Safari’s Hide Distracting Items feature lets you remove ads from your iPhone, along with other elements on the page that irritate you. It doesn’t require an ad blocker or a paid extension — Apple built it right into the browser in iOS 18.
Hide Distracting Items is not an ad blocker per se, but if you are pestered by pop-ups and other items with no obvious close button, Hide Distracting Items can come to the rescue. Here’s how to use it — keep reading or watch our video.
February 5, 2008: Six months after the first-gen iPhone goes on sale, Apple releases a new version with a whopping 16GB of storage.
“For some users, there’s never enough memory,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing, in a statement. “Now people can enjoy even more of their music, photos and videos on the most revolutionary mobile phone and best Wi-Fi mobile device in the world.”
If you paid $900 for your iPhone, then you paid less than the global average, according to a new analysts’ report. That’s because the average selling price for iOS devices grew 25% over the last four years, even as the number of handsets Apple sold also increased.
There’s been a trend for several years of greater demand for Apple’s more expensive iPhone Pro models, and that’s driving up ASP. Apple continues to push innovation, including features like Adaptive Audio AirPods, which were recently highlighted in this Spike Jonze short film.
Find My iPhone, a feature available in Apple’s Find My app, will help you locate your lost phone. You can find it using any other Apple device you own or by borrowing a friend’s device. You can even ping your iPhone from your Apple Watch.
From Find My, you can also remotely lock down your lost iPhone, put the device into a special Lost Mode, or even wipe its contents. You should take a peek at this incredibly useful app before you have to.
Keep reading or watch our video.
You can use your iPhone (or even your Apple Watch!) as a remote for your Apple TV. It’s a convenient feature when you’ve lost the remote in the couch cushions. (You can use your iPhone to help find it as well.)
Even if your remote’s not gone missing, sometimes it’s sitting on the table way over there and you don’t want to interrupt a show by asking for someone to pass it to you. Or maybe, someone is intentionally hogging the remote and you want to pause the video yourself. Either way, it’s really easy to do from an iPhone or an Apple Watch.
We went through Apple CEO Tim Cook’s earnings call with investors on Thursday, and found some genuine surprises during the discussion of the financial results of the holiday 2024 quarter. We also turned up impressive figures showing just how well the company is doing.
Financial details don’t have to be boring. Here are the high points from the call as quickly and as interesting as we can make them.
For Apple users seeking a high-capacity portable power solution for all their gear, the new CukTech 30 Power Bank packs a massive 40,000mAh battery, combined charging power of up to 300 watts for up to five devices at once and some useful features, the company said Wednesday.
The Apple Health app on your iPhone will help you track your medications. It has a lot of advanced options for all kinds of medicine — you can set up schedules, log your activity and even get advice on drug interactions. If you can connect with your health care provider through the Health app, setting it up is incredibly simple. Otherwise, you can just scan the label on the bottle using the camera to import it.
Let me show you how to get started.
Apple unveiled its latest Black Unity Collection Monday to celebrate Black culture and community. It features an innovative Apple Watch Sport Loop and watch face that bring the Pan-African flag colors to life through groundbreaking design technology, the iPhone giant said.
And as usual, the annual release for Black History Month in February includes iPhone and iPad wallpapers in addition to the Apple Watch features.
January 26, 2016: After nine years of spectacular growth, iPhone sales flatline for the first time. Some call the sales plateau means “peak iPhone” has finally arrived.
Numbers posted by Apple show that during the final three months of 2015, iPhone sales grew by only 0.4%. The crucial holiday season sales compare quite unfavorably with the 46% jump recorded during the same period a year earlier.
iPhone Mirroring on the Mac lets you control your phone using your computer — a handy convenience when your iPhone is in your pocket, purse or backpack. All your iPhone notifications can be mirrored onto your Mac as well, letting you triage them and take care of business without touching your phone and interrupting your workflow.
This feature also could come in handy if you shatter your iPhone screen. You can mirror an otherwise unusable iPhone to your Mac to make sure it’s backed up. You could even factory-reset your broken phone before sending it in for repair or replacement.
Here’s how iPhone mirroring works. Keep reading or watch our video.
It’s very important to set up your iPhone Medical ID so it’s ready in case you find yourself in an emergency situation. First responders can check your iPhone to get critical information about any allergies or preexisting conditions that could make a huge difference in their ability to help you.
It might be unpleasant to think about, but providing this vital information could prove lifesaving if an accident leaves you unconscious.
If you haven’t yet done so you’ll be happy to know it only takes a couple of minutes to update your medical records in the Health app on your iPhone. Here’s how to do it.
iPhone users who install iOS 18.3 after the upgrade launches next week will find that Apple Intelligence is now on by default for those who use a compatible handset.
