I put the iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 public betas on my spare devices back in July, mostly out of boredom, and I've been poking at them enough now that I feel like I owe this space some notes. Fair warning: this isn't a review. Betas change every week and half of what I complain about below might be fixed by the time this actually ships in September.
Lock screen customization is the one that surprised me. Apple made a huge deal out of it at WWDC back in June and I remember rolling my eyes a little watching the keynote, because "you can now change the font on your clock" doesn't sound like a headline feature. Actually using it is different though. I've got a lock screen right now with a little weather widget stacked above a countdown to a flight I'm taking next month, and switching between that and a plainer one for work hours takes about four seconds with a swipe. It's a small thing. It's also the first time in years an iOS update has changed something I look at fifty times a day, and I notice it every single time.
Stage Manager, on the other hand, I'm still not sold on. I've got it running on an older iPad Pro, and the idea is nice on paper: floating resizable windows, up to four apps grouped together, drag one app onto another to make a set. In practice I keep losing track of which group I'm in, and resizing a window by dragging the corner is fiddly enough on an 11 inch screen that I've mostly given up and just use the handle Apple gives you instead. The four-app cap also bugs me more than it probably should. I don't actually need eight apps open at once, but tell me I can have four and I will immediately want five.
Passkeys are tucked into the beta too, though there's not much to do with them yet since almost no sites support logging in that way. I tried it against a demo Apple linked from one of the developer session videos and it worked exactly like you'd expect: Face ID prompt, done, no password typed anywhere. If that actually becomes normal in a year or two I'll be thrilled, because I still have a sticky note (an actual paper one, I know, I know) with three passwords on it that I've never gotten around to migrating into 1Password out of pure laziness.
A smaller complaint: battery life on the beta phone is rough. Not unusable, but I'm charging it by 4 or 5 in the afternoon on days I'd normally still be sitting at 40 percent on my main phone. That's expected for a summer beta and I'm not pretending it's a real critique of the finished OS, just noting it here mostly so future-me remembers why I was carrying a backup charger everywhere in August.
One more aside, unrelated to Apple entirely: a friend showed up to coffee last weekend with a Nothing Phone 1, the one with the transparent back and the little LED strip that flashes in patterns for notifications. I went in skeptical, it looked like a gimmick in the ads, but seeing it in person changed my mind a bit. It's not going to replace my daily phone. It is the first Android device in a while that made me actually pick it up off the table instead of just glancing over at it.
There's also the CHIPS Act sitting on Biden's desk after clearing Congress last week, which matters a lot more for the next decade of chip supply than anything above, but I don't have anything smart to say about it that a hundred other blogs haven't already said better this week.
If you're running the betas too I'd genuinely like to hear whether Stage Manager has clicked for you, because right now I feel like I'm using it wrong and I can't tell if that's a me problem or a beta problem. My working theory is both.