At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on June 3rd, the company unveiled the next versions of all its operating systems—macOS 10.15 Catalina, iOS 13 (and a new iPadOS), watchOS 6, and tvOS 13–along with the much-anticipated new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR. Nothing that was announced will ship until later this year—probably September—but we wanted […]
Monday, 03 June 2019 09:08
Customize Your Mac’s Dock for Increased Productivity
Written by Adam Engst
By default, Apple populates your Mac’s Dock with all sorts of apps and arranges them in a particular order. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the defaults, and you shouldn’t be afraid to add, remove, and rearrange apps on your Dock. To add an app, drag its icon from the Applications folder to the […]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:07
Use Dropbox’s Selective Sync to Save Space on Small Drives
Written by Adam Engst
If you’re like many of our clients who use Dropbox intensively, you have a desktop Mac with a large drive and a MacBook with much less drive space. How do you prevent your large Dropbox account from overwhelming the laptop Mac’s available storage? The answer is Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature. On the MacBook, click the […]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:06
A Quick Way to Check Battery Levels on Your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods
Written by Adam Engst
Apple’s Batteries widget is a little known but highly useful tool for quickly assessing which of your small Apple devices is lowest on power—something you may wish to do when traveling with only one charging cable. To access it, switch to Today view on the iPhone, accessible by swiping right on the Home screen or […]
Do you sometimes find it difficult to read articles on your iPhone because of ads, banners, extraneous layout, social media icons, and too-small fonts? We certainly do, and there’s often a quick fix for the myriad ills of modern Web pages: Safari Reader. Whenever you see the Safari Reader icon to the left of the […]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:04
Catching up with Apple in May: New MacBook Pros, New iPod touch, OS Updates
Written by Adam Engst
Apple is well known for its splashy media events, now usually held in the Steve Jobs Theater at the company’s new Cupertino campus. But Apple reserves such events for major announcements. Smaller announcements, such as minor updates to particular product lines, operating system updates, or new repair programs, get only a press release, if that. […]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:03
5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using a Password Manager
Written by Adam Engst
We often recommend using a password manager like 1Password or LastPass, but we’ve gotten a few questions asking why we’re so adamant about this. Lots of people think that all they need to do to keep their online accounts secure is create a single password with some numbers, often switching a lowercase L with a [R30;]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:02
Have a Recent Apple Laptop? Here’s What You Need to Know about the Butterfly Keyboard
Written by Adam Engst
When Apple introduced the 12-inch MacBook in April 2015, the machine was the thinnest Mac ever, with a tapered design that starts at a mere 3.5 mm and grows only to 13.1 mm. A change from previous laptop models that made such an incredibly thin design possible was a new keyboard that swapped a scissor-style [R30;]
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Monday, 03 June 2019 09:01
For Faster, Easier Photo Sharing, Try an iCloud Link
Written by Adam Engst
It’s easy to share a single photo from your iPhone or iPad with a friend, but if you want to share a bunch of photos or lengthy videos, sending them in Messages or Mail might not work or could impact your (and your recipients’) data caps. In iOS 12, Apple added a clever feature that [R30;]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:08
Can’t Remember When Your Warranty Expires? iOS 12.2 Lays It Out
Written by Adam Engst
With luck, you should never need to check your iPhone’s or iPad’s warranty status. But bad things do happen to good devices. In iOS 12.2, Apple has just made it easier to figure out if your device is still under warranty or covered by AppleCare+. Go to Settings > General > About, where you’ll find […]
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We’re seeing an uptick in email phishing attacks purporting to come from Microsoft about Office 365. They’re quite convincing messages that tell users that their credit card payment has failed, that an account needs renewing, or that a password needs to be confirmed. Needless to say, they’re all complete scams, and clicking a link in […]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:06
Clean Up Old Tabs in Safari in iOS with This Quick Trick
Written by Adam Engst
Every time you tap a link to open a Web page in Safari on your iPhone or iPad, it automatically opens a new tab. That’s fine until you realize that you have oodles of old tabs open, making it difficult to find any particular tab. To close all your old tabs in one fell swoop, […]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:05
Is Your Apple Watch Out to Lunch? Check These Settings
Written by Adam Engst
Is your Apple Watch failing to turn on its screen when you raise it, display notifications from your iPhone, or even update the time zone? watchOS has four modes accessible from Control Center (swipe up from the bottom of the screen) that are useful but can cause confusion if you forget to turn them off: […]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:04
Need to Merge Photos Libraries? Here Are Your Options
Written by Adam Engst
Photos makes it easy to create and switch between libraries. That’s good when photos need to be kept completely separate. For instance, a real estate agent might want to keep personal photos separate from house photos taken for work. But too much separation is annoying—you have to keep switching between libraries, and it’s easy to […]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:03
What’s the Deal with AMBER and Other Emergency Alerts on Your iPhone?
Written by Adam Engst
Have you ever gotten an emergency alert on your iPhone, telling you about an abducted child or public safety emergency? That’s the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system, at least in the United States, although some other countries have similar systems. The WEA system enables authorized national, state, and local government authorities to send alerts about […]
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Macs haven’t had removable storage for years, so when you want to move files between computers, you can use USB flash drives, email, Messages, AirDrop, or local file sharing. Those techniques are fine, but for a more efficient, effective, and elegant solution, try a cloud-based file sharing service. These services use special software to integrate […]
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Wednesday, 01 May 2019 16:01
Running Low on Space on Your Mac? Here’s How to Clear Unnecessary Data
Written by Adam Engst
SSDs are great—they’re fast, durable, and reliable—but they’re also expensive, which results in many of us not having as much storage built into our Macs as we’d like. Particularly for those who watch videos in iTunes or take a lot of photos, it’s all too easy to run out of space on your Mac’s internal […]
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Monday, 01 April 2019 14:08
Photos Not Syncing between Devices Properly via iCloud Photos?
Written by Adam Engst
iCloud Photos (which Apple previously called iCloud Photo Library) is wonderful when it’s working. Take some photos on your iPhone, and they appear on your Mac and iPad a minute later. Delete unnecessary shots and edit the others on your Mac, and your iPhone and iPad reflect those changes almost immediately. But what if changes [R30;]
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When you follow a link in Safari, you generally don’t know where you’re going to end up. That’s fine most of the time, but what if you’re concerned that a site might be trying to trick you into going somewhere malicious? Safari provides an easy way to look at the URL under a link. On [R30;]
Monday, 01 April 2019 14:06
Use Emergency Bypass and You’ll Never Miss a Call or Text from Important People
Written by Adam Engst
There’s little worse than missing an important call or text because your iPhone was in Do Not Disturb mode or because the Mute switch was engaged. If there are certain people—a spouse, parent, or child—whose calls and texts you always want to break through the cone of silence, iOS has a solution: Emergency Bypass. When [R30;]
Monday, 01 April 2019 14:05
A Quick Trick to Turn Your iPhone into a Magnifying Glass
Written by Adam Engst
It’s maddening to want to read a serial number or other bit of fine print that you can barely see. But fret no longer—your iPhone or iPad makes a fabulous magnifying glass! Assuming Magnifier is enabled in Settings > General > Accessibility > Magnifier, you can bring it up by pressing the Home button (for [R30;]
Monday, 01 April 2019 14:04
What’s with All These Dialogs Saying, “SomeApp is not optimized for your Mac”?
Written by Adam Engst
If you’re running macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra or macOS 10.14 Mojave, you may have seen a dialog that says an app isn’t optimized for your Mac. The message differs slightly between High Sierra and Mojave, with the High Sierra version telling you the developer needs to update the app to improve compatibility whereas Mojave saying [R30;]
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