It’s World Backup Day, a good opportunity to learn how to clear iCloud storage of old backup files made by iPhone and iPad. Are you running out of iCloud storage space? Worried about privacy? You might want to delete some old backups from the cloud.
The good news is erasing these files is easy if you know the steps to follow. Here’s how.
Congratulations — you got a new iPad! Whether it’s the entry-level iPad that brings the essential features to an affordable price, the iPad Air with the powerful M2, the pocketable iPad mini or the top-of-the-line iPad Pro, you’ll want to set up your new device with the least amount of fuss.
We’re here to help you do just that with a ton of little tips and tweaks that will make sure you’re off and using that new iPad as quickly as possible. From backing up your old iPad (if you had one already) to getting up and running with a brand-new iPad from scratch, we’ve got you covered.
If your iPhone or iPad locks up, iOS 16/iPadOS 16 will let get out of the jam by rebooting the device with a simple Siri command. It’s the easiest method I’ve found to get the handset or tablet going again when there’s a problem with the touchscreen, or the device is just misbehaving.
Here’s all you have to do.
For many people, iPhone 12 will be radically different from previous iPhone models. Despite this, the iPhone setup process hasn’t changed much. However, while you might find yourself on familiar ground, there are still plenty of little things you really ought to do before you fire up your new phone for the first time (or pretty soon thereafter).
Let’s take a look at all the things you can do to get your iPhone set up exactly how you want it.
Everyone in Apple’s beta program is running a pre-release version of the next iOS version. Which is great, until you get a new iPhone or iPad. Then you can’t restore the new device from the backup made on your previous one because the old device is running a newer OS.
If you find yourself in this situation, don’t panic — there are a couple of possible solutions. We’ll walk you through both.
Oh man! You just got your amazing new iPad Pro, tore it out of the box, and wondered how you tricked somebody into dropping $130 on that tiny white Apple Pencil. Now it’s time to get things set up. Thankfully, this is an easy process, especially if you already use an iPhone or iPad with iCloud.
So easy, in fact, that there are just a few things you need to do to move from your old iPad to a new one, or to migrate from an iPhone. And setting up a new iPad Pro from scratch isn’t much harder — gone are the days of manually copying passwords just to get to the home screen.
Still, following these iPad Pro setup and customization tips will make sure you get the most out of your new machine. Let’s get started.
Every time I’ve written about bookmarklets, I’ve had to add a section on how to add them to Safari in iOS. On the Mac, you just drag them up to the bookmark bar, and you’re done. On iOS, the situation was so complex that I wrote a whole how-to just so I could link to that, instead of writing several paragraphs every time. But there is a way to drag and drop bookmarklets on iOS.
I’ve tested it on iOS 12 and iOS 13, and it’s amazing.
My real wallet is a shrine to minimalism. A bit of cash, a few cards, and zero old receipts or spent metro tickets. I keep it slimline, even with the aggressively European coin pocket included therein. My Apple Wallet, on the other hand, is as cluttered as the horizontal surfaces in my mother’s house, covered as they are with crystal animals, photo frames and lace doilies.
The problem is twofold. First, Apple Wallet never gets thicker, no matter how many cinema tickets and boarding passes you stuff in there. Second, how do you remove all those passes anyway? One at a time, with a swipe and a tap and a confirmation for each? No thanks.
Fortunately, there’s a (slightly) quicker way.
On a podcast this week, I heard the hosts complaining that they get all kinds of spam notifications from Apple. Their iPhones pop up promotional alerts about Apple Pay, apps, Apple Music, Apple Pay, podcasts and more.
“WTF?” I thought, because I don’t get anything like that. I checked through my notification preferences, sure that I’d find something in there, but no. So why wasn’t I getting all this Apple spam?
Because Apple hid the setting. You can turn off all those junky Apple spam notifications. You just have to know where to look.
Summer! That time of year where you stay in somebody else’s home via Airbnb, crank up their air conditioning and wear a sweater in the house, even though it’s 90 degrees outside. Aka the season where you leave the limitless comfort of your home Wi-Fi, to venture out into the world using just a restricted cellular plan.
Summer revives that old pioneering spirit of hardship, the bare essentials of living, and of making do with whatever you have. And just like the original English and Spanish invaders of the modern-day United States, you’ll have to do without the comforts of on-demand GPS and automatic app updates.
Today we’ll see how you can stretch your meager data allowance while traveling.
Siri may still be hopeless, but one thing it’s always been good at is setting alarms. In fact, I don’t use Siri much at all any more1, but for alarms and timers, I use it exclusively. Even with iOS 12’s great 3-D Touch timer widget, Siri is quicker.
Today we’ll see how to tell Siri to create an alarm, set a timer, how to edit an alarm, and how to delete one.
Have you got some embarrassing entries in your Safari browsing history? Or maybe it’s a question of security: You don’t want your iPad’s history to fall into the wrong hands, etc.
Smutty jokes aside, there are plenty of legit reasons to clear your Safari history on your iPhone or iPad. And the good news is that Safari for iOS has some great tools for doing so. For example, did you know that you can clear just the last hour of browsing history, or the past couple of days?
Get ready to learn how to sanitize your Safari history on iOS devices.
The Photos app’s Faces feature is fantastic. It does a pretty good job of gathering all the pictures of a person together, for both browsing and search. And it’s really easy to add new faces to the list. But what about managing those faces? What if the Photos app’s AI added some photos of a stranger into the photos of your husband?
