intel-based predecessors, with even the base model MacBook Air with the M1 chip outperforming a maxed-out Intel-based 16-inch MacBook Pro in benchmarks.

Apple is widely rumored to be planning redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models powered by a faster iteration of the M1 chip for later this year.

macOS Monterey is still compatible with a wide variety of Intel-based Macs, and is available now in beta for developers. The software update will likely be publicly released to all users at some point between September and November.

Update: According to Rene Ritchie, Intel-based Macs lack the Neural Engine that many if not all of these features require.

Before WWDC, rumors largely driven by leaker Jon Prosser suggested that Apple would announce redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros during the conference. Those rumors, however, did not come to fruition. Interestingly, though, Apple lists "m1x MacBook Pro" as a tag for the WWDC keynote uploaded on YouTube.

The tag, first spotted by Apple YouTuber Max Balzer on Twitter, is among other tags Apple has added to the video, including iOS 15, M1X, iOS, developers conference, and more. Apple released the M1 Apple silicon chip in November, and speculation has suggested that the next chip, expected in the redesigned MacBook Pros, would be called "m1x."

The inclusion of the tag, while not totally indicative, may suggest that Apple does plan to call the upcoming chip "m1x," or, more likely, is simply using the rumor mill as a way to bump up the WWDC keynote in YouTube search results. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has stated that the new MacBook Pros could debut as soon as early this summer.

Apple announced macOS Monterey this week, and one small but convenient feature that went unmentioned during the WWDC keynote is automatic window resizing.

As explained on the macOS Monterey features page, windows now automatically resize when they are moved from a Mac's built-in display to a secondary display, including an external monitor, another Mac, or an iPad using Sidecar.

This feature should prove to be particularly useful when moving windows between a smaller MacBook display and a larger external monitor.

Another new window management feature in macOS Monterey is the option to display the menu bar at all times when an app is in full-screen mode, making it easy to view an app's various menus and other glanceable information at any time.

macOS Monterey is available now in beta for developers, with a public release likely to occur at some point between September and November.

In iOS 15 and macOS Monterey betas, Apple has quietly included a new audio feature called "Spatialize Stereo" that takes any non-Dolby stereo mix and creates a virtual spatial audio environment out of it.

The addition was first discovered by a Reddit user, who had this to say about it:

I assumed that if they ever did this it would warrant at the very least a mention in a Keynote, but unless I completely missed it today I don't think they said anything about it!

The greatest thing about this is that it supports EVERY audio track. Sure I'd pick Atmos Spatial Audio mixes over Spatialized Stereo every time, but for the moment there are only a dozen or so options for Atmos available on Apple Music, so this is such an amazing feature to have!

It's worth reiterating that Spatialize Stereo is different from Spatial Audio, which Apple brought to Apple Music subscribers earlier this week. Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos creates a three-dimensional experience by moving sound all around you.

Spatialize Stereo meanwhile appears to be Apple's attempt to simulate the effect of having sound coming at you from different directions in a virtual environment. It doesn't utilize Dolby Atmos, but on the other hand it works with basically any content, although you do need AirPods Pro or AirPods Max headphones to access it. Here's how it works in the latest iOS 15 beta:

1. Connect your AirPods Pro or AirPods Max to your iPhone or iPad.
2. Play some non-Dolby audio content on your iOS device.
3. Bring up the Control Center.
4. Long press on the volume slider.
5. Tap the Spatialize Stereo button to enable it.

The same option can be found in macOS Monterey in the Control Center's Sound pane. In terms of sound quality, your mileage may vary, but it at least allows users to enjoy some of the benefits of spatialized sound on anything they listen to, and not just content that officially supports Spatial Audio. If you've been able to compare the two different modes, let us know what you think in the comments.

Apple this week released the first iOS 15 beta to developers, and away from the brouhaha surrounding its many tentpole features, many notable tweaks and improvements are continuing to be uncovered. Here, we've pulled out a few that we think are worth highlighting.

Bear in mind that Apple hasn't mentioned all of these changes in its iOS 15 marketing, and there's no guarantee that they'll make the final cut when iOS 15 is released to the public in the fall.

