75 million songs, and the year isn't over yet.
Five days after pushing out its first release candidate, Apple sent a second round of iOS and iPadOS 14.6 test builds to developers — a sign that the software is close to ready and that engineers are still working through the final details before a public launch.
The headline feature for most users will be what happens when they open Apple Music. The update brings two distinct audio upgrades: Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos, which creates the sensation that sound is moving around you rather than arriving from a single point, and Lossless Audio, which delivers music at the same fidelity it had when the artist finished recording it in the studio. At launch, thousands of tracks will carry Spatial Audio support. Lossless Audio starts with more than 20,000 songs and is expected to reach all 75 million tracks in the Apple Music catalog before the year is out.
For anyone who has been frustrated with the Apple Podcasts app since its overhaul in iOS 14.5, this update brings some relief. The bigger news is the arrival of Podcast Subscriptions — a paid tier that Apple announced at its spring event in April — which lets listeners pay individual creators or channels for ad-free episodes, bonus content, and other perks. But the update also quietly addresses the smaller, grinding complaints: there are now tools to mark all episodes as played at once, remove downloads in bulk, and recover episodes that went missing. These are the kinds of fixes that don't make headlines but matter to daily users.
Apple Card Family is the other major addition. The feature, also previewed at the April event, lets spouses or partners merge into a single Apple Card account as co-owners, both building credit under the same account. It also extends to children: parents can add family members as young as 13, set optional spending limits, and apply parental controls — the idea being that teenagers can learn to manage money with a real card while parents keep a hand on the dial. All purchases across everyone on the account roll into one monthly statement. Up to five people can be added to a single Apple Card through Family Sharing.
There is also a small but practical change for AirTag users. In iOS 14.5, anyone who put an AirTag into Lost Mode could only leave a phone number as a contact method. With 14.6, an email address becomes an option — useful for people who would rather not broadcast their number to whoever finds a lost item.
The update includes a handful of bug fixes as well. Among them: Apple Watch unlock sometimes stopped working after using the Lock iPhone option on the watch; Reminders could display as blank lines; call blocking extensions occasionally disappeared from Settings; Bluetooth devices would sometimes drop or reroute audio mid-call; and some iPhones were experiencing sluggish performance at startup. There is also an accessibility improvement — Voice Control users can now unlock their iPhone for the first time after a restart using only their voice, without needing to touch the screen.
Apple has not announced a specific release date for the public version of iOS 14.6, but the arrival of a second release candidate suggests the window is short. Notably, Apple has already begun seeding iOS 14.7 to developers in parallel, which points to a brisk update schedule in the weeks ahead.
Notable Quotes
Spatial Audio creates the sensation that music is coming from all around you, while Lossless Audio reproduces sound exactly as artists recorded it in the studio.— Apple, via iOS 14.6 feature description
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a second release candidate matter? Isn't the first one basically the final version?
Usually, yes — the first RC is close to what ships. A second one means something got caught in testing, whether a bug fix or a last-minute tweak. It's a small signal that Apple found something worth correcting before the public got it.
The Lossless Audio rollout is interesting — 20,000 songs at launch, 75 million by year's end. That's a massive gap. What does that tell us?
It tells you the infrastructure is ready but the catalog encoding takes time. Apple isn't waiting for completion to ship the feature — they're releasing it and filling it in, which is increasingly how they handle large content transitions.
Is Spatial Audio actually meaningful, or is it more of a marketing term?
It depends heavily on what you're listening to and what you're listening on. For orchestral music or certain pop productions mixed for it, the effect is genuinely different. For a lot of everyday listening, you might not notice. The honest answer is: it varies.
Apple Card Family feels like it's doing two different things — financial partnership for couples and financial education for kids. Is that an awkward combination?
Maybe, but it reflects how Apple Card actually gets used. Families share finances in complicated ways. Bundling co-ownership for adults with supervised spending for teenagers under one feature keeps the account structure simple even if the use cases are different.
The Podcasts fixes feel almost apologetic. Does Apple usually patch this quickly after a bad reception?
Not always. The 14.5 Podcasts redesign drew real complaints — missing episodes, confusing navigation. Shipping fixes in the very next update is Apple acknowledging the rollout was rough without saying so directly.
What does it mean that iOS 14.7 is already in developer testing while 14.6 hasn't shipped publicly yet?
It means Apple is running its update pipeline in parallel rather than sequentially. They're not waiting to see how 14.6 lands before starting 14.7. That pace has become normal for them, especially heading into WWDC season.