When you back up your iPhone before upgrading to iOS 9, you have a couple of choices. You can use iCloud or iTunes.
For your best, most comprehensive backup, connect your iPhone (or iPad) to iTunes. Seriously, iTunes backs up almost everything — and it’s your best bet for downloading iOS 9 when the upgrade becomes available today.
Here’s how to do it.
Update: Apple has delayed deployment of watchOS 2, possibly for a day or more, after discovering a bug that’s taking longer to fix than expected.
Are you ready? It’s finally time to update your Apple Watch to watchOS 2. The software upgrade will let you run third-party apps right on the Watch without your iPhone, add nightstand mode and new watch faces (including your own photos), and much more.
If you’re ready to make it so, read on and get all these new features on your wrist today.
Whether you’re getting a new iPhone 6s or not, you’re going to want to upgrade to iOS 9 to take advantage of everything Apple’s new mobile operating system has to offer.
iOS 9 is ready to revolutionize your mobile life, but there are a few things you should do before making the leap. Here’s how to get your iPhone (or iPad) ready for its iOS 9 upgrade — the right way.
Sometime in the last few weeks, I’ve had a big problem with Apple Music.
Whenever I’d start an album or playlist, I’d only hear the first song I chose, over and over and over.
I’d hit the Up Next list button and see the same song, endlessly repeated.
The fix is an easy one, but man did it frustrate me for weeks. Here’s how you can make sure you’re not stuck on repeat.
Imagine working on a sketch with a reference photo right next to it, or writing a paper while copying citations from an iBook. Or, heck, running YouTube in Safari while writing a post about Split View on the iPad (hypothetically).
iOS 9 brings this multitasking joy to your iPad, provided you have the latest and greatest iPad Air 2, since it’s the only device that can currently manage the power needed to run such a double screen.
So the next time you need to FaceTime with your boss in San Francisco but still take Notes on your iPad, you can easily make it happen.
Here’s how.
Our digital lives are busy. We send iMessages while we’re browsing the web, type in phone numbers and addresses while FaceTiming, and bounce between apps on our Macs constantly.
Now, with iOS 9 and a modern iPad, you can quickly browse the web, respond to a text message, or jot something down in a note, then slide that app away so you can focus on your original app.
This feature, called Slide Over, is going to make using your iPad a lot more fun and useful.
Here’s how to make it happen, assuming you have an iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad mini 2, or iPad mini 3.
If the rumor mill has it right, new iPhones are right around the corner. But that doesn’t mean you should relegate your current model to the junk drawer once you trade up: You can turn your old iPhone into money in one of several ways.
We’ve all been using a passcode to secure our iPhones and iPads since forever, right? You’ve had the option to use an alphanumeric passcode since iOS 7, but if you chose to use a simple numeric code, you were limited to four digits.
Not anymore! Apple added the ability to use a six-digit passcode in iOS 9, and this quick settings tweak will make your iPhone or iPad far more secure.
Finally! Apple has added a small yet incredibly useful feature to the way iOS 9 handles Bluetooth devices.
In the past, you’d have to drop into the Bluetooth settings, tap on an offending Bluetooth device, and tell your iPhone or iPad to Forget the device, just to re-pair it or use the built in speakers. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent doing that, especially when I get a call while connected to a speakerphone-capable audio device; I have a lot of Bluetooth speakers.
Now however, Apple’s added a little extra so you can disconnect from a Bluetooth device instead of Forget it entirely, making it much easier to, say, stop using a specific speaker and return to your iPhone’s built-in speaker.
Here’s how.
iOS has so many settings in one app, it’s kind of ridiculous.
Whether you want to change preferences for an app or the operating system itself, a trip to the crowded Settings app can often be a frustrating experience.
iOS 9 — still in beta — has a solution for that information overload though: Search.
Here’s how to access it.
Although it looks like Apple is about to turn the Apple TV into a PlayStation-killing video game console, it’s not the indisputable king of the hill of streaming media boxes right now. Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast … all have their advantages over the Apple TV except for one killer feature: AirPlay Mirroring, which allows the Apple TV to stream anything running on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.
If you don’t have an Apple TV, you can’t use AirPlay Mirroring, right? Actually, you can — as long you have a Raspberry Pi.
We love how easy it is to set up an alarm from the Apple Watch. All you have to do is say, “Hey Siri, wake me up at 7 a.m.,” and the digital assistant will put that order in for you.
But this comes a slight inconvenience: What happens to alarms after you’re done using them? Well, if you’re like me, you just turn them off to stop the horrendous buzzing on your wrist and then forget about them. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Here’s how to clear off all of those old, unused alarms with a quickness.
