iPhone: The Missing Manual, 13th Edition

Introduction

How do you make the point that the iPhone has changed the world? The easy answer is “use statistics”—2.5 billion sold, 2.2 million apps on the App Store, 200 billion downloads…. Trouble is, those statistics get stale almost before you’ve finished typing them.

Maybe it’s better to talk about the aftermath. How the invention of the iPhone changed society, business, and culture forever. With the iPhone (and Google’s imitator, Android), we became, for the first time, a society of people who are online continuously. Our communications blossomed from text messages to video calls, WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Skype. Billion-dollar businesses like Uber, Snapchat, and Instagram sprang into existence. Distracted driving, distracted walking, distracted eating, distracted dating, and even distracted sex all became “things.”

Apple introduces new iPhone models every fall. In September 2019, it introduced the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th models, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.

There’s also a new, free version of the iPhone’s software, called iOS 13.

You can run iOS 13 on older iPhone models without having to buy a new phone. This book covers all the phones that can run iOS 13, from the iPhone SE through the iPhone 11 family and iPhone SE 2.

About the iPhone

What is the iPhone? The better question is what isn’t the iPhone?

It’s a cellphone, obviously. But it’s also a full-blown multimedia player, complete with a dazzling screen for watching videos. And it’s a sensational pocket internet viewer. It shows fully formatted email (with attachments, thank you) and displays entire web pages with fonts and design intact. It’s tricked out with a tilt sensor, a proximity sensor, a light sensor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, a gyroscope, a barometer, and that amazing multitouch screen.

The iPhone is also the most used camera in the world. Furthermore, it’s a calendar, address book, calculator, alarm clock, ebook reader, stopwatch, podcast player, stock tracker, video viewer, traffic reporter, and weather forecaster. It even stands in for a flashlight, a tape measure, and—with the screen off—a pocket mirror.

And don’t forget the App Store. Thanks to the 2.2 million add-on programs that await there, the iPhone can also be…everything else. A medical reference, a musical keyboard, a time tracker, a remote control, a sleep monitor, a tip calculator. Plus, the App Store is a portal to thousands of games, with smooth 3D graphics and tilt control.

Calling this thing a phone is practically an insult. (Apple probably should have called it an “iPod,” but that name was taken.)

About This Book

You don’t get a printed manual when you buy an iPhone. Online, you can find an electronic manual, but it’s free of details, hacks, workarounds, tutorials, humor, and any acknowledgment of the iPhone’s flaws. You can’t easily mark your place, underline, or read it in the bathroom.

The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied the iPhone. (If you have an iPhone 5s or an earlier model, then you really need one of this book’s previous editions. And if you do have an iPhone SE or later model, this book assumes that you’ve installed iOS 13.5 or later; see Appendix A.)

Writing a book about the iPhone is a study in exasperation, because the darned thing is a moving target. Apple updates the iPhone’s software fairly often, piping in new features, bug fixes, speed-ups, and so on.

About the Outline

iPhone: The Missing Manual is divided into five parts:

• Part I, covers everything related to phone communications: dialing, answering, voice control, voicemail, conference calling, text messaging, iMessages, MMS, and the Contacts (address book) program. It’s also where you can read about FaceTime, the iPhone’s video-calling feature; Siri, the voice-operated “virtual assistant”; and the surprisingly rich array of features for people with disabilities—some of which are also useful for people without them.

• Part II, is dedicated to the iPhone’s built-in software, with a special emphasis on its multimedia abilities: playing music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows; taking and displaying photos; capturing photos and videos; using the Maps app; reading ebooks; and so on. These chapters also cover some of the standard techniques that most apps share: installing, organizing, and quitting them; switching among them; and sharing material from within them.

• Part III, is a detailed exploration of the iPhone’s ability to get you onto the internet, either over a Wi-Fi hotspot connection or via the cellular network. It’s all here: email, web browsing, and Personal Hotspot (letting your phone serve as a sort of internet antenna for your laptop).

• Part IV, describes the world beyond the iPhone itself—like using your Mac or PC to sync or back up the phone. These chapters also cover Apple’s iCloud service, Continuity (the wireless integration of iPhones and Macs), and the Settings app.

