Backing up your iPhone to iCloud is the best way to keep its data safe and secure. You can always be at peace knowing your data is always recoverable, even if something happens to your phone.
What better day than World Backup Day to set up and enable iCloud backups for your iPhone then? Read our guide to see what iCloud backups entail and how to get started.
The Voice Isolation feature that’s been making FaceTime and Zoom video chats better for over a year is finally available for regular iPhone voice calls. With it, the people you’re on a phone call with can’t hear noises going on around you.
Here’s how to activate one of the best new features of iOS 16.4.
Magic Eraser — Google’s AI-powered tool for removing unwanted objects from photos, which once was reserved for Pixel phones — now works on iPhones and other Android devices. With just a tap or two, Magic Eraser lets you quickly and easily remove photobombers and other annoyances from your images.
You can find plenty of powerful photo editing apps for iPhone on the App Store, many of which offer similar object-removal functionality. However, it is hard to beat Magic Eraser’s ease of use, as it makes it simple to remove (or mask) unwanted objects in your photos.
I’m going to show you five ways you can instantly boost your productivity on your Mac. You might not have thought your Mac was capable of these advanced features. But in my opinion, the Mac’s reputation for being un-customizable is misunderstood. Four of these tips depend on third-party productivity apps that will add radical new system features to your Mac.
I’ll show you how to get instant window snapping on the Mac, powerful screenshot and recording tools, a clever clipboard manager that should be built into macOS, a simple tip for opening apps faster, and a smart time-tracking tool that’ll keep you productive.
It’s Major League Soccer’s opening weekend, and Apple TV will show every match… and they all can be watched free.
And that’s only the start. Apple TV is the home for MLS and will have every live match from the 2023 season plus the playoffs. Apple promises to offer more free matches later in the month and throughout the season.
Here’s how to enjoy these games without paying so much as a dime. These can be enjoyed on a wide variety of devices, not only ones from Apple.
I have four top tips for Mastodon users after spending a few months on the hot new social media platform. There’s a healthy community of Apple writers, developers, creators and fans — even Phil Schiller — who have all jumped ship from Twitter.
I’ve previously written a detailed guide to getting started. I’ll start with some brief advice on picking an instance and move on to the pro tips I’ve picked up.
Add your COVID-19 vaccine card to Apple Wallet on your iPhone, and you can leave your physical card safe at home. Some places may require proof of vaccination to enter, like international airports, concert venues and cruise ships.
If your health care provider can share data with the Apple Health app, and if digital cards are considered valid proof of vaccination where you’re going, and if the stars are in the right place, too, you just might be able to go all-in on Apple Wallet. Let me show you how.
iPhone battery dying faster than you’d like? You can see exactly what’s using up your iPhone battery in the Settings app. It will show you which apps use more power than others, what services run in the background, and what drains your battery most over the course of the week.
If you suspect your phone doesn’t last as long as it used to, or notice that it’s charging very slowly, this will help you diagnose the problem.
Keep reading to find out whether you should quit all your iPhone apps when you’re done using them (you shouldn’t) and how you can keep apps and email from running in the background.
A lot of healthcare providers have terrible websites. Apple’s Health app, on the other hand, is very well organized and intuitive to use. You can add your medical records to the Apple Health app for easy access to all your health history, medications, test results and data. If your healthcare provider supports this feature, it’s incredibly convenient having all your information in one place. Once it’s in the Health app, you can easily add medication reminders and share your information with doctors, close family members and friends.
I’ve juggled between a few healthcare providers and I’ve never found one with a comprehensible, user-friendly website. If you have the right healthcare provider, and the stars are in the right place too, you should be able to connect them.
You can instantly translate text anywhere on your iPhone and Mac. You don’t need to futz around retyping or copying text into a Google Translate tab — you can select text and get translations from 11 languages wherever you are.
It’s extremely fast and it works everywhere: not just text on the web, in email and in apps; but also inside pictures, videos and directly from the camera, too. Let me show you how it works.
How do you use BeReal, one of the top new social media apps? It’s simple: You and your friends get one (and only one) opportunity to post a picture a day, all at the same time. You can see what everyone’s up to in this small slice of the day.
It’s a social media app like no other. Let me walk you through what it’s like to create an account and use BeReal.
Your iPhone automatically syncs the details of any Wi-Fi network you join with other devices linked to your Apple ID. Thanks to this handy feature, your Mac or other Apple devices will seamlessly join that network without you doing anything. And iOS also makes it easy to share Wi-Fi passwords with other people who are using iPhones or iPads. You can even turn your home’s Wi-Fi password into a QR code for easy sharing.
However, there will be situations when you need to retrieve a Wi-Fi password for sharing with friends who don’t use an iPhone. When that’s the case, follow the steps below to discover the password of a saved Wi-Fi network on your iPhone or Mac.
When you pick up a classic Macintosh (or a vintage computer of any kind) that hasn’t been used in a while, you need to check it out before plugging it in and turning it on. Capacitors on old motherboards fail and leak over time; you DO NOT want to run power to a computer if this has happened; you could easily fry the motherboard.
