Tommy Ai

Over 6 billion smartphones are in use worldwide. Almost every owner treats the battery the same way: plug it in overnight, panic at 15%, and buy a new phone the moment it starts dying around the 2-year mark. A battery engineer who's worked on lithium-ion packs for a decade told me: "Your phone isn't dying because it's old. It's dying because of how you charge it. Charging to 100% every night, running it down to 0%, and leaving it hot in your pocket or car are the three habits that quietly eat away at a battery's lifespan. The hardware is built to last years longer than most people ever get from it. Most of the settings that fix this are buried a few menus deep, and manufacturers don't exactly advertise them, because a worn-out battery is one of the biggest reasons people upgrade." I tested every one of these on my own phone. Here are 7 settings and habits that can add years to yours 🧵

A Tesla service technician has worked on [1,500+] cars in [5] years, from Model 3s with 30,000 miles on the clock to Model Ys that were barely two years old, from daily commuters to rideshare drivers putting 100,000 miles a year on their cars. He said the same thing happens in almost every service bay. The owner walks in nervous, expecting a huge repair bill. They've read horror stories online. They think the battery is dying or the screen is failing. But the real problem is almost always a small habit they've repeated for years without knowing it was costing them. "Teslas don't have oil changes, so people assume there's no maintenance at all. That's the mistake. The car is low maintenance, not no maintenance. Most of the repair bills I see were avoidable with five minutes of attention a month. The owners who spend the least are not the lucky ones. They're the ones who pay attention." He said most people treat their Tesla like an appliance. They drive it, plug it in, and ignore it until something breaks. They never read the manual, never check the tires, and never look at the service menu. "You bought one of the most advanced cars on the road and maintain it like a toaster. That's like buying a $1,500 laptop and never installing an update or backing up a single file." Here are the 8 mistakes he sees most often, and what he tells every owner to do instead 🧵

AppleCare+ is one of the most debated add-ons in tech. Millions of people buy it at the Apple Store counter, tap "yes" because the salesperson mentioned a cracked screen, and never think about it again. That's AppleCare+ to roughly 90% of the people who pay for it: a vague insurance policy they hope they'll never use. What most owners don't realize: AppleCare+ includes 10 benefits beyond "fixes my screen" that can save hundreds of dollars on a single device. They're already part of the plan, they cost nothing extra, and most people have never checked, never claimed, and in some cases never read what they actually bought. A former Apple Store technician of 7 years told a customer while she waited on a battery replacement: "You've had AppleCare+ on this phone for 2 years. You paid for it, you forgot about it, and you've been living with a battery that dies by 3 PM. You've used 1 of the 10 things it gives you. You've never checked your Battery Health, which would have shown the battery qualifies for a free replacement. You've never used the 24/7 priority support, so you've spent hours on hold with random fixes from the internet. You've never looked at your coverage status, so you didn't know the plan was still active. You've never used Express Replacement, which ships you a replacement before you send yours back. And you've never compared the claim fee to the out-of-warranty repair price, which is the whole reason the plan exists." She said: "I've been paying for this for 2 years." "And you've used about 10% of what you paid for, while a dying battery cost you two years of frustration." He showed her 10 things. Her battery was replaced at no extra charge that afternoon, she set up a coverage check for her husband's phone and her iPad, and she stopped second-guessing every drop. Same plan, same phone, same price. Here are the 10 things 🧵

Costco has 84.1 million paid members worldwide, and 150.4 million people carry a Costco card. It runs 939 warehouses, and 42.3 million of those members pay extra for the Executive tier. They pay $60 a year (or more) for what most of them treat as one thing: a giant store where you buy toilet paper, rotisserie chicken and a $1.50 hot dog. That's it. Show the card, fill the cart, eat the hot dog, leave. For most members that's the entire Costco experience. Costco knows this. Its membership fees brought in $1.37 billion in a single quarter, and renewal sits around 92% in the US and Canada. People re-up without ever touching most of what they're paying for. [YOUR STORY: e.g., "I asked a friend who'd been a member for 8 years which Costco services he'd used. He named one: the food court."] Costco is a services company hiding inside a warehouse. Here are 7 things most members have never found 🧵

