I was one of the lucky few to snag an iPhone 14 Pro Max on launch day. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t around to take the delivery — we were on the road to my cousin’s wedding when UPS tried to deliver it. I rerouted the UPS shipment to a UPS store near our house.
Monday about 12:10pm… I received a notification from UPS that they had dropped my phone off at the UPS Store. The planets had aligned, as I had just finished a meeting and was ready to eat lunch. I bounded off to the UPS Store to pick up the phone. I walked in and the lady seemed confused.
“When did you get the notification?” she asked while poking around on the keyboard.
“About 10 minutes ago.”
This woman had the nerve to look me in the eye and say, “We just got a lot of boxes from the truck, but haven’t had time to scan them. Can you come back in 30 minutes?”
I mustered the most stern, yet pleading face I could. “No.”
She sighed and went to the back and spent about 5 minutes to find my phone.
Finally, it was mine.
Behold, a gold iPhone 14 Pro Max in its box.
I went with a gold iPhone 14 Pro Max with 1 terabyte. I was upgrading from an iPhone 12 Pro Max 512gb, and I was down to about 100gb free on the phone. I wanted to have plenty of space to shoot massive videos in case my wife continues to produce content for her Facebook reels or YouTube channel.
Again, I was quite lucky in that the transfer from the old phone to this new one was seamless and trouble-free. It took about 45 minutes to transfer and moving the phone number was easy.
I’ve had two days to play with the phone and I thought I’d jot down a few of the pleasant discoveries of iOS16 that I don’t recall many people discussing.
Recently Deleted Items in iMessage
I saw a lot of people remark about the ability to edit messages and unsend in iMessage. But I didn’t see anyone talk about deleting a thread. Turns out, when you delete a message in iMessage now, it will put the thread in a trash bin for 30 days. If you’re not aware of this, it could be privacy-impacting. I’ll bet this will bite a few people who think they’re hiding messages from a significant other. This also has some ramifications for court cases.
A new todo if you’re trying to be bad
Haptic Feedback When Typing
I tried it and it was nice. You can set your phone to give you a little haptic tap every time you type on the keyboard. It’s nice. It makes the phone feel a little more tactile. You can enable this in Settings → Sounds & Haptics → Keyboard.
One warning though — Apple warned that your battery life could suffer. Battery life is pretty important to me so I switched this one back off. I do miss it, though.
Better Smart List Options for Notes
I am constantly looking for a better way to do work and take notes. I’m trying to make Apple Notes my second brain, and remember to use it to jot things down more often.
But sorting through that pile of mess can be painful. I think of notes and reminders and tasks as “threads” that need to come up in my life by date. I was trying to use the app Agenda to accomplish this, but it was becoming troublesome to maintain the proper tags and menu clicks to keep the threads in motion. I gave up.
Please, someone smarter than me figure out a good workflow from this.
I’m back on Apple Notes now and was quite relieved to see that there’s a plethora of new options for smart lists in Apple Notes. It seems like that you can create a nice workflow for Apple Notes using tags and filters to keep relevant notes in flight as you work. I’m going to play with this some more and see if I can make a nice workflow that I could someday write an article about.
These new smart list filters do not work on Monterey. If you turn them on before loading Ventura, the smart list will show up in your Monterey Notes app (or the iPad pre-iPadOS 16.1) in gray and you’ll not be able to use it until your other OS’s are on par with the 16.x line.
Chime for Startup
You can now visit Settings → Accessibility Options → Audio/Visual → Power On & Off Sounds to make your iPhone chime when it shuts down and starts back up. This seems super useful.
The Lock Screens are Bad Ass
The new lock screens are just amazing. I wish you could move the widget blocks around, but for now all you can do is manage three widgets in the same box and maybe apply a color filter. I applied a gold filter to this lock screen to match the hue of the new phone.
Yes, I just brought this up so I can show off my gorgeous wife
Other Items of Interest
A few other fun points of interest that I’ve found over the last few days while playing around:
- The voice dictation in iOS16 is much better.
- The home automation stuff is much, much more responsive and reactive. Siri actually seems to have vast improvements for me.
- watchOS 9 allows you to edit the watch faces on the watch itself now. I found this out by accident. Try it!
Have you found anything cool that no one is talking about in iOS16? Drop a comment below and let’s look forward to even newer stuff in a few weeks.