Tips and Guides

It’s easy, particularly when traveling, to end up connecting to a Wi-Fi network that doesn’t provide Internet access, requires credentials you don’t have, or lacks access to the network’s printer. Unfortunately, once your iPhone, iPad, or Mac has connected to such a network, it may reconnect to it l

In iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple expanded the concept of "Do Not Disturb" to what it calls "Focus". You can create a Focus for different types of activities, so only specific people and apps can break through your cone of silence at appropriate times. F ocus subsumes the old

You have a new iPhone or iPad—congratulations! When transferring your data to the new device, you have three options: Quick Start , an iCloud backup , or a Mac backup . All will work, but they don’t quite provide the same end result (particularly if you didn’t encrypt your Mac backup). My advice—

It's hard to predict when your computer might become obsolete or when it might start breaking down. And sometimes you just get lucky or unlucky. But in general: MacBook Air typically lasts about 5 to 8 years MacBook Pro typically lasts about 6 to 9 years iMac typically lasts abo

Many security breaches—even high-profile ones—stem from simple oversight. There’s one spot in macOS that has long been particularly susceptible to such lapse: the Sharing pane of System Preferences. In it, you can enable a wide variety of sharing services, some of which could allow another user to a

Complaining about getting too much email is like complaining about bad traffic—we (collectively) brought it upon ourselves, and while it’s impossible to escape entirely, it’s worth knowing how to reduce it. Apple is fully cognizant of the issue, too, and has built features into the last couple versi

For many people, increasing vaccination rates mean that long-delayed vacations are now possible, and in-person conferences are slowly starting up again too. But before you head out for the beach or the convention center, you’ll want to write an out-of-office email auto-reply message to send to every

A new feature of Messages in both iOS 14 and macOS 11 Big Sur is the option to pin up to nine conversations at the top of the conversation list for easy access. No longer do you have to worry about them scrolling out of sight. They will stick right where you left them. On an iPhone or iPad, touch an

Some of the trickiest editing and proofreading problems are related to characters you can’t typically see on the screen: spaces, tabs, returns, etc. Just because they’re invisible doesn’t mean they don’t affect the look of a document, often in negative ways. For instance: An extra space can

If you’ve turned on automatic App Updates in Settings > App Store on your iPhone or iPad, you might wonder how you’d know if an app was updated or what changed. To find that information, open the App Store app and tap your avatar icon in the upper-right corner. Scroll down and you’ll see an Updat

For the most part, Spotlight works well. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term. Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. To fix the problem, you can

Every once in a while Mac users will find that their computer doesn't turn on. Sometimes your computer shows no signs of life, sometimes the fans will spin or the screen might come on, sometimes you get a big question mark icon, and sometimes you will see the Apple logo and maybe a progress bar that

Since the earliest days of the iPhone, Apple’s Safari and Mail have been the default Web and email apps for iOS and iPadOS. There was no way to choose alternatives that would be used whenever an app wanted to open a Web page or create an email message. That changed with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, which i

I regularly hear from people who think they need Adobe Acrobat to manipulate PDFs. Don’t misunderstand: Adobe Acrobat is the gold standard, but it’s complicated and expensive—$14.99 per month or as part of Creative Cloud for $52.99 per month. In contrast, Apple’s Preview is easy and free wit

It’s difficult to imagine that a camera could be improved with a software update, but it can! With iOS 14, the camera in your iPhone becomes all the more capable. You’d be excused for not discovering the new features, though, so here’s a rundown. Apple ProRAW For professional and committ

You may be accustomed to the Do Not Disturb feature on our iPhones since they’re with us for most of the day and often spend the night next to the bed. But Apple long ago added Do Not Disturb to the Mac as well, and it’s useful for muting your Mac at night to eliminate unnecessary noises and for p

In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, Apple added two new status indicators to the right side of the status bar at the top of the screen. They’re designed to give you feedback about what an app is doing. An orange dot indicates that an app is using the microphone, and a green dot means that an app is using the c

Even as the world has more and more options for seemingly unlimited high-speed data, there are plenty of times when you might want to reduce your data usage. Perhaps you’re trying to avoid running over a data cap while traveling, or maybe you’re sharing a Wi-Fi network with a very slow Internet conn