iOS 18.4 - Top 10 Features - New Emoji, Ambient Music, Visual Intelligence!

0:00 in this video I'm going to talk about my top 10 iOS 18.4 features you don't want to miss this so 18.4 comes bundled with several new emoji characters to choose from including the bags under the eyes emoji so if you just type in that bags under eyes you're going to find that preview there and that is just one of the several different emoji characters that you'll find in 18.4 so you also have this fingerprints emoji we swipe over we'll see the bags under eyes emoji that is sure to be very popular you also have a tree without any foliage you have this root vegetable you have a harp and you have a shovel and

0:46 then finally you have the splatter emoji so which one's your favorite let me know down below and for those times you just want to chill out there's the new ambient music feature so the ambient music feature in iOS 18.4 is well you can see it right here it's like a basically a paired down music app and you can of course use your transport controls to go back skip forward uh play pause control your AirPlay destinations change the volume scrub through the song etc but you can't really do anything else like for instance you can't actually go to the artist information etc you but you can see here that it actually is a standalone application called Ambient Music so how to access this well let's walk through that now to do so you're

1:32 going to open up Control Center and Control Center just swipe down from the upper right hand corner like that and then you're going to tap the little plus button in the upper leftand corner to add a new control center shortcut so tap add a control and there you'll see the new ambient music function right there so you have sleep chill productivity and well-being so you can add any of those or all of them to your control center just by tapping like that so let's go ahead and just quickly add all of them so there we go there's all four now if you tap them while still in edit mode you can actually go in there and change the playlist so Apple provides four different playlist options for each ambient music type and you can switch between those you can also add a playlist directly from your library if

2:18 you choose to do that so it's going to be up to you however you want to do it you can add your own or use one of the can playlists that Apple provides from Apple Music and some of these may be familiar to you just by looking at their names now you can also start playback of an ambient music station just by tapping the ambient music button or toggle in control center and there we go and you can use the dynamic island to open it all up or use the shortcut within the control center to open it up to the main ambient music interface where you can go in there and control it now here's the other thing about ambient music since it is a control center toggle you can actually add this directly to your action button to be able to invoke the ambient music directly from the action button and you can go in there and

3:04 customize the playlist there as well so now if I press and hold on the action button you could see in the dynamic island it starts playing back my ambient music station just like that and also on the lock screen since it is a control center shortcut you can add an ambient music shortcut there there's also the ability to prioritize your notifications with Apple intelligence so all you do is go to settings notifications and you'll see where it says prioritize notifications so when you go there you can see Apple Intelligence can show you notifications that may be important in a separate section on the lock screen and you can actually choose which apps you want to work with the priority notifications so these notifications stand out it's going to be very obvious when you receive

3:50 them and iPhone 15 Pro owners rejoice because there's now a way to invoke visual intelligence using the action button thanks to new visual intelligence shortcuts so you can see you can actually assign a control for visual intelligence and invoke it that way and that works just as you would expect but what's cool is that in 18.4 when you go to assign the control to the action button there's actually a dedicated visual intelligence action for the action button just like that so you can just select that one and that will allow you to quickly invoke visual intelligence using a long press on your action button just like that and you may be wondering what is visual intelligence exactly if you've never used it or if you don't see the uh benefit of it let me just show you quick demonstration so

4:37 basically you put whatever you want in the viewfinder like that and for instance you can tap to perform a Google image search and it will quickly tell you what this is whatever you're looking at so in this case K3 Max it was accurately able to give me details on that or I can tap where it says ask and it will use chat GPT to determine what this is so just give it a second you can see this is a mechanical keyboard with a compact layout so it gives you those details but what if I wanted to know who makes this so I just type in this box say who makes it submit that query and it's working with chat GPT and it's going to try to figure it out and you can see it does a good job this image appears to be from Keyron if you're a foodie that happens

5:22 to be an Apple News Plus subscriber there's a new feature that I think you're going to like and this feature allows you to view recipes within the news app so if you're an Apple News Plus subscriber you can view recipes you can also view articles related to those specific recipes and it gives you some details on Baked Ziti for for instance here I tap recipe and now if I scroll down here I can see the ingredients and then eventually it'll show me the directions and I can even get more info on the recipe but notice what you see here you see the ability to set a timer directly from the recipe instructions and you can actually set multiple timers if you want to do that you can see step eight bake zit the timer is counting down so you can see how this could be

6:08 very handy on a larger device like an iPad or perhaps a HomePad what do you guys think and finally robot vacuum support in the home app comes to 18.4 thanks to matter compatibility so this is something I've yet to be able to test but I'm looking forward to getting one of the compatible robot vacuums like the Switchbot S10 robot vacuum and mop uh so I'll be getting that soon and we'll hopefully be walking through controlling my vacuum with Siri and through the home app but that is a much much needed feature and something we've been looking forward to for quite some time there's also a new proximitybased Mac OS setup in 18.4 if you're running Mac OS 15.4 on newer Macs so what this allows

6:54 you to do is to get your iPhone or your iPad and then once it's near a new Mac it's going to prompt you to set up that new Mac you just tap continue and then you hold up your phone to your Mac's display so you can see this little fingerprint display right here so you just hold it up like that just like you would when setting up a new iPhone to start setup of your Mac super handy new feature and the categories that we've been enjoying on iPhone in the mail app finally comes to iPad OS in 18.4 so here you can see your various categories like your primary your transactions promotions etc right there and you can break it down between all those different categories and view only those related items and then within each email

7:41 thread you can go in and further basically break it down to either show only things related to promotions while under promotions or show all mail from that particular sender as well so definitely nice to have parody with the iOS version of mail and 18.4 includes lots of subtle but very handy new photos updates let me walk through those for you right now so for instance you can switch in the album section to a key photo view instead of the list view and now you can also sort utilities and media types if you want to so here you see media types you see utilities below that if I tap media types you'll see a new edit button in the upper right hand corner and that's going to allow me for instance to drag up slow well didn't actually work that

8:27 time but if I tap and drag slow-mo up using the drag handle then I could put that in one of the first four slots and why is that important because the first four four slots are what appear on the main page there in the photos app and there's the ability to filter on shared with you or not in an album and this lets you quickly find photos that were sent to you and in 18.4 you can now hide recent searches in Safari so of course when I tap on the search bar you can see my recent searches at the top so I have ChatgPT Microsoft Apple i can clear those if I want to individually or in one fell swoop but now you'll find this new show recent searches toggle you can turn that off and now when you search

9:13 there's no recent searches displayed so that is a look at iOS 18.4 what is your favorite new feature of course this is just the tip of the iceberg if you want a full look at all of what iOS 18.4 contains be sure to check out my full walkthrough i'll have that link down below in the description and if you appreciate videos like this be sure to thumbs up and click the subscribe button this is iOS Decoded from Jeff Benjamin with 9to5 Mac