Original Wheel Picker Returns

In iOS 14, Apple removed the original large wheel-style dial picker used for selecting times, and replaced it with a smaller dial picker that's sort of hidden behind a boxed number input field. This new design was supposed to unify the two selection modes, but it also made it somewhat slower to wheel through numbers.

Happily, iOS 15 sees the return of the larger dial picker, but with a neater, more modern design. You can also tap the wheel to input digits with the number pad, so it basically retains the added functionality of the less-coveted version seen in iOS 14.

Custom Text Size Per App

In iOS 14, you can add a button to the Control Center that allows you to change the text size on the screen on the fly. Any change that you make is reflected systemwide regardless of your preference, but in iOS 15 that's no longer the case.

Bring up the Text Size selector in Control Center, and you'll see new options to apply the text size adjustment to the system, or just the app that's currently open. iOS 15 will also remember your selection, so you can exit out of the app to do something else and then return to it with your chosen text size for that particular app intact.

Text Selection Magnifier Returns

After its removal in iOS 13, Apple has reintroduced a new version of the magnifying glass for text selection. The new magnifier is a little smaller than the original one, but the fact that it has reappeared is likely to be welcomed.

From a user perspective, removing the loupe felt like an odd decision on Apple's part, as it makes it harder to see where the cursor is situated under your finger. Fortunately, this tweak is likely to stay, since Apple lists it as a feature on its iOS 15 page.

Drag Apps From Spotlight to Home Screen

In iOS 14, the functionality of app icons that appear in Siri Suggestions and Spotlight search results is limited to opening the app. In iOS 15, however, it's possible to drag an app from Spotlight and place it right onto the Home Screen, which means you no longer need to continually drag app icons between ‌Home Screen‌ pages to rearrange them.

You can also now directly delete apps from within Spotlight via a long-press Quick Action that wasn't available in previous versions of iOS, meaning you can make short work of any apps that have lain forgotten in your App Library.

HBO Max has updated its Apple TV app to fix problems with its video playback interface that came to the fore last week following its introduction of a custom video player.

The new update reinstates the native tvOS video player UI, which means users should no longer face the issues with fast-forwarding and rewinding video that the custom player was seemingly responsible for.

"We just released an update to our ‌Apple TV‌ app, restoring the native tvOS video playback experience you know and love, with more improvements to come," HBO Max announced in a tweet. "Ensuring HBO Max viewers have a quality experience is our top priority and we missed the mark here. Thank you for your patience."

As pointed out by The Verge, some users on the HBO Max subreddit are still reporting some other issues to do with subtitles and thumbnail previews after updating, but the general consensus is that reverting to the native video player interface has made the app a lot more responsive to ‌Apple TV‌ Siri Remote inputs.

A shortage of mini-LED components has reportedly been the cause of delays to the production of the redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, according to a published report today by DigiTimes.

Yesterday, ‌DigiTimes‌ provided a snippet of today's reporting outlining that shipments of the redesigned Apple silicon MacBook Pros are forecasted to begin in the third quarter of the year. According to the full report published today, Apple had planned to produce these new MacBook Pros in the second quarter of 2021, but a shortage of mini-LED display components forced it to push it into the next quarter.

The sources revealed that Apple originally planned to mass-produce the two notebooks in the second quarter, but has pushed the schedule back due to the weaker-than-expected yield rates for miniLED modules.

Apple on Monday held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, and despite some rumors suggesting the new MacBook Pros could be announced, no hardware at all debuted during the event. Reliable Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman continues to report that these new MacBook Pros could launch as soon as early this summer.

The redesigned MacBook Pros are expected to come in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes and will feature an Apple silicon chip with improved performance and energy efficiency over the M1, announced this past November. They'll also feature updated designs, including removing the Touch Bar, more squared-off edges, and a mini-LED display which recently launched in the ‌M1‌ 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Apple on Monday previewed iOS 15 as the next major update to iOS, and already, despite the new software being in the hands of developers for just a few days, a plethora of hidden features continue to be discovered. One new hidden tweak is a change in behavior in the App Store, where now screenshots for already installed apps are hidden in ‌App Store‌ search results.