Collecting old computers is a lot of fun. You can use old versions of Mac OS in emulators online, but it’s nothing compared to the experience of setting up a heavy machine on your desk, hearing the fans and disk drives whir to life and watching a fuzzy CRT display fade in from black. If you’re new to this (rather expensive) hobby, you can also check out my earlier piece on how to get started — what to look for, what to watch out for and where to shop.
So, you are the new custodian of a classic computer. What should you do before you power it on for the first time?
HomePod 2 and (surprise!) HomePod mini both include temperature and humidity sensors. These can be used by Apple’s Home app to control HomeKit accessories. Or just tell you how hot or cold it is in your living room.
Here’s how to use the sensors in Apple’s large and small smart speakers.
The Apple Watch borrows a lot from the iPhone, but the biggest difference between them is down to the extra buttons. They each do different things whether you click, double-click or hold them down. What do the Apple Watch buttons do?
This guide was written before watchOS 10 changed and moved a lot of these features. See our updated guide if you’re confused why your Watch suddenly works differently.
It’s annoying when a book you want to read doesn’t have an audiobook version — they’re great while you’re driving, doing dishes or folding laundry. Apple is now offering authors AI-generated audiobooks of their work. Novels you otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear, you can now find in the Apple Books app. Let me show you how you can find and listen to them if you’re curious.
iPhone users can now find a parking space with Apple Maps. Starting Monday, the navigation application has SpotHero built in, giving parking options for more than 8,000 locations across North America.
The feature is free, though the spaces are not. Here’s how to use it.
Most people don’t really use AM and FM radios anymore, but streaming live content is hardly dead. Lots of podcasts do live streams — and you can still tune into radio stations online. Broadcasts, an app by independent developer Steven Troughton-Smith, makes listening to live music and streaming radio on your iPhone very easy.
Let me show you how it works.
After Apple killed Dark Sky on January 1, many fans found themselves lamenting the loss of the groundbreaking weather app that offered hyperlocal forecasts. Luckily, you can re-create Dark Sky’s main features using a competing app called Carrot Weather. Alternatively, you can quickly tweak Apple’s built-in Weather app so it acts more like Dark Sky.
Let me show you how to enjoy Dark Sky’s beautiful user interface, and its uncannily accurate weather alerts, using other weather apps.
I have a bunch of pro tips to help you organize the Notes and Reminders piling up in your iPhone. Apple has added tons of powerful new features over time, making them comprehensive tools for all the goings-on in your life.
With tagging, you can quickly filter and search through a big folder of notes or a long to-do list. You can easily put together a bunch of filters by date, location and tag to create a smart list of everything that needs your attention in Reminders. You can even set up template Reminders lists that you can copy at any time.
Let me show you how to set it all up.
Years ago I was a regular Mac user who switched to PC for a long time. When I fully re-immersed myself in the Apple ecosystem, an old annoyance came right back — all those unwanted apps launching for no apparent reason on startup, slowing things down.
Like many folks, I don’t restart my Mac very often these days because Sleep mode has its benefits. So having to close a bunch of apps is not a massive annoyance. But for anyone who wants a fix, there are easy ways to disable startup items.
And if those don’t work, you can try a couple of tricks to get rid of hidden launch agents.
As soon as AirPods Pro (2nd generation) launched, I ordered them. I got them into the shipping queue so fast, in fact, I skipped any option that looked like it might take extra time or add expense. That included “Personalize them for free,” which would have done neither.
Apple has been letting users monogram AirPods cases with letters and numbers since 2019. It added emojis the following year. Now you can even choose your own Memoji via the Apple Store app.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that whatever you have etched on the case shows up on your devices wherever your earbuds are indicated, like when you pair them. Now I wish I’d monogrammed mine because it’s so much easier to identify your own personal AirPods.
The iPhone setup process gets easier every year. So easy, in fact, that there are only a few things you need to do to move from your old iPhone to a new one. You can even directly transfer your data from an Android phone. Setting up a new iPhone from scratch isn’t much harder — you just have a few extra steps you need to go through.
There are still a few tricks that will help things run smoothly, though. Let’s see how to set up your new iPhone the right way.
Stage Manager in iPadOS 16 makes Apple’s tablets act much more like a Mac. The optional multitasking system puts applications into floating, resizable, overlapping windows.
Even better, the system can also be used on external displays, greatly increasing the available space to work in.
Here’s how to get started using Stage Manager.
Perhaps you, like many others, would like to move away from Twitter. If you read news, webcomics or blogs, you can follow all the same stuff with an RSS reader. But if you want to follow people in your community and talk to others online with the same interests, there’s a Twitter alternative you may have heard about: Mastodon. It’s a full-blown Twitter clone that a lot of people you may know are moving to.
Recent changes at Twitter did not instill confidence in the platform’s future. That’s about the shortest and most diplomatic way I can summarize the cavalcade of poor decision-making that has trickled down from their new CEO, he-who-shall-not-be-named, Rocket Car Tunnel Guy. It’s the last straw for a lot of people.
Despite the memes you may have seen, signing up for Mastodon isn’t that hard. There are just a few things you need to consider. Let me show you how to use Mastodon.