M2 iPad Air (2024) - First 16 Things To Do! | Tips & Tricks

what's up guys my name is Brandon and you just got your new M2 iPad Air you've already unboxed it you've gone through the initial setup process but now you might be wondering what should I do next well in this video I'm going to be showing you the first 16 things that you should do after getting your brand new M2 iPad Air to get the most out of it so these are going to be tips tricks and just things you need to know about the new Air okay so this first tip I'm not even going to count in the list but it is something that you need to do right away and that is go into to your settings General and then into software update and make sure your iPad is up to dat because when you get it it's very likely not going to be on the latest software so make sure you go ahead and update so you get all of the features that you were promised with your iPad so next up is a critical setting that is disabled by default and this is going to help you extend the lifespan of your iPad Air's battery and that is also inside of settings and if you go to battery we have a section here a new section for the iPad battery health and if you go into here we have an 80% limit this is the first time ever on an iPad we have this on the iPad Pro as well I would strongly consider turning this on so what this does is it charges your iPad to about 80% and then it stops charging now this helps increase the longevity of your battery health and your batter's overall capacity and this comes from Apple themselves because they said this reducing the time that your iPad spends fully charged charged reduces the wear on your battery limiting charging to 80% can help prolong your battery's lifespan so if you're planning on keeping your iPad Air for at least a few years I would highly recommend turning that on if you're just going to sell it in a year or two then this may not matter to you but I think for most people you want to keep that enabled another first for the iPad Air is the landscape ultrawide camera so we now have the camera in the landscape orientation instead of the portrait orientation which means that Center Stage is going to be even better because there's a much wider angle to view you at the camera is in the middle instead of being lopsided and just on one side of the iPad so this is great and Center Stage is where you know you can Center yourself in the middle of the camera no matter where you're at it's going to try to Center you in that angle so if you swipe down to go to the control center in the top right and then you'll see video effects up top tap on that and that's where you can disable Center Stage or if it was accidentally disabled that's where you can go back to enable that oh and also with that front-facing camera we do have Smart HDR 4 now on the iPad Air which means you're going to have better photo quality and better video quality for both the front-facing and the rear-facing camera so that's also an advantage over previous iPad Airs now the next thing you want to do is take advantage of the USBC port on the iPad Air so you can connect a mouse you can connect a keyboard you can connect USB C hubs ssds or even external webcams to use as a webcam on a video call if you like the quality of a webcam better than the built-in camera you can now do that with iPad OS 17 now one note that you need to keep in mind is that this is not a thunderbolt Port like we have on the iPad Pro so it's not going to be as fast but it's still great if you you know use this iPad Air at a desk if you use it in a work environment that can be very beneficial especially because if you connect a mouse and keyboard you don't need to buy you know the expensive magic keyboard accessories so that could be beneficial with that USBC Port okay so a big part of iPad OS is multitasking and the next thing you need to do is understand the three different types of multitasking systems that are built in to iPad OS so the first one is the one that's most common the one you're probably going to use the most and that is split view and that is if you have an application open and you swipe from the bottom or you just go into Spotlight search and open up another application you can drag it over to one of the sides of this uh application that's open and it will start a split screen view and you see these three dots up here you can tap on that to change it to full screen split view or slide over and slide over is the next one we're going to mention so if you have two applications opened up and you want to open up a third application you can do that not in split view but with slide over so if we're going to take let's just do the calendar for example we'll take that and put it right here in the middle you can see when it's over here it's wide but when you put it in the middle it gets a little skinny and that represents slide over so now when you let go it's going to put it in the slide over View and you'll notice that you could also have you know different applications down here you see the little line down here for navigating between applications that's because you could have another app so if I put this on top of that you can see now we have two different applications in that slide overv viw that we can go in between and if you want to get rid of the slide overview you can just take and drag on these three dots here and push it over to the side and you can see you have a little arrow representing that it's hidden over there and you can swipe out from that right side to bring it back to light or if you just want to close out of this completely just tap the three dots and then just tap on close and you have to do that for every application in that instance so we'll close again and there we go it's gone and again you can also resize right here for split view as well if you want to make one app larger than the other while multitasking and then the third multitasking system is stage manager and this is one of my favorites for multitasking I don't use it often but when I do use