Transcription
You carry your iPhone everywhere. You use it hundreds of times every single day, and yet right now, as you hold it in your hand, that little phone is hiding its greatest secrets from you. There are simple gestures and shortcuts that would simplify everything you do, and not a single one of them came with instructions. Apple built them in and then just never bothered to tell you. And that's where I come in. Think of me as the manual that didn't come with your iPhone. I'm about to blow your mind. Stick around. I got you covered.
I'm Dylan Stewart, The MacWhisperer, and today, buckle up. We're going on a fact-finding tour across your iPhone to reveal the secrets and pro tips that no one ever showed you. Four stops on a device that you thought you already knew, each stop revealing a set of tools that most people never discover. But don't get off the ride before I unveil my greatest secret of all, the MacWhisperer power tip, a tip that will literally change the way you use your iPhone forever.
Before the tram departs the station, if you want to follow along without having to rewind this video and scribble notes, grab your free Smart Guide by scanning the QR code on your screen or tapping the link in the description below. Smart Guides are easy-to-follow, step-by-step visual guides that walk you through everything we're going to learn today.
All right, keep your hands and arms inside of the tram at all times. Our first stop is that button on the right side of your phone that you've been underutilizing since day one. In order to make a phone this simple and yet this complex, every single button had to pull double duty, and that's never been more true than with the button on the right side of your phone: your side button. You probably tap that button when you want to put your phone to sleep, and that's where most people stop. But that one button has six things that it can do, and I'm betting you only know two of them. Let's walk through all six of them right now.
Number one: click that side button to lock your phone, like this. One click, and your phone goes dark. Your phone's still on, notifications are still coming in, but your screen's asleep, your phone is locked, and your battery is happy. That's the one function of the side button that everybody knows.
Number two: press and hold the side button to trigger Siri. That's right. Instead of saying "Siri," just press and hold that side button, and Siri pops up ready to go. Voice activation can be faulty and cause problems. If you're in a busy room, calling out Siri's name might not hear you properly. If you speak slowly or stall while you're making your Siri request, Siri might do something completely different from what you wanted, and that's going to frustrate you to no end. But when you press and hold the button and keep holding it while you speak to Siri, it continues to listen until you release the button. Easy, fast, and way more efficient than saying her name. It's perfect when you want to be a little bit more deliberate about how you use Siri. It works just like this. "Turn on Do Not Disturb." "Text my dad saying, 'Thinking about you!'" Exclamation point. Super simple and hidden right underneath that side button.
Number three, double-click that side button for Apple Pay. Apple Pay is one of the most effective ways to make payments from your Apple devices, and yet some people still haven't figured out that there's a dedicated button that triggers it. It's that side button. Two quick clicks and your cards appear on the screen, Face ID confirms who you are, and within moments, your payment has gone through. You can click on the stack of cards down below to choose a different card at any given time. No more digging through the Wallet app. No more hunting through your wallet or purse for your credit card. Two quick, simple clicks on the side button on your phone and you are ready to pay.
Secret number four, triple-click for the accessibility shortcut. Almost nobody knows this one, and it's incredibly useful. But to fully understand this trick, we're going to need to hop into Settings and into the Accessibility section. Click on Settings on your phone and scroll down and click on Accessibility. Accessibility is a treasure trove of amazing tools. It has things like the magnifier, which can turn your phone's camera into a magnifying glass, or Live Captions, which can show closed caption-like text on your phone calls and FaceTimes, or VoiceOver, which can read whatever is on your screen out loud. It can even turn on a powerful functionality called Voice Control, which lets you use your voice to do almost anything on your iPhone. Turning those features on and off can be annoying and frustrating, but if you come down to the bottom of the Accessibility section and click where it says Accessibility Shortcut, you can activate any one of these tools that you regularly use. Then a quick triple-click from your right side button, like this, and you can choose your accessibility tool and toggle it on or off, allowing you to turn on Voice Control or the magnifier, or have your screen read out to you with just a triple click. No one uses this one. For me, I use it for Voice Control, which can allow me to control my phone from my car without ever touching it. That's right, another secret hidden in plain sight.
