D. Griffin Jones - page 11

 Is it worth it to buy the M3 iPad Air? The new tablet is a stellar upgrade to a fine line of iPads. The M3 chip brings even more power to the mid-range offering.

If you have an older iPad Air with a Home Button, it’s time to upgrade to the new class of iPad. It can be a laptop replacement, with an attachable keyboard and trackpad, and desktop-style multitasking. For those considering a high-performance alternative, check out this M3 iPad Pro review to compare features. Add the new Apple Pencil and it becomes an advanced drawing tablet.

Is it worthwhile to upgrade? We have a guide below with helpful charts and a video to help you decide.

Is it worth it to buy the M4 MacBook Air? This machine has got to be the best value in all computing right now. The latest model brings a big boost in performance, and comes in a stunning new sky blue color — at an even-lower price. The new MacBook Air is one of Apple’s best laptops ever.

If you’re still using the Intel MacBook Air you bought in early 2020 during COVID-19, now is the golden time for you to upgrade. You’ll be getting a fantastically powerful laptop that can handle it all.

Is it worthwhile to upgrade? We have a guide below with helpful charts and a video to help you decide.

How can you report a spam text you get on your iPhone, and what happens when you report it? Where does the report go? Does anyone look at these things?

Apple has useful tools like Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple for managing email spam, but text spam can be far more annoying. You don’t have a spam filter for your texts, and texts can be easier to fake.

If you’re getting spam texts, there are a few different steps you can take to can it, and I’ll walk you through all of them.

You can visit the App Store to download Apple apps like Music, Podcasts, Weather, Maps and Find My missing from your iPhone or iPad. If you can’t find them. It’s possible you uninstalled them and your device needs to download them again. Or they might have simply disappeared from your Home Screen, and are now hiding in the App Library.

There are also a few iPhone apps that Apple hasn’t made available on iPad. This was the case with Calculator until very recently, so you may need to install an update to get it.

I’ll walk you through all the possibilities, showing you how to get Apple’s stock apps back on your iPhone or iPad.

Apple unveiled a revised MacBook Air with an M4 chip inside Wednesday. It comes in a beautiful new sky blue color, at an even lower price point — with the same incredible 18 hours of battery life.

“MacBook Air is by far the world’s most popular laptop,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in a press release, “and today we’re giving everyone even more reasons to love it, including a big boost in performance with the M4 chip, a new Center Stage camera, and a beautiful new sky blue color.”

The M4 MacBook Air starts at $999 and will become available on March 12.

The iPhone 16e might lack some of the iPhone’s most premium features, but I can’t help but love it. While testing it for my iPhone 16e review, the phone’s light weight and clean rear design made me happy every time I picked it up, in a way I haven’t felt since my iPhone 5s. And its updated guts make it a perfectly serviceable daily driver that’ll stay fast and responsive for years to come.

It isn’t as cheap as the iPhone SE it replaces in Apple’s lineup. And while it largely resembles the iPhone 14 and 15, it’s missing MagSafe, one of the iPhone’s best features for many years now.

I downgraded from my personal iPhone 16 Pro to the iPhone 16e for the review, to put it through its paces — and came out impressed. Keep reading or watch the video below.

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 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.

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.