My 5 favorite iPhone features that don’t get enough love

• StandBy
• Apple Pay
• Family Sharing
• Video recording (for non-professionals)
• Apple Health

If you’ve followed any of my writing here, you’ve probably seen me give Apple a lot of flak, most recently over the iPhone Air. I stand by my criticism. I’m not doing it just because controversy draws clicks — I’m doing it because Apple gets so many things right that it’s frustrating when it goes off-course. Or what I consider off-course, naturally. “Other opinions are available,” as one of my favorite podcasters would say, and Apple has business considerations that even market analysts can’t peek into. We may never know exactly why the Apple Car project was canceled.

For a change of pace, then, here are some of the things I genuinely like about iPhones that don’t get the attention they deserve, in my opinion. You might feel that some of them are properly hyped, or even overhyped. But one thing’s for sure — these aren’t the first things Apple trots out to sell you an iPhone 17.

StandBy

Apple’s first smart display

If you’re not familiar with StandBy, that’s understandable. The mode is only triggered when you slap an iPhone on a MagSafe/Qi 2 charger both upright and horizontally, and even then, it’s largely pointless if your phone doesn’t have an always-on display (AOD). Now that Apple is finally adding AOD tech to every iPhone — not just Pros — you may be experiencing StandBy for the first time.

Effectively, StandBy turns your iPhone into a smart display like an Echo Show or a Nest Hub. It isn’t as elaborate, but you can still swipe left or right to switch between general clock, photo, and widget views, and up and down on individual widgets to change their look or function. The mode remembers your settings for each charging location, and by default, automatically dims and red-shifts when it gets dark.

This won’t sound special until you think about the ramifications of ambient information. If you’ve got calendar widgets available at a glance, it becomes a little easier to plot out events, and remember the ones you already have. A Live Activities widget might keep you up to speed with an incoming flight or rideshare. And personally, I like being able to check the time in the middle of the night without blinding my eyes or doing anything more than rolling over in bed.

Apple Pay

Showing the importance of convenience

Much like StandBy, Apple Pay may seem like a minor convenience on the surface. If you’ve got your wallet with you, you’ve got access to your physical credit and debit cards. And when you’re paying online, many sites and apps force you to enter your card details separately anyway.

The trick, of course, is that if you’ve got all your cards saved in Apple Pay, you may not even need your wallet except for your driver’s license. Whenever I head to the gym, I leave my wallet stuffed in my bag, since I know that just about any pharmacy or gas station I might need to stop at will let me pay with my iPhone or Apple Watch. And enough apps do support Apple Pay — such as Instacart and Uber — that I can take care of a lot of essentials without having to fetch my card numbers.

For some people, the big attraction may be the Wallet app’s ability to store tickets, passes, and rewards cards. If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with good public transportation, you may be able to swipe your iPhone at a train turnstile without unlocking it.

Family Sharing

Not for the reasons Apple wants

Apple’s dream for Family Sharing is that you’ll use it to share top-tier Apple subscriptions along with a bunch of app, book, and movie purchases. You can do that if you like, and for a middle-class home that’s all-in on the Apple ecosystem, it makes sense. It would be pointless and costly to make everyone pay separately.

For me, though, the main interest is managing my son’s iPad. While he prefers making music and audio recordings over playing games, he’s only seven, so impulse control isn’t his best asset. My wife and I use Family Sharing’s Screen Time feature to control which apps he can access and when. Most days, the only app he gets is YouTube Kids when he goes to sleep — it’s on weekends and holidays that he can go to town mixing house or ambient.

One thing I’d caution is that you should be careful about turning on Purchase Sharing. By default, that foists every App Store, iTunes Store, Apple Books, or Apple TV purchase onto one person, the family organizer. You can require approval for purchases, but you’ll still have to come up with your own solution if you need to split the cost.

Video recording (for non-professionals)

No ProRes or Genlock needed

In revealing the iPhone 17 Pro, Apple ran a blitz for its professional camera features, including an expensive TV ad with mock film sets. And if you’re in the position where you actually do need an iPhone for film work, you’ll get access to technologies like Genlock and ProRes RAW support. If you don’t know what either of those are, you probably don’t need to bother.

What I really appreciate is that for a long time now, the iPhone’s amateur video recording has been excellent. You’ll still run into problems occasionally, like “dot” flares in some night scenes, but video shot in reasonably-lit conditions tends to look great without any editing. Things only get better if your iPhone can take advantage of software features like Audio Mix or Action Mode. One way of making video look dramatic is Cinematic Mode, which gives you more control over focus.

A note here is that while it’s worth recording in HDR (high dynamic range), I’d recommend shooting at 1080p resolution instead of 4K for most clips. 4K video can fill up your iPhone pretty quickly, not to mention your iCloud storage.

Apple Health

The quantified life

Apple Health is, admittedly, a useless tool unless you have apps, wearables, and other products that support HealthKit. But the more of these you have, the more helpful it is for gauging your overall health and fitness. Using a nutrition app, I can get a sense of how much protein, caffeine, and other content I’m consuming. My scale tracks both weight and body fat percentage, and my Apple Watch monitors sleep, heart rate, and blood oxygen data, among other metrics.

If you’re trying to get strong or burn fat, making use of this trend data does require interpreting it and taking it with a grain of salt — no wearable can get a precise measure of calorie burn, for example. For the average person, though, combining Health with an Apple Watch will open up notifications for sleep apnea, irregular heart rates, and other issues. Apple likes to make a big deal out of how many lives have been saved by a Watch catching atrial fibrillation — but they’re not kidding. You absolutely should go to the doctor if Health pops up an AFib warning.