How-To - page 19

The other day I was walking with music blasting through my AirPods when I almost stepped in front of a speeding ambulance.

Luckily, the magical Sound Recognition feature on my iPhone was turned on and my AirPods recognized the wailing sirens. They silenced the music and piped the sirens into my ears instead, saving my bacon. It was amazing and quite magical.

Your iPhone can also listen and alert you for crying babies, running water, knocks on the door, barking dogs and more.

Here’s how to use it.

If you’re uncomfortable with social media apps tracking your movements, here’s how to stop them using your iPhone’s built-in Location Services.

Or if you’re moving to a different city or to a new job, it can be annoying seeing travel suggestions to the wrong place. Resetting your location history will start from a clean slate.

If you find yourself traveling to a country with an authoritarian government, as everyone attending this year’s Olympics were, clearing your phone’s location history is a safe bet.

These moves may also protect you from shady data brokers, who spy on and sell your movements.

Here’s how to do it.

Your iPhone battery has run out, you absolutely must make a call or text, and there’s no wall socket anywhere. If you have an iPad, the solution is easy: Connect the iPhone to the tablet.

Using your iPad to give your handset an emergency charge is a trick you might not have thought of. But maybe it’ll get you out of a jam sometime.

Apple’s MagSafe Battery Pack now wirelessly charges iPhones up to 50% more quickly. Ever since the external battery launched in 2021, it topped out at 5W. But now it can wirelessly juice up an iPhone at 7.5W.

Even better, getting the improvement doesn’t require buying a new one — anyone who has the power bank can upgrade it. Here’s what to do.

iOS 11 added screen recording to the iPhone and iPad, allowing you to make videos of your device’s screen. You can use it to copy videos you can’t just download, record game play, show someone how to use an app and more. Personally, I use it most often to record bugs and crashes in the apps I use so I can submit bug reports.

But did you know that you can record a voiceover, too? Here’s how.

Apple added Find My to AirPods in 2021, and it’s causing problems for resellers of these wireless headphones. Many people are unaware that their AirPods now support Activation Lock, which means they are locked to their user’s Apple ID. This must be deactivated when selling or giving the devices away or no one else can use them.

Here’s how to turn off Activation Lock on your AirPods.

The iPhone is renowned for its many accessibility features. Accessibility settings can make text on the screen bigger, buttons easier to identify, animations less jarring and sound easier to hear.

An accessibility feature that is useful for everyone is Spoken Content. You can have your phone read out loud anything you have on-screen. This feature was designed for people who have trouble reading small text, but you will find it handy even if you don’t — in lots of situations.

You can have recipes read to you while your hands are busy cooking, quickly hear how to pronounce a word you don’t know — that’s what I use it for most of all — and more. You can even hear what you’re typing as you write.

Here’s how to turn on Spoken Content.

Nothing says springtime is here like a visit from the Easter Beagle. Snoopy and his friends are back in It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, showing now on Apple TV+. Watch now to enjoy this and many other Peanuts holiday specials on Apple’s streaming video service.

Here’s what you need to watch it.

When it premieres today, Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+ won‘t require a subscription. And it’ll stay that way for a while. The show presents two marquee games a week, along with live pre- and postgame coverage.

Here’s how to watch baseball games on Apple’s streaming service for free — without needing an Apple device or an Apple TV+ subscription.

Twitter made creating a GIF as easy as posting an image. Using the iPhone camera, users can capture a short video in the social-networking service’s app that is automatically converted into a GIF.

Here’s how to make your own GIFs with the Twitter app. It’s easy and fun.

Your iPad is a powerful computer, and becomes even more so if you attach a keyboard to it. Fortunately, it’s easy. The only complication is there are a bunch of different options.

Let’s go through the possibilities so you can pick the one that’s best for you.

What makes people start collecting vintage Macs? There are many reasons. Some folks want to play abandoned games or use old software on original hardware. Some simply don’t know how to transfer files, and thus keep their old machines as a giant backup, just in case.

I collect old Macs because I care deeply about history. I want to have an informed perspective on the past so I can better understand trends of user-interface design and the evolution of technology.

My first vintage computer was a Macintosh Classic I bought on eBay for about $80. After lifting it out of its shipping box, I reached around the back to flip on the power switch and watch it boot. I loved hearing the whir of the hard drive, the fans humming and the delightful blip!-blip!-blip! noise the disk drive made when reading a floppy.

Apple computers are highly collectible. They span the entire history of personal computing. The company’s unwavering design philosophy, always pushing ease of use, means even the oldest and weirdest Apple computers are never hard to figure out. The historical lineup spans all different kinds of form factors and designs. Not to mention, they look rad.

