Speaker 1: iOS 18 is finally here with a bunch of new settings that are important to optimize for your privacy and battery life. And to make things more interesting, Apple hit the shuffle button in iOS 18's settings app. So things are in different places than they used to be, but we'll walk you through that. Let's dive in. We'll start in settings, and let's open the completely redesigned battery section, and then tap on charging. Let's talk about charge limit. The first thing to understand is that lithium ion batteries, like the one in your phone, don't like to be charged all the way to 100%. And if you do charge it to 100%, they don't like to stay there for too long, because that can decrease your battery's longevity. In the past, Apple built optimized battery charging, where your iPhone would charge all the way to 80% overnight and then try to time it so that when you woke up, the battery was at 100%. But that never really worked as well as Apple had hoped. So they built in this charge limit slider. If you have good battery life and you wanna maximize your iPhone battery's longevity, instead of using optimized battery charging, take this slider and let's just drag it down to 90%. You'll still have more than enough battery to make it through your day, and you'll keep your iPhone battery healthy for as long as possible. And pro tip, remember you turned this setting on, especially when your friends come to you complaining that their iPhone only charges to 80% or 90%. You can say, it's not broken. You just turned this setting on. Next, let's tap back to battery and then back to the main page of settings. Tap on your name at the top of the screen. Then tap personal information and tap communication preferences. And I'll turn off these three switches to cut down on the number of emails I get every day. Now let's save some money. I'll tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, back again, tap on subscriptions, and in here, take a look through this list and make sure you're not paying for any subscriptions you don't need to be paying for. You can see how many I've canceled in just the past year. To cancel one of these, just tap on the subscription and then tap cancel subscription. And the good thing about this is that you get to keep all the time that you've already paid for. It's just not gonna renew at the beginning of the next month. You can always reactivate the subscription. These companies make it easy for you to give them your money. And a cool new feature I just found out about, subscription price increase. You get to pay a dollar more a month. Check this out. If I tap see all plans to view all the available plans, I can say, eh, I'd rather not pay $12.99. I'll just keep paying $11.99 per month. Double-click to subscribe. There's no guarantee that that's gonna work for you, but it worked for me. Check out the other available plans on your subscriptions. You could save money. We go through a lot of settings in these videos pretty quickly. If you wanna print out a PDF and go at your own pace, consider joining our channel. Just click the join button below. Next setting, I'll tap back to subscriptions, back to Apple account, back to settings. Then tap cellular and tap on cellular data options. And let's talk about 5G. If you don't have a great 5G signal everywhere you go, tap LTE. It might actually be faster, true story. And I guarantee you will get better battery life. And while you're here, make sure to turn off the switch next to 5G standalone. There is no reason not to use 4G LTE if it's available. Let's tap back to the previous menu and then I'll tap on data mode. Unless you have terrible wifi, stay away from allow more data on 5G. Standard is a pretty good option, but low data mode is one of my favorite hidden sleeper settings on iPhone. It's kind of a substitute for low power mode. It shuts down some of the most battery intensive things that happen in the background of your iPhone and just waits to do them until you're connected to wifi again, which is a win across the board. And last tip for the cellular section of settings, I'll tap back and I'll tap back again. And I'm gonna scroll down to iCloud backup. Unless you never connect to wifi ever, ever, there is no reason to have this switch turned on because these giant file sizes both burn through your battery and your high speed data cap. And if you go over that data cap, even with a limited data, your plan is gonna slow down. Speaking of wifi, let's go to wifi, good segue. Tap back to settings and then tap on wifi. Then scroll all the way to the bottom and you have to wait a second and then tap on ask to join networks. I recommend turning this off because random wifi networks are one of the easiest ways a hacker can spy on you and steal your information using what's called a man in the middle attack. We're not gonna get into that, but suffice to say that if you're at Starbucks, it's safe to use Starbucks wifi, but it's not safe to use some random network called Netgear or something like that at Dave's Coffee Shop because who knows who's in charge of that. Tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and go back to settings and let's scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on App Store. There are a couple important settings in here that are gonna make your life easier. First, let's turn off the switch next to app downloads so that when you download an app on your iPad, it doesn't automatically show up on your iPhone and vice versa. This helps keep your devices organized. Typically, I don't want things appearing everywhere. Then scroll down to video autoplay. Tap on that to open it up and just turn this off so that when you're using the App Store app, your iPhone doesn't start randomly playing videos that drain your battery life. And tap back to App Store and make sure the switch next to in-app ratings and reviews is turned off. This just makes your life a little bit easier because now an app doesn't open up and immediately ask you to give a five-star review. You could do that if you want to. I don't wanna be forced into it. Next, some awesome camera settings. Let's tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and scroll up to camera and tap on that. There are some awesome new settings in here, most of which are things I'm gonna recommend you turn on, which is not this video. It will be the next one. So if you wanna get one little notification when that video comes out, hit the subscribe button, but there is a setting to turn off. And if you scroll to the bottom, it's prioritize faster shooting. Intelligently adapt image quality when rapidly pressing the shutter. I'm gonna turn this off. Now, maybe you're taking a lot of quick shots at your son's football game to capture the action. The problem with this setting is that it sacrifices image quality for speed. So when you go to zoom in on your son's awesome catch, if this setting is turned on, you're gonna have a less high quality photo to work with. So in my opinion, I always want the photos that I take with my iPhone to be as high quality as possible. I recommend turning it off. One more camera setting to talk about. Scroll up here to formats and then scroll down and turn off Apple ProRes unless you really know what you're doing and are okay using all the space on your iPhone to take one video. If you wanna see a whole video about the new iPhone camera settings in iOS 18, let us know in the comment section below and we'll make it. Next up, let's tap back to camera in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and go back to the main page of settings, then tap to open up sounds and haptics, scroll all the way to the bottom, then tap on keyboard feedback. And right now I have sound turned on and haptic turned on. First off, turn off sound, please, for everybody else. I hate those keyboard sounds. And haptic are the little buzzes that you feel when you tap on the keyboard. This is okay. Some people like them, some people hate them. I turn them off, saves battery life. Pretty much all the settings we talk about in this video save battery life. And we'll tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and I'm gonna tap to turn off the switch next to lock sound. I don't need to hear that lock sound. While we're here, let's scroll to the top and I wanna talk briefly about change with buttons, which is the setting that everyone who owns an iPhone should understand. First off, this switch only has to do with your ringtone and alerts like your alarm clock. When the switch is on, you can use the volume buttons in the side of your phone to adjust the volume of ringtones and your alarm clock. When it's off, and I prefer it to be off, so I'll tap that switch, you set the volume of your ringtone and your alarm clock right here with the slider, but you can still use the volume buttons to control the volume of everything else on your phone. The reason I like to have this switch off is that when I turn down the volume of a YouTube video, for instance, I don't want my alarm clock volume also going down so that I don't wake up tomorrow morning. This is kind of a safety feature for me. And that's a plant. So I'm gonna put that back, smash it off the table. Next, a quick detour to notifications. So I'll tap back to settings and then I'll tap on notifications because it's right here. And then I'm gonna tap on screen sharing and just turn off allow notifications right here. Cause I don't want my text messages appearing on the screen when I'm doing a New York Times crossword puzzle with my friend. Next, let's head to display settings. So I'll tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and back again to the main page of settings. Then I'll tap on display and brightness, which is right there. Then I'm going to scroll down and tap on always on display. I love always on display because it doesn't really affect your battery life that much because the truth is it's not actually always on. Your iPhone intelligently turns it off if your phone is, for instance, face down on the table or if it's in your pocket. But I don't like the way it comes out of the box. I recommend turning off show wallpaper because the whole point of always on display for me is that it shows me useful information at a glance, not to show me a crappier version of my wallpaper. Next, let's tap back the upper left-hand corner of the screen. You'll notice that I have auto lock set to never, which is a bad idea and true tone turned off. This is only because we're recording a video right now. These are not my normal settings. Next, let's tap back to settings and talk about one of the most important sections of this video, privacy, which if we scroll down, we will find with the hand, tap on privacy and security. First things first, let's tap tracking and turn off the switch at the top next to allow apps to request a track. This is another quality of life setting. I'll tap back to the main page of privacy and we're going to talk about two of the most important things on your phone, your photos and your contacts. What happens when you give an app access to all of your photos or contacts? Well, it opens the floodgates and allows that app to do whatever the heck it wants to with all of that information. TikTok pre-uploads your photos to their servers to make it faster to use, but really it's just sending all your photos to China. So let's scroll down to photos and tap on that. And then scroll all the way down and check out our settings here for TikTok. I'll tap on that and TikTok currently has full access to all of the photos on my phone and I want that. So I can choose limited access and then choose which photos or videos I want to give TikTok access to, or just choose none, which is the right choice for you if you're not making TikToks and uploading them. Let's tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and scroll all the way to the bottom and let's open analytics and improvements. Make sure that all these switches are turned off and there are more and more of them every day. I'll just come up to the top. When you turn off the main switch, it turns off a lot of the other ones automatically, but just go through the list. Let's let Apple improve their own products. I'll tap back again