Three Important Settings Tricks

The Settings app is many screens deep. You might “drill down” by tapping, for example, General, then Keyboard, and then Text Replacement. It’s a lot of tapping, a lot of navigation. Fortunately, you have three kinds of shortcuts.

First, you can jump directly to a particular Settings screen using Siri (Chapter 5). You can say, for example, “Open Sound settings,” “Open Notifications settings,” “Open Wi-Fi settings,” and so on. Siri promptly takes you to the corresponding screen—no tapping required.

Second, you can jump directly to the four most frequently adjusted panels—Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Cellular, and Battery—by hard-pressing the Settings app icon on the Home screen (6s and later models). The shortcut menu offers direct access to those panes.

Finally, on any model, you can swipe to go back (facing page). Once you’ve drilled down to, say, General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, you can “drill up” again by swiping across the screen to the right (start from the edge).

[Your Name]

At the top of Settings screen, a tappable banner displaying your name and photo appears. Tap it to open a screen that summarizes everything Apple knows about you: your phone numbers; email addresses; passwords; credit card information; iCloud account info; and even the list of iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, and Macs you own. Tap one of these items to edit it.

Airplane Mode

As you’re probably aware, you’re not allowed to make cellphone calls on U.S. airplanes. According to legend (if not science), a cellphone’s radio can interfere with a plane’s navigation equipment.

But the iPhone does a lot more than make calls. Are you supposed to deprive yourself of all the music, videos, movies, and email that you could be using in flight, just because calling is forbidden?

Nope. Just turn on airplane mode by tapping the switch at the top of the Settings list (so the switch background turns green). The word Cellular dims there in Settings (you’ve turned off your cellular circuitry); but the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switches are still available, though turned off; you’re now welcome to switch them back on, even in airplane mode.

Now it’s safe (and permitted) to use the iPhone in flight, even with Wi-Fi on, because its cellular features are turned off completely. You can’t make calls, but you can do anything else in the iPhone’s bag of tricks.

Wi-Fi

This item in Settings opens the Wi-Fi Networks screen:

• Wi-Fi On/Off. If you don’t plan to use Wi-Fi, then turning it off gets you a lot more life out of each battery charge. Tap anywhere on this switch to change its status.

• Choose a Network. Here’s a list of all nearby Wi-Fi networks. See “Wi-Fi Hotspots” for details on using Wi-Fi with the iPhone.

• Ask to Join Networks. See “Silencing the “Want to Join?” Messages”.

Bluetooth

Here’s the on/off switch for the iPhone’s Bluetooth transmitter, which is required to communicate with a Bluetooth fitness band, earpiece, keyboard, or hands-free system in a car. When the switch is on, you’re offered the chance to pair the iPhone with other Bluetooth equipment; the paired gadgets are listed here for ease of connecting and disconnecting.

Cellular

These days, all major cell carriers are pushing their unlimited data plans. (They’re not actually unlimitedly unlimited; after you’ve used a certain amount of data, your Internet speed slows way down until the end of the month.) But most people still have capped plans, where, for example, you pay $50 a month for 8 gigabytes of Internet data use.

That’s why iOS offers so many settings to help you control how much Internet data your phone uses.

• Cellular Data. This is the on/off switch for Internet data. If you’re traveling overseas, you might want to turn this off to avoid racking up insanely high roaming charges. Your smartphone becomes a dumbphone, suitable for making calls but not for getting online. (You can still get online in Wi-Fi hotspots.)

• Cellular Data Options. These controls can prevent staggering international roaming fees. Enable LTE lets you turn off LTE—just for voice calls, or for both voice and data—for situations when LTE costs extra.

On AT&T or T-Mobile, you can turn off Data Roaming (when you’re out of the country, you won’t get slapped with outrageous Internet fees). On Verizon and Sprint, once you tap Roaming, you have separate controls for Data Roaming and Voice Roaming. Turning off the last item, International CDMA, forces the phone to use only the more common GSM networks while roaming; sometimes you get better call and data quality that way, and you may save money.

• Wi-Fi Calling. How would you like crisp, solid phone calls even indoors, even where the cell signal barely reaches? That’s what Wi-Fi calling can do for you (“FaceTime Audio Calls”).

  Of course, if you’re on Wi-Fi and you dial 911, the operators won’t know where you are, since cellular transmits your location but Wi-Fi doesn’t. That’s why turning on Wi-Fi Calling requires you to enter your address.

  Once that’s done, you can also turn on Prefer Wi-Fi While Roaming—and you should. When you’re traveling abroad, incoming and outgoing calls will use Wi-Fi, if you’re in a hotspot, instead of the outrageously priced cellular network.

• Allow Calls on Other Devices is part of Continuity, and it’s described in “Mac as Speakerphone”.

• Carrier Services is just a bunch of stuff inserted here by your cellphone carrier. For Verizon, it’s a list of phone numbers (411 for directory assistance, #3282 to see how much data you’ve used so far this month, and so on); for T-Mobile, it’s links to customer service and apps. You get the idea.

• Personal Hotspot. Here’s the setup and on/off switch for Personal Hotspot (“Personal Hotspot (Tethering)”). Once you’ve turned it on, a new Personal Hotspot on/off switch appears on the main Settings screen, so you won’t have to dig this deep in the future.

  

• Cellular Data. The phone tracks how much Internet data you’ve used this month, expressed in megabytes: email messages, web page material, iMessages, Facebook updates, and so on. Your iPhone plan is probably capped—for example at 8 gigabytes a month. If you exceed your monthly maximum, then you’re instantly charged $15 or $20 for another chunk of data. So keeping an eye on these statistics is a very good idea.

  (The Current Period means so far this month; Current Period Roaming means overseas or in places where your cell company doesn’t have service.)

  Next, you see an amazingly useful list. It shows every Internet-using app on your phone and how much data it’s used. Better yet, it offers individual on/off switches for every app on your phone. Each one is an item that could consume data without your awareness. You can shut off the data hogs you really don’t feel like spending megabytes on, and you can find out where the heck all your data is going.

• Wi-Fi Assist. Thousands of iPhone fans know about The Old Flaky Wi-Fi Trick. If the phone is struggling and struggling to load a web page or download an email message on a Wi-Fi network, it often helps to turn off Wi-Fi. The phone hops over to the cellular network, where it’s usually got a better connection.

  That’s why Apple offers Wi-Fi Assist: a feature that’s supposed to do all that automatically. If the phone is having trouble with its Wi-Fi connection, it just hops over to cellular data. (You’ll know when that’s happened because of the appearance of the cellular-network indicator on your status bar, like ,or , instead of the Wi-Fi symbol.)

  If you’re worried about this feature eating up your data allowance, you can, of course, turn Wi-Fi Assist off. Apple notes, however, that Wi-Fi Assist doesn’t kick in (a) when you’re data roaming, (b) for background apps (it helps only the app that’s in front), or (c) if large amounts of data would be consumed. For example, it doesn’t kick in for audio or video streaming or email attachments.

• iCloud Drive. Is the phone allowed to use data (if no Wi-Fi is available) for syncing with your iCloud Drive (“The Carpenter’s Level”)?

• Call Time. The statistics here break down how much time you’ve spent talking on the iPhone, both in the Current Period (that is, this billing month) and in the iPhone’s entire Lifetime. That’s right, folks: You own a cellphone that keeps track of your minutes, to help you avoid exceeding the number you’ve signed up for (and therefore racking up overage minutes).