Are you getting something like following message on your Mac every time you log in?
talagent wants to use the "local items" keychain. please log in with password.
If so, you’re in luck, because we have a fix. Here’s how to get this utterly annoying pop-up out of your face.
iOS 8 introduced the idea of showing your most-contacted contacts in the multitasking screen. You’d simply double click on the Home button to see the list of the most recent apps as well as a row of the folks you contacted the most across the top.
If you’re looking for that feature in iOS 9, you might have noticed that the contacts are no longer in the multitasking screen. Never fear, though, they’ve just moved.
If you use Gmail – and let’s face it, most of us do – one of the biggest draws of using an external app, like OS X Mail, is being able to get Notifications when new emails arrive. Unfortunately, many email apps don’t support Gmail’s best features natively, like labeling, search or automatically filtered inboxes.
If you’d like to get Notifications when a new Gmail comes in, but continue to use the Gmail web app instead of a dedicated client, here’s how.
Taptic feedback on the Apple Watch felt a little weird at first, but we’ve come to love its gentle nudges to let us know something is going on. But some Cult of Mac staffers have noticed that after time, the taptic feedback has started to feel not so … tappy anymore.
If you’re having this problem, here are a couple quick and easy ways you can try to put the pep back on your wrist.
In previous versions of iOS, finding your photos was a bit tricky, especially as you started to amass them in the thousands, what with having a high-quality camera in your pocket at all times.
In iOS 9, currently in public beta, the Photos app has gotten a new way to find the photo you’re looking for amidst the haystack of your Photo Roll. Here’s how to use this new feature.
Using the mobile web is an uneven affair in terms of what you’ll see once your little blue progress bar slides across the page to let you know your page has loaded.
Some sites give you a crippled version of the original, making sure you can’t find any information on them at all. Looking for a tiny link to load the desktop site can be an exercise in frustration.
iOS 9, currently in public beta, has an answer to this issue baked right into Safari. Here’s how to make it happen.
iOS 8.4.1 might have fine-tuned Apple Music, but some users are complaining about about battery issues after updating to Apple’s latest mobile operating system.
If you’re afflicted, the good news is that iOS 9 is right around the corner. The bad news? That doesn’t help you now, and iOS 9 will likely have its own host of bugs that Apple needs to address. Here are some tips to help you eke out as much battery life in iOS 8.4.1 as possible.
Closed captioning is useful to those with a hearing impairment to make the audio of videos accessible. Subtitles help those who speak a different language understand what’s going on in a film not in their original language.
You can enable these features on your Apple TV, but it’s not super-intuitive — there’s no single button to make it happen.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t easy. Here’s how to turn on Apple TV subtitles, even if you just want to watch a scary movie at night and have the sound turned down.
WhatsApp is a pretty popular messaging app that went from 200 million daily active users in April of 2013 to 800 million of them as of April 2015.
Unlike competitor SnapChat, however, WhatsApp will save every photo and video file sent to you to your Camera Roll. This could make for some embarrassing moments when you’re swiping through your photos to show mom your latest cat pictures.
It could also start to clog up your iPhone, really, with all that racy video your friends keep sending you.
To avoid these situations, you can disable the “feature.” Here’s how.
If you travel a lot, iOS 9 and El Capitan have a hidden feature just for you.
Apple’s latest operating systems (both of which are currently in beta) offer a way to keep tabs on airline flights. Here’s how to access this hidden new feature.
I wanted to find photos from my vacation a couple of weeks ago, so I figured I’d try out Siri’s new iOS 9 functionality.
“Siri,” I said, “show me photos from Hawaii.”
Dutifully, Apple’s updated digital assistant pulled up photos from my trip to Oahu a couple of years ago. They’re lovely, but I wanted more recent pictures.
“Siri, show me photos from Hawaii last week,” I said, reasonably.
As soon as I finished speaking, there they were. Siri had launched my Photos app on my iPhone and brought up the photos I’d taken while in Kona. Great stuff.
Here are some other ways you can get Siri to find the photos you want in the huge pile you have sitting on your iPhone.
Apple’s new Wallet app replaces Passbook in iOS 9, currently in public beta. Just like Passbook, when you wave your iPhone at an Apple Pay kiosk, it will only let you choose your default credit card and pay for the goods or services you bought.
In iOS 9 beta, you’ll also be able to choose any of your other provisioned credit cards from your Apple Pay account without even unlocking your iPhone or accessing the Wallet app.
Here’s how.
iOS 9 brings a bunch of battery-boosting features, most of which work right out of the box. But there’s one battery-saving feature you’ll have to enable yourself.
Called Low Power Mode, this new feature should prove super-useful when you need to eke out just a bit more time with your device — provided you’re not doing anything intense.