Is there anything worse than your phone dying – especially when you aren’t at home?

Well, if you’re an iPhone user then you’re in luck because Apple has revealed there are three iPhone settings that you can tweak on your phone to actually double your battery life.

There are so many things you can do to conserve battery life but the tech giant has now compiled a list of three things that you can do to prevent your phone from dying at the worst possible time.

Is there anything worse than a ‘dead’ phone? (Getty stock)

Location services

Apple writes: “Background Location: An app has been using your location in the background. To improve battery life, set the app’s location access to While In Use.”

Yes, when you download apps some of them will ask for you to turn on your location services – which for many is needed, but often we accidentally turn it on and leave it running in the background.

To prevent this from happening in the future, make sure you only allow the app to access your location while you’re using it.

For those of you wondering how do you turn your location services off, you need to click on Settings then ‘Privacy & Security’ – while you’re there, select the app you wish to stop sharing your location with and toggle it off.

Waiting for your iPhone to charge in the middle of the day is frustrating, but there are tips you can adhere to for a longer batter life (Getty stock)

Auto-brightness

OK, this is another simple one – simple in the way that we know reducing your brightness saves battery life… but not everyone knows how to access this.

Using their many built-in light sensors, our iPhones can detect how bright their surroundings are and automatically adjust their brightness to make for easier viewing

To turn auto-brightness on or off:

1. In the Settings app, tap Accessibility.
2. Tap Display & Text Size.
3. Scroll to Auto-Brightness and tap to turn the feature on or off.

If you think your screen brightness isn’t adapting correctly, try to turn off auto-brightness and then turn it back on.

Hopefully these suggestions by Apple will help you to always have a charged phone! (Getty stock)

Auto-Lock

It’s what it says on the tin – auto-lock locks your phone after a set amount of time without activity and it was designed to conserve battery life.

So how do you make the most of this?

Go to Settings, then click on ‘Display & Brightness’, and you’ll find ‘Auto-Lock’.

From there you can actually change how long it takes before automatically locking.

If these tips save at least one phone’s life, then I can live with that.

The year 2007 marked a lot of iconic releases. From Britney Spears’ album Blackout, to Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille, and of course, the very first iPhone.

New tech will always be the talk of the town. Several iPhones later, the original iPhone is still a subject of intrigue and interest. As any collector will tell you, getting your hands on an old gadget in its original packaging will cost a pretty penny.

The first ever iPhone — known as the iPhone 2G or first generation — was unveiled by Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs 17 years ago in 2007. It cost $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model. In recent years, original iPhones have sold for as much as $63,000 at auction.

One Apple fanatic managed to get his hands on an original, sealed iPhone. Marques Brownlee bought the groundbreaking phone for $40,000 — and luckily for us, he broke the seal and showed us everything inside the box.

He begins by telling his subscribers that the most ‘sought after tech in the collector world is the factory-sealed, unopened, original iPhone’. This is understandably very rare, because who would buy a new gadget and not use it? Smart people, apparently. Perhaps they had an inkling that the iPhone would be worth a fortune in the years to come…

Brownlee says sometimes people re-seal used original iPhones and sell them as if they have never been used. A lot of effort goes into making the scam look as believable as possible.

When the YouTuber won the auction for the iPhone he paid $40,320 for it. The sellers sent it in a massive wooden box. He initially offered to pay $32,000 before the price jumped massively during the auction.

This is what he finds in the box (Marques Brownlee)

After unscrewing the box and peeling back the bubble wrap, Brownlee finds the brand new (but also very old) iPhone. The box has a ‘lucky you’ sticker, which he eventually discovers was used sometimes if the phone was intended as a gift.

Thankfully, the phone is a factory-sealed new phone that has not been used before. He finds the documents for using and operating the phone, and a microfiber screen cleaner, plus Apple stickers. The box has a sealed USB-A wall plug, a 30-pin dock with a headphone jack, a 30-pin charging and data couple, plus old school earphones.

All the signs suggest the $40,000 iPhone is authentic (Marques Brownlee)

Unfortunately, the iPhone did not turn on originally because the battery is so old but he is eventually able to charge it.