it it's usually when I'm working and it really makes a big difference so if you go to the control center from the top right and then look for the the square down here with the three dots to the left this is in there by default which we need to tweak this we need to add more in there but we'll do that in a moment just tap on that and that's going to enable stage manager you'll likely see a splash screen when you enable it for the first time but we're going to go into any application now so nothing changes on the home screen when you enable that but if you open up an application you will see a big difference right away in what's happening on your home screen so I already have some applications opened up in here but if you don't you will just see some applications on the side and if you want to bring those into this window you can just take and drag and pull them here onto the window and then look for this little black little circle circle like half circle down here in the corner of these applications and that's how you can resize these and then take on the top right here where the three dots are that's where you can drag these different applications the little Windows to pretty much wherever you want on the home screen there aren't really many limitations to where you can move these which is really nice you could also put them over top of each other like so and if you want to do another iteration of safari we can just take that from the dock down here and put that in here and we can make it bigger or larger and if you tap on the three dots up here this is where you can also enter full screen you can add another window or you can minimize now when you minimize that's going to put it over here in this you know section over here this little shelf that's called the minimized windows and if you tap on one of those it's going to bring it up to the Forefront and you're only going to see that application you can see this home screen was all these applications at once so they're going to always remain you know together until you close out of them or you know whatever you want to do so we close out of those now next time we go out of an application and into another one another you know stage the stage stays set so these are all called stages every one of these iterations is called a stage and you know if I go to app store for example and then I pull up you know a music window now that stage is set like that so if we go into something else and then go back you can see that stage remains at how you had it set I hope that makes sense it can get pretty complicated but hopefully that explained it a little bit and one of the ways you're going to benefit the most from this feature especially if you have a 13in iPad Air it's going to be to go into settings we're going to disable this for now so we're going to disable it right there and then go into your settings and then go to display and brightness and then go down here to the bottom where it says display Zoom so this is set to default by default of course but if you select more space and then tap on done you will have to restart your iPad it's going to do a soft restart here and you'll see that when you go back to the home screen and if we enable stage manager you're going to have a lot more space to play with in terms of your applications being on the screen which is awesome you can see just from this big difference in the amount of screen real estate that you have now one little bonus thing I'll throw in here is that sometimes when you do more space so we're going to turn off stage manager sometimes if you have more space set up it will make text on Safari smaller so if you want to change that so you can see here the text is a little bit small I wish it was you know larger sometimes if you go into your settings and then go down here to Safari and then go down to page zoom and then go into this and you can set a page Zoom to automatically apply to all websites so maybe do like 115% so now when we go back to Safari everything looks about the same size as it was before we did more space for the home screen now while we're in Safari the next thing you should do is take advantage of safari profiles so this is something that's very overlooked especially on iPad OS and this basically allows you to keep your browsing separated based on what you're doing so I think it's great for work for personal and for travel those are like the main three that I can see this being very beneficial for but if you tap on where it says personal right here and then down at the bottom we have profile and it's set to personal if you tap that that's where you can change what profile you are using so if I change mine to recording you can see it changes my favorites it changes the background here you can see the favorites bar up top is different as well now if you go into your settings for Safari and you can see that right here under profiles is where we have our profile set up and where you can create a new profile and keep in mind that your history your cookies and your website data is going to be separated per profile so if I go into let's just say Leisure for example you can change the icon the colors the favorites and what you open new tabs on like when you open a new tab what does it take you to does it take you to the start page does it take you somewhere else that's where you can set that you could also change which extensions show up using that profile so if you have ADD block but you don't want AB block showing up on work when you're in the work uh profile then you can have that disabled for work but enabled for leisure and travel for example now the next one's not really a tip or trick but it's just something that you need to know about your iPad Air and that's that you have Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 on the new iPad Air whereas before on the previous iPad Air you had Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 now Bluetooth 5.3 is a big one since devices connect quicker your iPad has improved range and it consumes