• Reset Statistics resets the Call Time and Data Usage counters to zero.

Personal Hotspot

Once you’ve turned this feature on (“Personal Hotspot (Tethering)”) in Cellular, this switch appears here, too—on the main Settings screen for your convenience.

Notifications

This panel lists all the apps that think they have the right to nag for your attention. Flight-tracking programs alert you that there’s an hour before takeoff. Social-networking programs ping you when someone’s trying to reach you. Instant-messaging apps ding to let you know that you have a new message. It can add up to a lot of interruption.

On this panel, you can tailor, to an almost ridiculous degree, how you want to be nagged. See “Notifications” for a complete description.

Control Center

The Control Center is written up in “Control Center”. There are two settings to change here. If you turn off Access Within Apps, then you won’t land in the Control Center by accident when you’re playing some game that involves a lot of swiping. And Customize Controls, of course, is iOS 11’s shining achievement: It’s where you decide which buttons appear on the Control Center, and in which order.

Do Not Disturb

This is one of iOS’s most brilliant and useful features. See “Do Not Disturb”.

General

The General pages offer a huge, motley assortment of settings governing the behavior of the virtual keyboard, the search feature, and about 6 trillion other things:

• About. Here you can find out how many songs, videos, and photos your iPhone holds; how much storage your iPhone has; techie details like the iPhone’s software and firmware versions, serial number, model, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth addresses; and so on. (It’s kind of cool to see how many apps you’ve installed.)

  At the very top, you can tap the phone’s name to rename it.

  

• Software Update. When Apple releases a new operating system update, you can download it directly to the phone.

  You’ll know when an update is waiting for you, because you’ll see a little number badge on the Settings icon, as well as on the word “General” in Settings. Tap it, and then tap Software Update, to see and install the update (above, right). (If no number badge is waiting, then tapping Software Update just shows you your current iOS version.)

• AirDrop. Do you want strangers to be able to send you photos? (See “AirDrop”.)

• Handoff. Handoff is for people who own both a Mac and an iPhone; it automatically passes half-finished documents between them, as described in “Handoff”. This is the on/off switch.

• CarPlay. Many car models come equipped with a technology called CarPlay, which displays a few of your iPhone’s icons—Phone, Music, Maps, Messages, Music, Podcasts, and Audiobooks—on the car’s dashboard touchscreen. The idea is to make them big and simple and limited to things you’ll need while you’re driving, to avoid distracting you. Here’s where you connect your phone to your CarPlay system and, if you like, rearrange the icons on the CarPlay screen.

• Home Button appears on the iPhone 7 and 8 models. The home button on these phones, believe it or not, doesn’t actually move. It doesn’t actually click. Instead, a tiny speaker makes the button feel as though you’ve clicked it by producing a little twitch vibration. That helps with the iPhone’s water resistance, of course, but it also permits features like this one: You can actually specify how big the phony click feels, using the settings Apple calls 1, 2, or 3 (and then try it out, right on this screen).

• Accessibility. These options are intended for people with visual, hearing, and motor impairments, but they might come in handy now and then for almost anyone. All these features are described in Chapter 7.

• iPhone Storage. Handy (and new in iOS 11)! Here’s a clean graph showing how full your phone is—and some recommendations. One suggests deleting all text messages and attachments older than one year. Another proposes offloading apps you don’t use much. (That is, their dimmed icons remain on your Home screen, but they’re just bookmarks that download the real apps when tapped.)

  Then comes a list of all your apps, complete with the dates you last used them and how much storage they (and their documents) are eating up on your phone. (Biggest apps are at the top.) Tap an app’s name to review more details, along with Offload App and Delete App buttons. This is an amazing tool if you’re constantly running out of space.

  TIP

  If you tap Messages, you’re offered some especially helpful space-saving options. Review Large Attachments shows an actual list of every attachment (usually photos and videos) people have ever sent you. They’re listed with the biggest first, and identified by date. They’re all still here, taking up space; you can tap one to see it at full size, swipe left to delete one, or tap Edit and then tap many rows (and then hit ) to do the job faster.

  Depending on what version of iOS you have, you may also see Messages in iCloud listed here. Once Apple actually turns on this long-promised iOS 11 feature, your messages and attachments from Messages will all be stored online, freeing up that space on your phone.

  

• Background App Refresh. The list that appears here identifies apps that try to access the Internet, even when they’re in the background. Since such apps can drain your battery, you have the option here to block their background updating.

  You can also turn off the master Background App Refresh switch. Now the only apps that can get online in the background are a standard limited suite (music playback and GPS, for example).

• Restrictions. This means “parental controls.” (Apple called it “Restrictions” instead so as not to turn off potential corporate customers. Can’t you just hear it? “ ‘Parental controls?’ This thing is for consumers?! ”) Complete details appear on “Software Updates to Come”.

• Date & Time. Here you can turn on 24-hour time, also known as military time, in which you see “1700” instead of “5:00 PM.” (You’ll see this change everywhere times appear, including at the top of the screen.)

  Set Automatically refers to the iPhone’s built-in clock. If this item is turned on, then the iPhone finds out what time it is from an atomic clock out on the Internet. If not, then you have to set the clock yourself. (Turning this option off produces two more rows of controls: The Time Zone option becomes available, so you can specify your time zone, and a “number spinner” appears so you can set the clock.)

• Keyboard. Here you can turn off some of the very best features of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. (All these shortcuts are described in Chapter 3.)

  It’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t want any of these tools working for you and saving you time and keystrokes, but here you go: Keyboards lets you add keyboards suited to all the different languages you speak. Text Replacement is where you set up auto-expanding abbreviations for longer words and phrases you type often. One Handed Keyboard is described in “The One-Handed Keyboard”.

  Auto-Capitalization is where the iPhone thoughtfully capitalizes the first letter of every new sentence for you. Auto-Correction is where the iPhone suggests spelling corrections as you type. Check Spelling refers to the pop-up spelling suggestions. Enable Caps Lock is the on/off switch for the Caps Lock feature, in which a fast double-tap on the Shift key turns on Caps Lock.

  Predictive refers to QuickType, the row of three word candidates that appears above the keyboard when you’re typing. Smart Punctuation, new in iOS 11, automatically replaces two hyphens (--) with an em dash (—), and straight quotes (“like this”) with typographically proper curly ones (“like this”) as you type. (This feature can interfere if you’re a programmer typing code; you’ve been warned.)

  Character Preview is the little bubble that pops up, showing the letter, when you tap a key. The “.” Shortcut switch turns on or off the “type two spaces to make a period” shortcut for the ends of sentences, and Enable Dictation is the on/off switch for the ability to dictate text. (If you never use dictation, turning this switch off hides the button on the keyboard, giving the space bar more room to breathe.)

• Language & Region. The iPhone: It’s not just for Americans anymore. The iPhone Language screen lets you choose a language for the iPhone’s menus and messages. Region Format controls how the iPhone displays dates, times, and numbers. (For example, in the U.S., Christmas is on 12/25; in Europe, it’s 25/12.) Calendar lets you choose which kind of calendar system you want to use: Gregorian (that is, “normal”), Japanese, or Buddhist. Temperature unit—well, you know.

• Dictionary. Which dictionaries (which languages) should the phone use when looking up definitions and checking your spelling?

• iTunes Wi-Fi Sync. You can sync your iPhone with a computer wirelessly, as long as the phone is plugged in and on Wi-Fi. Details are in “Connecting the iPhone”.

