• November 21, 2024

    First Wave of Apple Intelligence Features Appear in macOS 15.1 Sequoia, iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1

    Is it time to make your Apple devices smarter? Apple has just released macOS 15.1 Sequoia, iOS 18.1, and iPadOS 18.1 with an initial collection of Apple Intelligence features and a promise of more coming in December. The company is making a big deal about... Read more
  • November 12, 2024

    Apple’s Tips App Provides Extensive User Guides and Helpful How-Tos

    Apple has included the Tips app with the iPhone and iPad since iOS 8 in 2014 and on the Mac since macOS 10.14 Mojave in 2018. Initially, it didn’t contain much useful content, and many longtime users ignored it. However, Apple has significantly increased the amount of information in Tips over time, adding device-specific tips, full device and app user guides, highlights of new features, and mor... Read more
  • November 7, 2024

    Use Guided Access for Securely Allowing Others to Use an App on Your iPhone or iPad

    iPhones and iPads are highly personal devices, but you might want to let someone else use a particular app on yours without letting them poke through Messages, Mail, and Photos. For example, a child could play a game, a volunteer could check in attendees, or a friend could take photos. To allow this, Apple created Read more
  • September 17, 2024

    What You Need to Know Before Switching to a New iPhone

    Are you planning to upgrade to a new iPhone 16? It’s exciting, we know, but it’s best to proceed deliberately when setting up your new iPhone to avoid causing yourself headaches. Follow these instructions when you’re ready to transfer your data—and, for many people, much of your digital life—to the new iPhone. Apple also has a Read more
  • September 5, 2024

    Five Quick Tips to Ease iPhone and iPad Text Editing and Amaze Your Friends

    A friend recently expressed astonishment when she saw us using trackpad mode while editing text on an iPhone. (It works on the iPad, too!) So, even if you already know these tips, do your friends a favor and show them:
    • Tap once to position the insertion point at the start or end of a word.
    • Touch and hold to reveal the magnifier and move the insertion point within words ... Read more
  • August 29, 2024

    Make the Most of the Mac’s Videoconferencing Capabilities

    A side effect of the pandemic is that online videoconferencing improved drastically. Video calls happened before 2020, but videoconferencing wasn’t an everyday activity for most people. Now, with many people working remotely or in a hybrid model, it’s a fact of business life. To support videoconferencing tools, Apple has extended macOS’s basic webcam and microphone capabilities to allow Mac-pow... Read more
  • August 29, 2024

    Use High-Quality Cables for Optimal Performance and Safety

    Apple’s prices for Thunderbolt, USB-C, and Lightning cables often seem unnecessarily high. $69 for a Read more
  • August 13, 2024

    Missed an Alert? Check Notification Center

    iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all let you specify whether any given app should show no notifications, temporary banners, or persistent alerts: look in Settings > Notifications and System Settings > Notifications. Temporary banners appear briefly and then automatically disappear, which is appropriate for notifications requiring no acknowledgment. But what if you see a temporary banner only as it’... Read more
  • August 6, 2024

    Be Careful When Scanning Unknown QR Codes

    QR codes, those square, blocky codes you scan with your iPhone’s camera to load a Web page, have become ubiquitous. So much so that we seldom pause before scanning any QR code we see. But if you think about it, that’s the same as clicking random links in emails or texts, which is a terrible idea from a security perspective. “Quishing” (QR code phishing) isn’t commonplace yet, but some sources s... Read more
  • July 22, 2024

    Remember the Magnifier App When You Need to Read Tiny Text

    Trying to make out a tiny serial number or some fine print you can barely read can be frustrating. Years ago, Apple added a magnifier mode to its accessibility options and turned the feature into a standalone app in iOS 14. You can find the MagnifierRead more