Opinion: Moving to a new iPhone brings more questions

Raise your hand if you are the tech support person for your family.

I know I’m not the only one with a hand raised. Good for you for being the person everyone else relies on to answer their tech questions.

Android people, you might as well know now this is an iPhone-centric column – sorry.

I wrote a few weeks ago about helping my sister move from an iPhone 8 to an iPhone 15 Pro, and for the most part the transition was not too difficult.

What I didn’t realise was she was making a list of questions that would find its way to me earlier this week.

I’ll admit, I didn’t know the answers to any of her questions off the top of my head, but a quick search brought us solutions.

First up, her screen was dimming itself and she had to keep manually increasing the brightness multiple times per day.

You’d think this one would be in the Display and Brightness settings, but it was not.

I found it under Accessibility, then under Display and Text Size. Scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll find Auto-Brightness. Toggle it off and your screen brightness will stay where you set it.

Next, when her phone rang, she could hear the first ring clearly, but subsequent rings would get softer to the point she could barely hear them.

This one was tricky as well, and I’m not sure why it fixed her issue, but in the Settings, open Face ID & Attention and look at the toggle for Attention Aware Features. Turn that one off. Apparently, it can lower the volume when it sees you are looking at the phone. It uses the face scanner that is used for Face ID.

I wasn’t convinced it would fix her problem, but she tried it, and the rings stayed the same volume, and she was happy.

Finally, she didn’t know how to reboot the phone.

I can’t blame her for not finding this one. All her iPhones until this newest one shut down when you hold down the sleep/wake button.

iPhones without a home button have a different way to bring up the shutdown screen.

You have to hold down the sleep/wake button and either of the volume buttons at the same time. Hold both down for more than 3 seconds and you’ll get the slider to shut down the phone. – Tribune News Service