[Music] Apple just announced iOS 18 at its worldwide developers conference, and there are five features in particular that I'm most excited about. Number one, you'll be able to schedule messages in the Messages app. There are so many times when I want to message someone for their birthday, or just to ask them a question, or to see if we still have plans for this weekend. Maybe I don't want to bother them in that moment, and then I just forget to do it later. So, I would love to have this feature. I'm very excited it's part of iOS 18. I use it all the time in Slack for work messages, and I would love to be able to use it in my personal life as well, so that's going to be very useful. Another feature I'm really excited about is RCS support. I have a lot of friends with Android phones, and the experience between Android and iOS with messaging just really isn't as good as it is with iMessage. There's a lot of things that are still lacking when you're messaging.

someone on Android like typing indicators read receipts the way media is displayed things like that so I'm really excited to see how RCS support on the iPhone changes that in the future. The third thing I'm really excited about is the ability to edit the home screen to your liking. So for about as long as we can remember, the iPhone's home screen has looked like a grid of app icons, but now with iOS 18, you'll finally be able to rearrange apps however you want to. And you might not care about this or you might just be happy with your iPhone's home screen the way it is, but if you do have a background that you really love and you want to be able to manipulate apps around that background, I think this is going to be a great way to do that. And it just makes your iPhone's home screen feel more personal. And you know there's been a lot of attention on the lock screen in recent years and I think it's nice to see some attention on the home screen and making that more.

personal as well. The fourth feature I'm really excited about are all the new updates to Siri. I'm really excited to see how this changes the way I use Siri in my everyday life. So for one thing, you'll be able to actually type to Siri instead of just talking to Siri, which I think will make it a bit more useful. There are lots of times when we don't want to talk into our phones. We don't want to. Maybe you're in a meeting or something like that, or you're on the subway, and you really don't want to be talking out loud. I feel like just something as simple as being able to type to Siri is going to make it much more useful, and it's going to make me want to actually interact with it more often. And then there are a bunch of other new additions that are coming as part of Apple intelligence that I'm excited for, such as the ability to have Siri kind of get a better sense of what's happening on your phone and draw from that context so that if you ask a

question like will I make it to the theater on time? It'll be able to kind of gather contexts like your location, maybe what time the show is starting, who you're supposed to meet, and give you answers that are actually useful. And for me, this is really about making Siri more than just a question and answer machine or a useful tool for setting alarms. It's really about making it an intelligent system that can actually help you navigate your phone and get things done. So we'll have to see if it lives up to that promise. And finally, the last feature I'm excited about in iOS 18 is notification summaries. Sometimes just surfacing the right notifications at the right time isn't really enough. If you have a really long notification, I would love to be able to just look down at my lock screen, get a gist of what that message says, and know exactly what the takeaway from that is. We're all bombarded with notifications throughout the day. We all have so many apps on our phone. Any way to make that process easier and not have to jump between apps.

as often is going to be very useful. So in terms of what this could mean for future iPhones, I think the big takeaway here is that a lot of these new software features are really going to be tied to hardware in the future, right? Because some of these Apple intelligence features are going to require newer processors to work. Because some of these features, I think a lot of them actually are processed on device rather than in the cloud. But I think as time goes on, we're going to see a lot of these new software features be more pegged to the latest hardware and the latest chips inside Apple's devices. So for the most part, I do think iOS 18 has everything I was hoping to see. But there are a couple of ways I do think Apple could maybe differentiate its Pro phones, especially the Pro Max, from its non-Pro phones. And I'm picking on the Pro Max specifically because it has that larger screen, and I would love to see Apple find new ways to make that screen stand out and use it in different ways. So for example, I've in

the past written about the idea of bringing some of the iPad's multitasking features to the Pro Max. Specifically, I don't know if Apple's ever going to do that, but that is one thing that's on my wish list that I would love to see in a future iOS update. So once again, this is what I'm looking forward to in iOS 18. For more details, check out CNET. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.

iOS 18: Top 5 Most Interesting Features

CNET is the premier destination for explaining and navigating the changing world around us. Through news, product reviews, price comparisons, and more, we’ll tell you what’s new in the parts of modern life that increasingly matter more — from health, home, and money to tech, culture, and climate — and how to get the most out of them.