Apple TV+ has turned out to be pretty good. Certainly, it’s a lot better than critics claimed. So, you may even want to share the shows with your family. And, thanks to Apple’s Family Sharing, this is not only possible, but easy.
You can all watch different shows at the same time, or you can just enjoy the lazy convenience of catching the latest episode of The Morning Show on whoever’s device is nearest. Let’s see how to share your Apple TV+ subscription with your family.
Since I wrote about Apple’s ongoing MacBook disaster last week, and then offered a bunch of alternatives to the current MacBook lineup, several readers got in touch to ask which — if any — older MacBooks we’d recommend. I haven’t bought a MacBook in years, so I did a little research, and asked around the Cult of Mac crew.
So, let’s find out which is the best (old) MacBook you can buy today.
The AirPods Pro come in a Qi-enabled wireless charging case, which means you can just drop it onto a charging mat, grab them a while later, and everything is topped up and ready to go. But the LED indicator on the case blinks off soon after you start charging. What’s up? How do you find out if your AirPods are full yet?
Apple’s current line of MacBooks is probably its worst laptop lineup in years. The keyboards are so broken that even the newest MacBook Air is covered under Apple’s keyboard repair program. There are too few ports, and too much heat. And if you want to upgrade any internal parts? You’ll have to buy a new MacBook. But what are the best MacBook alternatives?
If you want to ditch the MacBook, you will find plenty of options. However, none of them offer one essential element: macOS. Switching to another operating system is like moving house and having to leave everything but your clothes behind. But there are workarounds even for that. Let’s check out the best alternatives to the MacBook in 2019.
iOS 13 brought all kinds of neat new features to the Files app, aka the iOS Finder. But maybe the best of all these is the new column view, a very Mac-like view of all the files and folders stored on your iPad. It’s not just an easy-to-browse view, either. The Files app column view also introduces a preview panel with plenty of tricks of its own.
Did you know that you can scan paper documents into the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad? The app turns them into PDFs, and trims them to make them look as if you scanned them in a proper scanner. Maybe you read our how-to article on scanning into the Notes app, and you already know this. But in iOS 13, things get better: You also can search those scanned documents.
That’s right. You can scan a sheet of paper into Notes, and anything printed on it will become searchable, as if you typed it in yourself. Let’s see how to search scans.
You can add almost endless faces to your Apple Watch, and switch between them with a simple swipe on the screen. Maybe you have a carefully-crafted fitness face, an elegant, complication-free evening face, plus faces for shopping, hiking, commuting, and so on. But is this really an optimum strategy?
After a months or so using the Apple Watch Series 5, I’ve settled on something way simpler, and probably good enough for 90% of Apple Watch use cases. I call it the “Two-Face Mullet Strategy,” and you’re going to love it.
You’ve got your amazing new AirPods Pro, and now you have a set of perfectly good (if a little waxy) AirPods Normal just taking up mental space.
Should you keep them as spares? I guess that’s the safe route (just in case you misplace the Pros). But how about giving them away to a friend or family member? Today we’ll see how to unpair AirPods from your iCloud account so you can do just that. (Plus how to clean them before you pass them along.)
With the holiday season approaching, maybe you could make someone very happy.
The Apple Watch running cadence setting arrived in watchOS 5, but if you didn’t notice, you’re not alone. It tends to get buried in the myriad stats Cupertino provides for runners. Plus, there’s a lot of confusion about what it actually means and whether it’s useful.
But when you understand what your running cadence is telling you, it can help make you run faster and reduce your risk of injury. So it’s definitely worth taking the time to get your head around it. Here’s our handy guide.
Stressed? On edge? Struggling to block out the annoying construction work down the street? Or do you just hate silence, and the way it reminds you that your life is tick-ticking away? Then you need some room-filling ambient sounds.
How about a nice, relaxing rainstorm to help you fall asleep? Or some white noise to fill the space left by your grownup children when they left you behind to start their own lives? If you have a HomePod running iOS 13.2 or later, your smart speaker stands ready to help blank out the soul-bleeding silence of your empty life. You just need to ask.
Apple TV+ is here, and anyone can test it out for a week for free. After that, the $5-per-month charge will be billed automatically, just like any other Apple subscription you may have. Unless, of course, you get to watch Apple TV+ for free. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Apple’s new TV subscription service is pitched as a rival to Netflix, Amazon Prime and so on. It works on Apple devices. Plus, you can watch Apple TV+ on Samsung TVs, Roku boxes and in pretty much any web browser. Signing up is absurdly easy, but a few tips will help you get the most out of the service.
If you ever sat with a pair of earbuds, and a handful of interchangeable silicone tips, and felt a sense of apathy and confusion creep over you, then you’re going to love the new AirPods Pro Ear Tip Fit Test. This clever new feature uses the AirPods Pro’s own microphones to test how well the variously sized silicone tips fit in your ears.
It works really well. The only problem is, the results could be bad news.