• VPN. The typical corporate network is guarded by a team of steely-eyed administrators for whom Job One is preventing access by unauthorized visitors. They perform this job primarily with the aid of a super-secure firewall that seals off the company’s network from the Internet.

  So how can you tap into the network from the road? Only one solution is both secure and cheap: the virtual private network, or VPN. Running a VPN lets you create a super-secure, encrypted “tunnel” from your iPhone straight into your corporate network. Your company’s tech staff can tell you whether or not there’s a VPN server set up for you to use.

  If so, they’ll tell you what settings to plug in here. (If this is a company phone, you may see that your overlords have already set up some VPN connections; tap the one you want to use.)

  Once everything is in place, the iPhone can connect to the corporate network and fetch your corporate mail. You don’t have to do anything special on your end when you try to access your corporate email or calendar; the VPN is automatic. When your iPhone goes to sleep, it terminates the VPN connection, both for security purposes and to save battery power.

  TIP

  Once you’ve set up a VPN connection, it appears on the main Settings page, too—the “front door” of Settings—to save you having to burrow into General.

• Profiles & Device Management. This item shows up only if your company issued you this phone. It shows what profile the system administrators have installed on it—the set of restrictions that govern what you’re allowed to change without the company’s permission.

• Regulatory. A bunch of legal logos you don’t care about.

• Reset. On the all-powerful Reset screen, you’ll find six ways to erase your phone:

  Reset All Settings takes all the iPhone’s settings back to the way they were when it came from Apple. Your data, music, and videos remain in place, but the settings all go back to their factory settings.

  Erase All Content and Settings is the one you want when you sell your iPhone, or when you’re captured by the enemy and want to make sure they will learn nothing from it.

  NOTE

  This feature takes awhile to complete—and that’s a good thing. The iPhone doesn’t just delete your data; it also overwrites the newly erased memory with gibberish to make sure the bad guys can’t see any of your deleted info, even with special hacking tools.

  Reset Network Settings makes the iPhone forget all the memorized Wi-Fi networks it currently autorecognizes.

  Reset Keyboard Dictionary has to do with the iPhone’s autocorrection feature, which kicks in whenever you’re trying to input text. Ordinarily, every time you type something the iPhone doesn’t recognize—some name or foreign word, for example—and you don’t accept the iPhone’s suggestion, it adds the word you typed to its dictionary so it doesn’t bother you with a suggestion again the next time. If you think you’ve entered too many misspellings into it, you can delete from its little brain all the new “words” you’ve taught it.

  Reset Home Screen Layout undoes any icon moving you’ve done on the Home screen. It also consolidates your Home screen icons, fitting them onto as few screens as possible.

  Finally, Reset Location & Privacy refers to the “OK to use location services?” warning that appears whenever an iPhone program, like Maps or Camera, tries to figure out where you are. This button makes the iPhone forget all your responses to those permission boxes. In other words, you’ll be asked for permission all over again the next time you use each of those programs.

• Shut Down. This item, new in iOS 11, offers a visual button for turning off the phone—just in case you don’t know or can’t remember the holding-in-the-buttons trick described in “Side Button (On/Off)”. (You still have to swipe the “slide to power off” message to confirm.)

Display & Brightness

Ordinarily, the iPhone controls its own screen brightness. An ambient-light sensor hidden behind the glass at the top of the iPhone’s face samples the room brightness each time you wake the phone and adjusts the screen: brighter in bright rooms, dimmer in darker ones.

When you prefer more manual control, here’s what you can do:

• Brightness slider. Drag the handle on this slider to control the screen brightness manually, keeping in mind that more brightness means shorter battery life.

  If True Tone (see below) or Auto-Brightness is turned on, then the changes you make here are relative to the iPhone’s self-chosen brightness. In other words, if you goose the brightness by 20 percent, then the screen will always be 20 percent brighter than the iPhone would have chosen for itself.

  TIP

  The Control Center (“Control Center”) gives you a much quicker road to the brightness slider. And, of course, you can also tell Siri, “Make the screen brighter” (or “dimmer”). This version in Settings is just for old-timers.

• True Tone. New in iOS 11 (for iPhone 8 models and later): This on/off switch goes beyond the old Auto-Brightness setting. Now it’s Auto-Brightness and Auto-Tint. That is, the screen colors actually shift, based on the current lighting color of the room or place you’re in. The idea is to make colors on the screen seem consistent from one lighting condition to another.

  If you find the result off-putting, you can always turn True Tone off. Now the brightness of the screen is under complete manual control, and the tint never shifts.

• Night Shift. “Many studies have shown that exposure to bright blue light in the evening can affect your circadian rhythms and make it harder to fall asleep,” Apple says. You can therefore use this function to give your screen a warmer, less blue tint, either automatically (Sunset to Sunrise), on a bedtime schedule (for example, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.), or right now (Manually Enable Until Tomorrow). You can also tweak the slider to adjust the color temperature (yellowness) of the screen when Night Shift kicks in.

  You can also turn on Night Shift by telling Siri, “Turn on Night Shift.” Or you can hard-press the brightness slider on the Control Center to find the on/off switch.

  NOTE

  Truth is, there’s not much research indicating that blue light from screens affects your circadian rhythm, let alone little screens like your phone. (If using a gadget before bed makes it hard to sleep, it’s more likely that it’s the brain stimulation of what you’re doing or reading.) Sleep scientists have a more universally effective suggestion: Turn off all your screens a couple of hours before bedtime.

• Auto-Lock. As you may have noticed, the iPhone locks itself (goes to sleep) after a few minutes of inactivity on your part, to save battery power and to prevent accidental screen taps in your pocket.

  On the Auto-Lock screen, you can change the interval of inactivity before the auto-lock occurs (30 seconds, one minute, two minutes, and so on), or you can tap Never. In that case, the iPhone locks only when you click it to sleep.

• Raise to Wake. This on/off switch is available only on the iPhone SE, 6s, and later models. It makes the phone light up when you pick it up—no button-pressing required. The ramifications are huge, because the Lock screen now has many more functions than it did before. There’s a lot you can accomplish on the iPhone before you enter your password to unlock it; see Chapter 2.

• Text Size. As you age, small type becomes harder to read. This universal text-size slider can boost the text size in every app on your phone.

  Technically, what you’re seeing is the front end for Apple’s Dynamic Type feature. And, even more technically, not all apps work with Dynamic Type. But most of the built-in Apple apps do—Contacts, Mail, Maps, Messages, Notes, Phone, Reminders, and Safari Reader—and many other software companies follow suit.

• Bold Text. If the spindly fonts of iOS are a little too light for your reading tastes, you can flip this switch on (see “How to De-Sparsify iOS’s Design”).

• Display Zoom. The iPhone 6 and later models have bigger screens than the iPhones that came before them. The question here is: How do you want to use that extra space? If you tap View and choose Standard, then icons and controls remain the size they always were; the bigger screen fits more on a page. If you choose Zoomed, then those elements appear slightly larger, for the benefit of people who don’t have bionic eyes.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper can mean either the photo on the Lock screen (what you see when you wake the iPhone up), or the background picture behind the icons on your Home screen. On this panel, you can change the image used for either one.

It shows miniatures of the two places you can install wallpaper—the Lock screen and the Home screen. Each shows what you’ve got installed there as wallpaper at the moment.

When you tap Choose a New Wallpaper, you’re shown a list of photo sources you can use as backgrounds. At the top, you get three categories worth noticing.

