Continuity is an ingenious feature that enables Apple products to work together seamlessly as part of its cohesive ecosystem. Two company executives recently sat down in an interview with Forbes to discuss Apple’s goal of Continuity and how it fits into the company’s philosophy of a unified inter-device experience.
Continuity enables features like Universal Clipboard, which allows users to seamlessly copy and paste content between multiple devices as if they’re one. Stephen Tonna from Platform Product Marketing says that Continuity aims to empower users to be “even more productive, even more creative” with everyday tasks.
That’s what Continuity is all about, this rich set of features that lets you seamlessly move between your devices, helping you be even more productive, even more creative with those things that you do in your everyday life.
Stephen Tonna – Platform Product Marketing
Another perk of Continuity is that it doesn’t require any prior setup, asking for nothing more than signing in with the same Apple ID on all intended devices. Colleen Novielli from Mac Product Marketing describes the features enabled by Continuity as a “wow moment” that dramatically boosts productivity in an elegant and simple fashion that only Apple can pull off.
Some of our Continuity features have been around for a while but the wow moment comes because you can only do this with Apple devices and the Apple ecosystem, Only Apple would pay attention to that, and you get so much productivity from them working together.
Colleen Novielli – Mac Product Marketing
Novielli points out that Continuity is another example of Apple’s painstaking effort into hardware, software, and services. Apple’s primary goal is not to design “just products,” but entire user experiences where the product’s hardware and software are only part of the story.
We don’t just design products, we design experiences for the user. We’re really brainstorming on what is that end experience that we want for the user. And we have all the components to make that experience happen. Continuity is the embodiment of how we design software at Apple.
Colleen Novielli
Another part of Continuity is Handoff, which allows users to start one task on one device before transferring to finish it off on another. The key behind Handoff is sensing proximity between devices, enabling users to browse a Safari tab on their iPhone and pick up exactly where they left off on their iPad or Mac. Handoff also powers other features like Universal Control, so that users can use a single keyboard or mouse to control and navigate multiple iPads and Macs.
Continuity first launched back in 2014 with iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, and Apple hasn’t stopped investing in its features since. With the newest crop of Apple software, Tonna points out that Continuity empowers things like iPhone widgets showing up on the Mac desktop without the need to install apps, NameDrop for quick contact details sharing by tapping iPhones together, which also works for tickets and passes sharing through Wallet.
Continuity is one of those things that we are always thinking about how can we make our devices work even better together. This is an area that we continually invest in and add new features. Just this year alone in macOS Sonoma you can now have widgets that are on your iPhone on the desktop on your Mac, even if you don’t have those apps installed, That’s an amazing Continuity feature.
Stephen Tonna
Part of what makes Continuity special is that it almost fades into the background. Through this, Novielli says that users are empowered to focus on whatever task they’re undertaking without having to dramatically alter their “ingrained behaviors” to work around Continuity. This ultimately boosts productivity and enables more seamless experiences across multiple devices.
People have ingrained behaviours, certain ways of doing things that have been enabled by technology for a long time So if someone needs to get a file from here to there, they need to open up email, attach the file, maybe zip the file. And then, go to the other device. Our philosophy is, let’s have people do things in a better way. So, we came up with AirDrop. Continuity is really just magic, with different features that you can use across devices seamlessly.
Colleen Novielli
Tonna echos Novielli’s sentiment, describing Continuity as an “awesome” perk where users don’t really need to think much about how it works, focusing their energy on whatever task they have on hand.
That is what makes Continuity so awesome. You don’t have to think about these things anymore, you can just focus on the task you want to do on your device without worrying about how things got there. Because we take care of that.
Stephen Tonna
Read the full interview at Forbes here.