You don’t need to dig into the Settings app every time you want to change the noise canceling settings of your AirPods Pro. There are two other ways to toggle setting which are much, much faster. Let’s check them out.
Your AirPods Pro controls are cleverly incorporated in the earbuds’ stems. The stems are touch-sensitive, and various squeezes or strokes will play or pause music, adjust the volume, answer phone calls, launch Siri, change noise cancellation settings and more.
Here’s how AirPods Pro controls work, and how to customize their settings.
One big difference between the Mac and iOS is that, on the Mac, open tabs stay open (more or less1), whereas on the iPad and iPhone, switching away to another app, or even another browser tab, can mean disaster. iOS dumps all those Safari tabs, and they must reload when you return.
For partially watched YouTube videos, this means you automatically go back to the beginning. But what if there was a way to force Safari to remember your watching progress, and reload the page to the exact spot you left off? There is now! I got sick of losing my spot in videos, so I made a bookmarklet that will save your current spot in a YouTube video. Even if you reboot your iPhone or iPad, it’ll reload in the exact same spot.
You know how when you swipe an email on your iPhone or iPad, and depending on the direction you swipe, you get a bunch of options? Mark as read, move, archive — that kind of thing. But how do you customize these options? And how do you access the ridiculously well-hidden option to archive and/or delete?
Let’s find out.
Maybe you like to keep your iPhone and Apple Watch in English, but you also like to dictate notes and messages in your mother tongue. Or perhaps you want to dictate your notes in English, but send iMessages to your family in Spanish. Or maybe your Apple Watch is just screwed up, and keeps trying to take dictation in a language you don’t speak.
Whatever the reason, it is easy to change the Apple Watch dictation language. Plus, you also can specify a different language for each and every app. Let’s see how.
In iPadOS and iOS 13, long-pressing a link does two things simultaneously. It brings up a contextual menu with options for sharing and so on, and it loads a preview of the linked web page. Apple calls this a link preview.
But what if you don’t want a link preview? Maybe you’re on a cellular connection and you don’t want to waste data by loading pages you won’t read. Or maybe you only need the link, and never want to see the page. What if it’s a link to a huge image, or an MP3? Or perhaps it’s a link in an email, and you want to use the contextual menu to check the URL for scams. In this last case, there’s no way you want that link to load. It could prove disastrous.
The good news is that you can disable link previews in iOS 13 with a single tap.
My Apple Watch Series 5 gets seriously good battery life. I can easily get 24 hours out of it, but I don’t really stress it by doing multiple daily workouts or by streaming audio directly to Bluetooth headphones. But what if your watch has trouble lasting the whole day? Or if you’re traveling, and not able to just stop and charge the watch whenever it needs a quick boost?
Today, we’ll check three settings that can prolong your Apple Watch battery life.
The Reminders app got a total revamp in iOS 13, making it way quicker and easier to add due dates, alerts and location-based notifications to new reminders. But it also added one killer new feature: Remind me when messaging.
This lets you add a contact to the reminder, and the next time you’re messaging that person, a notification will pop up.
In watchOS 6, your Apple Watch can monitor the noise levels around you, and warn you when things get too loud. This is an essential tool to help people who work in noisy environments avoid hearing damage, but it’s also a handy safeguard against excessive noise for anyone.
Here’s how to set up Apple Watch noise alerts.
Instant Markup is one of the best parts of the iOS screenshot tool, and in iOS 13 and iPadOS it’s better than ever. The tools are more flexible, you get more colors, and it even remembers your selections for next time. It still doesn’t offer all the advanced features of a markup app like Annotable (you can’t pixelate parts of the image, for example), but it’s more than good enough for most uses.
Let’s see what’s new in the iOS 13 screenshot markup tool.
Have you ever been part of one of those threads where your boss sends out a fairly benign yet pointless email, and then one of your less-smart co-workers hijacks the thread with reply-alls about dress code for the upcoming office team-building excursion? Before long, the thread is an embarrassing morass of arguments on whether sneakers count as casual shoes, and who will sit where during dinner.
Your moronic co-worker (hopefully) ends up getting a do-not-promote mark in their personnel file. While you, thanks to today’s tip, manage not only to stay above the fray, but to completely ignore it. That’s because you’re about to see how easy it is to mute an email thread so you never have to see it again.
You know how you can double-press the side button on your Apple Watch, and then wave it over a contactless terminal to pay with your credit card? Wouldn’t it be great if you could do the same with your Mac login password? Instead of having to type your password to authenticate yourself, you’d be able to double-tap the Apple Watch’s side button to do it instantly.
Well, now you can do exactly this — if you’re running macOS Catalina.
In iOS 13, Slide Over goes from being a useful-but-annoying novelty, to being an essential utility. Instead of only letting you dock one app window to the side of the screen, and sliding it out for a quick look or edit, Slide Over is now fully integrated.
In iOS 13, you can have multiple Slide Over panels, you can switch between them as easily as switching apps on an iPhone, you can open almost anything into a Slide Over pane, and you can easily turn a Slide Over app into a full-screen app. Here’s how it all works.