• Dynamic wallpapers look like soft-focus bubbles against solid backgrounds. Once you’ve installed the wallpaper, these bubbles actually move, rising and falling on your Lock screen or Home screen behind your icons. Yes, animated wallpaper has come to the iPhone.

• Stills are lovely nature photographs. They don’t move.

• Live wallpapers (iPhone 6s and later), once installed as your Lock screen, behave like the Live Photos described in “Live Photos”: When you press the screen hard, they play as three-second movies. (It’s not immediately clear what that gains you.) Note that live wallpapers play back only on the Lock screen (not the Home screen).

Scroll down a little, and you’ll find your own photos, nestled in categories like All Photos, Favorites, Selfies, My Panoramas, and so on. Tap one to see what it looks like at full size.

Once you’ve spotted a worthy wallpaper—in any of the flavors described already—tap it. You’re offered a choice of two installation methods: Still, which is what you’d expect, and Perspective, which means that the photo will shift slightly when you tilt the phone, as though it’s several inches under the glass. (If you’ve chosen a Live Photo, you’ll see a third choice, Live Photo, meaning that it will “play” when it’s on the Lock screen and you hard-press the glass.)

Finally, tap Set. Now the iPhone wants to know which of the two places you want to use this wallpaper; tap Set Lock Screen, Set Home Screen, or Set Both (if you want the same picture in both places).

Sounds (or Sounds & Haptics)

Here’s a more traditional cellphone-settings screen: the place where you choose a ringtone sound for incoming calls.

• Vibrate on Ring, Vibrate on Silent. Like any self-respecting cellphone, the iPhone has a Vibrate mode—a little shudder in your pocket that might get your attention when you can’t hear the ringing. There are two on/off controls for the vibration: one for when the phone is in Silent mode and one for when the ringer is on.

• Ringer and Alerts. The slider here controls the volume of the phone’s ringing.

  Of course, it’s usually faster to adjust the ring volume by pressing the up/down buttons on the left edge whenever you’re not on a call or playing music or a video. But if you find that your volume buttons are getting pressed accidentally in your pocket, you can also turn off Change with Buttons. Now you can adjust the volume only with this slider, here in Settings.

• Sounds and Vibration Patterns. The iPhone is, of course, a cell­phone—and therefore it sometimes rings. The sound it makes when it rings is up to you; by tapping Ringtone, you can view the iPhone’s list of 25 built-in ringtones; 25 more ringtones from iOS versions past (tap Classic to see them); 27 “alert tones”; plus any you’ve added yourself. You can use any of them as a ringtone or an alert tone, no matter how it’s listed.

  Tap a ring sound to hear it. After you’ve tapped one you like, confirm your choice by tapping Sounds to return to the Sounds (or Sounds & Haptics) screen.

But why stop with a ringtone? The iPhone can make all kinds of other sounds to alert you: to the arrival of a voicemail, text, or email; to the sending of an email message, tweet, or Facebook post; to Calendar or Reminders alarms; to the arrival of AirDrop files; and so on.

This is a big deal—not just because you can express your individuality through your choice of ringtones, text tones, reminder tones, and so on, but also because you can distinguish your iPhone’s blips and bleeps from somebody else’s in the same family or workplace.

For each of these events, tap the light-gray text that identifies the current sound for that event (“Tri-tone” or “Ding,” for example). On the resulting screen, tap the different sound options to find one you like; then tap Sounds to return to the main screen.

On that Sounds screen, you can also turn on or off Lock Sounds (the sounds you get when you tap the side button) and the Keyboard Clicks that play when you type on the virtual keyboard.

Siri & Search

Here are the on/off switches for Siri and a whole slew of options for her behavior; see “Siri Settings”.

Touch ID (Face ID) & Passcode

Here’s where you set up a password for your phone, or where you teach the phone to recognize your fingerprints or (on the iPhone X) your face. Details on training the phone start in “Fingerprint Security (Touch ID)”.

The rest of the settings include controls like these:

• Use Touch ID (Face ID) For: As it turns out, your fingerprint or face can do more than unlock the phone (iPhone Unlock). You can also use them to authenticate your identity when using Apple Pay (“Apple Pay”) or buying songs, movies, and apps (iTunes & App Store).

  On the iPhone X, your face can also unlock the auto-typing of memorized website passwords (Safari AutoFill). Other Apps reveals a list of other apps that can use Face ID as authentication, including Notes (to unlock notes you’ve password-protected), Twitter, Dropbox, and so on. In those situations, you’ll see the little Face ID icon on the screen, and a message will instruct you to double-click the side button to seal the deal.

• Allow Access When Locked. At the bottom of this Settings page, a list of iPhone features awaits—features that you can use at the Lock screen (Chapter 2), before you’ve unlocked the phone. Depending on your paranoia tolerance, you may not be comfortable with the notion that somebody picking your phone up from your desk could dive into some of these things—so you can turn them off here.

• Erase Data. The note says it all: “Erase all data on this iPhone after 10 failed passcode attempts.” (That’s passcode, not fingerprint or Face ID attempts.) Clearly, if somebody needs that many guesses, he’s not you—he’s a spy trying to get in. Useful if you work for the CIA, NSA, or DMV.

The iPhone X offers a couple of important additional settings:

• Require Attention for Face ID. Ordinarily, the iPhone X’s face recognition system unlocks the phone only when you’re looking at the phone. That way, no evildoing relative or coworker can unlock your phone when you’re asleep by holding it in front of your snoozing face.

  But if you’re blind, wear opaque sunglasses all day, or have no eyes, what then? In that case, you can turn off this option. Now the phone will unlock whenever it recognizes you, even if your eyes aren’t open and looking at it.

• Attention Aware Features. Apple hasn’t said much about this option, but it’s very cool. The TrueDepth camera will prevent the screen from turning off after 30 seconds (or whatever your auto-sleep setting is)while you’re looking at it—and it will make your morning alarm quieter if you’re looking at it.

Emergency SOS

This is the beating heart of iOS 11’s new emergency calling feature, which is described in “Widgets on the Home Screen”.

Battery

This panel offers these goodies:

• Low Power Mode. See “Battery Life Tips”.

• Battery Percentage. Instead of just a “filling-up-battery” fuel-gauge icon at the top of your screen, how would you like a digital percentage readout, too (“75%”)?

  iPHONE X

  This option isn’t available in Settings, because there’s no room for the percentage on the right ear. But if you ever do want to see the battery percentage, just swipe down on that ear to see the Control Center; there it is.

• Battery Usage. Here’s the readout for all your apps, showing their battery appetite over the past day or week; see ???.

  TIP

  Tap to see exactly how much time you wasted using that app over the given time period—either the past 24 hours or the past seven days.

• Usage, Standby. These stats show you how many hours and minutes of life you’ve gotten from your current battery charge. (Usage = you using the phone. Standby = phone asleep.)

Privacy

By “privacy,” Apple means “the ability of apps and Apple to access your data.”

Many an app works better, or claims to, when it has access to your address book, calendar, photos, and so on. Generally, when you run such an app for the first time, it explicitly asks you for permission to access each kind of data. But here, on this panel, you have a central dashboard—and on/off switches—for each data type and the apps that want it.

iTunes & App Store

If you’ve indulged in a few downloads (or a few hundred) from the App Store or iTunes music store, then you may well find some settings of use here. For example, when you tap your Apple ID at the top of the panel, you get these buttons:

• View Apple ID. This takes you to the web, where you can look over your Apple account information, including credit card details.

• Sign Out. Tap when, for example, a friend wants to use her own iTunes account to buy something on your iPhone. As a gift, maybe.