• Part V, contains two reference chapters. Appendix A walks you through the setup process; Appendix B is a master compendium of troubleshooting, maintenance, and battery information.

About → These → Arrows

Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this: Tap Settings → General → Keyboard. That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested screens in sequence, like this: “Tap the Settings icon. On the next screen, tap General. On the screen after that, tap Keyboard.” (In this book, tappable things on the screen are printed in orange to make them stand out.)

About MissingManuals.com

Missing Manuals are witty, well-written guides to computer products that don’t come with printed manuals (which is just about all of them). Each book features a handcrafted index; handy cross-references to specific page numbers; and an ironclad promise never to put an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.

To get the most out of this book, visit missingmanuals.com. Click the Missing CDs link, this book’s first letter, and then it’s title to reveal a neat, organized list of the shareware, freeware, and bonus articles mentioned in this book.

That Missing CD web page also offers corrections and updates to the book; click View Errata for this book. In fact, please submit corrections yourself (Submit your own Errata)! Each time we print more copies of this book, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the website, so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And we’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more iPhone updates.

iPhone 11, 11 Pro: What’s New

The three 2019 iPhones aren’t radical upgrades from the previous year’s models; most reviewers advised iPhone owners that this time, there was no pressing need to upgrade. Here’s a rundown:

• iPhone 11. This model is last year’s iPhone XR—same size, price ($700 and up), and screen—with one juicy enhancement: a second lens.

  Yet this isn’t a 2x zoom like the one on last year’s iPhone XS. It doesn’t zoom in—it zooms out. It’s an ultra–wide angle lens. And because there are two lenses now, this phone can take Portrait-mode photos of people, pets, and things (“Portrait Mode”).

  You can get the 11 in six colors: White, black, yellow, red, purple, and green. Apple says it’s slightly more waterproof and slightly more shatterproof than before—and gets one more hour of battery life per charge.

  

  Figure P-1.  

• iPhone 11 Pro, the high-end phone, adds a third lens. Now it’s got ultra-wide, standard, and telephoto. This phone ($1,000 and up) has a nicer screen (OLED instead of LCD technology), contains a bigger battery (four hours longer per charge than last year’s iPhone XS), and comes with an 18-watt charger that “fast charges” the phone to 50 percent in 30 minutes.

• iPhone 11 Pro Max is the exact same thing as the 11 Pro, but bigger. It’s basically the size of last year’s XS Max model—but because Apple eliminated the margins above and below the screen, the screen is much bigger. For something that’s 6.5 inches diagonal, the Max (as some are calling it) feels surprisingly small in the hand. Maybe that’s because it gains its area mostly in height, not width. It costs from $1,100 to a staggering $1,450.

Figure P-2.  

All three new phones introduce substantial photography enhancements. They include these:

• Night mode (captures incredible color and detail even in pitch-dark conditions), Smart HDR (better highlights and detail), and Deep Fusion (a computational feature for even better detail).

• Video in Photos mode. All these phones let you start recording video even when you’re in still-photos mode, just by holding down the shutter button, without having to switch modes. They also offer audio zoom, which attempts to zoom into the audio source as you zoom in with the video.

• First-class front camera. The front-facing camera is now almost identical in quality to the back cameras: 12 megapixels and capable of recording 4K video at 60 frames a second. For the first time, the front-facing camera can shoot slow-motion video, too. It also makes Face ID recognize you faster—and from more angles.

iPhone SE 2: What’s New

In April 2020—an unusual time of year for an iPhone release, made even weirder by the coronavirus pandemic—Apple unveiled a strange and wonderful new model: the iPhone SE. (Because there was a previous model also called the iPhone SE in 2016, this book—and most people—call the 2020 phone the “SE 2.”) Adjusted for inflation, the SE 2 is the least expensive iPhone ever made: $400.

In most ways, the SE 2 is identical to the iPhone 8: Same size, LCD screen, home button with fingerprint sensor, front and back cameras (just one lens on the back), option for charging on a charging pad, and water resistance. But it has a more modern A13 chip inside, making it much faster, and it can take blurry-background Portrait-mode photos as described in “Portrait Mode”.

