How-To

Apple Music Replay is a great way to find your music stats for the past year: the most played songs, artists and albums in the last 12 months. Similar to Spotify Wrapped and the like, your annual Apple Music Replay is a fun way to see what tracks you listened to most.

Fun fact: Apple usually publicizes Apple Music Replay in December, but it’s actually updated weekly and available throughout the whole year! You can check in whenever you want to see how your year is shaping up.

We’ll show you how to find it and how to share your top music of the year to your friends and social media.

The Christmas season is starting, and there’s good news for fans of the Peanuts holiday specials. Apple will make the holiday classic A Charlie Brown Christmas available for everyone to stream free later this month, whether they’re an Apple TV subscriber or not.

That gives everyone the opportunity to watch Linus teach his friends what Christmas is all about.

If you want to know the fastest and easiest way to send someone photos, videos, files and so, so much more, you should know how to AirDrop. There’s no need to send an iMessage — Apple’s slick AirDrop feature will immediately send and open the content on someone else’s iPhone (or other Apple device). There’s no middle step.

AirDrop works iPhone-to-iPhone, iPhone-to-Mac, iPhone-to-iPad, Vision Pro-to-Mac — any combination and permutation of two Apple devices. And, if your friend has a Google Pixel 10, you can AirDrop with them, too!

Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about how to take advantage of AirDrop.

Spam calls and text messages seem absolutely relentless these days — you’ll want to know how to block a number on your iPhone to keep your sanity. Luckily, it’s easy. There are a variety of ways you can stop unwanted calls. You can block an incoming phone call or text message. And you can send unknown callers directly to Live Voicemail.

If you’re blocking a person in your contacts list, it doesn’t matter which app you block them from — Messages, Phone, Contacts, Mail, Settings — they will be blocked everywhere.

Here’s how to block calls from unknown numbers on iPhone and keep spammers at bay.

It’s good to know how to close apps on iPhone for those times when an app is acting buggy or becomes unresponsive. It’s really easy — just swipe up to see your running apps and swipe up again to close them.

But does this mean you should always quit your open apps? No, not at all.

Despite what you may have heard, quitting apps on iOS usually makes things worse, not better. It’s a myth that quitting apps will save battery life, make your iPhone run faster or free up memory. Overall, it negatively impacts your iPhone’s performance.

Here’s how to close iPhone apps — plus three reasons why you shouldn’t rush to do it.

If your iPhone ever experiences odd technical problems, the first thing you should try is a good, old-fashioned restart. You’ll be surprised how many problems you can fix by simply rebooting your phone.

Restarting your iPhone is just like restarting a computer. All of the apps and software will be reset, and you shouldn’t lose any saved data.

If a particular app you’re using is acting up, you can always force-quit it and open it again to reset it. But if there’s a deeper underlying problem with your phone’s software, like if Bluetooth accessories aren’t working or phone calls suddenly won’t connect, you should restart your iPhone.

Here’s how to do it with any model of iPhone.

From wild concept art to polished edits, Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro image creation and editing tool can spin up impressive visuals from a single prompt on your iPhone.

The featured image of this article itself serves as an amazing example of Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities. And it also showcases just how far behind Apple is in the AI race. (Sorry, Image Playground.)

If you’re itching to use Google’s Nano Banana Pro on your iPhone, this guide will show you how.

A great way to personalize your computer is to change your Mac icons. New in macOS Tahoe, you can give each folder a custom color or symbol.

In fact, you can change any icon on your Mac to customize it to your taste. That includes any app, folder, disk or file icon. For instance, I didn’t like the yellow icon of my external hard drive — so I changed it to blue. I’ve also edited a few app icons for better consistency in my Dock.

I’ll show you how to do it yourself.

Phone addiction is real. Constant iPhone use can literally change the makeup of your brain. Sure, people waved similar panic flags about the television, the radio and even the novel, but those were easily left at home. You carry the internet with you, and it’s constantly blasting a firehose of content, everywhere you go.

Luckily, you can make your iPhone less addictive.

If you feel the impulse to unlock your iPhone at every empty moment, or scroll through an app when you feel like you should be getting to bed, here are my tips for making your iPhone a bit more boring. And that, in turn, will help you curb your phone addiction.

You can share passwords on iPhone automatically with your entire family, so you don’t have to reuse the same password everywhere or let everyone in your family know when a shared password is changed.

Setting up this feature is easy and saves the hassle of being texted “hey I can’t get into Amazon, what’s that password again?” and “I need you to send me the code.” When you set up shared passwords, two-factor authentication and passkeys are shared, too.

It’s a huge time-saver, and highly recommended. You can keep reading below or watch our quick video.

In several states, Apple’s state ID initiative enables iPhones and Apple Watches to hold a digital copy of the user’s driver’s license, in the same way these devices store credit cards and airline tickets. And across the United States, you can create an Apple Digital ID based on your passport that can get you through some airport security checks. 

The day when an iPhone can completely take the place of an old-fashioned wallet remains years away, but it’s a goal Apple is working toward. Apple Pay is making progress on replacing credit cards, you can put airline tickets in the Wallet app, and the same goes for loyalty cards.

But no wallet is complete unless it can hold an ID. And that’s where Apple’s digital ID initiative comes in. Here’s what you need to know to add your driver’s license, state ID or federal passport to your Apple Wallet.

You can queue songs in Apple Music so the tracks you want to hear play automatically, one after another. You don’t need to wait for the song to end and manually play the next one. And if you want to start over, you can quickly clear the queue as well. 

