I explain what matters in plain English, with practical steps you can use and recommendations based on my experience helping clients.
Showing 253–270 of 589 articles
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
If you have an Apple TV, you might not be aware that it could be advertising its existence to your neighbors, showing up when they AirPlay from their Apple devices. If you look at my phone above we can see two Living Room Apple TV's, but I have no way of knowing which is mine and which is my neighbo
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
Apple’s engineers put an astonishing amount of work into the hardware and software necessary for Face ID to recognize your face nearly instantly and unlock your iPhone or iPad. Regardless of whether you’re wearing a hat and glasses. Even in the dark. It’s one of those pieces of technology that’s lik
Today the Clipper Card , the unified payment card for all public transit in the San Francisco Bay Area , got Express Transit support in Apple Wallet . What does this mean? One less card in your wallet and one less card to pack. Now your iPhone or Apple Watch is your Clipper Card! Once it’s set up
Yes, you are reading that right, T-Mobile announced yesterday that they will swap your iPhone 11 for an iPhone 12 at no cost apart from taxes and fees. If you have an iPhone 6 through XS or XR you can trade in and get an iPhone 12 at 50% off. Or if you are still using any older iPhone you can up
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
Photos in iOS 14 provides four views of your library: Years, Months, Days, and All Photos. For the first three, Photos picks representative images that may not include particular shots you’re looking for. The All Photos view shows everything, but it can be overwhelming. What’s not apparent is that y
Several years ago, Apple bought a company called Shazam, which made an app that identified songs by listening to the music playing nearby. Since then, Apple has built Shazam into Siri in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. Most recently, Apple added it to Control Center in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 as well,
Erasing your iPhone or iPad completely is dead simple (Settings app > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings). But not so much on Mac. Intel Macs required a particular series of steps that were not obvious . That's also true with the new Apple Silicon M1 Macs , though it's an en
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