Overall, this is a fantastic iPhone for an unbelievably low price.

What’s New in iOS 13

You’d have to write an entire book to document everything that’s new or changed in iOS 13; it’s a huge upgrade. But here’s a quick rundown.

Dark Mode

This one gets most of the press, mainly because it’s so visible. It’s one of the most arresting and radical design changes in iPhone history.

Dark mode is a dark-gray color scheme. Once you turn it on, most of Apple’s built-in apps—Home screens, Settings, Mail, Calendar, Photos, Messages, Reminders, Notes, and so on—take on a stunning, white-on-black design. Even your wallpaper images shift when Dark mode is on.

Here’s what doesn’t change in Dark mode: photos, web pages in Safari, and preexisting non-Apple apps. Software companies will have to update their programs if they want them to take on Dark mode’s dusky hues.

You’d really have to stretch to say Dark mode is a useful change. Mainly it’s just cool-looking.

You can try Dark mode for yourself in any of three ways. First, there’s a Control Center button for it (“Control Center”), which is the quickest way to turn it on and off. Second, you can open Settings → Display & Brightness and tap Dark. Third, you can set Dark mode to kick in automatically at sunset, or on any time schedule you prefer.

In this book, you’ll mostly see illustrations of Light mode, the traditional white-background screens. That’s so you won’t lose your bearings as the pictures flip back and forth.

Figure P-3.  

Photos

Apple’s elves gave Photos a massive renovation. The browsing mode (Years, Months, Days, All Photos) is gorgeous, employing artificial intelligence to pluck your best shots from out of the haystack.

The editing mode in particular is infinitely better. There are more color correction tools, more flipping and perspective adjustments, more Portrait-mode effects. You can now control (and measure) the intensity of any edit, effect, or lighting style. And, for the first time, you can zoom in or out as you’re editing.

Above all, you can apply all these edits to videos, too. Color-correct them, brighten them up. And flip them! No more being stuck with a video rotated 90 degrees because the camera was confused when you shot it.

Interface Overhauls

For many years, Apple has tried to maintain a difference between the small, sweet simplicity of the phone and the sprawling, complex universe of the desktop computer. In iOS 13, though, the designers have finally given up. They’ve equipped the iPhone with a series of new standard navigation and selection techniques:

• Long-Pressing. For a few years there, Apple heavily promoted its Force Touch screens, which can summon different effects depending on how hard you press the glass. But with the iPhone 11 family, Apple has abandoned the idea.

  In iOS 13, long-pressing—leaving your finger down on some icon or button for about a second—achieves the same thing, and works on every single phone. You can now pop up a preview of an email message, Messages chat, or Safari web link just by long-pressing it. App icons on your Home screen produce shortcut menus when you long-press them, too. (The Edit Home Screen command is one of them. In other words, it now takes an extra step—or an extra half-second—to put your app icons into wiggling mode, for moving or deleting them.)

  Awkwardly enough, hard-pressing (pressing extra-hard) still works in many places in iOS 13—on the phone models equipped with Force Touch. Hard-pressing takes less time than long-pressing—and lots of people are used to it. When this book mentions hard-pressing, you’ll know it means “on models with Force Touch screens.”

  In related news: Many apps let you choose multiple items simultaneously (emails in a list in Mail, conversations in Messages, files and folders in Files). In the past, you’d tap Edit and then tap selection circles one by one. And you can still do that.

  But now you can select batches of them with one smooth move: a two-finger tap and drag.

• Editing text. Apple has put a lot of effort into making text easier to edit. To precisely position the insertion point, you just drag it (it grows a bit so you can see it). The loupe magnifier, which helped you move the insertion point for the first 12 years of the iPhone’s existence, is gone.

  There are new, three-finger gestures for Cut, Copy, Paste, and Undo, plus another formatting bar. It’s gotten easier to select addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, because iOS recognizes them; just double-tap.

  Scroll bars are on the phone now, too. They appear in Safari, Messages, long Notes, documents, and many other scrollable apps. Grab that tiny bar at the right edge of the screen and drag; now you can leap all the way to the beginning or end, or anywhere in the middle, without having to swipe-swipe-swipe-swipe.

