THE EXTENSION

Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.

A Christmas Stocking Full of Small Updates

• Jonathan

This is now my third version of this week’s column. This week’s updates to iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS affected the first two versions, mainly due to bug fixes and a few new hidden additions. They’re pretty nice, so instead, I’m going to cover them below, grab-bag style. A Christmas stocking, if you will.

Apple Music Focus Filter

Since it was added to the betas, one keenly awaited feature was the addition of a Focus Filter that would enable or disable listening history in the Music app. The most obvious example is when you play music for children. With the history disabled, playing ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen 200 times won’t affect suggestions in the Music app or count towards your end-of-year Replay. That’s the most obvious use case, but parties where everyone fancies themself as a superstar DJ is undoubtedly another.