iPhone owner issues warning to never ignore important pop-up that protects your health
Sometimes you just have to trust your smartphone.
For a while now, Apple has had an iPhone feature that notifies you if you've been listening to too high a volume on your headphones for a long period.
This can be really bad for your hearing in the long run, and the warning will simply tell you that you should turn your volume down if possible.
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Apple explains this in pretty clear terms: "Headphone Notifications let you know if your audio exposure has been loud enough for long enough to affect your hearing – for example, over 80 decibels (dB) for 40 hours total within the last 7 days."
If you exceed that total, the pop-up will appear, but some users have found that you can turn it off in the iPhone's settings.
Interestingly, this actually goes region-by-region - due to local health regulations, some territories don't let you disable the feature.
If you're curious about whether you should or not, though, you'll want to check out a post on the r/iPhone Reddit page.
The post asks how to disable the pop-up, but the comments under it are full of people warning the user to consider leaving them on.
One popular comment directed the poster to the subreddit for tinnitus sufferers, and said: "If you think warning notifications are annoying wait until you get the endless ringing in your ear."
Tinnitus is the name given to sounds that you can hear from inside your body, and can be one outcome of prolonged exposure to very loud noises - just think of that familiar ringing in your ears you might get after going to a concert or walking past loud roadworks.
For most of us is this a passing problem, but some people suffer from it perpetually, as another comment demonstrated: "I have tinnitus and am severely uncomfortable the vast majority of the time. Safe to say I should have listened to the Apple sound warnings."
So, if you want to avoid the same situation, there's probably no harm whatsoever in leaving the feature enabled.
This is far from the only little safety feature that iPhones now have running in the background, either.
Others include a pop-up that lets you know if devices like AirTags or AirPods that aren't yours are following you around - which could seriously come in handy.