Previously, using the suite of AI-powered functions required opting in, but no longer. It’s a seemingly subtle but important change.
Is a group chat blowing up at an inopportune time and distracting the hell out of you? There’s an easy fix. You can hide alerts on your iPhone from a particularly noisy group chat in Messages. It’s like switching on Do Not Disturb — but for a single person or conversation. You can hide alerts permanently or temporarily.
With the Hide Alerts feature, you can silence alerts from a specific app in a similar manner, silencing it while letting all other notifications through. Better yet, you can hide alerts directly from your iPhone’s Lock Screen, which makes it easy to switch them on and off at a moment’s notice.
Watch our video or read on to see how.
The iPhone SE 4, expected soon, makes the Dynamic Island universal on current Apple handsets, according to a generally reliable tipster. If true, it means the iPhone SE 4 will skip the screen notch previously expected.
It’s already virtually certain that Apple’s upcoming lower-cost model will drop another bit of obsolete tech: the Lightning port. And the Home button is on the way out, too.
Rich Communication Services messaging is new to iPhone, and it makes chatting with Android users much more fun. RCS messaging makes features like read receipts, video and file attachments and named group chats — previously exclusive to iMessage (and some apps) — possible between iPhone and Android.
What RCS features can you take advantage of? Keep reading or watch our video guide.
Apple’s efforts to move iPhone assembly to India and Vietnam are reportedly being hampered by the Chinese government.
The iPhone-maker wants to increase the number of countries in which its products are assembled amidst a worsening U.S./China trade war.
You can convert a PDF to JPG on your iPhone instantly and for free — without downloading any sketchy apps or using any slow and confusing websites. This feature works using Shortcuts, a versatile automation system built into your iPhone. To learn more, check out this guide on making PDFs on iPhone and iPad.
After you download the shortcut, you can convert any PDF into a JPG straight from the share sheet on your iPhone. Watch the video or keep reading below to see how it works.
iPhone sales dropped in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to separate reports released Monday by a pair of market research firms. Still, Apple shipped more handsets last year than any other company, including arch-rival Samsung.
And 2024 brought strong sales growth in Apple’s non-core markets. Premium iPhone models are selling well in China, too.
I’m not a fan of the Camera Control on all the iPhone 16 models. It’s too hard to use, it’s in the way, and it’s mostly unnecessary. But I stumbled across an alternative way to use it that’s preferable.
Even so, I can honestly see the Camera Control going the way of the infamous MacBook Pro Touch Bar in a few years.
January 9, 2007: Apple CEO Steve Jobs gives the world its first look at the iPhone onstage during the Macworld conference in San Francisco. The initial reaction to that first iPhone demo is mixed. But Jobs is confident that Apple has created a product that people want — even if they don’t know it yet.
The palm-size device combines an iPod, a phone and a PDA. The iPhone unveiling excites many Apple fans but critics remain skeptical.
In just a few minutes, you can create a cool iPhone Lock Screen wallpaper that can switch between two images with just a tap. Add the right images to your photo library, and you can toggle between them like magic.
For instance, you might pair up nearly identical photos of a muscle car with and without its headlights on. That way, when you tap your iPhone screen, the car’s lights flash on or off. Or maybe you take duplicate photos of your boss and add fiery red laser eyes to one of them so you can tap between “nice boss” and “boss from hell.”
To pull off this fun iPhone wallpaper trick, you need to add the right kinds of images to your photo library — I’ll share a few examples — and then create a custom Photo Shuffle wallpaper to toggle between them. Watch the video or keep reading below.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: The latest rumors indicate the iPhone 18 Pro will pack a variable aperture camera. Erfon and Griffin break down what that could mean — and why it could bring a significant photographic boost to the device.
Also on The CultCast:
Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video live stream, embedded below.
A diary can be a great and invaluable record of your life, but who has time for that? Well, now you do: Apple’s iPhone Journal app makes keeping a diary a breeze. Really, it couldn’t be any easier.
Apple’s Journal app, newly updated in iOS 18, lets you build a record of your life into a multimedia digital diary. Your iPhone will pull together details from your photos, locations and events to give you prompts for memories worth writing about.
Here’s the nitty gritty on using the Journal app — and its latest features.
December 31, 2012: App piracy hub Hackulous shuts down, bringing an end to two of its most popular apps, Installous and AppSync.
The iPhone jailbreak tool Installous allowed users to install “cracked” or pirated apps on their iOS devices, thereby avoiding paying purchase fees to Apple or developers. AppSync let users sync their cracked apps with iTunes.