So, you want to collect old Apple computers, too? Where do you start, and what do you want? Here’s a quick guide to buying classic Macs. These tips should get you started and help you avoid common pitfalls. (If you want to go even deeper, we also provide some links to further reading on the subject.)

One of the new features in iOS 15.4, released earlier this week, is a new, gender-neutral voice for Siri.

Apple developed the gender-neutral voice in response to criticism for using female voices as the default for the virtual assistant. If you want Siri to use a voice that is not explicitly female or male — maybe if you don’t identify that way yourself, or if you just want a nongendered voice assistant — now you have the option.

Here’s how to switch to the new voice on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

It’s now possible to set your iPad’s volume buttons to reflect that you are holding the tablet in landscape rather than portrait.

It’s an optional change, but one many iPad users have been asking for.

New in iOS 15.4, released today, Apple is extending Face ID to authenticate your face while wearing a mask. In my testing, it has increased the reliability and the number of situations in which Face ID works.

This feature is arriving late into the pandemic — it would have been great to have this for the past couple of years — but as new COVID variants surge, we may still need it for the foreseeable future. Plus, in some countries, wearing a mask when you’re sick has been standard for many years.

Here’s how to set up Face ID with a mask on your iPhone.

As Ukraine valiantly fights off a terrifying and unjustified Russian invasion, some 1.5 million of its citizens have been forced to flee in search of safety. More than 38.5 million have stayed behind — many of them to fight for their country — and a growing number are now without water, power and food.

Some are working in their bath tubs — the safest place in their homes — while others are sheltering underground as the cities around them are bombarded by Russian missiles and turned into ruble. It is a crisis, the likes of which Europe didn’t think it would have to endure again after World War II.

Ukrainians need all the help they can get. If you want to do your bit, you can donate to one of many charities that are now working to support citizens by providing food and water, blankets and clothes, and other essential supplies. Here’s how to get started.

We’re just a day away from Apple’s big “Peek Performance” event, which is expected to bring upgraded iPhone, iPad and Mac models. Cupertino could also have other sweet surprises up its sleeve — like a new desktop display.

Whatever the case may be, you won’t want to miss it if you’re an Apple fan. And you don’t have to! Here’s how to stream the enter March 8 event live.

Concealed in Wednesday’s invite to the Apple spring event is an augmented reality Easter egg. It’s a bonus to make the invite seem cool, and perhaps get Mac fans excited about what’s coming.

The graphic for the March 8 event has an Apple floating in space. And it looks even better in AR.

Don’t you just hate having to give visitors your long and complicated Wi-Fi password? Instead, make connecting to your network quick and easy by turning your password into a QR code that can be scanned in an instant. But if you prefer a built-in iOS method, you should also know how to share WiFi on iPhone, which allows quick and secure sharing without the need for QR codes. Learn more here.

We’ll show you how.

Keeping large numbers of browser tabs open is such a common habit that Apple created a system to organize them. Safari Tab Groups let you put open tabs into logical collections so you can more easily work with them. And the same groups are available across all your Apple devices.

The system gets a little complicated. But here’s how to get started with Safari Tab Groups.

If you’re using one of Apple’s newest iPhone models, you should be enjoying spectacular battery life — the best you can get from a modern smartphone. But if you’re not, the likely culprit is its super-speedy 5G connectivity.

5G consumes significantly more power than 4G, but there are some things you can do to minimize its impact on iPhone 12 and iPhone 13. We’ll show you how.

The blood oxygen sensor featured in Apple Watch Series 6 and 7 is “not intended for medical use,” Apple says. That seems odd, considering that low blood oxygen is a serious medical condition. If the watch’s monitor is not for medical use, then what exactly is it for?

In this post, we’ll look at what blood oxygen is, how Apple Watch measures it, how the device compares to medical-grade alternatives, and what you can actually use it for.

Just like any other electronic gadget, Apple Pencil can sometimes experience issues that prevent it from working as intended. The good news is that it’s quick and easy to fix almost any Apple Pencil problem.

Try these simple tricks to eliminate connectivity problems, stuttering and more when your Apple Pencil starts acting up.

AirPods Pro aren’t your average wireless headphones. Apple packed in a whole bunch of brilliant features that allow you to enjoy clearer FaceTime calls, quieter flights, and more. One of those is the brilliant Conversation Boost.

Designed for those who are hard of hearing and introduced last August, Conversation Boost allows AirPods Pro to function a little like hearing aids. When it’s active, it amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to.

Here’s how to use it.

Not a good time to send that important message to a colleague in Slack? The widely used communication platform lets you schedule messages to send later on desktop and mobile. You simply choose the date and time, and Slack takes care of the rest.

The feature comes in particularly handy if you work with colleagues in other time zones and don’t want to bother them after hours. Here’s how to send Slack messages later on iPhone, iPad and Mac so they arrive at appropriate times.