• iForgot. If you’ve forgotten your password, tap here. You’ll be offered a couple of different ways of establishing your identity—and you’ll be given the chance to make up a new password.

Wallet & Apple Pay

This panel, available on the iPhone 6 and later, sets all the preferences for Apple Pay (“Apple Pay”), including the master switch for Apple Pay Cash (“Apple Pay Online”). You see any credit cards you’ve enrolled, plus Add Credit or Debit Card to enroll another.

Double-Click Home Button (or, on the iPhone X, Side Button) is the on/off switch for using Apple Pay when the phone is locked.

Allow Payments on Mac is the on/off switch for the option to use your iPhone’s fingerprint reader (or iPhone X face recognition) to approve purchases you make on the web using your Mac (an option on sites that offer Apple Pay online). Finally, Transaction Defaults sets up the card, address, email account, and phone number you prefer to use when buying stuff online.

Accounts & Passwords

That’s iOS’s new name for what used to be called “Internet Accounts,” which before that was “Mail, Contacts & Calendars.” It’s a central clearinghouse for your email accounts—and the associated calendar, contacts, notes, and reminder accounts. (Yahoo, Google, iCloud, Microsoft, and others all offer such unified suites of services.)

At the top, App & Website Passwords (after requiring Touch ID, Face ID, or your passcode) shows a complete list of every password that your iPhone has memorized for you. Tap one to look up the password itself, or swipe leftward to delete it. You can also select one and Edit it, if the phone has somehow gotten it wrong.

Mail

In iOS 11, you don’t set up your email accounts here anymore; you do that in Accounts & Passwords, described above.

What you do do here is specify how often you want the iPhone to check for new messages, how you want your Mail app to look, and more.

• Preview. It’s cool that the iPhone shows you the first few lines of text in every message. Here you can specify how many lines. More lines mean you can skim your inbound messages without having to open many of them; fewer lines mean more messages fit without scrolling.

• Show To/Cc Label. If you turn this option on, then a tiny, light-gray logo appears next to many of the messages in your inbox. The logo indicates that this message was addressed directly to you; the logo means you were merely “copied” on a message primarily intended for someone else.

  If there’s no logo at all, then the message is in some other category. Maybe it came from a mailing list, or it’s an email blast (a Bcc), or the message is from you, or it’s a bounced message.

• Swipe Options. Which colorful insta-tap buttons would you like to appear when you swipe across a message in a list? See “Control Center” for details.

• Flag Style. You can flag messages to draw your own attention to them, either with the old-style flag icon—or, for visual spark, with an orange dot. Here’s where you choose.

• Ask Before Deleting. Ordinarily, you can delete an open message quickly and easily, just by tapping the icon. But if you’d prefer to encounter an additional confirmation step before the email message disappears, then turn this option on.

  NOTE

  The confirmation box appears only when you’re deleting an open message—not when you delete a message from the inbox list.

• Load Remote Images. Spammers, the vile undercrust of lowlife society, have a trick. When they send you email that includes a picture, they don’t actually paste the picture into the message. Instead, they include a “bug”—a piece of code that instructs your email program to fetch the missing graphic from the Internet. Why? Because that gives the spammer the ability to track who has actually opened the junk mail, making those email addresses much more valuable for reselling to other spammers.

  If you turn this option off, then the iPhone does not fetch “bug” image files at all. You’re not flagged as a sucker by the spammers. You’ll see empty squares in the email where the images ought to be. (Graphics sent by normal people and legitimate companies are generally pasted right into the email, so they’ll still show up just fine.)

• Organize by Thread. This is the on/off switch for the feature that clumps related back-and-forths into individual items in your Mail inbox.

• Collapse Read Messages. See “The Message List—and Threading” for details.

• Most Recent Message on Top. The messages in a conversation usually appear chronologically, newest at the top. (The latest message still appears when you click the thread’s name.) If you prefer oldest at the top, then turn off this setting.

• Complete Threads. What if, during a particular back-and-forth, you’ve filed away certain messages into other folders? Should they still show up in a conversation thread? They will, if this switch is on. (The moved messages are actually sitting in those other folders; they just appear here for your convenience.) Now your conversations seamlessly combine related messages from all mailboxes.

• Always Bcc Myself. If this option is on, then you’ll get a secret copy of any message you send. Some people use this feature to make sure their computers have records of replies sent from the phone.

• Mark Addresses. Your phone can warn you when you’re addressing an email to somebody outside your company—just type in its email suffix here (@widgets.com). Whenever you address a message to anyone else, it appears in red in the “To:” line.

• Increase Quote Level. Each time you reply to a reply, it gets indented more, so you and your correspondents can easily distinguish one reply from the next.

• Signature. A signature is a bit of text that gets stamped at the bottom of your outgoing messages. Here’s where you can change yours.

• Default Account. Your iPhone can manage an unlimited number of email accounts. Here you can tap the account you want to be your default—the one that’s used when you create a new message from another program, like a Safari link, or when you’re on the All Inboxes screen of Mail.

Contacts

Contacts gets its own little set of options in Settings:

• Sort Order, Display Order. How do you want the names in your Contacts list sorted—by first name or by last name?

  Note that you can have them sorted one way but displayed another way. Also note that not all those combinations make sense.

• Short Name. When this switch is on, the Mail app may fit more email addressees’ names into its narrow To box by shortening them. It may display “M. Mouse,” for example, or “Mickey,” or even “M.M.”—whatever you select here.

• Prefer Nicknames is similar. It instructs Mail to display the nicknames for your friends (as determined in Contacts) instead of their real names.

• My Info. Tap here to tell the phone which card in Contacts represents you. Knowing who you are is useful to the phone in a number of places—for example, it’s how Siri knows what you mean when you say, “Give me directions home.”

• Default Account. Here again, the iPhone can manage multiple address books—from iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and so on. Tap the account you want new contacts to fall into, if you haven’t specified one in advance. (This item doesn’t appear unless you have multiple accounts with Contacts turned on.)

• Import SIM Contacts. If you came to the iPhone from another, lesser GSM phone, your phone book may be stored on its little SIM card instead of in the phone itself. In that case, you don’t have to retype all those names and numbers to bring them into your iPhone. This button can do the job for you. (The results may not be pretty. For example, some phones store all address book data in CAPITAL LETTERS.)

Calendar

Your iPhone’s calendar can be updated by remote control, wirelessly, through the air, either by your company (via Exchange) or by somebody at home using your computer (via iCloud, Chapter 16).

• Time Zone Override. Whenever you arrive in a new city, the iPhone actually learns (from the local cell towers) what time zone it’s in and changes its own clock automatically.

  So here’s a mind-teaser. Suppose there’s a big meeting in California at 2 p.m. tomorrow—but you’re in New York right now. How should that event appear on your calendar? Should it appear as 2 p.m. (that is, its local time)? Or should it appear as 5 p.m. (your East Coast time)?

  It’s not an idle question, because it also affects reminders and alarms.

  Out of the box, Time Zone Override is turned off. The phone slides appointments around on your calendar as you travel to different time zones. If you’re in California, that 2 p.m. meeting appears at 2 p.m. When you return to New York, it says 5 p.m. Handy—but dangerous if you forget what you’ve done.

  If you turn on the Override, though, the iPhone leaves all your appointments at the hours you record them—in the time zone you specify with the pop-up menu here. This option is great if you like to record events at the times you’ll be experiencing them; they’ll never slosh around as you travel. If you, a New Yorker, will travel to San Francisco next week for a 2 p.m. meeting, write it down as 2 p.m.; it will still say 2 p.m. when you land there.