Secret number five: if you click your side button and the volume up button on the left side, you'll get a screenshot. And here's a quick bonus tip for you. If you don't like the way screenshots work on iOS 16 and you want to go back to the old floating thumbnail, like this, all you have to do is head into your Settings app, head over to the General section, and the section that says Screen Capture, and turn Full Screen Previews off. And from that point on, anytime you take a screenshot by clicking the right side button and your volume up key, it'll show up as a floating thumbnail that you can either swipe away or tap on in order to mark it up or share it with someone.
And for secret number six, I'm going to combine two separate gestures together: shut down and restart. If you press and hold your right side button and your volume up key, like this, you will trigger the emergency call mechanism or the ability to slide to turn off your phone. This is a great way to power your phone down when you're done with it. But what if you don't want to turn it off? What if you want to restart it? Here's what you're going to do. You're going to quickly press and release volume up, then press and release volume down, and then press and hold the side button until you see the Apple. You'll be tempted to let go when it tells you to swipe to power down, but don't be fooled. Keep pressing, keep holding. When the Apple shows up, you can release that right side button, and in a few moments, your phone will be fully reset. This can solve most glitches and issues easily. Funny true story, when they first set up this new restart gesture, even Apple employees didn't know how to do it properly. That's how secret this one is, but now you're in on the secret.
So now let's move away from the physical buttons of our phone and let's slide down to the bottom of your screen because right there, practically invisible to the human eye, is a whole set of gestures that is so powerful it eliminated the home button from every Apple device forever. When the iPhone went full screen with the iPhone X, the home button disappeared into hiding, and along with it, several gestures and functions also disappeared. Or did they? In reality, the home bar, which shows up at the bottom of your screen, sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly, does so much more than that tiny little home button could ever do. Let me show you what it's capable of.
The first gesture is one that almost everyone figures out right off the bat. Whenever you're inside of an app, if you swipe up from that little home bar, like this, the app disappears, and you end up back on your home screen. Whatever the app is, whether it's Messages or Safari, a quick swipe and you're back on your home screen. Now, as I said, sometimes that home bar is visible, and sometimes it's invisible. We'll see it show up at the bottom, but then it disappears. Don't worry about whether you can see it or not. You know where it is, and it's always ready for you to quickly swipe up to get right to your home screen. But maybe you didn't know if you're on one of the other screens of your phone with all your other apps, and you swipe up from the home bar on that page, it'll jump you right to the first page of your phone.
The second gesture is a quick way to search for anything right from your home screen. Just a quick swipe downwards from the middle of your screen, like this, will allow you to search for literally anything: an app, a person, a website. There are Siri suggestions up top to guide you to the app you might have been looking for, or you can come right into the search field here and just type anything in.
And for our third trick: We're going to swipe up and pause. This is for multitasking. It works like this. If you're inside of an app, swipe on the home bar and then hold it at the middle, like this, and let go. Instead of swiping all the way up, which gets you right back to your home screen, the swipe and hold pulls you into the multitasking screen. From here, you can tap on any of these apps to jump right to it. You can scroll back and forth to find one of the apps you were recently in. A quick click and you're right there. Many people have discovered this functionality, but they use it wrong. They think this is the place you go to quit every app that you've got opened all day, every day. As soon as you open an app, you've got to quit it and quit it and quit it, and they think they're saving battery. But in reality, the people who habitually quit all of their apps like that use way more battery than the person who never quits any of them. It's the completely wrong use of this multitasking screen. The screen isn't here so that you can quit things. That screen is made specifically so you can go from the app you're in to the other apps you were just in without starting over, without scrolling through your pages, without hunting through tiny little folders filled with apps. All you have to do is swipe up and hold, find the app you want, and tap on it.
