This week, Apple is expected to debut the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max, roll it out in the 24-inch iMac and MacBook Pro and potentially update the Magic Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad to USB-C. It’s less likely we’ll see any new iPads or AirPods at this event.
Here’s how you can watch it all live.
Gestures are a great way to become an iPad power user. Gestures help you easily navigate through apps, switch between pages, access controls, and reduce multiple taps to a single swipe. Gestures are especially useful for Stage Manager, the new multitasking environment on iPad.
Apple designed gestures to mimic natural, real-world movements, making them intuitive to use and learn. Swiping, pinching, tapping, and other gestures feel familiar and are easy to master.
If you use your iPad a lot, they’re well worth learning — even just a few. Your fingers will thank you!
How do you turn off the webcam video reactions on your Mac in macOS Sonoma? This feature, which puts full-screen animated effects on your video calls, made a good demo when it was introduced, but has since confused many people who trigger it accidentally in serious situations.
The Off button isn’t where you would expect — it’s not hiding in Skype, Google Hangouts or Zoom at all — it’s in the Mac’s menu bar.
Let me show you what’s going on and how you can turn it off.
AirBuddy is a handy Mac app that lets you monitor all your nearby Bluetooth devices and AirPods. You can check battery life, switch them back and forth between multiple Macs on your desk, and best of all — get the same beautiful AirPods animations that you see on your iPhone.
It offers granular Bluetooth controls that Apple should build right into macOS.
Check In is a new iOS 17 feature that tracks your travels and lets contacts know when you’ve safely reached your destination. It’s great for traveling, or kids going to and from school, or even going on a date. You no longer have to count on remembering to text someone when you make it home safely — your iPhone will let them know for you.
Check In is like sharing your ETA in Apple Maps, but tweaked for personal safety. Friends, family and loved ones will be automatically notified if you’re stopped for any reason before reaching your destination. It also has timer-based check ins, which come in handy for situations like meeting a stranger from Craigslist. If you don’t check in after a set time, your contacts will be alerted.
Here’s how to use it — frankly, every parent should know how this works.
★★★★☆
EZ Internet Solutions is a rural internet service provider that can give you a solid cellular internet connection that’s truly unlimited — no data cap, no speed throttling. If you live in a spot without any internet infrastructure, but you do have a cell connection, it is a solid option you should consider.
EZ Internet Solutions offers cellular home internet in places AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile don’t. Contrast that with HughesNet, a popular satellite internet provider, which charges an arm and a leg only to give you a fraction of the speed.
I truly live in the middle of nowhere, and yet I’ve been using EZ Internet to live stream a video podcast every week for months without a hitch.
You might only use Preview on the Mac when you need to read a PDF or zoom in on a picture, but there’s much more than meets the eye. It’s a pretty robust editor, too.
I’m going to show you the six features that will let you make the most of Preview, a handy tool that’s an overlooked benefit to the Mac. I have three tips for working with documents and three for editing pictures.
NetNewsWire is a delightfully simple RSS reader for Mac, iPhone and iPad that syncs over iCloud. What’s an RSS reader? It’s the best way to keep up with your news, read blog posts, get YouTube videos, read webcomics and follow anything online.
NetNewsWire is an app I leave open perpetually on my Mac and open dozens of times a day on my iPhone. Since its relaunch a few years ago, it’s become one of the most important, core apps for my work and relaxation. Best of all, it’s totally free and open-source with no ads or tracking.
If you forget your new iPhone passcode, you can reset it with your old one for up to three days later. This can save you hours of trying to remember the new passcode, or worse, resetting your phone from a backup.
You just have to tap Forgot Passcode? on the Lock Screen after you enter it several incorrect times.
Keep reading for a detailed walkthrough. And don’t worry — if you change your passcode intentionally to keep someone out, you can instantly expire your old one.
Editing and customizing the widget stack in watchOS 10 on your Apple Watch is a great way to clean up your watch face. If you have a Tim Cook-esque watch face full of complications, you can use widgets to pare it down to a simple, classy design with the same quick access to your apps and activities.
