I live in terminals and config files all day, so nothing gets under my skin faster than a default setting I never asked for. A roundup over on MSN runs through eight of these buried iPhone toggles, and the two it leads with are actually worth two minutes of your time, especially if you're on iOS 27 like I am on my daily driver.

Liquid Glass is the big one for me. Apple's transparency-heavy design language looks fantastic in a keynote demo and then gets genuinely distracting on a screen you actually stare at all day. The roundup's pitch is toning that effect down, and accessibility display settings would be where I'd start hunting for the toggle that flattens the transparency out. Verify the exact menu path on your own device though, don't take my word for it, because Apple shuffles these menus between releases. The principle holds either way: it's the iOS equivalent of killing a fancy theme because it's eating your battery. Boring wins sometimes.

And then the battery percentage. As best I can remember, Apple hid the actual number for years on notched phones and only brought it back as an opt-in toggle, which is a strange call for something so basic. Per the roundup, one toggle in the Battery section of Settings puts the real number back in the status bar. If you've been squinting at a tiny icon trying to guess whether you'll survive the commute, this is the fix.

The other six settings I'm not going to enumerate here, because the summary doesn't spell them out and I'd rather not guess at what the full article says. The pattern is what I'll point at: these roundups exist because Apple buries useful toggles several menus deep, and every year a fresh batch makes the rounds. Hit the source for the full list.

My own take here, opinion not reporting: defaults get picked for the median user, and the median user is not you. When I went through my own Settings app and shut off the noisy stuff I never asked for, my phone stopped buzzing randomly and my battery life got better as a side effect. Fewer background animations and previews means less wasted render work. That's just basic resource math.

Timing tip from experience: do this cleanup after a major iOS update, not before. Major releases love shuffling settings around, and there's no sense tuning a machine that's about to be rebuilt... Now that iOS 27 is shipping, it's a good moment.

Two minutes in Settings now saves you a year of small daily friction. Best trade in tech.