iOS 15 pushed out yesterday and I did the thing I always do, which is sit there refreshing Settings > General > Software Update on the couch at like 10pm instead of just going to bed and letting it install overnight. Downloaded, installed, restarted, and now I've had about eighteen hours with it on my regular daily phone (an iPhone 11, not one of the fancy new 13s that aren't even shipping for another few days yet).
The headline stuff is fine. Good, even. But the thing I actually want to talk about is Safari, because Apple's handling of that redesign this summer was genuinely one of the weirder product stories I've watched play out in real time.
If you weren't following the beta drama: back in June when iOS 15 first got shown off, the new Safari moved the whole address bar down to the bottom of the screen and turned it into this floating pill-shaped tab thing you could swipe between. People hated it. Not "some grumbling on Twitter" hated it, but genuinely loud, sustained hated it, all summer, through multiple betas. And credit where it's due, Apple actually listened and kept tweaking it, and by the time this shipped yesterday there's a toggle buried in Settings > Safari that lets you switch between "Tab Bar" (closer to the old top-address-bar layout) and "Single Tab" (the floating bottom thing from the original betas). I flipped it to Tab Bar within about two minutes of finishing setup. I don't think I'm alone in that.
What bugs me isn't that they tried something new, it's that the new thing shipped as the default when it was clearly the less-loved option after months of public testing. Feels like a case of a design team getting attached to an idea and not wanting to fully let go of it even after the feedback was pretty unambiguous.
Anyway. Other stuff that's actually worth your time:
Focus mode is the one I think will stick. It's basically Do Not Disturb grown up, you set up a "Work" focus or a "Personal" focus or whatever, tell it which apps and people are allowed to bug you, and it filters notifications based on that instead of the old all-or-nothing switch. I made a "Personal" one that only lets a handful of people through and turned it on around 7pm last night just to test it, and it was honestly kind of nice not getting a Slack notification while I was making dinner.
Live Text is the party trick everyone's going to show off this week. Point the camera at basically any text — a receipt, a whiteboard, a book page — and it recognizes it and lets you copy, translate, or look it up like it's regular text on screen. I tried it on the back of a cereal box this morning out of curiosity and it correctly pulled the ingredients list, which, sure, not exactly a killer use case, but the tech underneath is legitimately impressive.
Notification summary batches your less urgent stuff into one scheduled digest instead of drip-feeding you all day. Haven't decided if I trust it yet, mostly because I don't fully trust Apple's "importance" ranking to know what I actually care about versus what some app developer thinks I should care about.
One thing that's conspicuously not here: SharePlay, the watch-shows-and-listen-to-music-together-on-FaceTime feature they demoed back at WWDC. It's just missing. No settings toggle, no half-working beta version, nothing. From what I've read it's been pushed to 15.1 later this fall, which is a little odd for something they spent a good chunk of stage time on back in June, but okay.
Also new: proper spatial audio and grid view on FaceTime calls, iCloud+ with the Private Relay and Hide My Email stuff bundled in if you're already paying for iCloud storage, and a Weather app redesign that I honestly can't tell apart from the old one at a glance.
Nothing here is going to make you run out and buy a new phone. It's a solid, unglamorous point release wearing a big-number name, and the most interesting part of the whole rollout is still the fact that public beta feedback visibly changed a shipping feature. That doesn't happen as often as you'd think.