I’ve spent the final couple of many years writing about new options in Appleās working techniques. Tens of hundreds of phrases about new gadgets, massive and small, that improve the expertise of utilizing a Mac, iPhone, iPad, and different Apple gadgets. And but this previous weekend, I used to be reminded that the majority customers merely donāt discover new options, even once theyāve been obtainable for years.
In the event youāre studying this column proper now, youāre one of the vital well-educated individuals on the planet about Apple stuff. However your pals, household, co-workers, and acquaintances? They could by no means learn about flashy new operating-system options until you personally present them off. Itās one in all Appleās most vexing issues: protecting gadgets comparatively easy whereas additionally attempting to make complicated new options discoverable.
Lunch of discovery
My household spent the previous couple of days attending my daughterās faculty commencement. After a stroll round a cool Oregon neighborhood, my spouse and I dropped right into a bakery restaurant for lunch. The place was busy, and we discovered a desk and sat down, and waited for our order to reach. I set my iPhone 14 Professional down on the desk, and he or she gestured on the always-on lock display screen, gently ribbing me for utilizing nature footage on my lock display screen as an alternative of images of our kids.
I defined that the lock display screen is ready to shuffle between nature images in my library, primarily based on machine studying, and it shortly turned clear that sheād by no means tried to edit her lock display screen, a characteristic launched in iOS 16 final fall. (Additionally lacking from her lock display screen are one other banner characteristic of iOS 16, lock display screen widgets.)

Foundry
In the event you donāt learn web sites about Apple options, how are customers purported to intuit these modifications? To edit a lock display screen, it’s a must to lock your cellphone after which lengthy press on the lock display screenāa fairly unnatural sequence of occasions.
In iOS 17, Apple is introducing a brand new characteristic for app builders known as TipKit, which brings a unified means for all apps to supply useful recommendation about options their customers could not miss. Itās an amazing thought, however Apple itself appears to actually battle on the subject of getting customers to embrace new options.
Nevertheless it will get worse.
Face the music
As soon as I defined to her that she might actually create a lock display screen that shuffled amongst images of her youngsters, as recognized by machine studyingānot a set of pictures she chosen herselfāshe was enthusiastic. Sadly, my subsequent discovery was that Appleās shiny new characteristic was backed by a bunch of rickety applied sciences that couldnāt rise to the problem.
To do a Photograph Shuffle of individuals on the lock display screen, you choose their faces out of your Pictures Libraryāhowever my spouse had by no means spent any time within the Folks album within the Pictures app on her iPhone, merging faces collectively and assigning them names. (Why would she? The Folks album is buried on iPhone. Identify and face assignments donāt sync throughout a shared photograph library, so all of my work classifying faces on my Mac donāt lengthen to her.)
Worse, Photograph Shuffleās methodology of providing individuals to show seems totally damaged. It supplied my spouse a small variety of faces, most of whom have been utterly random and pretty unusual. Sheās obtained a whole lot, if not hundreds, of images of me and our children on her cellphone, and but we werenāt among the many faces supplied. And if the faces youāre in search of arenāt in Photograph Shuffleās very small record of choices, thereās no recourse. Youāre caught.
So, off to Pictures to spend 5 minutes doing a fast move by means of her photograph library to determine her relations by title, mark them as favorites, and clear issues up by merging duplicate entries collectively. Sadly, no matter course of gives the record of faces in Photograph Shuffle apparently doesnāt get up to date with any precedenceāafter I got here again to it on the finish of our lunch, not one of the relations had appeared in her Photograph Shuffle choices. A lot for that intelligent thought.
What number of apps?
The opposite factor I found at lunch was that, regardless of Appleās improvements in iOS options over the previous couple of years, my spouse remained set within the behaviors she had discovered when she began utilizing the iPhone. In different phrases, Apple made modifications to make the expertise higherāhowever they only by no means registered together with her.

IDG
Let me get particular: that is about apps. My spouse has pages and pages of apps on her residence display screen. Weāre at a marriage, and thereās an app it’s essential to obtain to contribute images to the comfortable couple. It will get downloaded and stays perpetually. Have to pay to park in a brand new metropolis? Obtain an app and hold it perpetually. They usuallyāre all getting tacked on to the top of the final web page of her residence display screen, perpetually.
(In actual fact, she complained that she hated dragging apps she truly needed all the best way from the final web page ahead onto the primary web page. I identified that she might now maintain the wiggling app with one finger whereas quickly swiping with one other as a way to shortly change pages, which blew her thoughtsāas a result of she was nonetheless following the previous conduct of dragging the app icon to the left facet of the display screen and ready for the web page to scroll. One other new characteristic she by no means knew about!)
Seems, she makes use of one or two pages of apps and searches for every part else. Sheās obtained just a few folders from again when she made an try to arrange her cellphone, however sooner or later, she gave up and went to look. I ended up deleting a number of pages of her residence display screen and displaying her how one can use App Library.
The reality is, her conductāa web page or two of key apps after which utilizing search to search out apps within the junk drawerāmight be the best way most individuals use their iPhones. Apple is aware of it, which is why they added App Library and stopped requiring individuals to place each app theyāve downloaded someplace on the house display screen. But when my spouse is any indication, that new characteristic simply by no means registered.
I donāt have any solutions right here. I acknowledge how laborious an issue it’s to make new iPhone options discoverable and the way laborious it’s to vary ingrained person conduct. The brand new TipKit APIs recommend that Apple continues to wrestle with the difficulty.
Within the meantime, Iāll hold writing (and Macworld will hold publishing) articles about what the brand new options are. And also you, pricey reader, will presumably share them together with your family and friends. As far as I can inform, we could also be one of the best ways Apple has of getting its message out.