Apple has sold well over 100 million AirTags since launch. Most owners use exactly one feature: open Find My when they've lost their keys. That's a tiny tracker with a precision-finding arrow, a built-in "you forgot this" alarm, a way to be found by strangers' iPhones, a luggage tracker, a family-sharing tool, and a safety system that warns you if someone is tracking you. And most people use it like a $29 keychain that beeps. Think about how most people set theirs up. They pop off the plastic tab, tap "Connect," clip it to the keys, and never open the app again. Then life happens. They tear apart the couch cushions at 8:05 a.m. while already late for work. They stand at a baggage carousel watching the same three bags circle while theirs is somewhere else entirely. They leave a laptop bag on a train and realize it two stops later. They hear a beep from somewhere in the house and spend ten minutes walking in circles, because the sound doesn't tell them which direction to go. Almost nobody blames the way they set it up, because almost nobody knows the settings exist. A frequent flyer who has gotten lost luggage back more than once told me: "[replace with a real quote] People use an AirTag as a panic button after the thing is already gone. I use it so I never reach the panic part. My phone tells me the second I walk away without my bag." He said he stopped losing things the day he turned on one setting, and he did it in under a minute. Then he said the thing that stuck with me. The people who never seem to lose anything aren't more careful. They just stopped relying on memory and started letting the tag do the remembering. Here is what's waiting for you: • A feature that points an arrow straight at your lost item, down to the foot • A setting that buzzes your phone the moment you walk away without your bag • A way to share one AirTag with your whole family so nobody has to ask "where are my keys?" • A trick that lets you tap a found AirTag and instantly show the finder how to reach you • A luggage move that can get your location shared with the airline when your bag goes missing • A built-in alert that warns you if someone slips a tracker into your stuff None of it costs a cent beyond the tag. All of it is already in the Find My app. Here are 8 AirTag features most owners never touch:🧵

A woman used her phone for 4 years and had no idea there was a secret menu built into it the whole time. She had never opened it. She had never heard of it. She had scrolled past her battery warnings, her slow charging, and her dropped calls, and just assumed that was normal and nothing could be done. Then her cousin, who repairs phones for a living, picked it up at a family BBQ because she was complaining about the battery. He didn't open Settings. He didn't open an app. He opened the dialer, typed a few characters, and a menu she had never seen appeared on her own screen. He scrolled for about 10 seconds, looked up, and said: "You've been carrying a full diagnostic lab in your pocket for 4 years, and you've never once walked into it." She asked why nobody had ever told her. He shrugged. "Because it's not in the ads. It's not in the manual. And it's not in Settings. It's not meant for you. It's meant for technicians. But it works for anyone who knows the code." Here's everything he showed her, and how to open it on your phone in 5 seconds 🧵

A guy pays $80 a month for internet and has never once touched his router. Seven years. Same box, same blinking lights, same spot behind the TV. When the internet got slow, he did what everyone does: unplugged it, counted to ten, plugged it back in, and hoped. Last Monday, in the middle of a client video call, his screen froze mid-sentence. His face locked in a weird half-smile for eight seconds. By the time it came back, the client had already said, "Hey, can you hear me? Maybe we should reschedule." He lost the meeting. He thought about upgrading to the $120 plan. Two days later, his neighbor came over to borrow a ladder. He's a network technician who spent 11 years setting up and fixing home and office networks. He glanced at the speed test on the guy's laptop, then at the router sitting in a cabinet, covered in dust, and quietly said: "You're paying for a highway and driving on the shoulder." "What do you mean?" "You pay for 300 Mbps, and you're getting a fraction of it where it matters. It's not your plan, it's the box. Your router is running on the exact settings it shipped with in 2019. Old firmware. One crowded channel. Every device fighting for the same lane. Nobody told you, because nobody ever opens that menu." The guy didn't say a word. "Your provider gives you the road. The router decides how your devices use it. And yours has never been told what to do." They spent 15 minutes in the router settings. He changed 4 things. Nothing else. Same plan, same provider, same $80. That night, he did a 3-hour video call with zero freezing. His reaction: "I almost paid $480 more a year to fix something that was free." His neighbor's answer: "You didn't need faster internet. You needed to stop driving on the shoulder." Here are the 4 settings he changed, in the exact order he did them 🧵

A man is buying the iPhone 18 Pro Max this month. He's been saving for it since spring. He knows the price. He knows the color he wants. He'll walk out of the store, open the box, and tap "Transfer from old iPhone" like everyone else. Twenty minutes later he'll have a new phone that looks exactly like his old one, and he'll feel like he's done. Last Monday, a notification popped up on his old phone: iOS 27.2. He swiped it away, like he has every update for years. That night, his friend came over for dinner. She spent 9 years as an Apple Genius Bar specialist, and she has explained this exact phone to thousands of people at the counter. She saw the phone face-down on the table and asked one question. "How many of the features on that thing have you actually turned on?" "Features? I just use it." She put her fork down. "You're about to spend $1,200+ on a phone, and you'll use maybe 10% of it. The other 90% is already installed. It's free. And almost nobody opens it." She took his phone and spent 25 minutes going through Settings. He'd never seen most of it. She wrote down the ones that matter. Some take 10 seconds. Some take 2 minutes. All of them are already on the phone. Here's every single thing she wrote down 🧵