less power compared to the M1 iPad Air that had Bluetooth 5.0 and then as far as Wi-Fi 6E that's going to get you faster Wi-Fi speeds which really benefits you if you have you know a more recent router with Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E speeds but it's still going to improve the speed no matter what router you have you're just going to see the bigger advantages the bigger differences if you have a Wi-Fi 6 or 6E router the next thing you need to do is learn how to use the apple pencil with the iPad Air specifically the apple pencil Pro but even if you don't have the apple pencil Pro a new feature on the iPad Air that used to be an iPad Pro exclusive is apple pencil hover so now you can take your apple pencil USBC or your apple pencil Pro and hover over things before actually selecting them so that used to be an iPad Pro exclusive before 2024 now it's also available on the iPad Air which is awesome especially if you're doing things you know on a website or if you're drawing something in notes and you want to be really you know precise you can see the hover right there of where your tool is going to go before you actually put the pencil down and start drawing so that is super beneficial and by the way if you have not purchased an apple pencil yet I would highly recommend getting the apple pencil Pro over the apple pencil USBC for just a $50 difference it is well worth it so the reason for that is because you have this right here for one a squeeze gesture so you have haptic feedback built in so if you squeeze right here you get quick access to your control panel where you can do all these things you can change brushes you can change the size the color all that straight from just pinching in on this which is really awesome you can even get access to your different tools your shapes your signatures even settings right there so you don't have to go all the way across the screen to do so and one of the really awesome new features is called barrel roll and this allows you to see the orientation of your stroke right here your brush you're using before you actually push it down on the screen so you can see that it's changing the orientation based on how I'm turning the apple pencil Pro which is awesome it uses a gyroscope that's built in to detect this and another little detail that you might notice is that you see a refle you see a shadow here like it looks like it's a reflection of your actual hand but it's actually a software-based shadow of the apple pencil right before you touch it on the display even when you're touching it you can see a basically AI you know machine learning generated shadow of the apple pencil it's really hard to see on screen but it's quite incredible and then something else you can do with the apple pencil is make perfect shapes if you draw things like a star or like a cloud it will make those perfect if you hold down on the screen so instead of picking up like right when you draw a square just hold down on it so just hold down and don't let go until it makes that shape perfect and it will do that every time as long as it's a you know decently drawn shape to begin with unlike this one I did right here and then we also have scribble which allows you to turn handwritten text into typed text so this works even in the address bar this works throughout iOS and if I type in apple.com up here so apple.com you can see it will convert that into type text which is really cool and you can even like cross that out if you want to erase it so it will select it right there and you can just like cross it out to delete it so let's see if we can do that we'll scribble out like that and it will erase it and while we have the apple pencil in our hand take a look at this gesture so if you swipe up from the bottom right that's going to enable a quick note right away it's going to allow you to write a quick note very quickly and easily now if you do that from the bottom left hand side it's going to take a screenshot so that's a quick and easy way to take a screenshot just from the bottom left with your apple pencil you can do that like so now you can also do this with your finger but you can see by default this is not turned on and it even shows you up top that it's not turned on but if you want to enable that go into settings and then under multitasking and gestures you can see right here we have swipe finger from corner and if you turn that on it allows you to change what shows up from the bottom left and the bottom right corner so now if we take my finger from the bottom left you can see it's going to create a screenshot it's going to take a screenshots and from the bottom right with my finger it's going to pull up that quick note and we can also do it with the apple pencil at the same time but if you don't have your apple pencil on hand you can use it with your finger if you have this turned on the next thing you need to do is know how to scan documents and annotate PDFs in the Notes application so if you go to notes right here and you tap and hold on that you will get the option to scan document that's going to be one of the easiest ways to do that there are other ways to do it but that's my favorite so if you go to scan document it's going to take you to where you position the document in View and it will automatically take a picture or you can manually do it right there and then it's going to put it in the Notes application and when you're in the notes app it shows up like this but you could also tap on the three dots and you can view this as small medium or large you could also just zoom in and it will change the size automatically and if you tap on the annotate button up in the top right you can go right here and if you want to add a signature if you need to add a signature to a form you can just tap on the plus right here and then go to add signature and then you'll have your selection of signatures or you can add or remove your own signature and then you can take and put that anywhere inside of the document so if we take this