Plus, you can let friends add songs to the queue from their own phones — even if they don’t have an Apple Music subscription. Watch our video or keep reading below.

With Thanksgiving coming in a few weeks, it’s time to watch the beloved Peanuts special that celebrates this holiday, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. While Apple TV subscribers can watch it anytime, Apple will also make the special free for anyone to stream one weekend this month.

You do not need an Apple device to enjoy either. It’s easy on Windows and Android.

Apple released new firmware for AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3, and AirPods 4 on Thursday that offers bug fixes for a major recent firmware upgrade. Version 8B25 and 8B21 merely tweak the wireless earbuds, but there’s hope it’ll fix a bug that plagues some users. 

Apple recently explained exactly how to update your AirPods firmware. The process can happen automatically, in the background, but there is a way to speed things up. It’s a good idea to manually check that you’re running the latest version, which brings bug fixes and sometimes great new features.

Read on for more details, and find all current AirPods firmware versions, along with instructions for getting the AirPods update as quickly as possible.

Spotlight on the Mac is a universal search bar, available everywhere, ready to quickly launch an app or find a file. And in macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple supercharged Spotlight by adding many advanced features.

Spotlight has a new visual interface for browsing apps on your Mac. It’s also a powerful tool for running Shortcuts and actions inside the apps you use. And, finally, it’s a clipboard manager, too.

Here are the ins and outs of Spotlight on the Mac.

AirPods Pro 3’s redesigned ear tips are an unexpected hit-or-miss change. The new foam-infused tips radically change how the earbuds feel when worn.

Apple knows the ear tips are not one-size-fits-all, so the company includes five sizes of ear tips in the AirPods Pro 3 box. You can easily switch them out to find the best size for your ears.

Using the wrong size can cause problems. The earbuds can slip out if they’re too small or irritate your ears if they’re too big. They might even cause high-pitched feedback if you engage active noise cancellation with the wrong size ear tips (especially when flying).

If you don’t like how your new AirPods Pro 3 feel in the ear, don’t be hasty and return them. You should try out different ear tips first. Here are some tips to make sure you achieve the best results.

Your iPhone can record 3D spatial video and photos, effectively future-proofing the images you capture. And the results are stunning.

The stereoscopic 3D video and photos captured with the iPhone can be viewed on an Apple Vision Pro headset as an immersive way to relive memories.

Here’s how it works.

You’re happily listening to music on your AirPods when the audio suddenly gets yanked away by a Bluetooth speaker. Don’t get frustrated. Make a quick tweak to the settings on your iPhone running iOS 26.1, and it’ll never happen again.

Here’s what to do.

The HomePod operating system occasionally needs updating, because the device is a lot more than a simple speaker — it’s a computer. Here’s how to make sure your Apple smart speaker has the software version released Monday. The new HomePod Software version 26.1 is a simple bug-fix update, but it’s still worth installing. Who wants bugs? 

If you depend on automatic updates, it’s possible your smart speaker hasn’t yet installed the update. Here’s how to do so manually.

You’ll want to reset your iPhone if you’re trading it in, selling it or passing it down to another family member. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

If you don’t fully reset the phone, it’ll still be locked to your Apple Account — and the phone will be effectively useless to anyone who tries to use it.

Follow along to make sure you reset your iPhone the right way.

Liquid Glass in iOS 26 brings dramatic change to the look of the iPhone user interface, so it’s no surprise that some people hate it. If it’s just not for you, the option to turn off Liquid Glass was added in iOS 26.1. And it’s easy.

The same setting is available in macOS Tahoe 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1, so you can turn off Liquid Glass on all your devices. Here’s how:

My favorite change in iOS 26.1 has nothing to do with Liquid Glass, though cosmetic tweaks to the glossy user interface have drawn the most attention in the latest OS update. To me, the biggest improvement is the option to disable the Lock Screen swipe to open the iPhone’s Camera app.

I frequently pull out my iPhone to find the Camera app has been running in my pocket, draining the battery. It’s that damn Lock Screen swipe at fault. If this happens to you, too, here’s how to disable it in iOS 26.1.

Slide Over, one of the best iPad multitasking features, got rescued from the rubbish heap with the new iPadOS 26.1. It’s an ideal way to keep an application that you check frequently but not constantly within easy reach — it’s offscreen but accessible with just a flick of a finger.

Here’s how to use Slide Over, and why you shouldn’t ignore the option now that it’s back in iPadOS 26.1, which launched on Monday.

You can use the built-in iPhone Wallet app for some basic order tracking with classic Apple ease of use. No need to fiddle with finding and copying tracking numbers — your orders will appear there automatically. 

If you order something from an online store that doesn’t automatically integrate with the Wallet app, there’s a solution for that as well. If your device supports Apple Intelligence, it’ll scan your email inbox and add in all those Amazon orders, too. 

Here’s how the iPhone’s order-tracking feature works. 

You can hide apps on your iPhone so they’re completely invisible, and you can lock all kinds of apps so they require Face ID to open.

Why would you want to? Maybe you have sensitive content you don’t want anyone to see, or you don’t want anyone to know you’re using dating or hookup apps. Hiding apps is also good for staying off social media or away from addictive games. Plus, it’s a great way to declutter your iPhone’s Home Screen. You can really clean things up without deleting apps you might want to keep.

There are, however, a few essential apps on your phone that can’t be hidden. Here’s how it all works.