News, Tips, and Tricks
For Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.
New 16-inch MacBook Pro Sports a Redesigned Scissor-Switch Keyboard
Responding to customer complaints and media mocking, Apple has introduced a new 16-inch MacBook Pro that features improves on its predecessor in several ways, most notably with a scissor-switch keyboard in place of the flaky butterfly-key keyboard. The 16-inch MacBook...
You Can Now Access Flash Drives on an iPhone or iPad—Here’s How
An unexpected and useful feature of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 is also nearly invisible, and for most uses, requires a special adapter. With this feature, the Files app now can “see” external storage devices. That’s huge—now you can move data to and from an iPhone or iPad...
Apple’s New AirPods Pro Offer Active Noise Cancellation and Better Fit
Are you a fan of Apple’s AirPods, or have you had trouble with them staying in your ears? Either way, you might like the just-released AirPods Pro, which offer a new design with three sizes of soft, flexible, silicone ear tips and welcome new capabilities. The ear...
Be Careful in iOS 13’s Mail App—the Trash Button Is Where Reply Used to Be!
For unknown reasons, Apple redesigned the toolbar in the iOS 13 version of Mail. Such things happen, but this time, Apple made a big mistake and moved Mail’s Trash button to where its Reply button used to be. Lots of people who have become accustomed to tapping Reply...
Ignore Unsolicited Calls and Texts from Apple and Other Tech Companies
We don’t want to belabor the point, but multinational tech companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google will never call or text you personally out of the blue. So if you get a call or text purporting to be from such a company, it’s 99.9% likely to be a scam, and you...
Use AirPods to Improve Your Hearing
An ever-increasing number of people have hearing loss due to exposure to loud noise and age. If you’re in that group, but don’t yet need hearing aids, try using your AirPods to help you hear better in certain situations. iOS’s Live Listen feature uses your iPhone’s...
Do You Put Dates in Filenames? Use This Format for Best Sorting
There are plenty of situations where it makes sense to put a date in a filename, but if you don’t use the right date format, the files may sort in unhelpful ways. For instance, using the names of months is a bad idea, since they’ll sort alphabetically, putting April...
iOS 13 Makes Editing Text Easier
Today’s article will make text editing in iOS 13 faster and more fun. Read about important new and improved techniques for selecting, copying, and moving text, plus a new slide-to-type option.
Need to Restart a Mac That Has Frozen? Here’s How
It’s extremely uncommon for a Mac to freeze or crash these days, but it can happen. What should you do if your Mac locks up and becomes completely unresponsive to the mouse and keyboard? The trick is to press and hold the power button until the Mac turns off. Wait 5...
Everything You Need to Know about Multitasking in iPadOS 13
Read this article to learn all the ways you can use multiple apps at the same time on an iPad running the new iPadOS 13.
What Does Having a T2 Chip in Your Mac Mean to You?
If you own an iMac Pro, or a Mac mini, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro model introduced in 2018 or later, your Mac has one of Apple’s T2 security chips inside. On the whole, having a T2 chip in your Mac is a good thing, thanks to significantly increased security and other...
iOS 13 Replaces 3D Touch with Tap-and-Hold
Do you use 3D Touch on your iPhone? From 2015 through 2018, every iPhone from the iPhone 6s through the iPhone XS supported 3D Touch, other than the iPhone SE and iPhone XR. With 3D Touch, you could (sometimes) press a control, and then press a little harder to make...