Hands-On Apple 243 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
You're lying in bed, phone about, you know, 6 inches or so from your nose, and suddenly the screen goes dark with a message telling you to move it away. That's not a glitch, that's Screen Distance. And if you have kids in your family sharing group, it's probably already on for them and you never knew. Today, we're looking at 4 features that all claim to make screen time easier on your eyes. 2 of them work exactly as advertised, one is more complicated than Apple's marketing suggests, and one isn't on your iPhone at all. Let's check it out. Podcasts you love. From people you trust.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:39]:
This is TWiT. Hello and welcome to Hands On Apple. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at, well, screen distance, plus a few other tools that you can use to help manage your viewing distance. viewing experience on your phone. So let's first talk about that Too Close alert. If you haven't gotten it, it's probably because you haven't set it up. So what is it? Well, it was introduced in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, and in order to get it, well, let's take a look at where we go to do so by heading over to iOS. All right, here we are on iOS, and the first thing we're going to do is head into Settings.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:30]:
And then we're going to scroll down until we get to Screen Time. We'll tap on Screen Time and you'll notice there is a Screen Distance section. Now, you probably have this, but if you don't have it, it's because you don't have a device that supports TrueDepth. A Face ID phone or a Face ID iPad, those are the devices, the same ones that use The TrueDepth camera, which is part of Face ID, will detect when the device is closer than 12 inches from your face for an extended period of time. So not just immediately, but for an extended period of time. When you cross the line and you cross the time, then an alert will cover the entire screen and block you from continuing. And here's the fun thing about it, but is annoying to some people. you can't just dismiss it.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:25]:
The only way to clear away that notification, whoop, moving the device away from your face, more than 12 inches away, and then tapping continue. You can't just dismiss it. So let's hop in and turn Screen Distance on. Now you'll notice that this isn't currently on and it shows you a little notification about how it works. We'll tap continue to turn it on. And it talks about the different things that, that how it works and what you need to do in order to turn it on. So we'll choose turn on screen distance, and now you've got a toggle. So it goes from that sort of intro option to actually just a toggle.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:05]:
So let's get this rolling by putting my face very close to the phone and keeping it there until we see this pop up. The idea again is that you're, you know, lying in bed, you're doing something, and suddenly as you are doing so, The phone is going to say, okay, you need to move this phone away from your face. It's far too close. And unfortunately, it does take a while to get this to happen. Or perhaps fortunately, I guess it depends on what you're doing. But a full-screen block is going to come up and say to you, you know, it might actually, because we've got the screen recording going, it might not do it currently. But the point is, It will not let you continue until you move the phone away. At that point, then the continue button appears.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:57]:
Now, if you've seen this turned on, then it's either you turned it on or you're using a phone that was set up for children under 13. So it's on by default for children under 13 in a family sharing group. You, uh, this is also very important to understand if you've ever toggled it off on one of these devices and somehow it's on again. Well, it does turn back on automatically each time a child updates it's a device that's signed into their Apple account. And adults, you will have to opt in manually. I had to turn it on in order to get it to work. How— what devices can use it? What devices can't? Well, again, TrueDepth camera is required, so Face ID iPhones and iPad Pro models only. It's not on Touch ID devices, and it isn't on the Mac, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that it is because you can turn it on From a Mac, you head into System Settings, you choose Screen Time, you choose Screen Distance, but the setting only applies to the iPhone or the iPad that are also signed into that same Apple account.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:02]:
Your Mac is not going to alert you for sitting too close. It doesn't know how close you are to it. So what about privacy? Because this is something that I have had, you know, folks go, okay, I'm used to Face ID doing what it does, but dude, tell me about— tell me about what's happening here if this is using the front camera and using the TrueDepth sensor. Well, don't you worry, the depth data is processed on device. It's not stored or sent anywhere, so it's not collecting that data and kicking it out somewhere else. 12 inches, right, is the distance, right, that you hold it That you have to hold it from your face. And that's not an arbitrary number. If you look at Apple support documents, Apple cites eye strain and myopia as the risk from holding your phone at that distance.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:57]:
You may remember your parents telling you when you were younger that you shouldn't sit so close to the TV. That guidance was provided not because the TV was sending out some sort of waves, but because It resulted in your eyes not doing what they needed to do at distances. And so nearsightedness is a true issue, and it is particularly an issue when it comes to kids and teens. A lot of times with adults, a little too late, but with kids and teens, if early on we can intervene, then it can mean better sight for longer. That is The easy way to kind of give yourself a reminder that you are holding the phone too close. I have this feature turned on and there are times when it annoys me so much, right? But it's also a nice reminder because I do be holding my phone far too close to my face. And it is, you know, again, when it's happening, but at the same time, thank goodness something is there. So going, okay, buddy.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:04]:
