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iOS 17.1: Your iPhone Just Got These New Features

Apple’s next iOS update addresses iPhone 12 safety concerns and adds these features.

Apple released iOS 17.1 to the public on Wednesday, more than a month after the arrival of iOS 17. The update brings a few new features and bug fixes to your iPhone, but some touted features, like the Journal app, are still missing. 

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To download the update, go to Settings > General > Software Update, tap Install Now and follow the onscreen prompts. 

Here are some of the new features and fixes iOS 17.1 brings to your iPhone.

iPhone 12 radio frequency concerns addressed

France’s National Frequency Agency said on Sept. 12 that the iPhone 12 exceeds European-specific absorption rate limits, and it appears Apple addresses those concerns with iOS 17.1.

«iOS 17.1 includes an update for iPhone 12 for users in France to accommodate this specific test protocol that requires reduced power when off-body on a static surface,» Apple posted Oct. 10. «iPhone 12 will no longer increase the allowed power when the off-body state is detected, such as while it is sitting on a table.»

New StandBy mode settings

An iPhone with its Standby screen active

StandBy mode is one of my favorite new iOS features, and in iOS 17.1, Apple gives StandBy mode more setting options. With iOS 17.1, you have the option to turn StandBy mode off after 20 seconds, never or «Automatically.» Apple writes that if you choose Automatically, the display will turn off when your iPhone is not in use and the room is dark, like when you’re sleeping at night.

However, I checked these settings on my iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone XR and only found these options on my iPhone 14 Pro. So it appears the new settings are only available on iPhones with an always-on display.

Apple Music upgrades

Playlist options in Apple Music

In iOS 17.1, Apple adds a new button in Apple Music that allows you to quickly find Favorite songs. When a song is playing and you’re looking at its card on your iPhone, there’s a star outline near the song’s title. You can tap this star to add the song to your Favorites. 

There’s also a new way to find all your Favorited playlists, albums and songs. To find them, go into the corresponding category in Apple Music, tap the button in the top-right corner of your screen, and tap Favorited.

Apple Music also shows you song suggestions in iOS 17.1. To see them, go into any of your playlists and scroll to the bottom of the playlist to see a section called Song Suggestions. These are songs that the app thinks you might like, based on your musical tastes.

AirDrop using cellular data

With iOS 17, Apple upgraded AirDrop with NameDrop, which allows two devices to tap each other and exchange contact information — kind of like exchanging digital business cards. And in iOS 17.1, Apple now lets you use cellular data to send and receive information over AirDrop when two iPhones are out of range of each other. 

Flashlight symbol in Live Activities 

Have you ever accidentally switched on your iPhone’s flashlight and had someone point it out to you later? Some iPhone users won’t have to worry about that anymore. With iOS 17.1, when you turn on your flashlight, a little flashlight symbol appears in the Live Activities feed across the top of your screen. However, I couldn’t replicate this symbol anywhere on my iPhone XR, so this feature likely only works on Live Activity-enabled iPhones, like the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 15 lineup.

Full release notes for iOS 17.1

Here are Apple’s full release notes for iOS 17.1, including bug fixes and other improvements:

AirDrop
• Content continues to transfer over the internet when you step out of AirDrop range.

StandBy
• New options to control when the display turns off (iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14 Pro Max, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max).

Music
• Favorites expanded to include songs, albums and playlists, and you can filter to display your favorites in the library.
• New cover art collection offers designs that change colors to reflect the music in your playlist.
• Song suggestions appear at the bottom of every playlist, making it easy to add music that matches the vibe of your playlist.

This update also includes the following improvements and bug fixes:

• Option to choose a specific album to use with Photo Shuffle on the Lock Screen.
• Home key support for Matter locks.
• Improved reliability of Screen Time settings syncing across devices.
• Fixes an issue that may cause the Significant Location privacy setting to reset when transferring an Apple Watch or pairing it for the first time.
• Resolves an issue where the names of incoming callers may not appear when you are on another call.
• Addresses an issue where custom and purchased ringtones may not appear as options for your text tone.
• Fixes an issue that may cause the keyboard to be less responsive.
• Crash detection optimizations (all iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 models).
• Fixes an issue that may cause display image persistence.

