Chapter 9. Music & Videos

Of all the iPhone’s talents, its iPoddishness may be the most successful. This function, after all, gets the most impressive battery life (40 to 80 hours of playback, depending on the model). There’s enough room on your phone to store thousands of songs.

In iOS 10, the Music app got yet another huge annual makeover. Five tabs greet you across the bottom: Library, For You, Browse, Radio, and Search. In reaction to the howls of millions of customers who were baffled by the previous incarnation, Apple has radically simplified this app.

Note

This simplification means the loss of a few features. To save you hunting around for them, here are two of the missing: Genius playlists and playback history.

Some of them are useful only if you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, Apple’s $10-a-month music service—but not all of them. The Internet radio stations, for example, mean that you’ll never run out of music to listen to—and you’ll never pay a penny for it.

Note

If you’re not interested in paying for an Apple Music subscription, you can hide the two tabs that you’ll never use (For You and Browse). To do that, open Settings→Music and turn off Show Apple Music.

The For You and New tabs disappear—and a new tab, Connect, takes their place. This is the mini-rock-band Instagram service described in The Library Tab.

The bottom line: Your Music app might show you either of two different sets of tabs. omplicated? Yes. Anyway, this chapter is written as though you haven’t hidden the Apple Music tabs.

Apple Music

The Apple Music service, which debuted in 2015, is a rich stew of components. For $10 a month (or $15 for a family of six), you get all of the following.

Tip

You can give Apple Music a free 90-day trial. After that, you’re charged $10 a month—unless you turn off the auto-renewal feature now, while you’re still thinking about it. To do that, tap the (top right of the Music app), and then View Apple ID→Subscriptions. Tap Apple Music Membership, and then Cancel Subscription. You’ll still be a member until the trial is up.

Note

Apple’s matching algorithms aren’t flawless; sometimes they don’t recognize and match a song that you and Apple both, in fact, have.

Another note: When you turn on iCloud Music Library, you’re offered the opportunity to delete all the music on your phone and replace it with what’s in your online locker. Back up your phone’s music before you do this. There are occasional stories of people losing their entire music collections.

The Library Tab

Here’s all the music you’ve actually chosen yourself.

In the old days, this meant “music files that are actually on your phone.” If you have an Apple Music membership, though, you’ll also see online songs listed here that you’ve added to your personal catalog.

You can view them grouped in any of the lists you see here: Playlists, Artists, Albums, Songs, or (if you subscribe to Apple Music) Downloaded Music. Below all that, in the Recently Added section, you get thumbnails for albums and playlists you’ve recently downloaded or built.

Tip

There are other categories you could be seeing here, too, like Genres, Compilations, Composers, and Videos. To add them to the list of headings—or to remove some of the ones that start out there—tap Edit next to the bold Library heading.

As you could probably guess, you operate the Music app by drilling down—by tapping from category to album to song or whatever. (Tap the top-left corner of the screen to backtrack.)

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Playback Control

When you tap the name of a song, album, playlist, or whatever, it plays. You can control playback—skip, rewind, and so on—in any of several ways.

On almost every screen of the Music app, you get a miniature controller at the bottom of the screen, like the one shown above at left (very bottom).

It identifies the current song, provides a “next song” button () and offers the most important playback control of all: .

If you tap (or drag upward on) the mini-player, though, the Now Playing screen appears (facing page, right). This time, there’s room for all the controls you need to control music playback. Here are its contents, from top to bottom:

Tip

Swipe down to close this screen.

Incidentally, people go batty trying to find three important controls in the Music app’s new version: Shuffle, Repeat, and the Up Next queue (Up Next).

They’re all there—but you have to swipe up from the Now Playing screen to see them.

The Options Panel

The ellipsis () awaits on every Now Playing screen. Its choices depend on whether you’ve tapped some music that you own (facing page, left) or that you’ve found in Apple Music’s collection (right). But here are some of the commands you might see there:

Tip

If you have an iPhone 6s or 7, you can hard-press a song in a list (for example, a playlist) to open the same Options menu. That is, you don’t have to burrow all the way to its Now Playing screen.

The Control Center, of course, is the panel that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen (Control Center). It includes playback controls, too. That means that you never have to go to the Music app just to change tracks if you’re busy doing something else on the phone.

Playback While Locked

Once you’re playing music, it keeps right on playing, even if you press the Home button or change apps. After all, the only thing more pleasurable than surfing the web is surfing it with a Beach Boys soundtrack.

