If there’s one thing that has really made going to the movie theater less fun in the last couple of years, it’s phones. People checking texts, answering calls, and even playing games during movies. According to Sonny Dickerson, a reporter who has a knack for breaking early stories about Apple and their various IOS updates, the software and phone giant is going to try and make texting more polite in the movie theaters… though I have a feeling that it’s going to make everything worse.
While we’ll have to wait until January 10th before the new update of IOS 10.03 seeds, we can guess what will happen when you hit the popcorn shaped button that will send your phone into theater mode. Ideally, it would use GPS to determine your theater and then virtually “brick” your phone for the duration of the film. What it will most likely do is limit sounds to vibration mode, and max out screen brightness to 50%. What it will also do is make the asshats who already think using a phone in the movie theater is OK feel emboldened. More people will use their phones in theaters. You’ll be hearing the buzzing of vibrate mode from the phones that are getting texts during the movie and you’ll probably more than double the amount of people using their screens. This pretty much negates the purpose of making screens less bright. It’ll just mean we’ll have more people using less bright screens. This is a huge problem, especially given that 3D movies tend to be a little bit darker on screen because of the glasses that you have to wear.
The only people this sounds like it will help are the stock holders for Netflix.