Five Ways iOS 12 Changes Everything

Apple’s still-in-beta mobile OS is already familiar and very, very smart

You won’t instantly recognize an iPhone running iOS 12.

For those upgrading when iOS ships this fall, there’ll be some “who moved my cheese?” moments, but iOS 12 is not a radical departure from iOS 11, it’s a features and performance update.

The changes are, as we learned in June at Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, sprinkled throughout the decade-plus-old operating system. Many of them are infused with Apple’s new secret sauce, local Machine Learning (ML); throughout the platform are new For You tabs that serve up curated information, actions and content based on your interests, activities and contacts.

With, I think, weeks left before iOS 12 lands on millions of iPhones, I wanted to take a closer look at some of the more interesting and meaningful changes to the venerable mobile platform.

The Age of Discovery

In the early days of the iPhone, I used the rapid scroll to find a particular photo, hoping my ability to scan through hundreds of scrolling images would result in a jackpot find. The more photos I had, the less this worked.