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Apples iOS 26 for iPhone is now available to download. The star of the operating system is the all-new design language known as Liquid Glass, which introduces a translucent layer to various interface elements that mimics the physical properties of real glassincluding the way light shines and refracts through the material. But iOS 26 is about more than just a pretty new digital face. The new operating system also adds some compelling new productivity features that make Apples smartphone a more helpful tool for work than ever before. These are the top five new productivity features Apple has just added to the iPhone. 5. Only take the phone calls you want [Photo: Apple] One of the most common interruptions to our workflow is phone calls. And given that U.S. consumers received over 4.1 billion robocalls in August alone, the chances are good it might be spam. Yet this isn’t always the case. One way to distinguish between a call you need to take and one you don’t is by glancing at the iPhones caller ID. But this only works if you recognize the number calling. If the number is unknown, you need to pick up to see who is on the other lineand what theyre calling for. Now, with the new operating system, your iPhone gains a feature called Call Screening, which enables your iPhone to answer the unknown call for you by playing a message for the caller, which asks them to identify themselves and state a reason for their call. Once they do this, your iPhone will alert you to their response so that you can decide whether to take the call. If you decline, the unknown caller will be sent to voicemail. To enable Call Screening in iOS 26: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Phone. Under the Screen Unknown Callers heading, choose the level of Call Screening you desire. The three levels are Never (disable Call Screening), Ask Reason for Calling (your iPhone will collect the caller’s name and their reason for the call before alerting you), or Silence (all calls from unknown numbers will go right to voicemail). 4. Create calendar events with a screenshot [Photo: Apple] For many conferences or retreats, event organizers will email poster invites for the event, which include a photo of the venue, date, time, and location. Or sometimes theyll post the invite to their social media feed or webpage. Prior to iOS 26, you had to enter this event information into your calendar manually. However, with the new OS, you can now take a screenshot of the invite, and your iPhone will extract the relevant information from it and add it to your calendar with just a few taps. This greatly simplifies the tedious process of manually adding invites to your calendar. Heres how: With the event invitation on your screen (whether it’s an image attached to an email, a webpage, or a social media post), take a screenshot on your iPhone by pressing the volume up and power buttons simultaneously. iOS 26 will detect the event information in the screenshot and display a Add to Calendar button below it. Tap this button. A pop-up will appear showing the event information that has been extracted from the screenshot. Tap the Create Event button to add the event to your calendar. You’ll now see a listing for the event in your Calendar app. 3. Make your iPhone wait on hold for you [Photo: Apple] With iOS 26, waiting on hold is a thing of the past, thanks to a new feature called Hold Assist. With Hold Assist, your iPhone can wait on hold for you while you continue with your work. When you finally get connected to someone, your iPhone will ring you again to let you know they are on the line. To use Hold Assist in iOS 26:/p> Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Phone. Ensure the Hold Assist Detection toggle is turned on (green). Now, dial a phone number as you normally would. When you are placed on hold, tap the Hold button on your iPhones dialer screen. Your iPhone will notify you when its time to pick up the phone again to talk to a real person. 2. Put AI to work as your foreign language interpreter [Photo: Apple] Business is global, and that means that we may often find ourselves needing to communicate with people who dont speak the same language as we do. Now, in iOS 26, your iPhone can act as your personal digital interpreter thanks to a new feature called Live Translation. The feature uses Apple’s AI platform, Apple Intelligence, and works across all major iPhone communication apps, including Messages, FaceTime, and Phone. In Messages, text conversations will be cross-translated in real-time. In FaceTime, real-time caption translations will appear on your screen. And in the Phone app, the iPhone will actually speak the translated conversation for you. Live Translation is enabled by default and will kick in whenever your iPhone detects you’re communicating with someone who is using a different language from yours. However, this feature only works on iPhones that support Apple Intelligence, which includes the iPhone 15 Pro and later models. 1. Customize folders for better file management [Photo: Apple] Apples Files app is a robust file management system on your iPhone, enabling you to store and access documents and other essential files for your work. Before iOS 26, the folders in which these documents were stored and sorted all looked the sameplain and pale blue. However, in iOS 26, Apple has added the ability to customize the look of each folder, allowing you to create custom designs that make it easy to pinpoint the folder containing the files you need at that moment. In iOS 26, you can customize the folders in the Files app in numerous ways, including by color and by adding a symbol or even an emoji to the front of the folder. Heres how: Open the Files app on your iPhone. Long-press on a folder you want to customize and tap Customize Folder & Tags . . . from the pop-up menu. Select the Tags button, then choose a color to give the folder a new hue, and tap the checkmark button. Now, choose a symbol you want to add to the front of the folder (Apple provides hundreds of options). Alternatively, tap the Emoji button and select an emoji you want to add to the front of the folder. Tap the blue checkmark button when done. Best of all, after customizing your folder to your liking, the new style will sync across all your devices using iCloud Drive, so itll look the same on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. iOS 26 is now available as a free download. It requires an iPhone 11 or later to run.
