3 new Apple features I'd literally be lost without

iOS 17 and watchOS 10 get new features to help you find your way (and your remote).

- DAN MOREN

Ah, autumn: The time of year when hot summer days turn to crisp fall ones, leaves are burnished in shades of red and gold, and pumpkin spice begins its inexorable creep back into all our lives. But if you breathe deep, you can just barely smell something else in the air: fresh Apple software updates.

Yes, Apple in September dropped a slew of revisions to almost all of its major platforms. You've no doubt already read of contact posters, new widget interfaces, and FaceTime on the Apple TV 4K, but I wanted to take a few moments to wax rhapsodic about a few of my favorite overlooked features - and, specifically, features that help you not overlook things.

Because this year's updates all provide better ways to navigate the world around us, and even without a second-generation ultrawideband chip, you can still find exactly what you're looking for.

1. NO GRID, NO PROBLEM

For those of us of a certain age, it's funny to look back at a time when we couldn't rely on a device in our pocket to tell us where to go - unless that "device" was a gigantic folded-up piece of paper called a map. Nowadays, we're so reliant on our devices to get to our destinations that it's a real shock when we end up someplace where we can't rely on them.