If you’ve got something else to do—like jogging, driving, or performing surgery—tap the Sleep switch to turn off the screen. The music keeps playing, but you’ll save battery power.

Tip

Even with the screen off, you can still adjust the music volume (use the volume buttons on the earbud clicker or the buttons on the side of the phone), pause the music (pinch the earbud clicker once), or advance to the next song (pinch it twice).

What’s cool is that if you wake the phone (press Home or the Sleep switch, or just lift the phone), the Lock screen looks like the Now Playing screen. It has all the same controls, so you can manage the playback without even having to fully wake the phone.

If a phone call comes in, the music fades, and you hear your chosen ringtone—through your earbuds, if you’re wearing them. Squeeze the clicker on the earbud cord or tap the Sleep switch to answer the call. When the call ends, the music fades back in, right where it left off.

There’s one more way to control your playback—a way that doesn’t involve taking your eyes off the road or leaving whatever app you’re using. You can control your music playback by voice command, using Siri. See Chapter 6.

Playlists

A playlist is a group of songs you’ve placed together, in a sequence that makes sense to you. One might consist of party tunes; another might hold romantic dinnertime music; a third might be drum-heavy workout cuts.

Creating Playlists on the Phone

To play with playlists, start on the Library tab. Tap Playlists. Here are all the playlists you’ve ever created—which might be zero (below, left).

To create one, do like this:

  1. Click the giant New Playlist button.

    A new screen appears, where you can name and set up your new playlist (below, middle).

  2. Tap Playlist Name; type a name for your playlist.

    You can also, at this moment, tap the little button to take, or choose, a photo to represent this playlist. Or even type a description.

  3. Tap Add Music.

    The Add Music screen appears (below, right). It offers the usual ways to view your collection: Playlists (that is, existing ones), Artists, Albums, Songs, Videos, Genres, Compilations, Composers, and Downloaded Music. (A compilation is one of those albums that’s been put together from many different performers. You know: “Zither Hits of the 1600s,” “Kazoo Classics,” and so on.)

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  4. Tap the category you want for finding your first song; drill down until you find the music you want to add.

    For example, if you first tap Albums, you then see a list of your albums; tap ⊕ to add the entire album to the new playlist. Or tap the album’s name to view the songs on it—and then ⊕ next to a song’s name to add it to the list.

  5. Keep adding music to the playlist until you’re satisfied.

    You can keep tapping ⊕ buttons, without leaving this screen; each turns into a checkmark to indicate that you’ve added it (previous page, right). A playlist can be infinitely long; we’re way past the days of worrying about how much will fit on a cassette tape or a CD.

  6. Tap every Done button until you’re back on the Playlists screen.

    Your newly minted playlist is ready to play!

To see what songs or videos are in a playlist, tap its name or picture. You now arrive at a Playlist details screen, where your tracks are listed for your inspection. To start playing a song once you see it in the Playlist list, tap its name; you’ll hear that song and all those that follow it, in order.

Or tap the Shuffle button () to start random-order playback.

Tip

Here you can use a standard iOS convention: Anywhere you’re asked to drill down from one list to another—from a playlist to the songs inside, for example—you can backtrack by swiping from the left edge of the phone into the screen.

Or do it the long way: Tap 〈 at the upper-left corner of the screen. That button’s name always tells you what screen you just came from (My Music, for example).

Once you’re here, you can have all kinds of fun:

Unless you’re a professional DJ, you’re probably happy to hear song after song played automatically, according to whatever album, playlist, or radio station they’re in.

But the Up Next playlist gives you a degree of control without requiring the full project of programming a playlist.

The Up Next playlist always exists. If you tell Music to play an album, then Up Next autofills with the songs on that album; if you’re listening to all the music from a certain performer, then Up Next displays what else you’ll hear from that artist. And if you tap any song in your Library, then everything after it gets added to the Up Next queue automatically.

But you can also queue up music yourself, adding songs to Up Next on your own schedule. The playback will plow through them in order.

Most people probably never realize it, but you can actually look over the Up Next playlist in progress. You can rearrange or delete anything in it.

There’s only one way to see the Up Next playlist, and it’s pretty buried. You have to open the full-height Now Playing screen described in The Now Playing Screen, and then scroll up.

