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IOS Iphone Operating Systems Software Apple Hardware Technology

iOS 11 Released (theverge.com) 139

Posted by BeauHD from the fresh-coat-of-paint dept.
Today, Apple released the final version of iOS 11, its latest mobile operating system. If you have an iPhone or iPad that was released within the last few years, you should be able to download the new update if you navigate to the Settings panel and check for a software update under the General tab. The Verge reports: OS 11, first unveiled in detail back at Apple's WWDC in June, is the same incremental annual refresh we've come to expect from the company, but it hides some impressive complexity under the surface. Not only does it add some neat features to iOS for the first time, like ARKit capabilities for augmented reality and a new Files app, but it also comes with much-needed improvements to Siri; screenshot capture and editing; and the Control Center, which is now more fully featured and customizable. For iPads, iOS 11 is more of an overhaul. The software now better supports multitasking so you can more easily bring two apps into split-screen mode, or even add a third now. The new drag-and-drop features are also much more powerful on iPad, letting you manage stuff in the Files app more intuitively and even letting you drag and drop photos and text from one app to another.
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iOS 11 Released More

iOS 11 Released

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  • Or escaped??

  • Features removed, Fing neutered (Score:3, Interesting)

    by m0gely ( 1554053 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @06:56PM (#55228241)
    I use Fing quite a bit for quick network scans. It's super useful because it identifies a large number of devices by brand. It does this by using MAC addresses. I got a notification in the app that with ios11 it would lose this capability as MAC addresses are no longer available for apps to see. The OS doesn't allow it. I remember when you could scan wifi channels with iOS. I like iPhones but I guess they just want normal people using the device, and not professionals who use it as a tool as well. Fing mentioned they will use other methods available to supplement the old method, but to expect it not to be as accurate.
    • WiFi / network scanning are one of the only things I've ever missed when using an iPhone. I guess Apple considers it somewhat suspicious behavior, things that hackers and all that lot would do.

    • Re:Features removed, Fing neutered (Score:5, Informative)

      by Yaztromo ( 655250 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:29PM (#55228389) Homepage Journal

      I use Fing quite a bit for quick network scans. It's super useful because it identifies a large number of devices by brand. It does this by using MAC addresses.

      Unfortunately, allowing apps to access your MAC address gives them a unique device identifier that can be sent over the network and used for tracking. Apple has removed this tracking vector. It sounds like Fing found the one useful non-tracking use for MAC addresses, and it got caught up in the security improvements.

      Yaz

      • The operators now own all the tracking... this is not about privacy its about control

        Network/Carriers simply inject cookies for advertising if they own media assets
        (https://www.accessnow.org/verizon-fined-1-35-million-use-supercookies/)

        The real problem is that Mobile network Operators can decrypt the streams via the MITM after all they own the Certificate authorities and can sign on the fly (its so bad that even advertisers had to ban some from their browsers)

        EV certificates are not the answer IMHO :
        https:

      • Unfortunately, allowing apps to access your MAC address

        But why should Apple decide what gets allowed on "my" device? I mean I get to decide if an App is able to see my exact location for tracking purposes but I'm not able to decide if it has access to this significantly less invasive tracking method?

        • The nicest way of doing this would be to add a permission to see MAC addresses. The problem is then explaining this to most end users. If you have too many permissions, users get into the habit of simply approving all of the ones that they don't understand. Given the ratio of apps that use the MAC address for useful-to-the-user purposes vs apps that use the MAC address for spying on the user, I can't immediately think of a way of doing this that would work well.

          • The problem is then explaining this to most end users.

            "This is dangerous, do not accept this permission unless you really know what you're doing". Is a good way to start. People who go ahead anyway don't give a crap about their own system, and likely privacy and security as well. It shouldn't be up to Apple to deal with the truly stupid at the expense of functionality. If we keep going the iPhone XIV will replace the entire screen with a single big button with a label "push here if you're drooling from the mouth because your brain has ceased functioning". At

        • I agree that it would be nice if this could be turned off on a per-app basis, but suggesting it's less invasive isn't correct, given the existence of international databases that provide locations for the vast majority of hotspots that can be observed by a car driving around. When news broke a few months back that apps were using MAC addresses to geolocate users who had location tracking turned off, a few links started circulating that would let you punch in the name of your hotspot and then would show it t

          • Perhaps they could make MAC addresses available if the user allows location tracking? Seems like that would be the reasonable compromise.

            I don't think that idea is workable. Locations are needed by lots of legitimate applications, and tracking is then not controllable separate from this.
            I would say tie it to a developer mode, like location forging is in Android. Users need to purposefully enable developer mode and make that complicated enough and you weed out the stupid and leave only the ones who know what they are doing, or those incredibly committed to breaking their own privacy.

    • Go find an old iPhone (you can find the 4S for $20), leave Fing and the other edge case programs on it and use as needed. OF COURSE there are going be winners and losers with significant structural changes. But the vast majority of the Apple universe would thing that Fing was some marginally obscene gesture that their kids picked up from junior high.

    • MAC addresses of other devices on the network?
      Or its own MAC address?

    • My son just tested his, it scans the MAC addresses themselves fine, it just doesn't auto-detect the device brand or hostname; you get "generic". You could cross reference the brand from a mac-vendor list website, but it seems to scan MAC addresses themselves. You just won't get any further info about the devices it finds.