The new change, spotted on Twitter, will make it easier for users to discover new or currently uninstalled apps on their device. Previously, all apps would display their screenshots inline within the ‌App Store‌ search page. On iOS 15, that's been changed only to show the app name, icon, and "Open" button for installed apps. As a result, apps that were previously only seen by scrolling are now visible right away due to the new compact format.

iOS 15 includes several noteworthy features, including completely redesigned notifications, a new Focus mode, improvements to Maps, significant new FaceTime features, and more. Learn more about everything new in iOS 15 using our guide.

Major camera upgrades coming to the iPhone 13 series are putting increased pressure on suppliers to meet Apple's demand for key lens components, according to a new DigiTimes report.

Apple has reportedly put Taiwan-based makers of voice coil motor (VCM) components on notice to increase their capacity by 30-40% in order to meet the company's demand, which is expected to outstrip the entire Android market this year.

The sources pointed out that the next-generation iPhones are expected to have upgrades in camera modules and 3D sensors for Face ID, resulting in increasing use of VCMs, said the sources adding that Apple has also asked related component suppliers to increase their capacities by 30-40% in order to meet its demand.

Apple's order pull-ins for VCMs are expected to turn strong as soon as this month and begin surging in July. Meanwhile, the reduced demand from Android makers for VCMs is partly due to the impact of Huawei's US-imposed sanctions. That said, successive iPhone models have required more and more VCM components, which are involved in camera lens focus functions, because Apple keeps increasing the number and quality of lenses in its camera modules.

This year, Apple is expected to make several notable camera improvements in the iPhone 13. The new "Pro" models are likely to feature an upgraded Ultra Wide camera lens with a wider f/1.8 aperture and a six-element lens, with some rumors suggesting that the Ultra Wide upgrade could come to all four iPhone 13 models.

Sensor-shift stabilization is expected to be expanded across the entire iPhone lineup, introducing improvements in low light performance and stabilization by reducing camera shake, with the feature rumored to be available for the Wide lens and the Ultra Wide lens of the Pro models. One rumor claims the new iPhone models will also be able to take Portrait Mode videos.

In addition, there are also claims that the iPhone 13 models will have astrophotography camera capabilities for capturing the sky. This could involve a special mode that activates when the iPhone is pointed at the sky, allowing the device to detect the moon, stars, and other artifacts and adjust exposure.

If the rumors are accurate, all of these improvements are likely to require a slightly larger camera bump, although individual lenses may protrude less from the device's body, according to one source.

Apple's iPhone 13 lineup will be unveiled in the fall of 2021, with the company likely aiming to return to its traditional September launch timeline.

Apple's new iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey software updates unveiled this week introduce the ability to capture and save the last 15 seconds of gameplay at any time by long pressing a designated button on a supported game controller.

Instead of having to remember to start and stop a screen recording while playing a game, this optional new feature allows iPhone, iPad, and Mac users to capture 15-second highlight videos by simply long pressing the Share (or Create) button on a supported game controller, such as the Xbox Series X/S controller or the PS5 DualSense controller.

Apple describes the feature as "an awesome way to let gamers capture a great boss battle, an amazing combo move, or an epic fail."

This is just one of many small but useful new features added in Apple's latest software updates. iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey are available now in beta for developers and will be publicly released in the fall.

Apple's watchOS 8 updates often come with new watch faces, but this year, Apple only announced a single watch face for Portrait Mode photos. There may be another in the works, however, as an unreleased "World Timer" watch face was spotted in a UIKit developer session.

There were no details provided on this watch face, and it was accidentally pictured in a slide with multiple other iPhone screenshots.

The analog watch face has a world map with a 24-hour clock that has the names of major cities around it, allowing users to determine the current time in different worldwide time zones.

Design wise, the World Timer watch face is similar to some high-end watches that offer multiple time zone functionality, and it's also somewhat similar to the GMT watch face that lets you track two time zones.

The World Timer watch face is not in watchOS 8 at the current time, so unless it was scrapped, it's something that Apple could be planning to add in a later beta update.