Today, I’ll show you how to make the most of your smart stack of widgets.
There are a lot of awesome features in iOS 17 — Contact Posters, StandBy, Safari profiles, shared passwords and much, much more. Here’s a simple to-do list on how to make the most of Cupertino’s latest and greatest iPhone operating system.
Reading Time for iPhone and iPad lets you build a library of books, then tracks your progress as you read. It encourages reading by making everything easier and more fun.
You can easily scan books by their barcodes to add them to your library. When you start a reading session, a Live Activity will show up on your Lock Screen, in the Dynamic Island or in StandBy.
The Reading Time app keeps track of your progress with detailed stats — like your reading speed, and estimated time until you’re finished — in an organized dashboard of books.
How can you stop Siri from randomly turning on? As if Siri’s unhelpful answers were not irritating enough when you actually want them, Siri often interrupts a conversation, meeting or TV show when you haven’t asked for anything at all.
Yes, Siri can be helpful — we previously covered six surprisingly useful things Siri can do — but it can oftentimes be an unwelcome guest, activating when you want it to zip it. And now in iOS 17, it’s going to activate every time it hears “Siri,” not just “Hey Siri.”
How do you stop Siri from activating all the time?
This hidden setting in iOS 17 will speed up Haptic Touch, the fantastic feature that lets you preview links and bring up option menus on your iPhone.
If you use Haptic Touch all the time like I do, changing this setting will make your iPhone feel supercharged. It brings up handy shortcuts — hidden actions, content previews and contextual menus in a flash, saving you precious time as you tap around your screen.
Alternatively, if you find Haptic Touch annoying and trigger it accidentally all the time, you can slow down the time needed to activate the gesture. That way, a tap won’t be mistaken for a tap-and-hold.
If you haven’t looked at any of Apple’s accessibility features because you’re not blind or deaf, and don’t think they would make your life easier, you might be surprised.
Apple built a handful of accessibility features into iOS 17 that let people with various disabilities use the iPhone in new and unexpected ways. However, absolutely anyone can take advantage of these tools, which prove surprisingly helpful in certain situations.
You can already get live captions to watch videos silently, lock your phone into one app to keep people from snooping around, play soothing ocean or forest sounds and more.
In iOS 17, five accessibility features take things even further. Assistive Access simplifies your phone to its bare features to make it easier to use; Live Speech and Personal Voice let you type on the keyboard to speak using your own voice; Detection Mode and Point and Speak help you get around using your iPhone camera.
Our hands-on demo will show you what these features can do for you.
The transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon changed every Mac for the better … almost. But there are a few niches in the lineup that have yet to be filled.
While Apple’s computers are best-in-class, there are a few categories the company does not currently compete in. These are the top seven Macs that Apple doesn’t make.
StandBy is a headline iOS 17 feature that turns your iPhone into a smart display on your nightstand, at your desk or in the kitchen. It’s an attractive way to put your phone to work as a small information board or digital clock when you’re not using it.
Of course, it works best if you have a phone with an always-on display like the iPhone 14 or 15 Pro. However, it works on any iPhone with MagSafe running iOS 17. Best of all, StandBy remembers different preferences for different rooms, so you can set it up as a bedside clock in the bedroom, a digital photo frame in the living room, or a music controller in the kitchen. Here’s everything you can do with StandBy on your iPhone.
Glass is a return to the simplicity of Instagram circa 2012. It’s a social network specially tailored for looking at and posting beautiful photography. I have a thing for niche social networks, I guess.
I was an early adopter of Instagram, which initially was a picture-first social network. It’s lost focus in the years since, getting crowded with Stories, Reels, shopping and countless more half-baked features that don’t make sense. I now avoid it at all costs.
You don’t need to be a professional photographer to use it — although you do need $30/year.