• Alternate Calendars. If you prefer to use the Chinese, Hebrew, or Islamic calendar system, go nuts here.

• Week Numbers. This option makes Calendar display a little gray notation that identifies which week you’re in (out of the 52 this year). It might say, for example, “W42.” Because, you know, some people aren’t aware enough of time racing by.

• Show Invitee Declines. You can invite someone to a meeting, as described in ???. If they click Decline (they can’t make it), maybe you don’t need your phone to alert you. In that case, turn this switch off.

• Sync. If you’re like most people, you refer to your calendar more often to see what events are coming up than to see the ones you’ve already lived through. Ordinarily, therefore, the iPhone saves you some syncing time and storage space by updating only relatively recent events on your iPhone calendar. It doesn’t bother with events that are older than two weeks, or six months, or whatever you choose here. (Or you can turn on All Events if you want your entire life, past and future, synced each time—storage and wait time be damned.)

• Default Alert Times. This is where you tell the iPhone how much warning you need in advance of birthdays and events you’ve put on your calendar. Tailor it to your level of absentmindedness.

• Start Week On. This option specifies which day of the week appears at the left edge of the screen in the calendar’s Day and Month views. For most people, that’s Sunday, or maybe Monday—but, for all iOS cares, your week could start on a Thursday.

• Default Calendar. This option lets you answer the question: “When I add a new appointment to my calendar on the iPhone, which calendar (category) should it belong to?” You can choose Home, Work, Kids, or whatever category you use most often.

• Location Suggestions. You may have noticed that if you enter the location for a calendar appointment (???), the phone proposes a list of full street addresses that match what you’re typing. That’s to save you data entry, and also to calculate travel times. Here’s the on/off switch.

Notes

Notes can sync with various online services: iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and so on. Tap Default Account to indicate which account you use mainly—the one that should contain any new note.

In iOS 11, you can also turn on an “On My iPhone” Account—a completely private one that’s not synced to any online service, or even your Mac. That data lives only on your phone—handy if you have deeply personal information, or if you just don’t trust those online services.

Until iOS 11 came along, your notes were always sorted with the most recently edited ones at the top. Now, using Sort Notes By, you can specify that you want them listed alphabetically by title, or chronologically by date created.

Notes comes with ready-to-use type styles like Title, Heading, and Body. So you can use the New Notes Start With option to choose which of those is the first line when you create a new note. If you usually start with a title for your note “card,” then choose Title, for example.

Lines & Grids lets you choose “lined paper” or “graph paper”; see “Sharing Notes”.

Password is the command center for the new locked notes feature (“Sharing Notes”). You can change your password here, or create an additional one—or allow your fingerprint or face to unlock your locked notes.

You can take photos, scans, and videos right from within Notes. If you turn on Save to Photos, then you’ll also get a copy of those images and videos in your Photos app, just as though you’d taken them with the Camera app.

Finally, here are all the options for creating Notes from the Lock screen (on the Control Center); they’re described in ???.

Reminders

Hey, it’s the preference settings for the Reminders app!

• Sync. How far back to you want Reminders to look when showing you reminders? At All of them? Or only those up to 6 months old? (Or 3 Months, 1 Month, or 2 Weeks?) It’s a question of storage and lifestyle.

• Default List. Suppose you’ve created multiple Reminder lists (Groceries, Movies to Rent, To Do, and so on). When you create a new item—for example, by telling Siri, “Remind me to fix the sink”—which list should it go on? Here’s where you specify.

Phone

These settings have to do with your address book, call management, and other phone-related preferences.

• My Number. Here’s where you can see your iPhone’s own phone number. You can even edit it, if necessary (just how it appears—you’re not actually changing your phone number).

• Announce Calls. Cool—the iPhone can speak the name or number of whoever is calling you. Here you can turn that feature on or off, or specify that you want it to happen only when you’re using headphones or in the car.

• Call Blocking & Identification. You can block certain people’s calls, texts, and FaceTime video calls.

  This isn’t a telemarketer-blocking feature; you can block only people who are already in your Contacts. It’s really for blocking harassing ex-lovers, jerky siblings you’re not speaking to, and collection agencies. Tap Block Contact to view your Contacts list, where you can tap to choose the blockee. (You can also see and edit this list in the Messages and FaceTime panels of Settings.)

• Wi-Fi Calling. This glorious option lets you place great-sounding calls even with a crummy cellular signal, as described in “FaceTime Audio Calls”.

• Calls on Other Devices. Here’s the on/off switch for Continuity, the ability to make phone calls from your Mac (“Mac as Speakerphone”). You can even specify which gadgets talk to your iPhone in this way.

• Respond with Text. This feature is described in “Respond with a Text Message”; here’s where you can edit the canned “Can’t talk right now” text messages.

• Call Forwarding, Call Waiting (AT&T and T-Mobile only). Here are the on/off switches for Call Forwarding and Call Waiting, which are described in Chapter 4.

• Show My Caller ID (AT&T and T-Mobile only). If you don’t want your number to show up on the screen of the person you’re calling, then turn this off.

• Change Voicemail Password. Yep, pretty much just what it says.

• Dial Assist. When this option is turned on, and when you’re calling from another country, the iPhone automatically adds the proper country codes when dialing numbers in your contacts. Pretty handy, actually.

• SIM PIN. Your SIM card stores all your account information. SIM cards are especially desirable abroad, because in most countries, you can pop yours into any old phone and have working service. If you’re worried about yours getting stolen or lost, turn this option on. You’ll be asked to enter a passcode.

  Then, if some bad guy ever tries to put your SIM card into another phone, he’ll be asked for the passcode. Without the passcode, the card (and the phone) won’t make calls.

  TIP

  And if the evildoer guesses wrong three times—or if you do—then the words “PIN LOCKED” appear on the screen, and the SIM card is locked forever. You’ll have to get another one from your carrier. So don’t forget the password.

• [Your carrier] Services. A duplicate of the options described in ???.

  TIP

  The button at the bottom of the screen opens your account page on the web, for further details on your cellphone billing and features.

Messages

These options govern text messages (SMS) and iMessages, both of which are described in Chapter 6:

• iMessage. This is the on/off switch for iMessages. If it’s off, then your phone never sends or receives these handy, free messages—only regular text messages.

• Show Contact Photos. Do you want to see the tiny headshots of your conversation partners in the chat window?

• Text Message Forwarding is the text-message element of Continuity; it’s described in “Texting from the Mac”. You get an on/off switch for each gadget that you might want to display your phone’s text messages.

• Send Read Receipts. If this is on, then people who send you iMessages will know when you’ve seen them. They’ll see a tiny gray text notification beneath the iMessage bubble that contains their message. If you’re creeped out by them being able to know when you’re ignoring them, then turn this item off.

• Send as SMS. If you try to send an iMessage to somebody when there’s no Internet service, what happens? If this item is on, then the message goes to that person as a regular text message, using your cell carrier’s network. If it’s off, then the message won’t go out at all.

• Send & Receive. Here you can enter additional email addresses that people can use to send your phone iMessages.

  This screen also offers a Start new conversations from item that lets you indicate what you want to appear on the other guy’s phone when you send a text: your phone number or email address.

• MMS Messaging. This is the on/off switch for picture and video messages (as opposed to text-only ones).

