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.
Notes and Reminders, two stock apps that come with every iPhone, iPad and Mac, can do so much more than write shopping lists and apologies on Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
Email doesn’t often get new features. Sending an email still works basically the same as it has since the ’90s. But these days, people want modern features — like scheduling emails or undo send. In iOS 16, Apple brings a bunch of new features to the stock Mail app for the first time.
You can quickly take back an email if you forget to include an attachment, or schedule an important email way in advance. You also can get smart reminders to read email later, or alerts to send a follow-up. If you catch a typo right after sending an email, or if you want to send an invoice on a specific day and time, both features will soon be available.
Read on to see how it all works.
The iPhone 14 Pro can take incredible 48-megapixel photos that capture eagle-eye details at incredibly high resolution. To take 48MP pictures, you need to shoot in Apple’s ProRAW format, which pairs the lossless RAW format preferred by professional photographers with the iPhone’s computational photography data.
This means that your iPhone 14 Pro is capturing all of the sensor data, and the results can be stunning — better than anything possible with any previous iPhone. (The iPhone 13 Pro captured ProRAW images, but only sported a 12MP camera.)
ProRAW captures images at 8064 × 6048 resolution. That means you can crop in really far on your pictures and keep everything pixel-perfect. You can print your images on a huge 26-inch by 20-inch poster, even at a professional-quality 300 DPI. The high-resolution images also give you more control during the editing process, so you can tweak your most important images to your heart’s content.
There are some caveats, though. Images with ProRAW enabled take up three times the storage space, for one. And shooting pictures like this takes a little longer. (The image capture isn’t as instantaneous as we’re used to.) And for everyday snapshots, ProRAW results might even be less satisfying than simply letting the iPhone perform its computational photography magic.
Read on to see how it all works so you can start taking 48MP photos with your iPhone 14 Pro, then edit them effectively.
Live Captions, in iOS 16, generate subtitles of any audio playing in any app on your iPhone. Powered by the Neural Engine in Apple’s custom silicon, the capability to turn words from music and/or videos into real-time text is a boon to many users, in many different situations.
If you’re hard of hearing, for instance, the ability to see instant captions on the screen is a game changer. Or, if you don’t have headphones when you’re sitting in bed late at night and your partner is asleep – or you’re in any situation where you don’t want to make noise, like on the bus or in an office – you can turn on Live Captions to get subtitles.
The applications are endless and exciting. Here’s how to use Live Captions in iOS 16.
Lockdown Mode is a new option in iOS 16 that limits system features for maximum security. Apple designed it to protect its products from sophisticated spyware, like NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which has been used to target journalists, politicians, dissidents and activists around the world.
Spyware like Pegasus may seem like an unlikely threat. But for some, Lockdown Mode could be life or death. U.S. citizens need not worry at the moment, but it doesn’t take a wild imagination to picture how such spyware might be embraced by slightly more fascist administrations.
Right now, Lockdown Mode is meant for high-profile activists and journalists. And I mean real journalists — the kind who expose state secrets — not bloggers like me. Read on to find out how to enable Lockdown Mode and how it affects your device’s functionality.
Always-On display is a key new feature of the iPhone 14 Pro series. To ensure the feature does not consume a lot of battery power, Apple even added a dedicated co-processor to the A16 Bionic chip that powers the smartphone.
The Always-On display comes enabled by default on iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, which many users might find annoying. It apparently looks a bit too bright for some folks. It makes your iPhone battery drain more quickly. And some folks just don’t like the new functionality because it makes them think they’ve got a new notification, even when they don’t.
If you find yourself in the same boat, here’s how you can disable Always-On display on your new iPhone 14 Pro.
New in iOS 16 is the ability to follow your favorite sporting pastime with My Sports. It allows you to get the latest scores, read coverage from newspapers and magazines, see scheduled games and watch highlights.
It works across multiple apps, including Apple News, Apple TV and others. You can follow teams from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NWSL, WNBA and MLS. It also includes college football and basketball. Here’s how to set it up.
iOS 16 brings a lot of exciting changes, but no one seems to like the new Search button on the Home Screen.
It can clutter your aesthetic theme, it’s easy to press accidentally, and it’s not any faster than using the swipe-down gesture for search. Luckily, it’s possible to turn it off — read on to see how.
The iPhone 14 series goes up for preorder on Friday, and Apple’s latest and greatest handsets are likely to sell out quickly. You need do some early prep work if you want to get your hands on the iPhone 14 Plus or the new Pro models as soon as possible.
AirPods Pro 2 also up for early orders at the same time.
Here’s how to be completely ready to put in a preorder for either or both items.
One of the more surprising features in iOS 16 is the ability to cut out people from a picture (or a dog, a car, whatever’s in focus) and copy it into another app. You can send it in iMessage, paste it in a photo editing app, or use Universal Clipboard to paste it on a nearby iPad or Mac.
What’s it for? Well, it’s great for making stickers for WhatsApp and Snapchat, plus it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you’re putting together a YouTube thumbnail or making memes, it can significantly cut down the time you spend precisely cutting out edges, but it’s by no means precise enough to use professionally.
In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Facebook turning over a teenager’s private chats about her abortion to police, protecting your data is more urgent than ever.
Your iPhone and Apple Watch, and third-party apps you use on them, efficiently capture data that could be used against you at a later date by law enforcement. We’re talking things like location data, ovulation records, text messages and your web-browsing history.
Keeping all your data private after Roe v. Wade to avoid prosecution could prove highly important. Luckily, Apple gives you powerful controls over how and where your data is stored. You just might need to adjust certain settings for maximum privacy.
Read on to dive deep into data security recommendations for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac.
There is a lot of explicit content out there on the internet, or so I am told.
Before handing a device off to a child, you may want to disable or limit access to the wide-open internet and App Store. Read on to learn how to block explicit content on iPhone and iPad.
Fortnite got kicked out of the App Store as part of a legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, but you can play it on your iPhone today for free. Microsoft added it to Xbox Cloud Gaming so the combat game is playable on iOS and iPadOS devices.
Setting up your iPhone or iPad to play Fortnite from the cloud rather than the App Store is different from what you’re used to. Not hard, just different. I’ll walk you through it.
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.
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.
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.)