Tips and Guides

I don't think I need to tell you that giving your computer a bath isn't a good idea, but I can tell you what you should do if that happens, and what to do before your computer gets wet. But be sure to act quickly! The water itself isn't always the direct problem, it's the corrosion that can rear i

Have you ever seen the dreaded “No Service” label at the top of your iPhone’s screen, even when you’re pretty sure there should be cellular reception? It’s not common, but the iPhone’s cellular radio can occasionally get confused. Luckily, you can easily fix the problem. Open Control Center (swipe d

Ever wanted to take a photo of a receipt and circle the item for which you should be reimbursed? Or perhaps you’d like to put some text or a speech balloon on a photo? You can do all that and much more using iOS 13’s Markup tools. They’re available when you take a screenshot, in Files and Photos, an

Power users use keyboard shortcuts because it’s faster to press a couple of keys than to navigate lengthy menus. If you have trouble remembering shortcuts, click the menu icons across the top of your screen and any items that have a shortcut will display the keystroke in the menu itself. But what ab

A common question I hear is, “Why is my iPhone/iPad battery draining so fast?” Luckily, Apple provides tools that help you see exactly how your iPhone uses its battery over the last 24 hours and—with less detail—over each of the last 10 days. Plus, you can tweak settings that will improve battery li

Digital cameras have been around long enough that we barely remember the days where a shoebox of 200 photos was overwhelming. But given the tens of thousands of photos many of us now have, it’s hard to be smug about the ease of finding any given image. Luckily, Apple has provided us with numerous to

It’s helpful to unplug occasionally and ignore email while on vacation or otherwise away from your work routine. And it’s a good idea to set up a vacation auto-responder to tell correspondents what to do in your absence. It might be tempting to create such an auto-reply with a rule in Mail on the Ma

If you’re like many of my clients who use Dropbox intensively, you have a desktop Mac with a large drive and a MacBook with much less drive space. How do you prevent your large Dropbox account from overwhelming the laptop Mac’s available storage? The answer is Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature. On

It’s easy, in some apps, to end up with oodles of open windows. You can usually switch between them by clicking those you can see or by choosing one from the Window menu, but wouldn’t it be nice to cycle through them from the keyboard, much as you can cycle through active apps with Command-Tab? You

By default, Apple locates the Dock at the bottom of your Mac’s screen. If that location interferes with you seeing as much of your document windows as you’d like, you can set it to appear only when you move the pointer to the bottom edge of the screen. But there’s a way I like better: put the Dock o

Those of you who use a Mac laptop—a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro—probably know you can connect it to a large external display for more screen space, getting you a desktop-like screen without having to buy a second computer. But sometimes it’s not convenient to have your Mac open on your desk

Ever wanted to save or share a voicemail? On the iPhone, every voicemail message is just an audio file. If you want to retain a message for posterity or share one with a friend or colleague, you can do that easily. While viewing a voicemail message, tap the share icon (the box with the up arrow) to

If you’ve resisted requiring a password on your Mac after it wakes up or comes out of the screen saver because it’s too much work to enter repeatedly, an Apple Watch can make authentication much easier. In previous versions of macOS, just wearing an unlocked Apple Watch is enough to enter your Mac’s

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of ways we can move data between Macs. You can send files via AirDrop, attach them to an email message, put them in a Messages conversation, turn on and connect via File Sharing, or use Dropbox or iCloud Drive as an intermediary, to name

If you’re experiencing a sporadic problem with your Mac, the sort of thing that happens often enough to be annoying but not so frequently as to be reproducible, allow me to suggest one little-known troubleshooting tip. Malfunctioning USB devices—keyboards, mice, hubs, hard drives, printers, etc.—can

With the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, Apple changed the way the Camera app’s shutter button works in ways that could cause confusion. Tapping it once still takes a single still photo, but if you press and hold on the shutter button, it now captures a quick video. (Previously, pre

Accidents, particularly those involving automobiles, are all too common, and while no one plans to be in one, you can prepare. If you end up in a condition where you can’t speak with emergency responders or are too shaken up to share your details clearly, your iPhone can provide them with essential

In previous versions of iOS, a scroll bar would appear on the right edge of the screen while you were swiping through a long Web page, email message, or document. But the scroller was merely an indicator of where in the page you were and how much content there was (the bigger the scroller, the less