Some features may not be available for all regions or on all Apple devices. For information on the security content of Apple software updates, please visit this website: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201222.

For more, check out my review of iOS 17 and our iOS 17 cheat sheet.

17 Hidden iOS 17 Features and Settings on Your iPhone

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Google’s AI Overviews Explain Made-Up Idioms With Confident Nonsense

The latest meme around generative AI’s hallucinations proves you can’t lick a badger twice.

Language can seem almost infinitely complex, with inside jokes and idioms sometimes having meaning for just a small group of people and appearing meaningless to the rest of us. Thanks to generative AI, even the meaningless found meaning this week as the internet blew up like a brook trout over the ability of Google search’s AI Overviews to define phrases never before uttered.

What, you’ve never heard the phrase «blew up like a brook trout»? Sure, I just made it up, but Google’s AI overviews result told me it’s a «colloquial way of saying something exploded or became a sensation quickly,» likely referring to the eye-catching colors and markings of the fish. No, it doesn’t make sense.

The trend may have started on Threads, where the author and screenwriter Meaghan Wilson Anastasios shared what happened when she searched «peanut butter platform heels.» Google returned a result referencing a (not real) scientific experiment in which peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure. 

It moved to other social media sites, like Bluesky, where people shared Google’s interpretations of phrases like «you can’t lick a badger twice.» The game: Search for a novel, nonsensical phrase with «meaning» at the end.

Things rolled on from there.

This meme is interesting for more reasons than comic relief. It shows how large language models might strain to provide an answer that sounds correct, not one that is correct.

«They are designed to generate fluent, plausible-sounding responses, even when the input is completely nonsensical,» said Yafang Li, assistant professor at the Fogelman College of Business and Economics at the University of Memphis. «They are not trained to verify the truth. They are trained to complete the sentence.»

Like glue on pizza

The fake meanings of made-up sayings bring back memories of the all too true stories about Google’s AI Overviews giving incredibly wrong answers to basic questions — like when it suggested putting glue on pizza to help the cheese stick.

This trend seems at least a bit more harmless because it doesn’t center on actionable advice. I mean, I for one hope nobody tries to lick a badger once, much less twice. The problem behind it, however, is the same — a large language model, like Google’s Gemini behind AI Overviews, tries to answer your questions and offer a feasible response. Even if what it gives you is nonsense.

A Google spokesperson said AI Overviews are designed to display information supported by top web results, and that they have an accuracy rate comparable to other search features. 

«When people do nonsensical or ‘false premise’ searches, our systems will try to find the most relevant results based on the limited web content available,» the Google spokesperson said. «This is true of search overall, and in some cases, AI Overviews will also trigger in an effort to provide helpful context.»

This particular case is a «data void,» where there isn’t a lot of relevant information available for the search query. The spokesperson said Google is working on limiting when AI Overviews appear on searches without enough information and preventing them from providing misleading, satirical or unhelpful content. Google uses information about queries like these to better understand when AI Overviews should and should not appear. 

You won’t always get a made-up definition if you ask for the meaning of a fake phrase. When drafting the heading of this section, I searched «like glue on pizza meaning,» and it didn’t trigger an AI Overview. 

The problem doesn’t appear to be universal across LLMs. I asked ChatGPT for the meaning of «you can’t lick a badger twice» and it told me the phrase «isn’t a standard idiom, but it definitely sounds like the kind of quirky, rustic proverb someone might use.» It did, though, try to offer a definition anyway, essentially: «If you do something reckless or provoke danger once, you might not survive to do it again.»

Read more: AI Essentials: 27 Ways to Make Gen AI Work for You, According to Our Experts

Pulling meaning out of nowhere

This phenomenon is an entertaining example of LLMs’ tendency to make stuff up — what the AI world calls «hallucinating.» When a gen AI model hallucinates, it produces information that sounds like it could be plausible or accurate but isn’t rooted in reality.

LLMs are «not fact generators,» Li said, they just predict the next logical bits of language based on their training. 

A majority of AI researchers in a recent survey reported they doubt AI’s accuracy and trustworthiness issues would be solved soon. 

