D. Griffin Jones - page 10

If you want to keep your iCloud data completely private and secure, but you live in the United Kingdom — where Apple is rolling back Advanced Data Protection to comply with government demands — you’ll need an alternative to iCloud sync and backup features.

That’s because the only option is to not use iCloud. There’s no getting around it: without Advanced Data Protection, your iCloud backups can potentially be snooped on.

Turning off iCloud will have many negative ramifications. iCloud manages syncing services across all your devices. If you own an iPhone, Mac and/or iPad, iCloud makes sure all your messages, photos, app data, notes, passwords, bookmarks, etc., appear everywhere.

Without Advanced Data Protection, there are still a few of these backup services that are end-to-end encrypted. But a few critical services, like device backups, are not — and if you don’t disable them, you’ll have a big hole in your data security. Keep reading or watch our video.

When guests come over, it’s common courtesy to share your Wi-Fi password — and your iPhone offers plenty of tricks up its sleeve to make it easy.

You don’t need to go through your photo library to look up the picture you took of the bottom of your router, then read the long string of numbers and letters. Instead, you can show them a convenient QR code to connect them instantly. Or, if they’re in your contacts, you can share the password with a single button tap. For your Android and Windows friends, you can look up any saved Wi-Fi password from either Settings, or, well … Passwords. If you often work with colors, a Nix Mini Color Sensor can make identifying and matching colors quick and effortless.

Here’s how. Keep reading below or watch our quick video.

The new Music Haptics accessibility feature in iOS 18 adds another dimension to audio: vibration. Taking advantage of the incredible precision of the iPhone’s Taptic Engine, the feature brings to life a specially recorded track of rhythmic vibrations and buzzing patterns timed to certain Apple Music songs.

Switch it on, and you can hold your iPhone in your hands and feel your music in a whole new way. Keep reading to see how the feature works (or watch our video that explains it all).

You can use a feature called Guided Access to lock down your iPhone to a single app before you hand it to a kid or someone else. You might want to let your offspring play a game, or pass your phone around for controlling music, or hand it off to show someone a video … but you probably don’t want them going rogue and reading your texts or calling your mom.

In Accessibility settings, you can enable Guided Access to limit your iPhone to a single app before you hand it off. It’s a kind of quick and dirty “guest mode.”

This will help you keep your phone — and your privacy — safe. You can even disable features like the volume buttons and set up time limits.

It’s easy to zoom in on your Mac screen and get a closer look at your display. If the text is just too small to read, or perhaps you’re making some graphics and you need pixel-perfect alignment, a simple tweak to your Mac settings is all you need.

Using your Mac’s zoom feature, you can hit a keyboard shortcut or use a multitouch gesture on your trackpad to zoom in on your screen. I’ll show you how to use this handy feature. Plus, I’ll cover Hover Text and Display Scaling, two more features that help you embiggen the words on your Mac screen.

You can get Apple Intelligence right now on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. All you have to do is update to the latest developer beta release. You’ll get access to Visual Intelligence, Image Playground, Genmoji and more.

The developer beta of iOS 18.4 enables Apple Intelligence in the European Union for the first time. visionOS 2.4 brings the featureset to the Vision Pro.

Apple Intelligence is compatible with the iPhone 15 Pro and the new iPhone 16 lineup. Unfortunately, older devices (or even the iPhone 15) don’t have enough RAM to support Apple’s Foundation models. Luckily, you can also try it out if you have an iPad or Mac with an M-series or A17 Pro chip.

Here’s how to get it all.

You can radically customize the Lock Screen of your iPhone with a bunch of widgets, aesthetics and styles. If you liked the themed custom Home Screens people were putting together using Shortcuts and Widgetsmith, you’ll love the level of creativity you can express with customized Lock Screens.

Read on to see all the features or watch our video.

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Today, Apple introduced the iPhone 16e. It features many top features from the iPhone 16 series, but at a lower $599 price point. The iPhone 16e replaces the former iPhone SE in the lineup.