Yeah. You're not taking very good care of your eyes. Next option, many of you have probably heard of it, Night Shift. Okay, Night Shift is the feature that lets you adjust the color, the color temperature of the screen depending on the time. You access Night Shift and control Night Shift by heading into Settings and then choosing Display and Brightness, and then scrolling down until we get to Night Shift. Now, this is currently turned off. To turn it on, we can choose Scheduled, and we can set it up from times or sunset to sunrise. And then, and this is the great part, we can decide how warm we want it to be from less warm to more warm.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:56]:
And while you are moving that slider, it shows you the different versions. Now, you can't see this on the screen, because it's not on the screen, but it is changing to a far more amber color. The color temperature slider makes, uh, makes it so that it's less amber or more amber, and you are able to toggle it on and off from Control Center. So if you don't like having this on, you can tap and hold on the brightness slider, And then turn on Night Shift or turn it off until a given time. Now I've got this turned on. Okay. That said, I want you to understand the science behind this. Not even Apple will go as far as to say this absolutely does something.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:47]:
Apple says shifting to warmer colors after dark may help you sleep better. And we looked into the research. Yeah. I looked into the research. There's a BYU study that's published in Sleep Health, and it looked at 167 young adults across 3 different groups. One group had Night Shift turned on on their phones. Uh, the other group had Night Shift turned off on their phones. So one was using the phone with Night Shift, one was using the phone without Night Shift, and then the third group was not using the phone at all before bedtime.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:18]:
So these are all instances of using a phone before bedtime. Night Shift on, Night Shift off. Yeah. No phone at all. Can you guess what the results were of this study? No meaningful difference across the 3 groups. In other words, night shift was not superior to using the phone normally, and it wasn't superior to using a phone at all. However, there was a secondary analysis of the participants who, when they were asleep, slept longer. Hmm.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:50]:
And they looked at what— who were the people who ended up sleeping longer? So not falling asleep, but stayed asleep and stayed asleep longer. Turns out the no-phone group slept longer, but there was no meaningful difference between the night shift group and the non-night shift group. So light temperature, maybe not really a sleep-impacting thing. It is instead perhaps a way to kind of protect your eyes, or some people say that it's easier to look at a warmer screen at night than it is to look at a bright blue screen. Uh, that— so that may be the case for you. That's a legitimate enough reason to keep it on, even if it doesn't have an impact on your sleep. And you just don't want to treat this kind of as like a sleep intervention, right? This is— this needs to be something that you use as a means of kind of— maybe it's a signal to your brain that it's getting dark and it's getting late and we should start winding down. But the idea that there's a direct link between that and how your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep are impacted is far less tenuous.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:59]:
Lastly, we've got True Tone, which is also accessed via Settings, Display and Brightness. And I shouldn't have said lastly because we've got another one, but Settings, Display and Brightness, the last one on the iPhone, and True Tone. Now, right now True Tone is turned on. And you can turn it off. And this is how it works. It is doing a different job than Night Shift. Okay. It's important to understand True Tone and Night Shift are not the same thing because what Night Shift does is it makes the screen quite a bit warmer and it does so on a schedule.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:33]:
What True Tone does is it matches the display's white balance to the color of the light in the room. And it does that all throughout the day. So as you're doing automatic brightness, you're also able to do automatic white balance shifting. It uses multi-channel ambient light sensors and looks at the surrounding light in the room and then adjusts the white point in real time. The idea is that white should always look white on the screen, whether you're under warm kitchen lights or you're, in a fluorescent office building. Either way, it's able to impact the way that white looks so that it looks like pure white. This feature, True Tone, is available on iPhone 8 and later, so it's been around a long time. It's on most of the modern iPads.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:27]:
It's on several Mac displays as well— MacBook Pro, Studio Display— and it is a feature that has a toggle because some people turn it off when they're working with photographs, for example, especially in third-party apps where the knowledge of the system isn't there and can have an impact on the phone's ability to display it. A couple of other things that you— or a few other things that you might also want to make adjustments to to help with your viewing include auto brightness. And to get to that, we go to Settings, we go to Accessibility, we go to Display and Text Size, and in here we have Our different options, including auto brightness all the way down at the bottom. This also will make a difference, and I recommend having this turned on because when you're in a dark space, it drops the brightness of the phone, and when you're in a bright space, it brings up the brightness of the phone and tries not to overpower you with light. Reduce white point. I've talked about this feature a lot before. It's a feature that basically, it lets you make adjustments to the intensity of bright colors. So I use this at night to drop down the brightness even more.