  • How long until Apple collapses into a heap of the past?

    tbh their mistakes aren't much worse than Microsoft's or Ubuntu's though, so maybe they'll keep going for a while.

    • You need to post options.

      But, they are literally sitting on a pile of cash larger than the money the US government just wasted on the US military in budget increases this year.

      So ... never.

    • Type AAPL in to google and click "5 years" or "max" to have an idea of when Apple will be collapsing in to a heap of the past...

    • People are still buying it, I don't see anything out there to dethrone them.

      Sure they may have good competition from Android, but at this point, either OS isn't different enough to really cause people to do a mass switch over. Unlike the release of the iPhone a decade ago where it offered a brand new device. We are now having competition of screen screens with touchscreens.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      And when Apple is in deep trouble, when will Steve Jobs return to fix the mess like in 1997 as shown in this old MacWorld video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com] ... Oh right, he's dead. :(

  • Before today I never heard of HEIF photo format which is some sort of spinoff of HEVC video. And apparently HEVC or H265 is the video format. More confusion.

  • 5 years support (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "If you have an iPhone or iPad that was released within the last few years, you should be able to download the new update [...]"

    Take that Google.

  • Aaaahhhhhh!

    Sorry, it was the first thing I noticed, because I never pay for apps, so nothing broke.

  • I'm sure glad Apple is on top of this.

  • ...but you probably don't want to.

  • How does it perform in older iPhones, like the 6 for instance? It seems Apple devs focus on newer devices, so I'd wait a bit before installing 11 on my 6.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by qzzpjs ( 1224510 )

      I installed it on my 6 right away and haven't noticed any slow downs. Even runs good with the screen recorder running. Tried a few games as well, but I don't have any of those really graphics intensive ones to know how they'd fair.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Algan ( 20532 )

      Seems to be good on my 6. No performance impact, at least nothing immediately obvious. Still early of course, we'll see...

    • I always wait for the .1 releases for these things. Maybe by then ID will have provided a 64-bit build of Doom, otherwise I'm gonna be in conflict!

    • It works about as well as iOS 10 did, but with the new options for reviewing what junk is taking up space on your phone, it gives you a lot more room to work if you made a dumb decision (like me) and bought the 16GB version.

  • Progressive features, like blocking public wifi (Score:3)

    by urbanriot ( 924981 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @08:53PM (#55228829)
    Not sure if this is a typical Apple 'progressive' feature or a byproduct of bugs but sit long enough at a location with public wifi and listen to the people who upgraded having a powwow trying to figure out how they can connect after upgrading to IOS 11.

    Users reported issues during the dev builds earlier in the summer but it seems they've rolled out these 'features' (bugs) regardless and piles of people can't connect to public wifi, especially if it doesn't have a password. There's an auto-join function to override whatever the feature is supposed to represent but it's not working.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      I’must be lucky then, I’ve never had those wifi isues, then sgain I tend to awoid overloafe publc wifi runing on god knows what hardware with possibly out of date firmware on it. At home on my cisco 877w ( soon to be replaced by ubiquity gear due to it beeing eold by ciisco) and at uni allso running cisco gear there has not been a singel problem. si wonder what equipmet us used on those networks that has given people truble. I have noticed btw that Apple devices seem to be a bit picky when it co
      • It seems dependant on the location. So far I've had issues at sites that do not have a password on the wifi connection but require additional sign up information. "iOS 11 will no longer allow your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to connect to weak Wi-Fi networks automatically" was how it was worded at another site but in practice I'm seeing it preventing people from connecting to their local wifi.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yabos ( 719499 )
      I haven't had any problems with the wifi at my gym or at the grocery store which is a cellular black hole with the concrete and steel. They even have those forced portal pages where you have to agree to their TOS to use the wifi and it works fine. It must be something specific to certain vendors and not something they're doing on purpose.

  • Just upgraded....fuck you Apple (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why the fuck am I losing about an inch of screen real estate for Apple to tell my I'm looking at my mailboxes? Or that I'm in my Inbox?

    Who designed this shit?

    • You're complaining about usability in the mail app on iOS? This is probably the poster child for poor UI design (hey, let's make phishing easier by having no way of displaying the actual From address, only whatever the sender put as their name!). Anything that Apple did to make it worse in iOS 11 is in the noise.

  • No discoverability. No affordances. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's wrong on so many levels, simply unbelievable. Hideous, 'flat' icons that look like absolute rubbish, all the same colour background (on some of the screens I saw), randomly swiping in different directions reveals other screens underneath. How is anybody supposed to know any of this without being shown it? This is just getting beyond a joke. Apple are making their user interface worse and worse with every new OS release.

  • Stop mucking with iOS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The old interface, font and graphics were fine. They keep following this stupid flat graphics fad horseshit. Fuck all these designers
  • I bought the new iPad Pro 10â a while ago and just installed ios11. It is a great improvement - now it is finally easy to drag and drop between apps. For lighter computer users it may be an acceptable single computer.

    So what is the frustration - I didnâ(TM)t expect that I had such a large number of 32 bit apps that donâ(TM)t work anymore. Hope that enough of them will still be upgraded.

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