If you don’t have twelve minutes to spare, you can watch the introduction in just 30 seconds.

The new Apple C1 modem that powers the cellular connectivity of the iPhone 16e is the company’s first cellular modem designed in-house.

The C1 offers “fast and reliable connectivity, and it’s the most power-efficient modem ever in an iPhone,” said Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPhone product marketing, in a launch video released Wednesday. Thanks to its efficiency — and an optimized internal design that allows for a bigger battery — the iPhone 16e offers an “unprecedented level of battery life in a 6.1 inch iPhone,” she added.

The Apple C1 integrates 4G, 5G, satellite and GPS radios in one chip. The C1 represents a brand-new direction for Apple silicon, alongside the company’s processors and other wireless chips. Recent Ookla speed tests suggest that the C1 modem holds its own against the Qualcomm chip in the iPhone 16, as detailed in this comparison.

You can use the iCloud website to access all of your online Apple services from any computer, tablet or phone. This includes Find My, Mail, Photos, Invites, Files, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Notes, Calendar and Reminders. It’s really convenient if you need to find a lost device, print a file or download a picture from a different computer you’re not signed into.

The iCloud website provides easy access to all of Apple’s cloud services — and it’s even customizable for those who use it often. Let me show you how it works.

The Dvorak keyboard layout offers a different way of arranging the 26 letters of the alphabet. Dvorak puts all the most common letters right on the center row for increased typing speed. It also balances the most common letters across all 10 fingers to reduce strain. Physical Dvorak keyboards have been available for computers forever, but finally, you can get it on your iPhone and iPad.

Eye Tracking is a pretty remarkable and ambitious accessibility feature that lets you control your iPhone entirely with your eyes. You can use this feature in a pinch if you need to use your phone with soapy hands while doing the dishes or with grimy hands while working on a car or doing other dirty work. Alternatively, if you’re losing your fine motor skills, this feature could be an essential one to learn.

Likely borrowing some of the software from the advanced Vision Pro headset, this feature lets you control your iPhone hands-free. And once you set up Eye Tracking, you can use the iPhone’s Sound Actions feature. It lets you perform certain functions, like toggling your flashlight or taking a screenshot, just by making various mouth noises.

Keep reading or watch our video.

Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues feature will help you use your iPhone in the car by reducing feelings of motion sickness. With the feature turned on, dots along the edge of your iPhone screen will animate in sync with the motion of the plane, train or automobile you’re riding in.

According to Apple, “Motion sickness is commonly caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel.” Apple says these animations “reduce sensory conflict.”

It may sound weird, but the feature evidently works really well. Here’s how you can enable it.

To tackle your party planning, the new Apple Invites app can help you get organized with RSVPs and keep everybody up to date. It can even handle a shared music playlist and photo album that anyone can contribute to.

And yes, you can invite people who don’t have the app installed yet, don’t have an Apple Account or don’t have an Apple device at all. You can invite people via email; they can RSVP on the web and get follow-up notifications in their inbox.

Keep reading or watch our video guide — and download the app here.

In the updated Notes app in iOS 18, you can transcribe audio to text for free: Your iPhone will automatically transcribe voice notes for later.

This is a great feature to use in a college class, if you want to record audio of a lecture alongside your notes. You can use it in meetings — the irritating in-person kind — for recording what people actually said alongside your notes. It’s also great for generating podcast transcripts or any kind of writing. It’s a quick and easy way to get a first draft.

Read more or watch our video guide.

Find My iPhone, a feature available in Apple’s Find My app, will help you locate your lost phone. You can find it using any other Apple device you own or by borrowing a friend’s device. You can even ping your iPhone from your Apple Watch.

From Find My, you can also remotely lock down your lost iPhone, put the device into a special Lost Mode, or even wipe its contents. You should take a peek at this incredibly useful app before you have to.

Keep reading or watch our video.

You can use your iPhone (or even your Apple Watch!) as a remote for your Apple TV. It’s a convenient feature when you’ve lost the remote in the couch cushions. (You can use your iPhone to help find it as well.)

