I have owned an iPhone for many years and I admit that I am an Apple addict. One of the things I’ve realized over the years is that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know how to do even the most basic things with their iPhones. Both my parents and my wife’s parents have iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, and it’s become a ritual: Every time we get together, they always bombard me with requests for help on their iPhones. Things like:

  1. How to set up iMessage to send free messages (blue) vs. text messages (green)
  2. What is AirPlay? How do you use the iPhone with an Apple TV?
  3. How to share iMessages between devices, for example iPhone, iPad and iMac?
  4. How to FaceTime: My mom always has her iPad in the wrong orientation, so I have to tell her to turn it around, every time!

With the staggering popularity of the iPhone and its saturation in the global marketplace, it has gone far beyond early adopters and you will now find people of all ages and backgrounds with iPhones. According to About.com, as of November 2013, Apple had sold 421 million iPhones. Now, many of the early phones will be in the trash now: the iPhone dates back to 2007. But, in its latest quarterly report, Apple reportedly sold 51 million iPhones in its first fiscal quarter of 2014. That’s a lot. iPhones. As smartphone usage reaches its saturation point, the latest adopters of this new technology are likely to be seniors upgrading from their basic phones or Blackberries.

The technological leap between these 2 classes of devices is considerable and the learning curve can be daunting for some people, especially since Apple does not provide a manual included with its iPhone.

However, it does provide PDF manuals online, which can also be downloaded from iBooks. But, I don’t know about you or the people you know who are trying to get help with iPhones, a PDF manual is not the easiest way to learn.

What’s so obvious from talking to friends or family isn’t that they don’t know how to perform basic functions on their iPhones, it’s that they don’t know half of what the iPhone can do. Basically, they don’t know what they don’t know! Things like Airplay, for example. This amazing feature allows iPhone owners to stream music to speakers or videos and photos to TVs. With a $99 Apple TV, iPhone owners can mirror their screen to their TV, stream Netflix movies, or share YouTube videos. If you don’t know that the little rectangle with an arrow pointing at it means ‘Airplay’, how would you find this by accident?

To be fair, Apple does provide resources to help these folks, with a very informative section on its website, as well as Geniuses in the Genius Bars at Apple Stores.

But, for those people who don’t have time to search for these methods of learning their devices, people like you and I will always be teaching them how to do more with their iPhones than just make phone calls.