I explain what matters in plain English, with practical steps you can use and recommendations based on my experience helping clients.
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Before macOS 12 Monterey, if you wanted to sell, trade in, or give away your Mac, you had to boot into Recovery, erase the internal drive with Disk Utility, and reinstall macOS to ensure that the new owner would get a fresh start and couldn’t see any of your data. It was a bit of a tedious process.
Apple’s Find My technology is a lifesaver when it works, enabling you to locate and potentially retrieve lost or stolen devices. It’s not perfect, even with the addition of the Find My Network, which drafts other nearby Apple devices to relay the location of a lost device, but it’s a heck of a lot b
Some people find it hard to find the mouse pointer at times, particularly on a large screen or when working in Dark Mode or in apps with dark interfaces. You’ve long been able to increase the size of the pointer generally and also zoom it temporarily by shaking it, but in macOS 12 Monterey, Apple no
Autocorrect on iPhone and iPad is an essential feature for most of us. The idea is that Autocorrect learns as you use your devices, learning new words from you and making changes based on what it thinks you would say. But sometimes it goes awry: you typed a made-up word once and now it wants to use
The Apple Watch has a lot to offer, including heart rate monitoring, atrial fibrillation detection, fall detection, and electrocardiogram recording. But if you are—or are helping someone who is—of the generation where watches once did nothing beyond telling the time, too many options can be overwhel
Thanks to Apple’s 2020 acquisition of weather company Dark Sky , the iPhone’s Weather app has learned some new tricks in iOS 15. (It still isn’t available on the iPad, oddly.) Most obvious is its addition of weather maps that can show precipitation, temperature, and air quality. More subtle are the
It’s no exaggeration to say that video calls went mainstream during the pandemic. However, Apple FaceTime didn’t stack up well against Zoom and others due to its emulation of the telephone call experience, questionable interface decisions, and lack of cross-platform compatibility. However, with iOS
Between texts, alarms, reminders, calls, and other notifications on our iPhones, iPads, and Macs, it’s a miracle we get anything done at all. To free us from this onslaught, Apple previously provided Do Not Disturb, which let you set times during which you could be free from interruption. In i
Even those of us who don’t work with graphics professionally often find ourselves needing to resize images. Perhaps you have a large square headshot, but the site to which you’re uploading requires it to be exactly 100 by 100 pixels. Or maybe you have an iPhone 13 Pro photo that’s 4032 by 3024, but
Have you ever wanted to identify a plant, flower, or pet breed, or find out what that famous painting is called? Me too. In iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple added a new AI-driven feature called Visual Look Up that provides more information about photos of plants, flowers, pets, books, artworks, and landm
When you move from an old iPhone or iPad to a new one, the easiest and most reliable approach is often the Quick Start device-to-device transfer. But if that doesn’t work, or if you have to give up one device before receiving the other, iCloud Backup is a fine alternative. Fine, that is, if you have
The most magical feature of Apple’s latest crop of operating systems—iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey—may be Live Text. You may be familiar with the concept of optical character recognition (OCR), which turns all the text on a scanned page into normal text you can select, copy, and edit ra
As you upgrade to iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS 12 Monterey, you’re going to see references to iCloud+. You might even already be an iCloud+ subscriber! That’s because iCloud+ is Apple’s new name for what you get if you pay for additional iCloud storage for yourself and up to five family members, wh
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
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