• Group Messaging, Show Subject Field, Character Count. These options are described starting in ???.

• Blocked. Here’s another way to build up a list of people you don’t want to hear from, as described in ???.

• Keep Messages. You can specify how long you want Messages to retain a record of your exchanges: 30 days, a year, or forever.

• Filter Unknown Senders. This feature gives you a sliver of protection from bombardment by strangers. It prevents you from getting notifications of iMessages from anyone who’s not in your Contacts. In fact, you’ll also see two tabs in Messages—one that lists chats for people you know (and regular non-Apple text messages), and the other labeled Unknown Senders.

• Audio Messages. You can now shoot audio utterances to other people just as easily as you can type them. And, under Expire, you can set them to auto-delete after two minutes. Why? First, because audio files take up space on your phone. Second, because you may consider them spoken text messages—not recordings to preserve for future generations. This is also where you turn on Raise to Listen.

  The audio-texting feature lets you send and receive audio messages without looking at the screen or touching it; see “Audio Texting (iMessages Only)”.

• Low Quality Image Mode. This option can save a huge amount of cellular data when you send photos. See “Bonus Settings in a Place You Didn’t Expect”.

FaceTime

These options pertain to FaceTime, the video-calling feature described in “Get Your Ringtones Back”. Here, for example, is the on/off switch for the entire feature; a place to enter your Apple ID, so people can make FaceTime calls to you; and a place to enter email addresses and a phone number, which can also be used to reach you.

The Caller ID section lets you specify how you want to be identified when you place a call to somebody else: either as a phone number or an email address. FaceTime Live Photos, new in iOS 11, lets you take a Live Photo during a FaceTime call—a three-second video slice of your conversation.

Finally, here yet again is the Blocked option—a third way to edit the list of people you don’t want to hear from.

Maps

The expanded Maps app has an expanded set of settings. At the top, three controls that also appear elsewhere in Settings, but are here again because they’re so important: Siri & Search (see “Siri Settings”); Notifications (do you want turn-by-turn instructions to pop up when you’re driving?); and Cellular Data (do you want Maps to be able to eat up your cellular Internet allotment?).

Then there’s:

• Preferred Transportation Type. Do you mainly drive, walk, or take public transport? By specifying here, you save yourself a tap every time you plot directions.

• Driving & Navigation. Here’s where you tell Maps that you want your plotted courses to avoid Tolls or Highways; turn a Compass display on or off on the map; specify the Navigation Voice Volume; and direct playback of any spoken entertainment (like podcasts or audiobooks) to Pause whenever the Maps voice is giving you an instruction.

• Transit. Which modes of public rides do you want Maps to show you when proposing routes? Bus, Subway, Commuter Rail, Ferry?

• Distances. Measured in miles or kilometers, sir/madam?

• Map Labels. Would you like place names to appear in English—or in their native spellings?

• Extensions. Now that Maps can incorporate other apps (see “Flyover Tours”), which ones should it show you? Lyft and Uber are the obvious ones here, so that Maps can incorporate those ride-sharing services into its proposals for your travel.

• Show Rides From New Apps. Lyft and Uber aren’t the only ride-sharing apps in town. But when you install new ones, you might want Maps to include their options automatically, so you don’t have to remember to burrow in here and turn on their Extensions switches.

• Table Booking Extensions. If you turn on OpenTable and/or Yelp here, then whenever you search for a restaurant in Maps, you’ll see whether it has tables available, courtesy of these apps.

• Show Parked Location. You wouldn’t turn off this cool Maps feature, would you (“Where You Parked”)?

• Follow up by Email. When you report a problem with Maps’ still-buggy database of the world, may Apple technicians get back to you by email?

Compass

You wouldn’t think that something as simple as the Compass app would need a Settings page, but here it is: an on/off switch called Use True North. (True north is the “top” point of the Earth’s rotational axis. If you turn it off, then Compass uses magnetic north, the spot traditional compasses point to; it’s about 11 degrees away from true north).

Safari

Here’s everything you ever wanted to adjust in the web browser but didn’t know how to ask. (At the top: The usual Siri & Search options, as described in “Siri Settings”.)

Search

• Search Engine. Your choice here determines who does your searching from the search bar: Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others. (Baidu is big in China.)

• Search Engine Suggestions. As you type into Safari’s search box, it tries to save you time in two ways. First, it sprouts a list of common search requests, based on what millions of other people have sought. This list changes with each letter you type. Second, Safari may autocomplete the address based on what you’ve typed so far, using suggestions from your History and bookmarks list. This switch shuts off those suggestions. (It’s here primarily for the benefit of privacy hounds, who object to the fact that their search queries are processed by Apple in order to show the suggestions.)

• Safari Suggestions. Safari searches (Chapter 3) can find matches from the iTunes, iBooks, and App stores; from databases of local businesses, restaurants, and theaters; and from the web. Unless you turn this off.

• Quick Website Search. You can search within a site (like Amazon or Reddit or Wikipedia) using only Safari’s regular search bar, as described in “Quick Website Search”. If, that is, this switch is on.

• Preload Top Hit. As you type into the search box, Safari lists websites that match. The first one is the Top Hit—and if this switch is on, Safari secretly downloads that page while you’re still finishing your search. That way, if the Top Hit is the page you wanted, it appears almost instantly when you tap.

  But here’s the thing: Safari downloads the Top Hit with every search—which uses up data. Which could cost you money.

News

“News” describes the News app. Here’s where you indicate whether it’s allowed to tailor your news to your Location, whether it’s allowed to provide Siri & Search results, if it can bug you with Notifications about news stories, whether it’s allowed to fetch news in the Background (at some cost to battery life), and whether it can fetch new news over the Cellular Data network (at some cost to your data allowance).

You can turn off the “Next Up” link at the bottom of each story, as well as the Story Previews (where the first couple of lines of each news story appear right in the app). Restrict Stories in For You means you’ll see only stories from news sources you’ve selected; you don’t give News leeway to propose articles from other sources on topics you like.

Music

What you see here depends on whether you’ve subscribed to the $10-a-month Apple Music service (Chapter 8).

• Show Apple Music. When this is off, the new tabs (For You and New) disappear from the Music app. Which makes sense if you’re not a subscriber, since they’re doing you no good.

• Add Playlist Songs. Songs you add to a playlist get automatically added to your library, too.

• Show Star Ratings. Turn this on if you’d like to rate the songs in your music collection from one to five stars. Note that this option doesn’t affect how Music suggests new music to you, as you might expect.

• iCloud Music Library (which appears only if you use Apple Music) is described on “The Library Tab”.

• Cellular Data lets you guard against having your streaming music eat up your monthly cellular data allowance. If it’s off, then you can download and play back music only over Wi-Fi. You can also permit or prevent using cellular for Streaming songs (or just High Quality Streaming) and Downloads of songs.

• Downloaded Music lets you see how much of your storage space is devoted to songs you’ve acquired.

• Optimize Storage. This option appears only if you use iCloud Music Library. It offers to auto-delete everything but 8, 16, 32, or 64 gigs of songs. They’re still yours—they’re just online instead of on your phone.

• Automatic Downloads is another iCloud Music Library special. It means that any song you’ve added to your online song library also gets auto-copied to your phone for offline playback.

• EQ, Volume Limit, Sound Check. See “Switching Among Speakers”.

• Use Listening History. Each song you play on your phone helps to shape the Music app’s “For You” recommendation. Also, people who follow you on Apple Music get to see what you’ve been playing.

