Tips and Guides

Need help with something? On occasion, we all need tech support. Even me. Speaking as the person who is often on the other end of those requests for help, I have some suggestions on how to get the support you need as quickly as possible. This isn't just to help me. If you provide the information to

Tired of typing your admin account password whenever you try to install software or change security settings on your Mac? A new feature in macOS 10.15 Catalina removes that requirement for Apple Watch owners. In System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, select the chec

It doesn't sound possible, but if you have an iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro/Max you can take a photo or video and then use the crop tools to do the opposite of what you normally do: Crop thing in instead of out. Your iPhone allows you to do that by using multiple cameras to take multiple simult

When you’re in the Finder, choosing File > New Finder Window does, as you’d expect, open a new Finder window. But what folder appears in that window? By default, new Finder windows open to Recents, which simply shows you recently opened documents, regardless of where they are located. If you’d pr

Starting back in iOS 11, Apple made Control Center significantly more useful by letting you customize it more to your liking by adding and rearranging buttons. You can even remove a few of the default buttons if they’re just taking up space. Opening and Closing Control Center To open Con

Sharing your location works well when you’re out with friends or family and want everyone to be able to see where everyone else is. It’s easy to enable in various spots in iOS 13—in Messages, in Contacts, in the Find My app , and so on. You can share your location for an hour, until the end of t

One of the reasons we love Mac is that they are very secure. But many of us are not using one of Apple's greatest security features: FileVault. Filevault encrypts all of the contents of your computer so that you and only you can access it should your computer be lost, stolen, or damaged. It so

A running fan or a hot computer doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem unless it's accompanied by random shutdowns. A computer that gets hotter turns the fan on. But not because of the age of the computer or because something is broken. It’s mostly because new software and more modern websites are m

Updated January 5, 2025 : Added information about macOS Ventura's easier erase option. All too often I've seen people buy a used Mac only to find that the seller did not properly erase the Mac first. Sellers sometimes just delete their documents, leaving poorly configured and obsolete apps lying ar

Complete macOS compatibility guide for every Mac model. Find out which version of macOS your Mac can run.

Apple’s credit card, the Apple Card , offers a nice mix of integration with Apple Pay, daily cash back, and an elegant interface in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Until recently, however, it was impossible to get your transaction data out of Wallet except in PDF form. Apple has now added exports in

If your Mac is acting up and you suspect a hardware problem, there’s an easy first step that you can—and should—try before calling for tech support: Apple Diagnostics . (On Mac models released before June 2013, Apple instead included a similar set of diagnostics called Apple Hardware Test .)

There’s little more frustrating than being unable to print a document when you need it. You choose File > Print, and nothing happens. Or, worse, macOS looks like it’s printing, so you focus on some other task, only to realize 20 minutes later that nothing has come out of the printer. Now what

Are you overwhelmed by email? Is your Inbox filled with promotions, special offers, and the like? These messages aren’t always spam—you almost always bought something from the company or have some sort of relationship with the sender or your email address got sold to an advertiser—but that doesn’t m

By default, Apple gives every iCloud user 5 GB of storage space. That disappears quickly, given how it’s shared between iCloud Mail, iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Messages, and iCloud-enabled apps. Apple will, of course, sell you more iCloud space. $0.99 per month gets you 50 GB, $2.99 per mont

In your list of conversations in the Messages app, you probably have lots of people who have generic icons next to their names or numbers. You likely look like that to other people as well, but a new feature in iOS 13 lets you share your preferred name and avatar picture with other iMessage users (b

Historically, picking a new Wi-Fi network has required you to open the Settings app and tap Wi-Fi, forcing you to unlock your iPhone or switch away from what you were doing. In iOS 13, however, Apple added another way to connect to a new Wi-Fi network. Open Control Center (swipe down from the upper-

Spearfishing: it’s no longer just a tropical ocean sport that could provide seafood for dinner. In today’s tech world, spearfishing is when someone targets you specifically, usually with the goal of taking over your online accounts or identity. Once that’s done, the attacker will try to siphon mon