I explain what matters in plain English, with practical steps you can use and recommendations based on my experience helping clients.
Showing 415–432 of 589 articles
Family life is all about togetherness, but keeping track of who’s doing what when can be tough. Apple’s Family Sharing service makes it easy to share apps, media, and more within a family of up to six members, and it provides a few helpful digital housekeeping capabilities, such as locating your kid
Here’s one for those who use Apple’s Notes app for storing bits of information. By default, Notes in macOS gives you a single window, with each note listed in a sidebar. But what if you want to see two notes at once? Or keep one always available no matter what else you’re doing? Click the desired no
As much flack as Siri often gets, she excels in a few core functions. In particular using Siri for quick mathematical functions works very well. Perhaps you’re trying to total receipts for an expense report, average your kid’s report card grades, or split a restaurant bill. Either way, instead of la
The first time you run the News app on iPhone or iPad, you are greeted with a welcome screen that helps to curate a custom news feed for you. If you hurry through the process it's really easy to enable breaking news alerts for what seems to be every news source. I've seen many phones that get alerts
Have you ever needed to call emergency services from your or someone else’s iPhone? Almost by definition, such calls take place at stressful times, and it can be hard to remember what to do. Or, if you’ve been in an accident, it might be difficult or impossible to navigate the iPhone’s interface. In
For people who use their Mac a lot it may be worth learning the various gestures available for the trackpad and mouse, or for others if you find yourself accidentally invoking these gestures it may be worth disabling them in the Apple menu > System Preferences > Trackpad (or Mouse) &am
Do you create reminders with Siri on the iPhone? Those reminders are automatically added to your default list, which you set in the Settings app > Reminders > Default List. That’s great generally—“Hey Siri, remind me to pick up the dry cleaning at 5pm tomorrow”—but less good when you w
One of the most important things you can do to stay safe on the Internet is to be careful while reading email. That’s because online criminals know that we’re all busy, and we often don’t pay enough attention to what we’re reading or where we’re clicking. To take advantage of our inattention
Since iPhone X lacks a Home button to double click for the app switcher, you’ll need to switch apps in a new way. To bring up the app switcher, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to about halfway, and then pause until the app thumbnails appear. Then you can scroll through your launched apps by s
Apple’s Calendar apps in both macOS and iOS let you manage multiple calendars, some of which may be private and others may be shared with family or colleagues. That’s great, but if you create a new event on the wrong calendar, you may end up oversharing with colleagues (who don’t need to know about
You’re out to lunch with tech-savvy friends, one of whom picks up the check and says, “Just send me your share via Apple Pay Cash.” Say what? Apple Pay Cash is Apple’s new person-to-person payment service, designed to make it easy for individuals to send and receive money. It’s perfect for repaying
Apple’s new iPhone X does away with the Home button, which has been a fixture since the original iPhone and has long served as the Touch ID sensor. To replace Touch ID, Apple developed a new facial recognition technology called Face ID. With Face ID, the iPhone X scans your face to authenticate you
Although macOS 10.13 High Sierra was light on new features, it did bring a welcome addition to Safari—site-specific settings. Imagine that you regularly visit a blog that you prefer to read using Safari’s Reader view. Rather than invoke it each time you visit, you can now set Safari to use Reader au
In macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Apple significantly enhanced the editing capabilities of Photos, adding tools for adjusting specific colors, fine-tuning color and contrast via curves, and even focusing an image with vignetting. But it still lacks many features found in other image editors, including app
**UPDATE** Apple has reduced the cost of iPhone 6 and later battery replacements to $29, and a leaked internal memo instructs Geniuses to offer the replacement for anyone who asks, regardless of their own diagnostics. However, because this has been such a quickly evolving stories many stores are out
When you’re unboxing a new iPhone, it’s time to think about how you’ll move your digital life from your old iPhone to the new one. If your old iPhone is running iOS 11, you can use Quick Start, a new iOS 11 feature that makes the transfer easy. Just turn on the new iPhone, set it next to the old one
Apple gives iCloud users 5 GB of free storage, but that fills up fast with iCloud Photo Library, iOS backups, iBooks, and more. Until iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra, each person in a family had to buy extra iCloud space separately. But now Apple has now made it so everyone in a Family Sharing gr
An extremely welcome under-the-hood change in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra is that Photos facial recognition syncs across iCloud Photo Library. Previously, people you identified on one of your devices remained unidentified on others. But what if Photos now identifies the same person twice, suc
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