How can you find a lost Apple TV remote? Whether it’s wedged between the cushions or kicked far under the couch, a handy-dandy new feature in iOS 17 and tvOS 17 lets you find the remote using your iPhone.
The mind races when one imagines how many hours of human life might have been saved if everyone had this feature 30 years ago.
Sure, you can take the L and simply use your iPhone or Apple Watch to control your Apple TV. But I like having the physical remote on hand, too. Let me show you how to find it.
You can fit two shortcuts into one small widget in iOS 17, a significant change for power users of Apple’s time-saving Shortcuts app. A lot of shortcuts I make are in pairs — and now, you can put two shortcuts of a kind in one small space on your Home Screen.
Shortcuts, if you’re not aware, let you automate the things you do most often on your iPhone, Mac, iPad or Apple Watch. For instance, you can create a shortcut that sets a Focus mode when you get to work, one that suggests easy-to-remember passwords, one for converting units — the possibilities are endless. (Read Apple’s helpful Shortcuts guide if you want to familiarize yourself with the powerful app.)
Home Screen widgets are a great way to launch the shortcuts you use every day. On the iPhone, where space is limited, fitting twice as many shortcuts without losing any icons could be a game changer for your Home Screen. Let me show you how to set it up.
What can you do with the iPhone 15 Pro’s new Action button? Lots of things, if you customize it: You can make a fart sound, or get ChatGPT to help you write an email.
Apple lets you assign the iPhone’s Action button to one of eight preassigned things — or, if you set it to Shortcuts, you can do a lot more. Shortcuts are a way for you to reach inside an app and automatically run a feature without opening it. With the Action button, you have a physical button you can press no matter where you are, adding an extra layer of convenience.
Let me show you what some power users are doing with Apple’s latest hardware innovation — and how you can trick your phone into assigning two or more Shortcuts to the single Action button.
★★★★☆
Apple Watch Series 9 is the biggest year-over-year leap in recent years. It has not one, not two, but a whopping four new features, most powered by its updated chip. Apps load faster, voice dictation is near instant and the display gets both brighter in the sun and dimmer in darkness.
A couple of the best features I haven’t been able to test — double tap promises to make tapping the screen with your nose obsolete; improved connectivity with your phone will make it easier to find, if paired with a new iPhone. And with this release, Apple dips their toe into more sustainable manufacturing practices.
The Apple Watch Series 9 a good product. In the end, with big releases like this so few and far between, I can’t help but wonder if it’s close to reaching its potential.
Here’s how to keep track of your mental health using the new mood-tracking feature in iOS 17. Logging how you feel throughout the day, your iPhone will help you identify what’s causing you trouble or what works for you, whether it’s work, family, exercise, sleep or other things.
In order to make any kind of meaningful change, you need to understand fully what helps, what doesn’t, and what you can do. Starting your log is easy. Set it up once, and your phone will ask you every day so you don’t forget.
Let me show you how to start a log of your mental wellness in iOS 17.
How can you best save your MacBook battery life for many years of use? Your laptop’s battery is the most likely component to wear out, and one of the biggest problems is keeping it plugged in all the time. Apple offers some built-in controls, but they’re pretty basic and inflexible. Energiza Pro, on the other hand, gives you far more options, extending your MacBook’s battery life for years to come.
It’s the smart battery manager you need to keep your MacBook alive for longer.
If you’ve ever been the victim of unsolicited dick pics, or “cyberflashing,” you can now automatically hide obscene images in iOS 17. Censoring NSFW sexts can give you an extra line of defense against unwanted, creepy texts. This feature, new in iOS 17, puts suspected nude images and videos behind a blurred gray background.
Unsolicited dick pics are a widespread problem. Among adults who reported receiving nude images, 91% of respondents say they were sent without their consent, according to Indiana University research. And one shocking study published in the Journal of Sex Research found 50% of heterosexual men admitted to sending them!
This new Sensitive Content Warning feature in iOS 17 isn’t just for protecting children. A lot of people likely will find it useful.