one right here it's going to place this here we can make it smaller and we can move it around to wherever we want so we just take on these three dots and we can drag it up here to maybe where it asks for signature on the form so it can be a little bit finicky also you can make this thicker as well so you can make the signature a different you know font thickness or color as well and you can also autofill forms very easily as well so if you tap on a form where you have like a last name or a first name it will auto detect ipados 17 will autodetect what you know it is asking for and will put that information in AO automatically based on your contact information or if you tap on choose other it will allow you to put in another person's contact information and this will apply to the address the first last name all of that so if we tap again right there and we select our name you can see will Auto input the last name first and the first name last because it was able to read that it says last name first and then the first name and then also it will fill in the address as well if that is a you know section here in the form the next thing you need to do is understand that we have Dynamic volume buttons that you cannot change on the iPad Air so if you're in landscape mode for example what would be the volume up if you're in portrait mode is now going to be the volume down as you can see the volume decreasing plus if we press the right button over here which is going to be the volume down if you're in portrait mode that's going to turn the volume up because based on the orientation that you're on that is technically the up button whereas the top button and portrait mode is the down button in landscape mode so just understand that these are Dynamic volume buttons that change based on the orientation of your iPad you do not have a defective iPad and something else to note is that the iPad Air 13in has double the base of the 11in model so if you thought it was Placebo if you heard them and you thought the 13-in was louder you were hearing correctly because Apple says that the landscape stereo speakers on the 13-in model have double the base of the 11in model okay so this iPad looks so boring right now looks like every other iPad out there like it just came out of the box and we need to change that so we're going to swipe down from the top left here and tap and hold on the lock screen and tap on the Plus in the bottom right and we're going to go down and we're going to check out the new exclusive iPad Air wallpaper so you can see that under collections right here these are the exclusive iPad Air wallpaper so you have them in different colors to accommodate the actual colors of the iPad so we're going to select the blue one right there at least for the lock screen when you tap on ADD you can make that a wallpaper p so you have the same wallpaper on the home screen but I personally like having a little bit of a different wallpaper on the home screen so from here you could just choose photos and you can choose a photo in your photo library I'm going to go to my wallpapers album here we're just going to select maybe this wallpaper right here this one looks cool so we'll tap on done and there we go done again and now we have a cool much better home uh lock screen and a much better home screen it already looks way better but now we need to change some of these widgets so just tap and hold on any blank space and then tap on the Plus in the top left and this is want to take you to the widgets selector so from here you can select any type of widgets that you would like I would highly recommend batteries for example so we'll just add this battery right here and we'll do home so we can control my homekit devices and we'll adjust all these as we go on but I don't need new so we can tap on the minus and remove that we can also move these around just like they were apps so to make it a little bit more cohesive on the screen that already looks much better and I didn't really even change much also it's a good idea to add applications that you use frequently to the dock so if you want to add those you do it just like you do on a Mac so settings you probably open up often so if you take and drag and put this down here next to Safari for example you can do that and that way it's always down there in your dock same with files I use that a lot so I'm going to put it down here in files or in the doc and I'm going to remove some of the applications I don't use very often from the doc that way it can be larger and I can get much easier access to these application so there we go now my doc CS better and it has apps that I actually use often in there also on the home screen it's already kind of cluttered from you know the factory so if you want to get rid of some of these applications I would not blame you so tips for example we can remove that and you don't have to actually remove these applications from the device you can just remove them from the home screen that way they're hidden so things like Garage Band these applications I don't use that come by default I like going ahead and hiding these right away now if you want to hide applications by default when you install them that way you have a much cleaner home screen you can do that by going into settings and then go to home screen screen and app library and from here choose app Library only under newly downloaded applications that way anytime you download an application it's just going to go straight over to the app Library which is to the right of the last page that's where you can access all of your applications in two different views and if you have a whole screen full of applications that you don't really use you can even hide a full screen so tap and hold to go back into jiggle mode and then tap on the page dots down here and you can deselect that page page or you can even remove that page entirely and it will send all those applications to the app library but if we just want to hide that page for now we can do that and then tap onone and