The fake definitions show not just the inaccuracy but the confident inaccuracy of LLMs. When you ask a person for the meaning of a phrase like «you can’t get a turkey from a Cybertruck,» you probably expect them to say they haven’t heard of it and that it doesn’t make sense. LLMs often react with the same confidence as if you’re asking for the definition of a real idiom. 

In this case, Google says the phrase means Tesla’s Cybertruck «is not designed or capable of delivering Thanksgiving turkeys or other similar items» and highlights «its distinct, futuristic design that is not conducive to carrying bulky goods.» Burn.

This humorous trend does have an ominous lesson: Don’t trust everything you see from a chatbot. It might be making stuff up out of thin air, and it won’t necessarily indicate it’s uncertain. 

«This is a perfect moment for educators and researchers to use these scenarios to teach people how the meaning is generated and how AI works and why it matters,» Li said. «Users should always stay skeptical and verify claims.»

Be careful what you search for

Since you can’t trust an LLM to be skeptical on your behalf, you need to encourage it to take what you say with a grain of salt. 

«When users enter a prompt, the model just assumes it’s valid and then proceeds to generate the most likely accurate answer for that,» Li said.

The solution is to introduce skepticism in your prompt. Don’t ask for the meaning of an unfamiliar phrase or idiom. Ask if it’s real. Li suggested you ask «is this a real idiom?»

«That may help the model to recognize the phrase instead of just guessing,» she said.

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Clair Obscur Expedition 33 Screenshots: Beauty and Wonder in a World of Death

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Disable These 3 iOS Settings to Extend Your iPhone’s Battery Life

Switching off these features can deliver better battery life.

Do you find yourself constantly charging your iPhone when the Low Power Mode warning pops up? While phones hold less of a charge over time, you don’t want your phone to die on you while you’re using it to navigate on the road or in the middle of a conversation. 

While your phone’s battery might not have the capacity to hold the charge it did when it was fresh out of the box, there are options that can help you squeeze more juice out of each charge. By disabling certain settings, you can ensure your iPhone battery can go the distance when you need it most. 

You can also keep an eye on your Battery Health menu — it’ll tell you your battery health percentage (80% or higher is considered good), as well as show you how many times you’ve cycled your battery and whether or not your battery is «normal.»

We’ll explain three iOS features that put a strain on your iPhone’s battery to varying degrees, and show how you can turn them off to help preserve battery life. Here’s what you need to know.

Turn off widgets on your iPhone lock screen

All the widgets on your lock screen force your apps to automatically run in the background, constantly fetching data to update the information the widgets display, like sports scores or the weather. Because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain power.

If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 18, the best thing to do is simply avoid widgets on your lock screen (and home screen). The easiest way to do this is to switch to another lock screen profile: Press your finger down on your existing lock screen and then swipe around to choose one that doesn’t have any widgets.

If you want to just remove the widgets from your existing lock screen, press down on your lock screen, hit Customize, choose the Lock Screen option, tap on the widget box and then hit the «—» button on each widget to remove them.

Reduce the motion of your iPhone UI

Your iPhone user interface has some fun, sleek animations. There’s the fluid motion of opening and closing apps, and the burst of color that appears when you activate Siri with Apple Intelligence, just to name a couple. These visual tricks help bring the slab of metal and glass in your hand to life. Unfortunately, they can also reduce your phone’s battery life.

If you want subtler animations across iOS, you can enable the Reduce Motion setting. To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and toggle on Reduce Motion.

Switch off your iPhone’s keyboard vibration

Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the ability to vibrate as you type, an addition called «haptic feedback» that was added to iPhones with iOS 16. Instead of just hearing click-clack sounds, haptic feedback gives each key a vibration, providing a more immersive experience as you type. According to Apple, the very same feature may also affect battery life.

According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback «might affect the battery life of your iPhone.» No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature drains, but if you want to conserve battery, it’s best to keep this feature disabled.

Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you’ve enabled it yourself, go to SettingsSounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.

For more tips on iOS, learn how to download iOS 18 and how to automatically delete multifactor authentication messages from texts and emails.

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