Once the list appears (previous page, right), you can remove a song from the queue by swiping left on it to reveal the Remove button; tap it. Rearrange the list by dragging the little “grip strip” handles up or down. (If you don’t see them, it’s because you’ve got your music on Repeat.)

Note

There’s no way to clear the entire list at once—except to force-quit the Music app (Force-Quitting an App) and then reopen it.

“For You” Tab

30 million is a lot of songs. You won’t live long enough to hear them all. So Apple has supplied the For You tab of the Music app to present new songs, performers, and albums its algorithms think you’ll like. (If you’re not a paying subscriber, then this tab is just an ad for Apple Music.)

Scroll horizontally to see more tiles in a category; scroll vertically to see the playlists, albums, artists, and new releases Apple thinks you’ll like.

And how does the app guess what kind of music you’ll like? When you sign up for the service, you’re shown dancing red circles bearing music-genre names. You’re supposed to tap the ones you like, double-tap the ones you really like, and hold your finger down on the ones you don’t like.

Then, of course, as you go through your life listening to music, you can always turn the button on or off to further fine-tune Apple’s understanding of your tastes.

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Browse Tab

The Browse tab is also for paying subscribers only. It’s lists of lists.

Scroll down long enough, and you’ll find lists like New Music, Curated Playlists (music lists, created by Apple’s editors, for particular genres, activities, and moods), Videos, Top Charts, and Genres. Once again, the idea is to help you find new stuff you like.

iTunes Radio

Your iPhone includes an amazing gift: your own radio station. Your own empire of radio stations, in fact.

They come in two categories: Free and Custom.

What you see on the Radio screen depends on whether or not you’ve turned off Show Apple Music, as described in Chapter 9.

If that’s turned off, then you see only free stations here: Beats 1 (the Apple live station described in Apple Music) and some Internet streaming stations like CBS, NPR, ESPN, and Bloomberg. These are free Internet radio stations.

Subscriber Stations

If Show Apple Music is turned on, then this screen offers ready-made “radio stations” that Apple has supplied for you. If you’re a subscriber, they play; if not, they give you an ad to sign up.

Tap Radio Stations to find more ready-to-play, software-curated “radio stations” in every conceivable category: Country, NPR, ESPN, Oldies, Soul/Funk, Chill, Indie, Classic Metal, Pop Workout, Kids & Family, Lullabies, Latin Pop, Classical, Reggae, and on and on.

You can hit to skip a song you’re not enjoying. And you don’t hear any ads.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the iTunes Radio service offers more than canned stations; you can create a new “station” instantly, based on any “seed” song you choose.

You don’t get to choose the exact songs or singers you want to hear; you have to trust iTunes Radio to choose songs based on your chosen song, singer, or music genre. For example, if you choose Billy Joel as your “seed,” you’ll hear a lot of Billy Joel, but also a lot of other music that sounds more or less like his.

To set up a new “radio station” of your own, find a song, band, or album. Hard-press or long-press it to open the Options menu (Force Touch (iPhone 6s and 7))—and tap Create Station.

You’ve just created a new station, and it begins instantly.

Tip

While a custom station plays, you can tap the on its Now Playing screen to see two new buttons: Play More Like This and Play Less Like This. That kind of feedback fine-tunes your custom station for future use.

The idea of a “seed song”–based radio service isn’t new, of course. It’s the same idea as Pandora, a website and app that has offered precisely the same features for years. But iTunes Radio is built in, it’s incorporated with Siri and the Control Center, and it’s part of Apple’s larger ecosystem; that is, you can see your same set of “radio stations” on your Mac or PC (in the iTunes app), iPad, and Apple TV.

On the main Radio screen, the Recently Played list shows all the stations you’ve listened to. Tap to start playing.

Truth is, there’s an easier way to create a custom radio station: Just let Siri do the work. No matter what you’re doing on the iPhone, you can hold down the Home button and say, for example, “Play ‘Just the Way You Are’ by Billy Joel” or “Play some Beatles.” Boom: The music begins.

Actually, Siri comes equipped to recognize a whole slew of commands pertaining to iTunes Radio. Here’s a sampler; you don’t have to use these precise wordings:

Speakers and Headphones

The iPhone’s speaker is pretty darned good for such a tiny machine. But the world is full of better speakers—Bluetooth wireless speakers, car stereo systems, hi-fi TVs, and fancy earbuds and headphones. The iPhone is especially easy to use with them.

