You want to get faster at typing? Sure, you can hold down the Backspace key or mash it really fast. But there’s a better and more precise way to backspace and delete text on the Mac, using the Option (⌥) and Command (⌘) keys. These Mac typing shortcuts can make editing text lightning-fast and seamless. Here’s how you can be a keyboard wizard.
All of these work on the iPad, too, if you have a physical keyboard connected.
By Alex from Planet Free VPN
Long a VPN professional and Apple ecosystem enthusiast, I have seen a marked shift in Mac users’ perspective of online privacy and security. Though macOS is frequently hailed for its built-in protections and user-oriented design, it does not mean Mac users are free from tracking, monitoring or data leaks. The increase in privacy incursions at the network level emphasizes the need for considering your connection to the web, rather than only the device you use.
A major new addition to Apple’s software lineup at WWDC25, the Games app, centralizes gaming experiences across all Apple devices, the iPhone giant said Monday. And it adds powerful social features that turn even single-player games into shared experiences with friends.
“The Games app is going to be a game changer for playing on iPhone, iPad and Mac,” said Tim Garbos, creative director and cofounder of game brand Triband. “The app makes it easy for us to create moments just for groups of friends. The new challenges feature works great and feels natural for our games on Apple Arcade, including our latest release, What the Clash?, and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it!”
Like iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe follows Apple’s new yearly naming scheme. It also adapts the new Liquid Glass design, using glassy UI elements and updated system icons.
But that’s not it. macOS 26 Tahoe includes a redesigned Control Centre, a revamped Spotlight, and, for the first time ever, brings the Phone app to the Mac.
“macOS is the heart and soul of the Mac, and with Tahoe, we’re building on what users love most. Whether you’re a power user or just getting started on Mac, there’s something for everyone, with even more features to turbocharge productivity and make working across Mac and iPhone more seamless than ever before,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering.
Apple won’t show off any new hardware at its developers conference this week, according to a reliable source. There are apparently no Macs or other products ready to launch.
Instead, WWDC25 will focus entirely on operating system upgrades and other software.
WWDC25 is nearly here, with iOS 19 and iPadOS 19 possibly set to steal the spotlight. However, the latest rumors indicate you shouldn’t count macOS 16 out just yet, as it might bring more upgrades than expected. It might not even be called macOS 16, if Apple’s rumored switch to year-based release names happens. (We’ll refer to it as macOS 16 until the big switch happens.)
With June 9 fast approaching, here’s a breakdown of what macOS 16 could bring to the table.
Apple’s Freeform app for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro is a digital whiteboard you can use to brainstorm or gather ideas in one infinitely scrolling canvas.
You can use Freeform to throw together ideas with a colleague. You could build a presentation using Freeform’s scenes, kind of like using Prezi. Or, you can use Freeform as a drawing app with your iPad and Apple Pencil.
Freeform comes with all kinds of features for adding text boxes, rich links, drawings, clip art, sticky notes, files, photos, videos and more. It’s a great way to build a mood board or connect big ideas.
Keep reading below or watch our video guide to find out how to use Freeform.
There are a bunch of not-great apps like Spotify and Slack that suck battery life, because they basically run a full copy of Google Chrome inside each window. Chrome is a notorious energy hog, and running multiple copies of its Blink engine inside four different apps can take unnecessary memory and resources.
But you can create your own, much better versions using web apps based on Safari. Web apps are easily made in Safari and live in your Mac’s Dock.
For apps that you use every day, like Spotify, Discord and Slack, it’s easier to launch them from the Dock and move them around separately from your browser tabs. Let me show you how they work.
The Mac mini is already a great deal, but this grade-A refurbished model drops the price of a 2023 model to just $359.99 with free shipping. Apple’s M2 chip powers the small desktop computer, delivering excellent performance in a sleek, compact design.
This deal offers exceptional value for both professionals and casual home users. But if you want one, act fast — stock is limited.
Apple charges a ton for storage upgrades on Macs. Worse, you cannot extend the built-in storage after buying the Mac. Thankfully, smarter solutions exist, as long as you don’t mind plugging an external disk into your Mac.
Here’s a breakdown of the best ways to expand your Mac’s storage, along with ideal solutions based on particular needs.
You can save time — and make sure your messages always go out when they’re supposed to — when you schedule email from the Apple Mail app. You can set your mail to deliver at any date or time in the future, whether it’s next Monday at 9 a.m. sharp, in two weeks’ time or even years from now.
If you work with someone in a different time zone, you can schedule messages to arrive just when they start their workday, which is especially helpful if the allotted time is in the middle of the night for you. You can schedule a series of reminders for that one irritatingly forgetful client of yours. Or, if you work remotely, you can try (and risk) prewriting messages to your boss to maintain the illusion of regular work. You can even schedule emails to remind you of an important anniversary, years down the line.
It’s easy to set up. Keep reading or watch our short video.
With the new automatic mail categorization in Apple Mail, you can organize your emails and keep your personal inbox less cluttered. It’ll intelligently put all your newsletters, receipts and promotions into separate folders.
If you struggle keeping up with your inbox, this feature is a great way to make your email easier to understand at a glance.
Keep reading below or watch our quick video.
You can stop your Mac from sleeping if you want it to stay on indefinitely. This might prove handy if you find it locking when you don’t want it to, like during a class or meeting. You don’t need to wiggle the mouse every few minutes to keep the screen on.
There are a few different ways to set this up. The simplest and most permanent way is to disable sleep entirely in your Mac’s System Settings. However, if you just want a quick way to disable sleep temporarily, there’s a simple command you can enter in the Terminal. Or, if you want something more user-friendly and customizable, there’s a free app you can download that you can toggle on and off from your Mac’s menu bar.