And our fourth trick feeds right onto that multitasking capability. With this gesture, which we call app swapping, you can be in the app you're working on, and rather than coming up into the multitasking screen, you can swipe the home bar to the right, like this, and one quick swipe, there's Safari, there's Mail. App swapping is super powerful. It's like having a flip switch between your two most frequently used apps. Just one swipe between the first app and the second app, and you can multitask even better. This tip will probably save you more time than anything else we'll talk about today, and almost no one knows it's there.
You would probably think that the home bar has done enough for this trip, but there are two other functions that we have to talk about because the only time anyone ever uses them is when they hit them by accident. The first one is called Reachability, and it was designed after the iPhones became bigger than our hands. It became so difficult to get to the top of your iPhone screen without either using two hands or readjusting your hand position completely to click that spot. So rather than leaving it that way, Apple designed something called Reachability to make it easier to get to the top of your screen without moving your hands. All you have to do is swipe down across the home bar, like this, and the top of your app comes right into reach. Reachability makes it that much easier for you to hit that top button without having to put down your latte.
And for our final home bar gesture, if you've ever had a situation where you wanted to talk to Siri but you didn't want to actually use your voice, maybe you were in a crowded room or you were in bed and your wife was sleeping, rather than using your voice, if you double-tap the home bar, like this, you will bring up a screen that will allow you to ask Siri anything. This allows you to discreetly type in any message or make any request of Siri, and she'll perform it instantly. I'm not kidding, the home bar is a treasure trove of amazing tools. It gets you out of an app, it takes you to the first page of your home screen, it helps you multitask, it helps you reach the top of your screen, and it can even be used to summon Siri. And yet most people are still grieving the loss of that poor little home button. Too bad for them, I've moved on.
And now it's time for us to move on to our next stop, which is something you probably wrestle with every single day: your keyboard. Because the place where you spend so much of your time typing has been quietly holding out on you. It's got a set of tools that make everything easier, and you've been working way harder than you needed to all along. Most people are still working on the keyboard the way they did back in 2007. That stops right here. I'm going to show you the proper way to manage text on your iPhone.
The first stop, your cursor. Most people move their cursor around by randomly stabbing somewhere on their screen and hoping they get it right. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's especially frustrating if you want to change a single letter in the middle of a word, or if you want to change out the entire word. Here are the best ways to move your cursor around. Instead of tapping randomly, grab the cursor and drag it to wherever you want it to be. Or if you want to have precision with where you place your cursor, put your finger down and hold it until you see the loop. That's that little magnifier that shows you exactly where the cursor is. Now you can move slowly, stopping anywhere you want, even right in the middle of a word.
If you need to select an entire word, all you have to do is double-tap. A quick double-tap selects the word. It highlights it, giving you the ability to delete it, edit it, or overwrite it without having to fight it. And if you'd like to grab an entire sentence or a paragraph, a quick triple-tap will grab it for you. And once you've grabbed that entire sentence, use these little dots to select more of the text or less of the text. I'm not kidding. Double-tapping on a word or triple-tapping for a paragraph is hands down the fastest way to put the cursor where you want it and to correct the word, words, or paragraphs that you need to edit without hitting that silly delete button like 400 times. You're in control, and precision is just a couple of taps away.
But to kick it up another notch, when you need to move around a large document with precision, you can use your keyboard as a trackpad. Press and hold on the space bar, and the letters will disappear, allowing you to move your finger to adjust the cursor. This is the fastest way to move the cursor, and on a large chunk of text, it's the easiest way to move it all the way to the bottom or all the way up to the top without having to take your finger off the screen. And to kick that tip one step further, if you hold the Shift button while you're using the trackpad, it will select text. I'm going to hold down the Shift button, and while I'm holding it, I'm going to use my other hand to press and hold on the space bar and just select that entire chunk of text, just like that. It's the most precise way to select text on the iPhone. And again, nobody knows it's there.
So six tricks from a keyboard that you stare at every day. Cursor control, precision placement, word selection, paragraph selection, a trackpad, and text highlighting, all literally under your thumb, and most people are still tapping like it's 2007? Come on, guys. It's time to learn your technology.
