iOS 18.1: imminent arrival with Apple Intelligence and a crucial improvement for the iPhone 16
iOS 18.1 was at the center of the news this Monday, October 21, 2024. American media like The Verge and the Wall Street Journal have in fact confirmed that the update will be made public next week. A statement that was made following the preview test of a new key function of the AirPods Pro 2: the hearing aid.
There “release candidate” of the update, i.e. the latest beta version before deployment, was also broadcast, thus sharing all the new features planned for the Apple firm's smartphones.
It all starts with Apple Intelligence reserved for iPhone 16 and iPhone 15 Pro (soon iPhone SE 4). A good part of the functionalities of this suite of tools announced during the WWDC 2024 will thus be available, such as rewriting and summarizing text, new Siri (without ChatGPT), advanced search and magic eraser in Photos. We won't forget the summary of notifications, automatic responses in Mail and Messages, the priority display of important emails in the inbox or even the summary of audio recordings in Notes.
iOS 18.1 will also bring call transcription in Notes up to iPhone XS. For the iPhone 16's Camera Control button, pressing will quickly switch to the front camera. Still on the photography side, the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max will support “spatial” photos.
To finish on the new features, this update will deploy the hearing aid functionality of AirPods Pro 2, unveiled during the September 2024 keynote. However, it will remain exclusive to the United States and Canada for the moment. Still on the health side, iOS 18.1 will also activate, jointly with watchOS 11.1, the sleep apnea detection feature of the latest Apple Watches.
Bug fixes and other improvements will also be included in iOS 18.1. The most important to us will be the bug fixes randomly restarting the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro, and blocking the unlocking or ignition of your vehicle “after restoring from a backup or direct transfer from another iPhone”.
Apple also emphasizes having added orders to its new Control Center, RCS Business, natural language understanding for searching applications on the App Store, as well as fixes for podcast playback and 4K 60 fps video recording.
