2 days Ago
Updated March 30 with more details of what’s coming. The next big Apple iPhone update is iOS 18.4, with new Apple Intelligence features—though no giant leap for Siri, which made its own headlines recently.
There are also new emoji (including one you’ll surely need ) and a new Vision Pro app . It now looks like it’s coming a week earlier than expected. Details and new release date, below and there’s a new report which chimes with my notes below.
Apple iOS 18.4 is coming to iPhones imminently. That new report comes from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg in his latest Power On newsletter .
In it, he comments that the latest beta versions of iOS 18.4, alongside beta releases for the iPad, Vision Pro, Apple TV, Mac and Apple Watch, have all just landed and “they’re seen as release candidates (meaning they’re close to being ready for customers). As is usually the case with these nearly finished updates, there are few visible changes from earlier betas.
But they do represent fairly big upgrades from the past public releases,” Gurman says. He then talks about what’s coming, and hits on several of the points I’ve focused on as well, as you’ll read below. “For iOS, the enhancements include the ability to see priority notifications in your lock screen and a new food section in News+.
Apple Intelligence will work in several new languages, and there are additional music options in the Control Center,” he explains. He also notes that the Mac and iPad will gain the Apple Intelligence features for the Mail app already found on the iPhone 16 series, for instance. Gurman doesn’t specify the date, though the fact that he’s writing about iOS 18.
4 now might suggest that it’ll be out before his next newsletter in a week’s time. While we may yearn for all-new Siri now, there are other features to be getting on with, such as priority notifications which sorts through stuff to bring the important notifications to your attention. Apple’s just-published release notes tell us a new style is coming to Image Playground, called Sketch, to go with Animation and Illustration: more ways to let your imagination take flight.
And, in a very big deal for Apple Intelligence, it’ll be supported with eight more languages including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Plus, English for speakers in India and Singapore. As before, Apple Intelligence is only for iPhone 16 models, including iPhone 16e, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
If you have an Apple Vision Pro, the iPhone will download this new app automatically, designed to help you find new content or access details about your headset. Tweaks to the Photos app will see new ways to order items, new filters so you can show or hide items in the Library view, and options for sorting albums. You can also disable recently viewed items.
If you’re a News+ subscriber, there’ll be a big emphasis on food, with recipes from multiple publishers, additions to the Food section for stories about restaurants, kitchen tips and more. The release notes also tell us there’ll be improvements to Safari’s recent search suggestions. Parents will find setup up for a Child Account is more streamlined, and kids clever enough to uninstall and reinstall an app to circumvent Screen Time limits will find this loophole has been closed.
You’ll be able to pause an app download in the App Store and Ambient Music is now accessible directly from Control Center. There’s more, including updates for AirPods Max with USB-C. Apple had dropped hints about the release date, so we knew early April was on the cards.
The arrival of a second Release Candidate beta on March 28 suggests Apple has got ahead of itself and it will be sooner that we thought. It looks like it will be Tuesday, April 1 at 10 a.m.
Pacific. But Apple has recently taken to releasing software on a Monday so I think Monday, March 31, though less likely, just might be a possibility, too. Not long now.
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