Mikah Sargent [00:13:43]:
And then last but not least, bold text and dynamic type. These features will change the way that text displays. So you'll note if you're watching that the text is immediately boldened. And we can also choose larger text and pop that up some as well. So don't be afraid to play around with these if you feel like you would be able to better serve your eyes with this change in the type. None of these, however— you know what? In fact, we're going to switch away because I really want you to focus up here. Okay. None of those features that I mentioned so far will actually replace the boring optical health advice.
Mikah Sargent [00:14:34]:
Distance, breaks, and blinks. We need to be doing that. There's actually a 20-20-20 guideline. Every 20 minutes, look at something that's 20 feet away. for 20 seconds. And that has more of an impact on your eyesight than any of these display settings do. 20, 20, 20. Love it.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:04]:
Follow it. Lastly, I want to talk about a feature that is not on your phone, but is instead on your wrist because your Apple Watch has an ambient light sensor that will estimate how much time you spend outdoors in daylight each day. And it does so passively. You don't have to be doing a workout You don't have to turn something on for it to start focusing on this. You just— well, I should say the one thing that you have to have on is motion calibration and distance, which is part of the setup with the Apple Watch. If you're looking for it, well, it's not in some sort of app. In fact, you have to go into the Health app, and we'll take— I'll pull this up on the screen in just a moment. You have to do this on the Health app.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:49]:
And This is the first time we've opened the Health app here on this phone, so we'll pop in and we want to go into the sections here so we can take a look at all of the options. And we want to scroll down to Other Data and then look for Time in Daylight. This is what tracks your time in daylight. super buried, and so you may have a bunch of data in here and not even realize it. To turn this off, on your iPhone, you launch the Watch app, you go to My Watch, you go to Privacy, and then you can toggle off Time in Daylight. On the Apple Watch itself, you launch the Settings app, you go to Privacy and Security, you choose Health, and then you choose Time in Daylight. This is a feature that also has ties to Family Sharing so that parents can monitor a family member's Time in Daylight. They do so with that activity and health report sharing that works with a managed Apple Watch.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:49]:
So if you set up a managed Apple Watch, this feature will be there. We talked about 20-20-20, right? Turns out that time outdoors is one of the better studied and better supported protective factors against childhood myopia, and that is why it is a feature primarily used for tracking Primarily helpful if you have a managed Apple Watch that you've given to a child, but it can be positive for, uh, for your eyesight as well. There was a 3-year randomized trial that found if you added 40 minutes of outdoor activity— this was at school— it cut incidence of myopia from 39.5% to 30.4% Really cool stuff. There's been a lot more research done. It points to roughly 76 additional minutes outdoors per day being associated with a substantially lower risk of developing myopia. And the reason why we think this is the case, its proposed mechanism, we're not sure, but we think the reason why is that bright outdoor light will constrict the pupil. This increases depth of focus, and it may even trigger— this is really interesting— Dopamine release in the retina that then slows the eye's elongation. Got it? So screen distance manages how close the screen is.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:18]:
Time in daylight measures the thing that matters more. It's the same, you know, think about these, these different means of trying to sort of help and the 20-20-20 rule. We need to work out our eyes. We need to see things in the distance. We need to look around. That's how our eyes worked for years and years and years. And these days we have a lot of things very close to us. So getting in early and making sure that we're managing that is very good.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:47]:
So let's round things out here. 2 of these features, set and forget. That's True Tone and Auto Brightness. Have them turned on, stop thinking about them. Don't turn them off, honestly, unless you really need to for photos or what have you. These are great features. Night Shift is fine to run if warmer screens, you know, make you feel, uh, make your eyes feel a little bit better. Or if it's again a signal to you that it's nighty night time, let's go ahead and turn this, you know, let's, let's go ahead and start to wind down.
Mikah Sargent [00:19:18]:
But don't think, don't think that it's going to have a significant impact on your sleep. Screen distance, I think everyone should give it a shot. And if you have kids, well, the fact is it's already running on your devices. So open the Health app on your iPhone, look for time in daylight, look at the last 30 days, and you may be surprised by how low that number is. Uh, yeah. The good thing is, unlike everything else on the list, which requires a lot more, uh, work, this one's kind of nice because you can change it Just by walking outside. And then once you've done so, while you're taking your little walk, go ahead and turn on screen distance. You know, try it for a week.
Mikah Sargent [00:20:04]:
You might find out that you're holding your phone really close to your face like I did. And now every time I have set up a new phone, I always go in and make sure it's turned on because it does make a difference. And it has really made me aware of how often I'm I'm holding my phone close to my face. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Hands On Apple. Always a pleasure to get to bring you this show, and I look forward to bringing you another episode again next week. Bye-bye. Bye.