You can buy amazingly small, powerful Bluetooth stereo speakers that receive your iPhone’s music from as far as 20 or 30 feet away—made by Jawbone, Bose, and others.

There are also wireless Bluetooth headphones and earbuds—an especially useful fact if you have an iPhone 7 (which lacks a headphone jack).

Once you’ve bought your headphones or speakers, you have to introduce them to the iPhone—a process called pairing.

From the Home screen, tap Settings→Bluetooth. Turn Bluetooth on (below, left); you see the Searching animation as the iPhone wirelessly hunts for your headphones or speakers.

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Grab them, turn them on, and start the pairing procedure, as described in the manual. Usually that means holding down a certain button until a tiny light starts flashing. At that point, the headphones’ or speaker’s name appears on the iPhone’s screen.

Tip

If the headphones or speakers require a one-time passcode—it’s usually 0000, but check the manual—the iPhone’s keyboard appears, so you can type it in.

A couple of seconds later, it says Connected; now any sound the iPhone would ordinarily play through its speakers or earbuds now plays through the wireless headphones or speakers. Not just music—which, in general, sounds amazing—but chirps, game sounds, and so on. Oh, and phone calls.

If your headset has a microphone, too, then you can even answer and make phone calls wirelessly. (There’s an Answer button right on the headphones.)

Using Bluetooth wireless stereo does eat up your battery charge faster. But come on: listening to your music without wires, with the iPhone still in your pocket or bag? How cool is that?

When your iPhone has a connection to a wireless sound source—Bluetooth speakers/earbuds or an AirPlay receiver, for example—you need some way to direct the music playback to it.

The answer is the button. It’s on the Control Center (Control Center). When you tap it, the iPhone offers a button for each speaker or set of earbuds or headphone (facing page, right). To switch, tap the one you want.

Instantly, the sound begins flowing from your other source. Use the same method to switch back to the iPhone’s speakers when the time comes.

AirPlay

There’s another way to transmit audio wirelessly from the iPhone (and video, too): the Apple technology called AirPlay. You can buy AirPlay speakers, amplifiers, and TV sets. The Apple TV, of course, is the best-known AirPlay machine.

AirPlay is described in TV Output, because most people use it to transmit video, not just audio. But the steps for transmitting to an AirPlay audio gadget are the same.

Music Settings

The iPhone has a long list of traditional iPod features for music playback. Most of these options await in Settings→Music. (Shortcut: Tell Siri, “Open Music settings.”)

EQ (Equalization)

Like any good music player, the iPhone offers an EQ function: a long list of presets, each of which affects your music differently by boosting or throttling various frequencies. One might bring out the bass to goose up your hip-hop tunes; another might emphasize the midrange for clearer vocals; and so on. (“Late Night” is especially handy; it lowers the bass so it thuds less. Your downstairs neighbors will love it.)

You’ll find the EQ feature way down the Music Settings page.

Volume Limit

It’s now established fact: Listening to a lot of loud music through earphones can damage your hearing. Pump it up today, pay for it tomorrow.

Portable music players can be sinister that way, because in noisy places like planes and city streets, people turn up the volume much louder than they would in a quiet place, and they don’t even realize how high they’ve cranked it. That’s why Apple created this volume slider. It lets you limit the maximum volume level of the music.

In fact, if you’re a parent, you can even lock down this control on your child’s iPhone; it can be bypassed only with a password. Set the volume slider here, and then, in Settings→General→Restrictions, turn on Volume Limit, as described in Volume Limit.

Sound Check

This feature smooths out the master volume levels of tracks from different albums, helping to compensate for differences in their recording levels. It doesn’t deprive you of peaks and valleys in the music volume, of course—it affects only the baseline level.

Playing Music from Your Computer

Here’s a trick you weren’t expecting: You can store many terabytes of music on your Mac or PC upstairs—and play it on your phone in the kitchen downstairs. Or anywhere on the same Wi-Fi network, actually.

This nifty bit of wireless magic is brought to you by Home Sharing, a feature of the iTunes program.

Here’s the setup: In iTunes on the Mac or PC, open Edit→Preferences. Click Sharing, and turn on Share my library on my local network. (You can share only certain playlists, if you like.) Turn on Require password and enter your Apple account (iCloud) password. Click OK.

Now pick up your phone. At the bottom of the Settings→Music screen, log into Home Sharing using the same Apple ID and password.

Now you’re ready to view the contents of your computer on the phone. You’d never guess where it’s hiding.