  You can read more about all these features starting in “Editing Your Writing”.

• Command panels. The iPhone has never had a menu bar, as a Mac or PC does. Over the years, Apple has had to cram more and more options into weirder and more awkward places. So in iOS 13, Apple introduced a menu-like concept called (at least in this book) command panels. You’ll spot them in many of Apple’s standard apps.

  Usually, command panels open when you long-press something: an email message in a list, a person or device in the Find My app, a place in Maps, a song in Music, a message in the list in Messages, a file in Files, a link in Safari, the button in any app. You can see the effect in “Long Press on a Link” and “Read It”.

  Often, a preview of your work appears in an upper bubble, and the panel appears below. You can drag up to enlarge the command panel. Or tap the gray background to make the whole thing disappear.

Sign In with Apple

You know those “Sign In with Facebook” and “Sign In with Google” buttons that appear on thousands of websites, to save you time when signing up for a new account? Apple has introduced its own version. The difference is that Apple promises it won’t track or profile you.

To use this feature, you’ll need an Apple ID, a device signed into iCloud, and a website that actually offers it.

Maps

Apple’s long-suffering Maps app is—dare we say it?—finally getting somewhere. In several U.S. cities, the maps show far more detail, right down to individual buildings. A new Look Around feature rivals Google’s Street View, in that it lets you see a photograph of an address, taken from the street—and look around you, or move forward down the road. (This feature, too, is available in only a few cities.)

There’s real-time bus and subway info in many cities, a handy Share ETA feature that texts your progress updates to someone you specify, one-tap Favorite places, and more.

Reminders

This app has been gutted and rebuilt. You can attach photos, scanned documents, and web link reminders for reference, and if your to-do title includes dates, times, and places, Reminders correctly parses them.

There are sub-tasks (indented to-dos underneath the primary ones), too, and message groups. And not only can a reminder pop up at a certain time or place—now it can pop up the next time you’re chatting with a certain person in Messages!

Voice Control

It’s now possible to do everything on the phone by voice alone—an enormous engineering accomplishment. You can press buttons, tap things, swipe or pinch, scroll, dictate, make text edits—all with very natural voice commands, all hands-free. This feature is primarily intended for people who can’t hold the phone, but it turns out to be useful in all kinds of situations, especially when you’re trying to fix dictation mistakes. (You can say, for example, Replace “Mr. Trannidy” with “missed her train today.” No fussy finger dance on glass!)

Messages

Used to be, everyone you chatted with could paste in whatever image they wanted to represent you. But now Messages automatically offers to share your chosen avatar image with the other guy.

iOS 13 includes more Animoji and more ways to use Memoji (the cutesy animated character you’ve designed to resemble you).

Search in Messages is better, too, because it gives you quick access to photos, web links, and attachments as well as messages.

Files

The Files app, the iPhone’s “desktop” for organizing files and folders, has come a long way. Now it can “see” the files on a memory card or flash drive—and even create folders on them. It’s got a Downloads folder to hold your downloads from Safari and Mail. You can compress and decompress zip files.

Notes

What a beefy upgrade! There’s a new thumbnail view of your notes, so you can see them like little Post-it pages instead of just a list. Checklists are easier to process: You can swipe to indent a line, or drag and drop them into a new order, or have them fall to the bottom of the list automatically when you check them off.

You can now create folders to organize your notes. And you can now share notes folders—and mark them “view only,” if you like.

Safari

The iPhone’s browser grows more like a desktop computer every day. Now there’s even a Downloads menu that lets you start, stop, track, and find file downloads. You can set up standard settings for each individual website: type size, Reader view, Desktop Site view, ad-blocker status, privacy settings, and so on.

You can also save an entire batch of open tabs as a single bookmark so they’ll all open at a tap later. Oh, and there’s a new Start page—the one that appears before you type in a web address—filled with shortcuts to recent sites, favorite sites, and suggested sites.

Mail

When you hit , you now get a command panel filled with options for processing a message—Reply, Reply All, Forward, Print, Notify Me of replies, Mark as Unread, Move to Junk (or a different folder), Flag, and the new Mute Thread—all in one place.