It’s easy to tell your iPhone or iPad that a photo does not contain the person it thinks it does. Unfortunately, it’s a real pain to find the setting you need to tweak.
Contrary to what you might expect, merging PDFs is easier on your iPhone than on your Mac. On the desktop, you first need to open both PDFs in the Preview app, and then work out how to combine the two of them. On the iPhone or iPad, you can select your PDFs in the Files app (or in the Mail app, or anywhere else you find them), and use a quick shortcut to combine and save them in one go.
It’s instant, foolproof, and Just Works™. Let’s see just how easy it is to merge PDFs on iOS.
There’s still something kinda magical-feeling about printing documents from your iPhone. Maybe someone sends you a long Word or Pages document that you prefer to read on paper. Or maybe you must sign a hard-copy version of a PDF and send it back via real paper mail.
You may be used to facing a task like this in your iPhone’s email app, and putting it off until you get to your Mac or PC. But chances are, if you own a fairly modern printer, you can just print right from the iPhone. In fact, once you get a taste for it, you’ll prefer printing from iOS. You will never need to deal with drivers, or pick up your 100-page print job only to find every sheet printed too small.
The answer is AirPrint. It’s how printers always should have worked.
Scenario: Your divorce papers finally came through, and you can’t wait to sign the things. The trouble is, your spouse already took your office and your home, and you have no way to print or fax the documents. Or perhaps you need to stick your autograph on some other document, but all you have is your iPhone or iPad.
No worries. With recent versions of iOS, it’s easier than ever to sign a PDF form and return it to the sender. In fact, you don’t even need to leave the Mail app to do it. If you’re looking for a PDF converter iPhone users can rely on, check out this guide for more details.
This tip is exhibit A in the case for Apple being really, really good at hiding features. I imagine if you went around to Apple’s house for dinner, and the company asked you to set the table, you’d have some real trouble finding the cutlery. Maybe you’d open the cutlery drawer and see only the spoons. Then you’d open the drawer below, expecting that Apple had just set things out differently, as usual.
But in that second drawer you’d find nothing but fruit. WTF Apple? And then you’d notice that the top drawer is a little thicker than it appears when open. You try the top drawer again. This time you see that if you press down on one of the wooden spoons, the others move aside — animated a little too slowly — to reveal the knives and spoons. But where the hell are the forks?
Back to today’s tip. It’s a combination of two tricks you may already know:
What do you think today’s tip might be?
Unlike some companies, Apple doesn’t want to sucker you into subscriptions by making it really hard to cancel them.
In fact, the latest iOS update makes it easier than ever to manage your recurring app subscriptions. Here’s how to dive in and take control of your iOS subscriptions.
Problem: Your iPhone is full of downloaded music. There’s probably a lot of it that you don’t need taking up space on there, but deleting it is a pain. The solution? As ever, it’s hidden inside the Settings app. There’s a dedicated page just to solve this exact problem, listing your downloaded music and making it easy to delete. Let’s check it out.
After enduring a rough quarter, Apple tells the world what went wrong. But even more interesting is what went right — and what that means for Apple’s future.
Get our take on what you really need to know from Apple’s latest earnings call, plus the rest of the week’s best Apple news, reviews and how-tos. You’ll find it all in this week’s free issue of Cult of Mac Magazine.
Did you ever look at the five-minute intervals on the Calendar app’s time picker and think, “I really wish I could set that appointment at 09:03 and not 09:05”?
No, neither did I (nor did anyone else that isn’t some kind of control-freak psychopath). But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Today we’ll see how to tweak the Calendar’s time wheel to show one-minute increments instead of the usual five-minute segments.
You know how iOS’ accessibility features often prove handy for all users? Like Live Listen, which lets you turn your AirPods into remote listening devices? Or a combo of settings that resurrects an iPhone with a broken screen?
The same is true for Screen Time. This feature tracks how long you spend using apps every day, and can help you limit that time. But you can also use Screen Time to password-protect any app on your iPhone or iPad.
It’s happening again! You cheaped out and bought that 32GB iPhone or iPad a few years back, and it’s full up, again. But wait — before you go deleting your photos, or uninstalling apps at random until you recover enough space, take a look at this how-to. You might be able to recover tens of gigabytes from apps you’d totally forgotten about.
The iPad Pro is pro enough for almost anything, but one thing it still can’t handle is making a Skype or FaceTime call and recording it at the same time. This is a total pain for podcasters who like to travel light. Luckily, there’s a neat workaround.
Find out how to podcast from the road in the latest free issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Get it now on iTunes, or keep reading for the week’s best Apple news, reviews and how-tos.
Editor’s note: As of Feb. 10, 2010, the tip outlined below no longer works. However, we published a new post about an iOS shortcut that currently does work: “Finally — a YouTube download shortcut for iOS that actually works.” Enjoy.
Using Apple’s amazing new Shortcuts app, you can rip a video from YouTube, download it, and store it in a folder on your iPhone — all without using a computer.
Maybe you want to watch some clips on your commute without burning through your cellular data. Or perhaps you’re a language or music teacher, and you want to keep teaching materials offline instead of relying on your pupil’s Wi-Fi?
This shortcut can be triggered in Safari, and will save the YouTube video to your Camera Roll, iCloud Drive, Dropbox or other location of your choice. Let’s get started.