In the Music app, on the Library tab, tap Home Sharing; on the next screen, choose your computer’s name. (Note that the Home Sharing heading doesn’t appear unless your computer is turned on and iTunes is open.)

That’s it! Suddenly, your entire Music app is filled with the music from your computer’s collection, rather than the music on the phone.

The iTunes Store

Just as you can buy apps using the App Store app, you can also browse, buy, and download songs, TV shows, and movies using the iTunes Store app. Anything you buy gets autosynced back to your computer’s copy of iTunes when you get home. Whenever you hear somebody mention a buy-worthy song, for example, you can have it within a minute.

To begin, open the iTunes Store app. The store you see here (below, left) is modeled on the App Store described in Chapter 11. This time, the buttons at the bottom of the screen include Music, Movies, TV Shows, Search, and More.

When you tap Music, Movies, or TV Shows, the screen offers further buttons. For Music, for example, the scrolling horizontal rows of options might include New Releases, Recent Releases, Singles, and Pre-Orders.

(Beneath each list is a Redeem button, which you can tap if you’ve been given an iTunes gift certificate or a promo code; a Send Gift button, which lets you buy a song or video for someone else; and an Apple ID button, which can show you your current credit balance.)

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Tip

You can’t buy TV shows or movies on the cellular network—just in Wi-Fi hotspots. That’s your cell company’s way of saying, “We don’t want you jamming up our precious cellular network with your hefty video downloads, bucko.”

Note, by the way, that you can rent movies from the store instead of buying them outright. You pay only $3, $4, or $5 to rent (instead of $10 to $16 to buy). But once you start watching, you have only 24 hours to finish; after that, the movie deletes itself from your phone. (If you like, you can sync it to your Mac or PC to continue watching in iTunes—still within 24 hours.)

To search for something in particular, tap Search. The keyboard appears. Type what you’re looking for: the name of a song, movie, show, performer, or album, for example. At any time, you can stop typing and tap the name of a match to see its details. You can use the buttons across the top to restrict the search to one category (just songs or movies, for example).

Tip

Sometimes it’s quicker to search directly from the Spotlight search bar, which can search the iTunes Store directly.

All these tools eventually take you to the details page of an album, song, or movie. For a song, tap its name to hear an instant 90-second preview (tap again to stop). For a TV show or movie, tap to watch the ad or the sneak preview.

If you’re sold, then tap the price button to buy the song, show, or album (and tap Buy to confirm). Enter your Apple ID password when you’re asked. (For movies, you can choose either Buy or Rent, priced accordingly.) At this point, your iPhone downloads the music or video you bought.

Anything you buy from the iTunes Store winds up in the appropriate app on your iPhone: the TV app for TV shows and movies, the Music app for songs. (Within the Music app, you can see everything you’ve bought: Tap Playlists and then Purchased.)

In the iTunes Store app, you can tap More and then Purchased to see what you’ve bought. Once you tap a category (Music, Movies, TV Shows), you get a pair of tabs:

Tip

If you prefer, you can direct your phone to download those purchases that you make on other gadgets automatically, without your having to tap Not on This iPhone. Visit Settings→iTunes & App Store, and turn on the switches for Music, Apps, and/or Books under Automatic Downloads. If you also turn on Use Cellular Data, then your phone will do this auto-downloading when you’re in any 3G or LTE cellular Internet area, not just in a Wi-Fi hotspot.

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Tapping More at the bottom of the screen offers these options:

Tip

If you tap Edit, you’ll see that you can replace any of the four iTunes Store bottom-row icons with one of the More buttons (Tones, Genius, Purchased, or whatever). Just drag one of these icons directly downward on top of an existing icon.

So you’ve downloaded one of the store’s millions of songs, podcasts, TV shows, music videos, ringtones, or movies directly to your phone. Next time you sync, that song will swim upstream to your Mac or PC, where it will be safely backed up in iTunes. (And if you lost your connection before the iPhone was finished downloading, your Mac or PC will finish the job automatically. Cool.)

The TV App

This weird hybrid app didn’t come with iOS 10; it appeared on your phone with iOS 10.2. (A matching app appears on the Apple TV, where it may make more sense.)

It’s intended to serve as a single repository for paid TV shows and movies online, in these three categories:

Tip

Even if you don’t have a cable subscription, there’s some free stuff you can watch in this app. Visit Store→Buy or Rent on iTunes section→Free Episodes.