in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and tap Apple Advertising and turn off the switch here next to personalized ads. Now let's talk about GPS. I'll tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, scroll all the way to the top, tap on Location Services. We've talked about this before, but it's just as important as ever for your privacy and your battery life. Go through this list. Watch out for anything that says Always because that means an app would have access to your location all the time, even when you're not using the app, even when the phone's in your pocket. We don't want that. It's a big battery drain or two. We've talked about this one before and I'm sure I'll talk about it again, so I'm just gonna keep zipping through here and tap on System Services. There are some new options in here, but as I always say, the only ones I recommend keeping on are Compass Calibration, Emergency Calls and SOS, Find My iPhone, Satellite Connection, and Share My Location. Last time we said you might wanna keep System Customization on because Apple says for optimized battery charging to work, you need to have this setting turned on, but now we're not using optimized battery charging. We're just setting the limit ourselves. No more need to drain that battery with System Customization. Then as we scroll down to the bottom here, turn off all the switches next to Product Improvement. And if you wanna learn more about what all these system services actually do, well, we have a video on that. Check out the card above, link in the description below. Let's tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, back again, and back to the main page of Settings. Scroll up just a bit, and just like I have here on the desk, tap on the magnifying glass next to Search. We're gonna open up Search, and I wanna talk about this setting, Improve Search. And you thought I wasn't gonna use this. I'll tap the switch here to turn it off. This stops Apple from collecting a list of the things that you search for on your iPhone, and by default, they're really collecting a lot of data here that you might not want them to have. And you thought I wasn't gonna use this. Okay, I'm gonna put this back here. Next up is setting you'll find refreshing. Tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen to Settings. Scroll up just a bit, tap on General, and then scroll down to Background App Refresh, and tap on that. Background App Refresh allows apps to download new content in the background when you're not using those apps. So it's a pretty simple concept, but it's a battery drainer. So tap on Background App Refresh here at the top. It's interesting, they kinda grayed out the on there. And then choose either Off or Wi-Fi. Don't choose Cellular Data because it will drain your battery. We'll tap back in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, back again, and then back one more time to the main page of Settings, and then scroll down to Mail. We've done this before. Oh, wait, Mail's gone, along with a whole lot of other settings. Where have they gone? Well, into the Apps menu. Apple relegated a lot of the apps that ship with your iPhone to this section of Settings. Why? Some people are saying so they don't get sued by the EU quite as much. Let's go to Mail, and I will use this little alphabet on the right side here. Just press and hold my finger on it and drag down to the M's. M's. And then I'll tap on Mail. Ah, familiar territory. Then we're gonna go into Mail Accounts, and then Fetch New Data. And make sure that Push is turned off here at the top. When Push is turned on, and an Apple lead genius told me this in my training, your iPhone maintains a connection to an email server asking, is there mail, is there mail, is there mail, is there mail, is there mail? With Fetch, you decide how often your iPhone checks to see if there's new mail. Obviously, it saves a lot of battery life. So at the bottom here, just make sure that you choose an interval that works for you, like every 15 minutes. This just means that the Mail app is gonna check for new mail every 15 minutes or whenever you open the Mail app. So most people will never notice a difference. Next, let's tap Back to Accounts, Back to Mail, Back to Apps, and then look for that familiar green icon down here in Messages. Tap on that, then scroll all the way to the bottom, and check this out, Low Quality Image Mode. Make sure that this switch is turned off. We want to send images in full, beautiful quality. So make sure the switch is off to turn full quality on. Tap Back to Apps in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and let's go down to Photos with a silent P, Photos. Tap on that, scroll down to Show Hidden Album. Make sure that this switch is turned off. Otherwise, it's not really all that hidden. Tap Back to Apps and we're gonna go down to Safari. Tap on that. Make sure Preload Top Hit is turned off. Whenever you do a Google search on your phone, Safari goes ahead and preloads the top result because it thinks that's the one you're going to click on, but that uses battery life and data and it's just not necessary most of the time, unless you always click on the first result and then go ahead. Scroll down all the way down here to Advanced. Tap on Advanced. Turn off the switch next to Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement, a setting that Apple keeps burying farther within the Settings app. When Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement is turned off, it means not that it's not private. It means that there's no ad measurement, not the privacy-preserving kind. So it's actually more secure to have this turned off than to leave it turned on. It's a little bit ambiguously worded, but that's what we're here for. Everything else in here, though, leave it the way it is unless you want your websites to break on you. Thank you very much for watching this video. We love making this video every year. And hit that Subscribe button to get a notification in a few days when we release our video. It's kind of the opposite of this video about iPhone settings to turn on in iOS 18. We'll see you soon.