I finally got around to installing iOS 17 last night, three days after Apple actually shipped it on the 18th, because I always wait for the "is anyone's phone bricking" reports to die down first. Nothing bricked. My iPhone 13 mini took about twelve minutes to update while I brushed my teeth and scrolled Mastodon, and when it rebooted the thing I was most curious about wasn't NameDrop or the new contact posters everyone on my timeline was already messing with. It was StandBy.
If you haven't seen it: plug your iPhone in, lay it on its side, and the whole screen turns into a big dumb clock. Or a photo slideshow. Or a little widget stack with your calendar and the weather. That's it, that's the feature. Apple didn't invent this, Android phones have had "Dock" modes for a while and third-party apps have been doing versions of it for years, but Apple doing it means it actually shows up on a hundred million nightstands overnight instead of on the three phones belonging to people who read gadget blogs for fun.
I plugged my phone into the charger on my nightstand, laid it flat the way I always do (wrong, apparently, it needs to be roughly horizontal and Apple is weirdly fussy about the exact angle), and got a big orange digital clock face. It's genuinely nice. I've bought four separate bedside clocks over the years and every single one eventually gets unplugged and shoved in a drawer because who needs two clocks in one room. Now I don't need any of them. The display dims properly in the dark instead of blasting me at 2am the way my old Sony one did, and swiping over gets me a little photo carousel of my dog looking unbothered by literally everything, which is a nicer thing to wake up to than a blank ceiling.
There's a complaint, there's always a complaint. None of my MagSafe stands are actually good for this. I've got a cheap $13 Anker one that holds the phone at basically the wrong angle for StandBy to trigger reliably, so half the time I plug in and just get my regular lock screen instead of the clock. I ended up propping the phone against an old paperback, currently a beat-up copy of Snow Crash, which feels thematically appropriate, just to get the angle right. Not exactly the tidy nightstand setup Apple showed off on stage last week. I assume the accessory makers are already tooling up actual StandBy docks, and I'll end up buying one within a month, because apparently that's who I am now.
The widgets in StandBy are also half-baked in the version-one way Apple software often is. Some refresh live, some clearly only update when you unlock the phone, and there's no obvious way to tell which is which until you've stared at a stale weather widget for forty minutes wondering why it still says no rain while you can hear rain hitting the window. Small thing. Mildly annoying. Not a dealbreaker.
I haven't touched NameDrop yet (the feature where you hold two iPhones close together to swap contact info), mostly because nobody else in my life has updated their phone and it takes two people on iOS 17 standing near each other to do anything with it. Contact Posters I set up in about ninety seconds and then immediately felt strange about, because now when I call my mom a giant photo of my face takes over her whole screen, which feels like a lot of me for a phone call about whether she wants me to pick up milk on the way over.
Twelve years of writing about phones on here and I'm apparently still more interested in the small stuff than the big stuff. The iPhone 15 lands in stores on Friday and I'm sure I'll have opinions eventually about USB-C finally showing up on an iPhone. For tonight I'm just happy my nightstand has one less gadget cluttering it, and that Snow Crash finally has a job to do besides sitting half-read on the shelf.