A few Apple features that I was super excited for, but have yet to ever try

Spatial Personas in Apple Vision Pro. They look awesome, and everyone who tries them says they’re transformational. But I don’t know anyone personally who has a Vision Pro to try it with. If you’ve got one and are interested in do a FaceTime call with an internet stranger, let me know!

Genmoji. Really cool idea, and I like that it’s a focused use case for generative AI. But people say it’s not as good as they expected, which kind of took the wind out of my sails. And I haven’t felt motivated to send one because I don’t know many other people with a phone capable of generating one on their end, and I don’t feel like doing the whole beta/Apple Intelligence explanation song and dance.

Creating a movie memory from a prompt. Again, I think it’s an ideal case for using natural language and image recognition to create little custom movie memories — which I tend to enjoy. But an opportunity hasn’t arisen for a real-world use yet.

Action mode for shooting videos. This is a bit of a stretch. I wasn’t terribly excited by this ultrastabilization feature, although I do think it’s a good one. It’s supposed to vastly improve action shots where the camera is hard to keep stable, like when running or skiing. The issue is that there are so many modes in Camera app now, that I forget to swipe around to try out new ones. I think I’d want it to just turn on — or suggest that I turn it on — when my phone recognizes it’s in a shaky, unstabilized shooting situation.

Bonus: Travel ETAs. I actually do send live ETAs with Apple Maps very often when I’m driving to meet someone, or to let my wife know when I’ll be home after an adventure. But I hardly ever get them from other people. I can only think of once or twice that I got a notification that someone was sharing their ETA with me. It’s such a great feature that I wish more people would use it!