You asked, and we answered your burning iPhone 15 questions

Ever since our reviews for the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro went up on Tuesday morning, you’ve had a ton of questions to ask about the phones — in comments, on The Vergecast, on Threads, an Instagram App, and in a live Q&A. So we thought we’d put all that information together in a nice little smorgasbord of nerdy tidbits and philosophical pondering and pick out a few favorites in the process.

Since the mute switch is going away, Apple put an indicator in the status bar so you can check if your ringer is silenced at a glance. But what if you find it annoying and want it to go away? Great news: you will have the power to banish it from sight.

A reader asked if you could switch the key frame in a Live Photo and still keep the depth map to turn it into a Portrait Mode photo. Imagine a world where you can take a picture of your kids, pick the frame where they’re actually looking at the camera, and turn it into a Portrait Mode photo after the fact! It’s the dream! But while you can have Live Photos and the automatic depth map saving feature enabled simultaneously, you only get the depth map for the single key frame. We were so close.

Joe Rossignol from MacRumors stopped by our iPhone 15 Q&A to ask a question about new battery optimization charging options on the phone. It turns out that Apple snuck in a new setting to limit charging to 80 percent, which will help extend the battery’s lifespan… how timely! Unfortunately, this setting doesn’t work in our testing so far.

Wouldn’t it be nice to tie your ringer on / off setting to a focus mode? You can on the iPhone 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max, where it’s now a filter option for your focus modes as well as an action in the Shortcuts app. That’s not the most fun you can have with Shortcuts, but it is handy.

This Vergecast hotline question is a delight. Start at 33:35 to hear Jordan’s question about a theoretical power struggle between two phones connected by USB-C. Deputy editor Dan Seifert got to the bottom of this one.