I explain what matters in plain English, with practical steps you can use and recommendations based on my experience helping clients.
Showing 235–252 of 589 articles
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
Today Apple released their big annual upgrade for the Mac. In keeping with their naming convention of places in California, macOS 12 is named Monterey. There are dozens if not hundreds of tiny new features as well as a few big ones. If you've updated to iOS 15 you'll find many of the new features to
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—
Today Apple released their big annual update across all of their mobile devices. There are a lot of exciting new features to explore. Feel free to dive into the update, though you should make sure that your device is backed up first in case you have a problem. Go to the Settings app > tap your
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
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