Why Doesn't My Apple Device Have This Feature?

This Gary with MacMost.com. Wondering why you can't find a new feature on your Mac, iPhone, or iPD? Let me show you how to find out if your device is compatible. 

So whenever Apple introduces new features there are often people who can't find those on their devices. This may be because your device isn't compatible. You can find out which features are compatible with which devices by simply looking on the Apple Website. But the first thing you should check is whether you actually have the operating system that the new feature is a part of. For instance, if something is new to macOS Sequoia check to make sure you have macOS Sequoia. If it is new to iOS 18 make sure you have iOS 18. Now I have to mention this because often I get people telling me they have the latest version of the operating system and they can't find the feature. After some back and forth it turns out they really didn't have the latest version. They thought they did but when they checked again they saw they hadn't updated or hadn't completed the update. So it is important just to double check that because it happens quite often. 

On the Mac you would just go to the Apple Menu and About This Mac. Right there at the bottom it will tell show you macOS and then the version that you've got. So check that carefully. 

On the iPhone you go into Settings, then General, then About. It shows you the version of iOS there. 

The same thing on iPad OS. You go into Settings, then General, and About.

Once you're sure that is right the next thing to do is check to see if that particular feature is compatible with your device. For instance, macOS Sequoia has a lot of features, that while they are there for the latest Apple Silicon Macs, they aren't there if you have the same macOS Sequoia for an older Intel Mac. 

Let's start by looking at the iPad. If you go to Apple's site you'll find a page for iPad OS. Getting to this page is usually fairly simple. You're usually just searching for iPad OS and any search engine is going to very quickly show you if you look if iPad OS main page here. So if you go to that you'll now have a page that lists all these new features. Now sometimes as you look at these features you'll see little footnotes here. Like this footnote for Live audio transcription for iPad OS. You can click on it. It will jump you down to the Footnotes and then you can look at that footnote, in this case #3, and see some compatibility notes. Now the problem with this page is it only shows you the main new features that Apple wants to highlight and sometimes the notes don't have all the details. Instead, look for the PDF, usually called All New Features. Click on that and you'll go to this PDF Document that goes into detail about all of the new features. Now you can search the PDF document real easily using Command F. You see you're searching inside the document here. So let's search for Transcript and you'll see here Transcripts & Summaries. That's not what we want so we'll go to the next one here and there's Live Transcription. Let's say we wanted to see if our Mac was compatible with Live Transcription. You can see there are two footnotes. 1 & 5. Let's go down to the bottom and here are footnotes 1 & 5. Footnote 1 says it is only available in certain languages. So if your iPad isn't set to one of those languages then it is not going to work. Even if you happen to be in one of these countries, if you're not using that specific language in Settings it is not going to appear there. Also, footnote #5 specifies that you need to have certain models of iPad. So you want to pay particular attention to exactly what is shown there. I'll show you how to lookup which model you've got in a minute. 

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You can do the same thing for your iPhone. You can search for iOS 18 and end up at Apple's main iOS 18 page and there are details here. But like with the iPad you can go to All New Features and go into the PDF. Let's say you're interested in the new Messages over Satellite feature. So let's search for Satellite here and there's Messages via Satellite. You can see it's footnote 3. So here you can see the footnote for Messages via Satellite and see that it will be available and you have to have an iPhone 14 or later for it. You can see it is only on supported carriers as well. 

Here is the macOS Sequoia page that you can easily search for and find at Apple. Let's jump right into the PDF here and let's say we're interested in iPhone Mirroring and why that is not working on our Mac. So we'll do Command F here and search for Mirroring. There's iPhone Mirroring and that is footnote 3 here. So you can see here the requirements for iPhone Mirroring that you need Apple Silicon or Intel Mac that has a T2 security chip in it and some various other notes about what you will need and when it may or may not work including saying it is currently not available in the European Union. 

So it is important to think about when you look at these notes the hardware you have, the region you have your Mac set to, and the language you have your Mac set to. All those could be issues that prevent a new feature from appearing. 

So how do you figure out which model you have. For the iPad you go into Settings, General, About, and then look for Model Name. Now iPads are identified by generation number so look carefully and you'll find something like iPad Pro and then a size 12.9 and also a generation number. In this case it is the iPad Mini 6 generation. So you want to pay attention to all of that information when trying to match a model up with what you find in the footnotes.

It is the same thing for the iPhone. You go into Settings, General, About, except there are no generations here. Every year of iPhone has a different number like iPhone 14, 15, or 16. Then other information like Pro or ProMax. Plus also look for things like SE. Make sure you correctly identify the model when you compare that to the footnotes. 

On the Macs it is a little different. You would just go to the Apple Menu and About This Mac. Then you just find the name there at the top of About. It will have a name like Mac Studio, or MacBook Air, and then also the year. Sometimes the year has a qualifier like early, mid, or late. So match that up carefully and also you, of course, can note there the processor you've got. If it says M, like M1, M2, M3, or M4 then that means you have Apple Silicon. So if a requirement is for Apple Silicon you should see M1, M2, M3, and so on listed here. Otherwise if it says Intel you've got an Intel processor which came before Apple Silicon and there is a lot of things, like Apple Intelligence, that wouldn't be compatible with your Mac. 

Now if you want you can also identify models by the Model Number. Note that on iPhone and iPad you actually have to tap on the Model Number to get a shorter model number there that usually begins with the letter A. Then you can go to one of these three pages at Apple's Site to identify the model you've got the name of the model with that number. So, for instance, for the iPad you can go to this page and then you can simply search for that number here. The same thing on the iPhone. You go to this page for the iPhone and you can search for that model number. 

For Macs there are a lot of different types of Macs like MacBooks, Mac Studios, and Mac Minis. If you go to this page if you look you'll find a list of links that then go to subpages for each type and you can find the model number for each of those listed throughout this page. Just search through this page and you should be able to identify exactly which Mac you have by the model number. 

So you've made sure that you have the operating system needed for this feature. You've checked the hardware requirements and also the region and language requirements. Then the only other thing to check is sometimes features have On/Off switches. For instance, on the Mac if you go into System Settings you'll see the Apple Intelligence & Siri here. You see that you can turn Off Apple Intelligence. So in the case of Apple Intelligence features if you don't see something it maybe because you've turned Off this feature. Most features don't have an On/Off switch like this. But it is worth looking into and doing a search in System Settings to see if there is one. If you know you've got the right operating system, you know your hardware matches, your region matches, your language matches, you've looked for any other requirements in the PDF footnotes, and you've checked for switches in Settings to make sure you haven't shut off the feature, the only other option you've got then, if your still not sure why the feature isn't there, is to contact Apple Support. 

You can start that by simply going to Support.Apple.com and you've got different ways to get in touch. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.