My iPhone 16 Pro felt wrong, then I tweaked these 7 settings

My

iPhone 12 Pro
recently retired — and by retired, I mean its knees gave out and phone calls started sounding like the adults’ voices on Charlie Brown. I would’ve held out for the

iPhone 17
, but I found a deal I couldn’t pass up and decided to bite the bullet and upgrade — I’m glad I did, especially since Apple is reportedly going to

jack up its prices
(not because of tariffs, of course).

That being said, I had about a week’s worth of growing pains to deal with from jumping four generational rungs up the iPhone ladder. I kept track of the settings I ran to change immediately to help smooth out the learning curve, as well as activating all the features that were new to me.

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1

Always-On Display

Not for me, personally

I’m not going to lie, I loved the idea of this at first — it seemed like the epitome of the casual infusion of a display screen onto my desk space. It became a serious problem when I actually couldn’t tear my eyes away from it, though.

Not only was it distracting (especially if I was waiting for an important text), but when I did go to pick up my phone, I couldn’t tell if it was on or not. I’m notorious for keeping my brightness low to prevent eyestrain, particularly at night, so I found myself clicking notifications that appeared when the display was on, but not quite activated yet. It only took a couple of extra taps, but then again, it was a couple of extra taps.

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2

Action Button customization

New hardware on the block alert

Now if you skipped four generations like I did, the Silence switch above the volume buttons has turned into another option: the Action Button. It’s a handy new hardware bit, but you’ll have to do some tweaking to get it to fit into your workflow.

When I first set up my iPhone 16 Pro, I thought it would be handy to customize it to be a flashlight button. Now, that was somewhat of a redundant choice, as my muscle memory had me selecting the default shortcut straight from the lockscreen anyway. I wanted to change it back to a setting that controlled my notifications, so I changed my Action Button to activate Silent Mode, just like the switch used to before.

You can choose between Silent Mode, Do Not Disturb, Camera, Flashlight, Voice Memo, Recognize Music, Magnifier, Controls, Shortcut, Accessibility, and even No Action if you want it to be particularly useless.

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3

Battery optimization

You don’t always need to be at 100% (100% of the time)

Battery health is all the craze lately. My iPhone 12 Pro was lucky to get through the morning on Low Power Mode after five years, so I’m determined to make my iPhone 16 Pro’s battery strong into its old age. One way to do this is to set up charging limits.

After you’ve used your iPhone for a little while, it will learn from your charging and usage habits and use them to preserve its battery life over its lifetime. When you turn on Optimized Battery Charging and set the limit to 100%, your iPhone will wait to finish charging past 80% until you pick it up to use it.

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4

Spatial Audio and Volume Control

Make the sound yours

Personalizing Spatial Audio is one of the most fun things to do with headphones since I discovered 8D audio on YouTube in 2017. It improves the rendering of Spatial Audio in general while you’re using supported AirPods or Beats headphones.

Also, you need to make sure that the volume buttons are doing what you want them to do, especially since the Action Button has replaced the Ringer switch. You can choose to have the volume buttons control Ringer volume or regular volume in Sounds & Haptics, too.

I toggled off the “Change with Buttons” option for the Ringtone and Alerts and instead just set the volume I always want them to be on with the selection bar above. That way, my volume buttons control the regular audio playing from my iPhone.

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5

Camera Settings

Turn off Live Photos

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a sucker for a portrait that captures half a second of movement like my very own moving Harry Potter painting. But they do take up a fair amount of storage space, and sometimes I just need to snap a quick shot without capturing an entire vibe.

Sure, you can toggle the setting off in the camera app itself, but I would rather consciously turn it on when I do want that particular moving-vibe. Luckily, it’s easy to achieve by going into Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings > toggle the “Live Photo” switch to off. The next time you open the camera app to snap a quick shot, the Live Photo setting will be off by default. Just tap it to enable it again.

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6

Automatically delete verification codes

2FA? More like 3FA

Passwords are safer than ever with two-factor authentication, but even the extra layer of protection doesn’t guarantee security. Think about how many emails and texts you get with one-time passcodes or double-authentication notifications — if someone does happen to get too deep into your personal info ecosystem, they might have access to these codes. Some are viable for up to 24 hours, after all.

Luckily, there’s a setting to counteract this. You can set up these verification codes to automatically be deleted from your Messages and Mail apps after you use them.

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7

Display and Brightness

Working on the night shift, baby

Jon Pardi reference, anyone? Even if you aren’t a country music fan, we all stay up way too late sometimes. If those forbidden hours of the night are filled with late-night scroll time (I know mine are), you’ll want to protect your eyes.

The first thing I did on my iPhone 16 Pro was go into Display & Brightness and change the following settings:

• Appearance (Light and Dark mode): set to automatic, with option Light Until Sunset (you can opt for a custom schedule here, but my eyes’ preferences align with the earth’s rotation, thank you very much)
• Night Shift: Sunset to Sunrise (when you click into this one, you can set a schedule, enable it manually, and change the color temperature — I chose the warmest option)

My eyes look at a screen 75% of the day, and I like to give them a break — and at least attempt to stay on track with my circadian rhythm.

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