then go out of here and you can see that page is completely hidden also you may have seen the setting in there for larger app icons if you find these app icons to be a little bit too small on the home screen you can go to settings and then under home screen and app library and turn on use large app icons and you'll notice that they are a good bit bigger and you don't really have to compromise on space too much like the widgets and everything are still intact also we need to change this control center right here because we don't have near as many you know beneficial toggles in here so go into settings and we're going to go down to the control center so right here under General and from here you can turn on or off the home devices so I actually like having these turned off on the iPad specifically because I always have a widget to control my homekit devices so if we go into here I like turning that off that way I have a clean control center here where I can access what I want to so you can remove any of these that you don't like by simply tapping on the minus and then remove you could also reorder these however you would like I would highly recommend having notes in here because you can tap and hold on notes and you can scan document straight from the control center which is very very convenient dark mode is nice to have up there music recognition screen recording text size low power mode those are some of the ones I really like having here in the control center that are very very beneficial and while we're customizing we may as well go ahead and change some other display settings so I already showed showed you the large app icons that is technically a display setting but we're going to change some other things here as well so under here under doc you have Show app library and Doc so if you don't want the app Library over here showing up where you can access all your applications you can turn that off so you can see it will change once we relaunch the doc so now it looks bigger and you don't have that folder of the app library and also if you don't want these suggested applications and the recent applications to show up right here you can turn that off that way you have a really clean dock that is always the same and then if we go to the display and brightness section this is where you can change between light and dark mode or have it on automatic you likely already did that with the setup process and then right here we have text size if you want to increase the text size you can do that right there you could also do this like I added in the control center earlier you can add this and it stays that way until you change it back so if you change it once it's going to stay like that throughout the OS but if you wanted to lock that to the specific application you can do that right here by going to settings only or whatever application you're in you can swipe that over and you can change the default for either all apps or the specific app that you're in also one of the first things I change is autolock so this is set by default to 2 minutes which means that your screen is going to go out you know after 2 minutes it dims all the time that gets really annoying so I'd highly recommend having that set to 10 or 15 minutes I would recommend against doing never just in case you fall asleep with your iPad on or something like that and then if we go into our accessibility settings and then to display and tex size you have have a bunch of different options here so if you want bold text you can see that makes all the text on the screen and in applications bold some people might benefit from that you have button shapes so if you need to see the shape around a button you can turn that on you have all these different ones right here but one of the main ones you might want to look into is auto brightness so this is turned on by default I would recommend having that on by default I would recommend keeping that on but if you're not a fan of auto brightness that is where you can turn that off also reduce white point is a great way to reduce intense brightness colors this is also a way to get your iPad to go below 0% battery or 0% brightness rather so if you turn your brightness all the way down to 0% and you turn reduced white point on that's going to allow you to get a lower brightness than basically what you're able to get from just using the brightness toggle here in the control center the next thing you need to do is learn the basic and even the more advanced iPad gestures so you have gestures with your hand that allows you to do things a lot quicker and more efficiently things like you know using for finger pinch in to go into the app switcher right here or if you go into an application you can use four fingers to go between your different applications that are opened up sometimes this is easier than trying to grab this little bar down here like you do on the iPhone to switch applications sometimes it's easier to just use four fingers to go across now you can disable that if you don't like that for whatever reason under multitasking and gestures you have four and five finger gestures that you can turn off if you don't like that along with the productivity gestures that I'm going to show you here in a moment oh and also one of the ways I like going home to the home screen from an application is using those four fingers and just pinching like so and that takes me into the home screen or back to the home screen now something else that's very beneficial we're going to show you this in notes so if you're in an application and you want to copy and paste text quickly you can just select the text right here and instead of copying and pasting pressing the buttons right there sometimes it's easier to just do a gesture so I'm going to take my three fingers and pinch in and you can see we have a copy dialogue there and now now if we go down to the bottom right here and I pinch out you can see it will paste it so pinch in is the copy pinch out with three fingers is to paste and if we wanted to