Parental Controls are now account based, again similar to what Google provides, meaning the same controls can be used across multiple devices, or set for all children in a household. This also allows Apple to move these settings from the child's device to the parent's, meaning it's easier to change settings on the fly, or perhaps lock down Minecraft until someone cleans their room.

If you set up Facebook or Minecraft to have a one hour limit a day, when the app hits that limit the app will gracefully fade out, and a small hourglass appears beside the app. So not to torment your child, all notifications from that app are also blocked.

A child can request a little more time, 15 minutes, an hour, or a day, depending on their bargaining power. Thankfully, if you decline the request, they cannot ask again for the rest of the day, so you won't be driven mad from notifications.

And speaking which, Apple is grouping notifications, and giving the ability to quieten an app's interruptions directly from the notification, bringing iOS up to date with features Android users have enjoyed for a few years. Siri will suggest notifications that you might not want to see from apps you're not really using, which will hopefully quieten notification spam from needy free-to-play games.

Notifications can be blocked completely with Do Not Disturb, and it's easier to set up specific quiet times that will expire automatically, so you won't need to remember to turn them back on. Say you have a meeting from 12-1, in Control Centre a simple tap will turn off notifications until the meeting is done. You can even set Do Not Disturb to locations as you're entering a restaurant or movie, so you can enjoy some radio silence until you leave.

Siri is often ridiculed but the simple things it does — like adding reminders or calendar appointments — it tends to do well. Apple opened up Siri to a select few app types (messaging and navigation) with iOS 10, but now with Shortcuts, Siri is suddenly a lot more useful. Shortcuts allow developers to create a few different actions in the app, for example Spotify could add “Play Discover Weekly” as a shortcut, and then as an end user I could pick that shortcut and give it my own phrase.

Once you've set up a few, Siri Intelligence can predict the shortcuts you might want next based on your usage: showing you a 'Play workout music' shortcut as you enter the gym, or show a shopping list when entering a supermarket.

It's not full app control — you can't just ask your phone to buy 14 random things from a supermarket's with your voice — but in theory you could set up a 'staples' shortcut of groceries, and have that ordered via voice.

There's also a dedicated Shortcuts app, allowing you to string multiple actions together, so saying something like "leaving the office" could in theory trigger Pocket Casts to play my next episode and have Citymapper send an ETA to my wife (I'm name dropping those apps in the hope they'll support Siri Shortcuts day one).

The Shortcuts app is based on the excellent Workflow, which Apple acquired last year. The App looks a little more friendly under Apple, and now being baked in to the system with Siri behind it, Shortcuts is infinitely more powerful. Still, once you get past the baked-in Shortcuts suggestions, the old workflow view is on show, and it's wonderfully geeky. I'll spend far too much time in this App. I might have to set myself limits.

The author travelled to California as a guest of Apple.