So now as we walk away from our keyboard, it's time for our final stop. This is what we call the swipe zone. For our final stop, we're going to finally learn the proper way to swipe down on your phone. Before we do this, it's important to understand that the two swipes we're going to talk about in this section technically start above your phone screen. If you have trouble pulling down your Control Center regularly, or if you have a hard time getting your Notification Center to pull down, it's usually because you're starting too far down on the screen. As you're getting used to these gestures, I recommend literally putting your finger on the top of your phone and gradually dragging it down until you catch those screens.
So we'll start on the left side of your phone with the Notification Center. Put your finger above the top of your screen and swipe slowly down from the top left corner, and your notifications will slide right down. This is where you'll see all your recent alerts, texts, emails, app notifications, and reminders. You can tap on any one of these notifications to go to the app that sent it and respond to that notification. You can also press and hold on a messaging notification, like these WhatsApp notifications, to respond to that message right from here. I can type in my response and click Send, and I don't even have to leave the Notification Center. You can swipe from the right to the left to dismiss any notification, just like this. And you can swipe partially in order to reveal options. These options can allow you to silence those notifications from that app for an hour, for a day, or even turn off those notifications altogether. You can come up to the top here and clear all of your notifications at once by clicking this X right here and choosing Clear All, or you can clear out clumps of notifications by tapping on a stack like this and clicking the X right there. If you'd like it to clump back up, you can click Show Less, and it'll shrink those messages down into one stack. So now you never have to wonder where notifications go if you don't see them when they come in. Where do they go? Top left corner of your screen. A quick swipe down, and they're revealed just like that.
Let's move over to the right side of our screen and let's talk about the Control Center. The Control Center is an underutilized tool that gives you quick access to your most common apps, settings, and actions. Again, start above the screen and pull straight down slowly. Be careful not to pull down too far or too fast because in iOS 18, the Control Center got the capability of having multiple pages, and so if you swipe down too quickly, you're going to end up on your bottom page or your second page without meaning to. We want to be intentional. So it's just a quick flick down from the top right corner, just like that. The Control Center can give you access to the music that you're playing, as you see right here. If you press and hold, it'll expand out into an even larger screen with more tools. It'll also give you the ability to turn on and off your Wi-Fi, your Bluetooth, your Airplane Mode. You can adjust your brightness or your volume, and you can access your favorite applications like your flashlight or your calculator or your timer. You can even create shortcuts or quick actions that allow you to do things with a single click. The Control Center is not just super powerful, it's completely customizable, which means you can make it look or function any way you want. To edit your Control Center, press and hold in the open space on your screen until the minus buttons show up. From here, you can click any minus button to remove an app or the little handle in the lower right-hand corner to make an app larger or smaller. Let me show you what I mean. In this section here, I've got a bunch of settings, but I can grab the handle in the bottom right and just make that entire section smaller. Now I can click the Add a Control button at the bottom to pick any other app that I want to put on my screen. Maybe I'd like to add Voice Memos. It shows up right there, and I can use the handle to make it a completely different size and shape, or I can press and hold on it to move it to a different section of the Control Center. But keep in mind that there are now multiple pages of the Control Center, so if you don't use the Control Center that much, you might end up with more pages than you need. You don't have to keep these extra pages. If you have a page that you don't tend to use, go into edit mode by pressing and holding, press the minus button to remove any apps on that page, and the page will disappear altogether. Take a few minutes and set up the Control Center in the perfect way for you with access to all of your favorite apps and buttons or a nice clear experience with only the things that you're using. When you take the time to set it up right, it becomes the most useful tool on your entire iPhone, and most people just use it for brightness and the flashlight. But now you know its true power.
