I thought it couldn’t get better when System 7 had color support. It was such a revolution. Then Aqua came along and everything changed. Liquid Glass looks pretty nice to me but I’m mostly just glad we’re getting dimension back. Material flat UI is a stain on the world.
2024 model here, supports ipods, wired and wireless CarPlay/ android auto, 3.5mm aux, Bluetooth. Only thing it doesn’t have is physical media (cd, dvd, cassette). If you plug in an iPhone that supports CarPlay, but turn off / disallow CarPlay from the phone settings, it just shows up as “iPod” too, so any downloaded music works fine.
Beat saber VR is great cardio. Ring fit has a nice variety of workouts too.
Dev betas usually have a LOT more logging and background processes running and battery life is expected to be worse than public stable release, especially in the first couple days after install while all the indexes get refreshed and rebuilt globally.