Today Apple has made a number of announcements relating to their three major operating systems. We've seen the announcement of WatchOS 2 for the Apple Watch, OS X El Capitan for Macs, and finally, iOS 9 for Apple's iPhones, iPods and iPads. With the ninth major iteration of their mobile operating system, Apple is bringing some long overdue improvements to features like Siri and Spotlight, improving performance on all devices, and revamping the experience for users on the iPad.
The big improvement with the new search feature is how much smarter it is than Spotlight Search was. This mirrors the improvements made to Spotlight in OS X El Capitan, with users being able to make text searches for information that they could access via voice using Siri. As you can see above, information about sports scores and weather can be accessed by typing a single search term. These results appear on the same sort of cards that you see in Siri.
While Apple has made some nice improvements to iOS that will work across all devices, they've made some drastic improvements to the experience on the iPad. These upgrades are part of the new multitasking features in iOS 9. There's a new Split View mode, which you can see above. This mode allows you to use two applications side by side, with both of them functioning as they normally would. When you're using one app, you can still do touch input on the other. This feature will only be available on the iPad Air 2, most certainly due to its 2GB of RAM. Legacy applications will not be able to take advantage of the feature,as it requires the use of Apple's existing flexible UI APIs, along with some new APIs just for Split View.
On top of the new features and improvements to existing features in iOS 9, there are also significant improvements to performance. Many of the iOS graphics APIs, including Core Animation and Core Graphics, are now using Metal instead of OpenGL ES on the iOS devices that support Metal. According to Apple this reduces CPU usage, and will improve the overall smoothness of the UI. Apple has also made improvements to power usage, and they claim that iPhone users will see battery life improve by up to an hour of usage. There's also a low power mode which disables all but the core functions of the device, much like the one introduced with Android Lollipop.
Meanwhie the amount of temporary free space required for OTA updates has been reduced. By changing their update mechanism to allow what Apple calls "streaming" - effectively an in-place patching - Apple has been able to do away with requiring OTA updates to download and unpack whole updates at once. As a result the free space requirement for the iPad Air has been brought down from 4.58GB to 1.3GB. The size of OTA updates has been an issue for Apple, especially as they continue to sell 16GB devices that have even less free space after accounting for what the installed OS occupies.
iOS 9 will be launching alongside OS X El Capitan and WatchOS 2 in the fall of this year. Unlike previous releases where certain devices get dropped from support, iOS 9 supports every device that iOS 8 supported, which includes the Apple A5 based iPad 2 from 2011. A developer beta of iOS 9 is available now, and for the first time ever, Apple will be hosting a public beta which will begin in July.