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E-Commerce
In a new report, OpenAI said it found that AI models lie, a behavior it calls scheming. The study performed with AI safety company Apollo Research tested frontier AI models. It found “problematic behaviors” in the AI models, which most commonly looked like the technology “pretending to have completed a task without actually doing so.” Unlike hallucinations, which are akin to AI taking a guess when it doesn’t know the correct answer, scheming is a deliberate attempt to deceive. Luckily, researchers found some hopeful results during testing. When the AI models were trained with “deliberate alignment,” defined as “teaching them to read and reason about a general anti-scheming spec before acting,” researchers noticed huge reductions in the scheming behavior. The method results in a “~30× reduction in covert actions across diverse tests,” the report said. The technique isn’t completely new. OpenAI has long been working on combating scheming; last year it introduced its strategy to do so in a report on deliberate alignment: “It is the first approach to directly teach a model the text of its safety specifications and train the model to deliberate over these specifications at inference time. This results in safer responses that are appropriately calibrated to a given context.” Despite those efforts, the latest report also found one alarming truth: When the technology knows it’s being tested, it gets better at pretending it’s not lying. Essentially, attempts to rid the technology of scheming can result in more covert (dangerous?), well, scheming. Researchers “expect that the potential for harming scheming will grow. Concluding that more research on the issue is crucial, the report said, “Our findings show that scheming is not merely a theoretical concernwe are seeing signs that this issue is beginning to emerge across all frontier models today.
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E-Commerce
There’s a quiet disaster happening in product organizations right now. Companies are hiring armies of people with “product manager” on their business cards, but they’re treating them like project management with better vocabulary. Frankly I see it a lot with enterprise clients. Teams are drowning in tactical decisions and theyre optimizing for activity over outcomes. The result is not ideal: Products that ship on time but solve all the wrong problems. Roadmaps packed with features nobody asked for. Teams that can execute but have no clue why they’re building what they’re building. THE PROJECT MANAGER TRAP This is what most companies get wrong: They hire product managers to manage timelines, coordinate stakeholders, and shepherd features through development. Basically, they want glorified project managers who can speak startup. But that’s not what product management is. Product management is about making strategic decisions under uncertainty. It’s about understanding users so deeply you can anticipate their needs. It’s about saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great ones. Project managers ask, “How do we build this faster?” Product managers ask, “Should we build this at all?” WHAT REAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE In the workshops we run with C-suite leaders, this topic comes up constantly. What separates great product managers from the rest? Three things keep coming up: Curiosity over compliance. The best product managers don’t just execute whatever roadmap is handed to them. They question assumptions, dig into user behavior, and push back when the plan doesn’t make sense. Curiosity is one of the top traits we hire for, by the way. Customer obsession over feature factories. Great product managers spend more time with users than stakeholders. They can tell you not just what features customers want, but why they want them and what happens when they don’t get them. There will never be a replacement for direct conversation with users. Strategic thinking over task management. Project managers focus on the how and when. Product managers obsess over the what and why. They’re constantly asking: “What problem are we actually solving? Is this the right problem?” A SIMPLE HIRING TEST Want to know if you’re hiring a truly product-focused individual? Instead of asking candidates to walk through their process, ask them to defend a decision where they killed a feature everyone else wanted to build. Great candidates will light up. They’ll tell you about the time they said no to the CEO’s pet project because the data didn’t support it. Or when they bravely pivoted the roadmap based on a real conversation with a real user. Weak candidates will struggle with this. They’ll probably talk around stakeholder alignment and delivery timelines because its what they’re focused on. THE STRATEGIC DIFFERENCE Companies that get it right understand that product management is a strategic function, not an operational one. Product managers should be thinking three steps ahead, not three sprints ahead. They should be the people who can walk into a room full of executives and say, “I know we planned to build X, but after talking to users, I think we should build Y instead,” and have the conviction to back it up. That requires a completely different skill set than managing Jira tickets and giving progress or status updates in Slack. A BETTER PATH FORWARD Companies serious about product excellence need to rethink how they hire for the product management craft. Stop optimizing for people who can run efficient meetings and start looking for people who can make hard decisions with incomplete information. Because here’s the thing: In a time where everyone can ship quickly (accelerated by the Bolts and Loveables of the world), competitive advantage comes from shipping the right things. George Brooks is CEO and founder of Crema.
Category:
E-Commerce
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