undo what we just did we can shake the iPad but if it's on a flat surface or on a magic keyboard you could also take three fingers and swipe to the left and you can see it will undo and we can swipe to the right with those three fingers to redo that process you can keep doing it very quickly unlike what you would be able to do you would never be able to do it this quickly if you were just pressing buttons right here you know to undo and redo or shaking your iPad and you've probably already realized how big the keyboard is especially on the 13-in model sometimes it can be a little bit cumbersome to be typing you know with two fingers or if you only have one hand available it can be too big to type efficiently on well you could actually pinch on the keyboard and make it small and make it iPhone size that way it's much easier to type on you could also move this around to pretty much wherever you want on this bottom half of the screen and just pinch out to bring it back to full size pinch in small pinch out make it big again and then we have some more basic gestures like swiping up from the bottom and holding to go into the app switcher and from here you can see your different apps that are open and you can swipe up to close out of those applications to force close out of those which I wouldn't recommend unless you are having issues with the application you can also swipe down from the top right to pull up the control center and swipe down from anywhere else from the top to pull down the notification center the next thing you need to do on your iPad Air is to configure Touch ID for more than one finger if you did not do so during the setup so if you into the settings right here and then go over to touch ID and passcode and then put in your passcode from here you will see your different fingers that you have in there now another Pro tip here is it just says finger one and two if you go into that you could actually rename what that finger is so like if it's your right hand and left hand you can put that in there and then tap on done and now it shows what fingerprints we have but anyways you want to go in here and add a fingerprint and add in fingerprints for different hands like if you want to use like your left and right index do both of those or your middle finger whatever is easier for you and different orientations you might want to go ahead and do that if you didn't do so already I would also take a look at these different settings and make sure that you want these enabled or disabled like for example some people do not like that anybody can have access to their control center from the lock screen even when the device is locked so if you want to turn that off and have like maximum privacy you can turn that off right there that way when your device is locked and you go to the lock screen you're not able to pull down the control center so that is something you might want to consider along with everything else in here the next thing you need to do is form a habit to use Spotlight search for pretty much everything so when it comes to opening up applications instead of searching around on your home screen or going to the app Library just swipe down from any blank space on your home screen and start typing in that application and then just tap on go it's just a much quicker and easier way to open up applications especially if they're not on your home screen now you can also do this for quick math problems as well so if I Tye in 985 * 7 it shows the result right there and we can tap this to copy that result so now that is copied and we can paste that in here so we go ahead and paste there we go also you can convert different things like pounds to kilogram so I don't even have to type in kilograms it already shows me the conversion right there but if I want to do that to something even lighter I can do that as well so I'll type in 2 ounces and it shows how many ounces are equivalent to 6895 lb so that is much easier and much quicker than going to Google and typing that in and you could also do this for launching applications like if I had an application you can see it pulls it up and you can run the shortcut straight from the spotlight search which is very beneficial it also searches through your notes your photos everything like that so I typed in you know iPad OS for example it will take me to some photos it will show some photos that read iPad OS in the photo and if you have a magic keyboard you could also press command spacebar just like you do on a Mac to launch the SP Spotlight search quick and easily as well and then the final thing you need to do on the iPad Air is know what to do if your iPad freezes up and nothing else works so if you want to turn off your iPad it's pretty simple you just press the volume up or volume down and the power button at the same time so if you press and hold both of those you will get the slide to power off option and you slide that to turn it off however if your device is frozen you may not be able to access that so to force restart your iPad Air you press volume up volume down and then hold the top button and continue holding that until the slide to power off goes away and you see the Apple logo so continue holding only the one power button we only tapped on the other two volume buttons and now we're still holding it until we see the Apple logo there we go now we can let go and our device will force restart no matter what's going on with the software so those are 16 things that you need to do on your iPad Air to get started off on the right foot so if you found this video helpful if you found it beneficial I would appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up also be sure to subscribe for more iPad content coming in the future but anyways guys thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon

Channel: Brandon Butch

Views: 42,465

Keywords: Brandon butch, iphone, ios, apple, iOS 17, iPhone 15, iPhone 16, iOS 18

Id: jv9OW5lxGAU

Length: 31min 8sec (1868 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024