So we're almost at the end of our tour. Four simple stops, and in mere moments, your iPhone went from a device you barely use to a device you actually understand. But I saved the best stop for last. This one takes everything you learned today, and it multiplies it. But before I share my MacWhisperer power tip, if your iPhone just went from a complete mystery to a technological marvel that you can't wait to use to its fullest, give this video a thumbs up. That helps share the wisdom to all the other people who don't have a clue what their phone is capable of, and it lets me know I'm on the right track with delivering the videos you're looking for. So you're really just helping me help you. I respect that strategy. And if your mind was already blown and you want to tell me about your favorite tip or ask a question, drop it in the comments section below. I love to hear from you guys, and I read every comment. And if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet, what are you waiting for? Apple to stop being so secretive and start sending manuals with their devices? It's going to be a really long wait, guys. It's better if you just click the subscribe button and the notify bell so that I can share all my Apple secrets with you. And speaking of sharing secrets, I think Apple's onto us. Let's not waste any more time. Let's hop right into the power tip.
Everything we've covered today has been about one gesture at a time, one swipe, one tap, one press. But your iPhone has a special series of tricks reserved for multi-touch gestures. And once you start using them, you're going to feel like your phone suddenly received an upgrade that was always there waiting for you to discover it. Let me show you three multi-touch maneuvers that most people have never tried.
Number one, multi-select. Let's open up our Mail app, and let's take a long look at all of those messages. If you take two fingers and swipe down, you immediately activate the multi-select tool, which grabs every single message that your fingers cross. And that trick doesn't just work in Mail. You can even do it in other apps like Notes. Right here, two fingers swiping down selects multiple notes. We can also do it in the Files app. Two fingers, and they're all selected just like that. Super simple, super helpful. One two-fingered swipe, and you can select a handful of items all at once.
Secret number two is called the multi-grab. Let's say that you want to move several items from one place to another. Maybe there's a bunch of apps on your screen, you want to move them to a different screen. Sure, you can press and hold and move them one at a time, but with the multi-grab maneuver, you don't have to. Here's how it works. Press and hold, and then move it. Keep your finger there. While your finger is holding onto it, take your other hand and start tapping additional items. You'll watch them join a stack, allowing you to move all of those items together to another page or another app, just like that. It works in the home screen, but it also works in apps like Photos. Press and hold on the first one and move it. While you're holding it, start tapping the other ones. They'll all join that first app and allow you to move things anywhere you need to with one simple movement.
And finally, let's reveal the drag and drop maneuver. This is the most advanced gesture of all, and it's the one that brings our whole tour together. Here's the situation. I'm in my Notes app, and there's a chunk of text that I want to email someone. So how do I do it? I don't want to email them the whole note. I mean, I can copy and paste, but that's so old school. The drag and drop maneuver is easy to do. Here's what we're going to do first. We're going to select the entire paragraph at the top of this note. Triple tap. It's all selected. Now I'm going to press and hold on that chunk of text, and it's going to lift right off the page. Now with my other hand, I'm going to swipe up and go into email and come into this new message and drop it down, just like that. It works with all sorts of things. So if I grab a stack of photos here, I can drop those photos right there. If I want to come into my address book and share contact information, press and hold, drag it, take my other hand, swipe myself right into this email message, and plop it right there. We're even going to go right into Safari here and grab this website, press and hold, and drag that right onto this email as well. Anything you want to grab, go and grab it, hold it down, and while you're holding it, move to the app you want to drop it into. That's right, one gesture, one drag, zero copying and pasting. Your first finger holds the cargo, your second finger drives the truck. Two hands, two jobs, one move, and that's the beauty of multi-touch. Your iPhone was built for two hands. Apple just never told you what the second hand was supposed to do. But now you know.
So that wraps up today's tour across your iPhone. Every gesture from today, including the three multi-touch maneuvers, is inside your free Smart Guide. Here's the QR code again, or you can hit the link in the description. Remember, if you're on a mobile device, when you pull up the Smart Guide, it won't download it automatically. You'll need to click the Share button on Safari to save it somewhere. You can put it in your Files, in your Notes, or my personal favorite, put it right into the Apple Books app. Once you've practiced, suddenly your phone becomes capable of so much more than you ever thought possible. I hope you learned a ton today, but remember, there's always more to learn. Check out this video over here for even more amazing Apple tips and tricks. I'm Dylan Stewart, The MacWhisperer, and I will see you next time.