Your outgoing messages now have full, desktop-class formatting options, complete with fonts, styles, paragraph alignment, bulleted or numbered lists, photos, scanned files, and finger drawings.

Now, when you flag messages to get your attention later, you can also choose colors for those flags.

And, if some idiot is harassing you, there’s a Block Sender command that can dump those inbound messages straight to the Trash before you even see them.

The Speed Round

Frankly, the category where Apple put the most effort into improving iOS 13 is Miscellaneous. Here’s a sampling:

• Quicker sharing. When you tap the button to share something, the Share sheet now offers a list of the people you most often share with—and how you share with them. There’ll be an icon for Mom/Messages, for Casey/Email, and Your Mac/AirDrop, for example. This single change saves so many taps!

• Hotspot fixes. You can choose a Wi-Fi hotspot right from the Control Center now, without having to burrow into Settings!

  Meanwhile, when the iPhone discovers a new Wi-Fi hotspot, it doesn’t interrupt you with a full-screen alert. If you wish, it can offer a subtle notification at the top of the screen.

• Personal Hotspot is now available to your Family Sharing members—either automatically or when you grant them permission. And it doesn’t shut down the connection when you put your laptop to sleep; you’ll still get messages and notifications when the lid is closed.

• The Health app has been blessed with sophisticated menstrual-cycle tracking and audiogram (hearing test) tracking, and new graphs show your various fitness stats over time.

• Swipe typing. Aficionados swear they can type faster and more accurately by sloppily dragging their finger across the keys instead of tapping them individually. As you go, you can type some and swipe some, without ever having to change keyboards or modes.

• Free radio. You can ask Siri to play any radio station. Also, Siri’s voice has been improved for more natural inflections.

• The Shortcuts app is now included with iOS 13 (rather than being a separate download), and includes an option to trigger Shortcuts (automated actions) automatically at certain times or places.

• Apps open faster—and also download faster—because they’re as little as half the size on the App Store.

• Calendar attachments. You can add photos or files to individual calendar appointments.

• Do Not Disturb While Driving is now smart enough not to turn on when you’re on the bus or the subway.

• Find My is a new app—the bizarrely named melding of two older apps, Find My iPhone and Find My Friends. Furthermore, you can now find your phone even when it’s not online—it can share its whereabouts with passing iPhones and iPads over Bluetooth, which gets relayed back to you, securely and privately.

• Controllers. You can connect an Xbox or PlayStation controller to your phone for game use.

• Separate Emoji and Language keys. Much better.

• Scrolling lyrics in the Music app.

• 38 new keyboard languages, two new translation dictionaries (Thai–English and Vietnamese–English), and seven new next-word prediction languages.

• Auto-dump robocalls. When you turn on Silence Unknown Callers, your phone rings and buzzes only if the caller is in your Contacts, Mail, or Messages collections—or you’ve called that number before. All other calls are automatically sent to voicemail.

• Screen Time now lets you limit your kids’ time on individual apps (not just in broad categories). And when their time is up, they can tap “One more minute” so they have a chance to save their work or say goodbye.

• Low Data Mode is like Low Power Mode, but for data. It makes your phone consume a lot less data when it’s on cellular networks (or even specified Wi-Fi networks). For example, it pauses app updates, pauses syncing photos to iCloud, turns off auto-video playback, chooses lower-quality settings for streaming music and FaceTime, and stops background apps from using data.

• Volume indicator. When you use the volume keys, the volume indicator no longer blocks your entire screen. It’s now a subtle vertical bar near the volume buttons themselves.

• The screenshot mechanism has had another overhaul. For example, you can capture a screenshot of an entire Safari web page, email, or long Note, even if, in real life, it would require scrolling.

• Eight new wallpapers!

What It All Means

Let’s be honest: iOS has become a very dense operating system, with more features than you could master in years.

But never mind. iOS 13 is better, smarter, faster, clearer, and more refined than everything that came before. It takes hundreds of steps forward, and only a couple of tiny steps back.

That’s a lot of tweaks, polishing, and finesse—and a lot to learn. Fortunately, 700-plus pages of instructions now await you.