There are also some channel apps that are free to watch without a subscription, including PBS, PBS Kids, CBS Sports, ABC News, and The Weather Channel.

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That’s the shiny future concept of the TV app. In its fledgling first incarnation, though, it’s of far less use, because it works only with a handful of lesser cable companies and only a handful of channel apps. Netflix, for example, is not among them.

Until more players join the party, here’s how to use the TV app.

The buttons across the bottom clearly exhibit the TV app’s split personality (split between iTunes purchases and cable-channel apps).

Tap a video’s thumbnail to see its plot summary, year of release, and so on. If it’s a TV series, tap an episode in that series, if necessary. Either way, tap to begin watching.

Note

If you see a on this screen, it means that this bought or rented movie is not actually on your phone. If you have a good Wi-Fi signal, you can watch it right now by streaming it (instead of downloading it to your phone).

If you don’t see that icon, then the video file is actually on your phone. An Edit button appears, which you can tap (and then tap ) to delete the video.

When you’re playing video, anything else on the screen is distracting, so Apple hides the video playback controls. Tap the screen once to make them appear and again to make them disappear.

Here’s what they do:

Tip

If you don’t see a video that you know you purchased through iTunes, open the iTunes Store app on your phone. Tap More→Purchased, and then select the person who bought the movie or TV show. Next tap either Movies or TV Shows; look under All and Not on This iPhone. When you find what you want, tap its name and re-download it by tapping . That puts it back into the TV app’s library.

And to delete a video from the library, swipe leftward across its name in the Videos list; tap Delete to confirm. (You can always re-download it, of course.)

The iPhone’s screen is bright, vibrant, and stunningly sharp. Sometimes, however, it’s not the right shape for videos.

Pre-HDTV shows are squarish, not rectangular. So when you watch older TV shows on a rectangular screen, you get black letterbox columns on either side of the picture.

Movies have the opposite problem. They’re usually too wide for the iPhone screen. So when you watch movies, you may wind up with horizontal letterbox bars above and below the picture.

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Some people are fine with that. After all, HDTVs have the same problem. At least when letterbox bars are onscreen, you know you’re seeing the complete composition of the scene the director intended.

Other people can’t stand letterboxing. You’re already watching on a pretty small screen; why sacrifice some of that precious area to black bars?

Fortunately, the iPhone gives you a choice. If you double-tap the video as it plays, you zoom in, magnifying the image so it fills the entire screen. Or, if the playback controls are visible, you can also tap or . Of course, now you’re not seeing the entire original composition. You lose the top and bottom of old TV scenes, or the left and right edges of movie scenes.

Fortunately, if this effect chops off something important—some text, for example—the original letterbox view is just another double-tap away. (No zooming happens if the source material is already a perfect fit for the iPhone’s screen shape.)

When you crave a screen bigger than a few inches, you can play your iPhone’s videos on a regular TV. All you need is the right cable: the Apple Digital AV Adapter. It carries both audio and video over a single HDMI cable.

It mirrors what’s on the phone: your Home screen, email, Safari, and everything else. (Photos and presentations appear on your TV in pure, “video outputted” form, without any controls or other window clutter.)

Your iPhone also offers wireless projection, thanks to a feature called AirPlay. It transmits music or high-def video (with audio) from your iPhone to an Apple TV (or another AirPlay-equipped receiver) across the room. It’s a fantastic way to send slideshows, movies, presentations, games, FaceTime calls, and websites to your TV for a larger audience to enjoy. Whatever is on the screen gets transmitted.

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AirPlay receivers include the Apple TV (version 2 or later) and speakers, stereos, and receivers from Denon, Marantz, JBL, iHome, and so on. The phone and recent AirPlay receivers no longer have to be on the same Wi-Fi network, thanks to a feature called peer-to-peer AirPlay.

When you’re playing a video or some music, open the Control Center (Control Center), and tap to see a list of available AirPlay receivers. If you have an Apple TV, tap its name, and then turn its Mirroring switch on.

That’s it! Everything on the iPhone screen now appears on the TV or sound system. (The phone’s status bar displays the icon, so you don’t wander off and forget that every move you make is visible to the entire crowd in the living room.)

If you’re a teacher, trainer, or product demonstrator, you might be amazed at how easy it is to display your iPhone’s screen on a Mac’s screen. From there, you can either project it onto an even bigger screen, or record it as a QuickTime movie to use in presentations or post online.