The current iPhone is the 16. It is available in five different shades – white, black, ultra marine, teal and pink – which all come with an aero-space grade aluminium finish. The iPhone 16 and 16 Plus start at $799 and $899.

Apple users have been encouraged to turn on a new security feature that could help them if their phone is stolen.

Getting your phone stolen is annoying to put it mildly. This situation becomes even more frustrating when someone has the potential to gain access to much of your sensitive data.

Apple’s latest update, iOS 17.3, has a new feature that it believes can help deter thieves from going after iPhones.

Following the update, that released on January 22, iPhone users are able to use the Stolen Device Protection feature for added security protection, which initiates barriers against theft and stalls access to a stolen phone.

It’s essentially an emergency backup solution before you call the police and report it stolen.

When the feature has been turned on, it will require the person accessing to perform a successful Face or Touch ID to access sensitive information, such as your wallet and stored passcodes.

Ultimately, it’s one extra layer of protection against thieves who would likely try their hand at taking your money after they’ve stolen your device.

On the back of the recent feature, the tech giant wrote: “In the event that your iPhone is stolen, the security delay is designed to prevent a thief from performing critical operations so that you can mark your device as lost and make sure your Apple account is secure.

Getty Stock Image

“When your iPhone is in a familiar location, these additional steps are not required, and you can use your device passcode like usual.”

Apple confirms that familiar locations are places where the iPhone is commonly used, including places of work and your home.

However, if the device is in an unusual location, the feature will trigger an hour-long delay if someone is attempting to change the password. This would give the actual owner more time to report their phone stolen.

As well as this, passcodes will no longer be able to be used a backup method of unlocking the phone.

Getty Stock Image

If you haven’t already turned on the feature, here is how:

• Make sure you have the latest iOS 17. 3 software updated.
• Activate two-factor authentication in settings under ‘Password & Security’.
• Make sure both Face and Touch ID are enabled, along with Find My features, and create a password if you haven’t already.
• Enable ‘Significant Locations’ in locations services.
• Tap on ‘Face ID & Passcode’ in settings and enter your password.
• Toggle ‘Stolen Device protection’ to turn it on.

Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out against Apple ‘just kind of sitting’ on the iPhone 20 years on and what it means for developers.

The chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc. appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and it didn’t take long for him to reveal his true thoughts about the technology company. Zuckerberg praised it for ‘one of the most important inventions of all time’ in creating the iPhone but interrogated how the company still makes money.

On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on January 10, the host admitted there’s ‘so much about Apple‘ he ‘doesn’t like’ and it didn’t take long for Zuckerberg to chime in, noting how the rise of the iPhone parallels fairly closely with his own journey starting Facebook, Steve Jobs coming out with the first iPhone in 2007 and Zuckerberg with his first social media platform in 2004.

In the clip, Zuckerberg reflects on the ‘dominant platform’ being ‘smartphones’ and, while this is ‘great’ to ‘build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket’ and ‘there’s like four billion people who use the different apps’ covered by Meta, he notes the company ‘didn’t play any role in basically building that, those phones, because it was kind of getting worked on when [he] was just trying to make the first website’.

He argues: “[Apple] have ‘used that platform [of the iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think, feel arbitrary and feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while – Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later and they actually, I think year-over-year I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones at this point. I think the sales might actually be declining.

“I think part of it is each generation doesn’t actually get that much better so people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before, the number of sales has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company?

“Well, they do it by basically like squeezing people and, like you’re saying, having this 30 percent tax on developers by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it.”

For example, AirPods, which Zuckerberg praises as ‘cool,’ but says Apple have ultimately ‘thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way’.

Zuckerberg continues: “Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods basically to connect to it and it’s much more seamless and they’ve enabled that but they’ve not let anyone else use the protocol.

“If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there. And whenever you push on this they get super touchy and they basically wrap their defence of it as, ‘Well, if we let other companies plug into our thing then that would violate people’s privacy and security’.

“It’s like no, just do a better job at designing the protocol.”

Zuckerberg reflects on the whole issue as ‘wild’, but notes he’s ‘pretty optimistic that, just because [Apple] have been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things that eventually […] [it’s] just going to get beat by someone’.