• Home Sharing. Conveniently enough, you can access your iTunes music collection, upstairs on your computer, right from your iPhone, over your home Wi-Fi network. Or at least you can if both machines are signed into the same Apple ID. Here’s where you enter the Apple ID that matches your iTunes setup.

TV

This is what you can adjust for the TV app:

• Notifications. Here are the app’s notifications controls.

• iTunes Videos. Use Cellular Data for Playback is a safeguard against eating up your cellular data with videos; leave it off to stream videos only over Wi-Fi. Playback Quality asks: When you’re watching over Wi-Fi, do you want the best picture, even if that uses up more data? (Yes, some people have to worry about how much Wi-Fi data they use every month.) You get the same choices for Cellular data.

  Download HDR Videos is for iPhone X owners, whose screen can show high dynamic range (HDR) video, with darker darks and brighter brights. Purchases and Rentals: When you buy or rent a video from Apple, do you want it in High Definition or Standard? (High Definition looks better but takes forever to download.)

  Home Sharing means you can access your video collection in iTunes on your computer, as described already. Same deal here.

• Up Next. All your Apple machines will remember where and what you left off watching.

• Connect to TV. These are the apps for your various cable and pay-TV channels. The ones you turn on here sync, with your other iOS devices, what you’ve been watching and where you stopped.

  That’s a slick convenience—but it does mean Apple’s computers will know what you’ve been watching. So here, for the sake of your privacy and self-esteem, you can turn off that data sharing on a per-channel basis.

• Clear Play History. Again, Apple’s worried about your worries about privacy. This function deletes your viewing data from the TV app.

Photos

In iOS 11, the old Photos & Camera settings have been split into two, ingeniously titled Photos and Camera.

• Siri & Search. Duplicates of what’s described in “Siri Settings”.

• iCloud Photo Library. See “iCloud Photo Library”.

• Optimize iPhone Storage, Download and Keep Originals. See “Geotagging”.

• Upload to My Photo Stream. Every picture you take will be sent to all your Apple gadgets (see “Hide”).

• Upload Burst Photos. Recent iPhones can snap 10 photos a second when you hold your finger down on the shutter button. That’s a lot of photos, which can fill up your iCloud storage fast. So Apple gives you the option to exclude them from the uploads.

• iCloud Photo Sharing and Cellular Data are covered in “iCloud Photo Sharing”.

• Summarize Photos. In the Photos app, the Years and Collections screens generally display one tiny thumbnail for every single photo. This feature makes those more manageable by displaying fewer, but representative, thumbnails. (You won’t see any difference unless you have a pretty huge collection of photos.)

• View Full HDR (iPhone X only). You lucky dog—your OLED screen can display the full range of colors and brights and darks in your photos. Don’t turn this off.

• Show Holiday Events. You know the Memories feature (“The Memories Tab”)? It can create auto-slideshows based on the holidays in your country, if you want. If you’d just as soon not be reminded of these stressful times, then turn this off.

• Transfer to Mac or PC. iOS 11 takes photos in a new format called HEIF (high efficiency image format). These photos take up half the space without losing any quality, which is awesome—but not all desktop photo programs can open HEIF files. Mac OS High Sierra can open them, but older Mac OS versions can’t; the current Photoshop version can, but older ones can’t.

  If you’re having trouble, turn on Automatic. That way, photos get sent as JPEGs, which every desktop program on earth can recognize.

Camera

Behold: the controls for the iPhone’s amazing camera.

• Preserve Settings. The Camera app can remember the mode you had selected when you last used it—Video, Photo, Panorama, or whatever—instead of always starting with Photo.

  Depending on your phone model, it can also remember the last photo filter you used (“Filters”), what lighting effect (“Studio Lighting”), and whether or not you had Live Photo turned on (“Live Photos”).

• Grid turns the “Rule of Thirds” grid (the tic-tac-toe lines) on or off on the camera’s viewfinder screen.

• Scan QR Codes. So cool! If you point the camera at a QR bar code (of the type you often see on movie posters and ads), the corresponding web link appears as a notification, ready to tap. You don’t need a dedicated QR-reading app anymore.

• Record Video. This option, exclusive to the iPhone 6 and later, controls the frame rate and quality of the video you shoot. The first number in each option (like 720p, 1080p, or 4K) controls the resolution of the video (how many pixels make up each frame—and how correspondingly huge the video files are). The second, fps, controls the frames per second. Normal TV video is about 30 fps, so choosing 60 fps creates bigger files but smoother playback.

  A weird additional option appears here if you have a Plus or X model: Lock Camera. These phones, of course, have two lenses (“Editing Live Photos”). Under certain lighting conditions, if you zoom while recording video, a little hiccup results as the phone switches from one lens to the other. But if you turn on this option you’ll get no such glitch, because the phone will use only one lens the whole time. (You can still zoom—but it’s a digital, fake zoom, and the image will slightly degrade as you do so.)

• Record Slo-mo. Recent iPhone models give you a choice of slow-motion modes (and tell you how much space each takes up). 240 frames per second plays back at half the speed of 120.

• Formats (iPhone 7 and later). As noted, your photos and videos now occupy only half the space they used to—and look exactly the same. That’s because Apple has adopted a new format called HEIF (high efficiency image format) for photos, and HEVC (high efficiency video coding) format for video.

  Which is great—except what happens when you try to share one of your pictures or videos with someone whose phone or computer doesn’t know that format? No sweat: iOS automatically checks before sending to see if the receiving device can handle HEIF or HEVC. If not, it converts the outgoing photo to JPEG, or the outgoing video to H.264—the old standards.

  If you’re having any trouble with this system, you can turn it all off here. If you choose Most Compatible, the iPhone captures photos and videos in the older formats (JPEG and H.264). As the note here points out, though, super-deluxe capture styles like 4K and 60 frames a second, and slow-mo at 240, must use HEVC, no matter what your selection here.

• Auto HDR. If this is on, Camera switches to HDR (“High Dynamic Range (HDR)”) whenever it thinks that lighting conditions merit it. If you turn this off, then the HDR button returns in the Camera app, so that the choice is yours.

• Keep Normal Photo. When you take a photo in HDR mode, iOS saves two photos, one normal and one HDR. If you turn this off, you get only the HDR shot.

iBooks

These iBooks ebook settings are described starting in “iBooks Settings”.

Podcasts

These settings affect the Podcasts app described on “Podcasts”. They govern how often the app auto-downloads new episodes, and how many; whether it can do so using cellular data (or only Wi-Fi); and whether you want the app to auto-delete podcasts you’ve already heard.

Game Center

For millions of people, the iPhone is a mobile game console. Once you’ve logged into Game Center with your Apple ID, you can allow Nearby Players to invite you to multiplayer games wirelessly, and you can create or edit your Game Center Profile (your player name). And when you get fed up, you can Remove All Game Center Friends—the nuclear option.

TV Provider

As noted in “The TV App”, the TV app is designed to let you watch all the shows you’re paying your cable or satellite company for—on your phone. At the outset, alas, very few major cable companies are playing ball with Apple. You can sign in here if you have an account from DirecTV, Dish, or a few obscure cable companies. But if you have, say, Comcast, Time Warner, or another big one, you’re probably out of luck.

App Preferences

At the bottom of the Settings screen, you see a list of apps that have installed settings screens of their own. For example, here’s where you can decide whether you want Feedly to use cellular data, change how many days’ worth of news you want the NY Times Reader to display, and so on. Each one offers an assortment of preference options.

It can get to be a very long list.