In the old days, manuals had to describe EVERYTHING, because you couldn’t Google/YouTube for your questions. Thus the 500-page beasts. Quite a contrast to today, where an iPhone comes with just a teensy pamphlet that if you’re lucky has an arrow to indicate the power button, and some 4-point type telling you not to stick it in boiling water.
Apple actually has pretty thorough user guides in the Apple Books store not just for each iOS major version, but for point releases as well. The latest one is iOS 15.2.
These also exist for other Apple products, but Apple could do a better job advertising them.
They might be somewhat thorough in the amount of features covered, but they are severely lacking regarding explanations and illustrations, compared to pre-internet documentation. My father, who is the type who reads manuals, but isn’t computer-savvy, has a hard time with the iPad manual.
Agreed! The team puts a lot of work into consumer documentation, wish their developer documentation was much better. There are so many undocumented intricacies in Swift, SwiftUI, and pretty much every framework or API Apple provides.
There is. Last christmas I had the idea to buy iPhones for my parents, side effect of that was finding out that there is 1000+ page manual for every iOS/iPadOS release which is localized for every country where the relevant thing is sold (well, there even is 200+ page manual for AirPods…)