Even if your remote’s not gone missing, sometimes it’s sitting on the table way over there and you don’t want to interrupt a show by asking for someone to pass it to you. Or maybe, someone is intentionally hogging the remote and you want to pause the video yourself. Either way, it’s really easy to do from an iPhone or an Apple Watch.

The Apple Health app on your iPhone will help you track your medications. It has a lot of advanced options for all kinds of medicine — you can set up schedules, log your activity and even get advice on drug interactions. If you can connect with your health care provider through the Health app, setting it up is incredibly simple. Otherwise, you can just scan the label on the bottle using the camera to import it.

Let me show you how to get started.

As you’ll read in our hands-on review of the BenQ DesignVue PD2730S, this Apple Studio Display alternative offers similar specs at a lower price. The new BenQ display delivers the same 27-inch screen, 5K Retina resolution, frame rate, color gamut and Thunderbolt connectivity as Apple’s pricey monitor.

This formula might ring a bell — BenQ’s new high-end display is the second Studio Display alternative to hit the market. The BenQ display proves nicer than the Asus ProArt 5K I reviewed two months ago, but it also costs more ($1,199 compared to $799).

One thing is for sure: Both are still a steal compared to the Studio Display, which starts at $1,599. Read on to see how these monitors stack up.

iPhone Mirroring on the Mac lets you control your phone using your computer — a handy convenience when your iPhone is in your pocket, purse or backpack. All your iPhone notifications can be mirrored onto your Mac as well, letting you triage them and take care of business without touching your phone and interrupting your workflow.

This feature also could come in handy if you shatter your iPhone screen. You can mirror an otherwise unusable iPhone to your Mac to make sure it’s backed up. You could even factory-reset your broken phone before sending it in for repair or replacement.

Here’s how iPhone mirroring works. Keep reading or watch our video.

It’s very important to set up your iPhone Medical ID so it’s ready in case you find yourself in an emergency situation. First responders can check your iPhone to get critical information about any allergies or preexisting conditions that could make a huge difference in their ability to help you.

It might be unpleasant to think about, but providing this vital information could prove lifesaving if an accident leaves you unconscious.

If you haven’t yet done so you’ll be happy to know it only takes a couple of minutes to update your medical records in the Health app on your iPhone. Here’s how to do it.

Is a group chat blowing up at an inopportune time and distracting the hell out of you? There’s an easy fix. You can hide alerts on your iPhone from a particularly noisy group chat in Messages. It’s like switching on Do Not Disturb — but for a single person or conversation. You can hide alerts permanently or temporarily.

With the Hide Alerts feature, you can silence alerts from a specific app in a similar manner, silencing it while letting all other notifications through. Better yet, you can hide alerts directly from your iPhone’s Lock Screen, which makes it easy to switch them on and off at a moment’s notice.

Watch our video or read on to see how.

Rich Communication Services messaging is new to iPhone, and it makes chatting with Android users much more fun. RCS messaging makes features like read receipts, video and file attachments and named group chats — previously exclusive to iMessage (and some apps) — possible between iPhone and Android.

What RCS features can you take advantage of? Keep reading or watch our video guide.

Traveling is a lot easier if you can keep track of your stuff with AirTags in your luggage. It’s been in the news lately: Airlines have lost flyers’ bags and people have recovered them because they had the foresight to put an AirTag in the luggage. You can make sure it’s with you all the way along your journey and quickly find it among the baggage claim at your final destination.

Read on for my tips on traveling with AirTags.

 You can convert a PDF to JPG on your iPhone instantly and for free — without downloading any sketchy apps or using any slow and confusing websites. This feature works using Shortcuts, a versatile automation system built into your iPhone. To learn more, check out this guide on making PDFs on iPhone and iPad.

After you download the shortcut, you can convert any PDF into a JPG straight from the share sheet on your iPhone. Watch the video or keep reading below to see how it works.