Here are the three best solutions if you want to stop your Mac from sleeping.
After the U.S. government seemed to exempt iPhones, Macs and other electronics from hefty tariffs Friday, a clarification issued Sunday by President Donald Trump revealed that’s not the case.
Trump said on Truth Social that his administration did not announce a tariff exemption Friday. Instead, the “existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs” will still apply to electronics — with higher tariffs possibly coming soon.
In a tremendous turnaround, President Donald Trump removed the hefty tariffs he’d imposed on phone, computers and many other electronics being imported into the United States. The change, which came late Friday, should prevent price hikes that Apple, HP, Dell, etc. would likely have had to charge customers to pay for the import taxes.
There will reportedly also be no tariffs on processors, TVs, solar panels, flash drives and removable memory cards — no matter what country they are made in.
Update: The Trump administration said Sunday that it only provided electronics with temporary tariff relief.
ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Apple Intelligence are powerful, but they all share one major drawback — they need constant access to the internet to work. If you value privacy and want better performance, running a large language model like DeepSeek, Google’s Gemma or Meta’s Llama locally on your Mac is a great alternative.
Think it sounds complicated? It’s easier than you think. With the right tools, you can run DeepSeek or any other popular LLM locally on your Mac with minimal effort.
Mac shipments continue a steady upward trend, increasing 14.1% year over year during the first quarter of 2025, according to a market research firm. While three PC makers sell more units than Apple, none can match Cupertino’s annual growth rate.
But the analysts note that tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump on computers brought into the United States will have “a direct inflationary impact” later in the year, potentially cooling demand for computers of all types.
You could have dozens of copies of the same images in your Photos library, taking up space on your phone and in your iCloud account. Luckily, Apple offers an easy-to-use little tool that lets you find duplicate photos and delete the copies, all right from the Photos app.
These types of duplicate images can accumulate more quickly than you might expect. They arise if you make a copy of a photo to edit, if you screenshot a photo to bump it to the top of your Camera Roll, or if you and your partner both upload the same picture to your Shared iCloud Photo Library. In fact, I found hundreds of duplicates in my own carefully curated library.
It’s a surprisingly sophisticated feature that took Apple engineers a fair amount of smarts to cook up (more on that later). Here’s how to use Apple’s duplicate image remover and get rid of all those unnecessary files. Keep reading or watch our video instructions.
Apple released macOS Sequoia 15.4 for Mac users around the world Monday. The upgrade brings AI-powered automatic categorization of emails in Apple’s Mail app, among other things. Plus, it makes Apple Intelligence available in many more languages and regions.
The launch came earlier than expected — Apple previously said the next macOS version would debut in April.
iPadOS 18.4 also launched Monday with the same mail categorization. Plus, iOS 18.4 reached iPhone users, and visionOS 2.4 arrived as well.
Big updates across Apple’s Final Cut Pro video-editing software lineup introduce AI-driven Image Playground integration, plus improved workflows and enhanced recording options.
Apple released Final Cut Pro updates Thursday that add Image Playground for Mac and iPad users. Plus, iPad users can use the software in portrait orientation for the first time.
Apple is perceived as a laggard in the AI race — despite that, Apple has developed the single best computer for AI research. The new Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip, which supports up to 512GB of unified memory, is the easiest and cheapest way to run powerful, cutting-edge LLMs on your own hardware.
The latest DeepSeek v3 model, which sent shockwaves through the AI space for its comparable performance to ChatGPT, can run entirely on a single Mac, Apple AI researchers revealed Monday.
It’s a machine that fits comfortably on your desk, rather than a server farm; it costs the same as a used Honda Civic, not a new Lamborghini.
How did this happen? Most remarkably of all — by sheer coincidence. Here’s why the Apple silicon architecture makes for the best AI hardware, a use case Apple didn’t mean to design it for.
Window snapping and tiling is a new way to quickly organize your Mac desktop. It lets you throw the two apps you’re working on side by side so you can focus on them.
Window snapping proves more versatile than fullscreen mode, which the Mac has had ever since OS X Lion. Using fullscreen mode comes with a few compromises. For one, fullscreen mode only supports two windows side by side. And while you’re in fullscreen mode, you can’t have any other apps visible — fullscreen apps exist in a separate space from everything else.
With window snapping, you can have your Mac windows tiled in halves, quarters or a mix — you pick the orderly layout that works best for the task at hand. You can use gestures or keyboard shortcuts for quick tiling. Or you can control the tiling from your Mac’s menu bar. Keep reading or watch our video to learn how this cool Mac productivity feature works.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows finally launched on Thursday, and Mac gamers can play the action-packed, role-playing game from Ubisoft at the same time as players on PCs and consoles. Mac owners won’t face the usual wait of months or years. There’s even a version for iPads with M-series processors in development.
The adventure is set in medieval Japan, and players can choose either a samurai or a shinobi (aka ninja) for very different gaming experiences.
You don’t need to buy an old Macintosh to experience classic Mac OS anymore. In fact, you don’t even need to fiddle around installing an emulator and downloading ROMs. Thanks to Infinite Mac, you can boot up every major release of Mac OS from the 1980s and ’90s right in your web browser.
With more than 25 Apple computers and devices in my collection, I’m something of a vintage Mac collector. It’s an expensive hobby that few can indulge in, but the Infinite Mac website lets you experience one of the joys of collecting vintage gear: Taking ancient software for a spin on a vintage Mac.
★★★★★
The 2025 MacBook Air with Apple’s M4 processor comes as close as you can get to a perfect computer for just about everyone. As I found during testing for this review, Apple crammed tons of power into a svelte, lightweight design. And this combination has never been more affordable.
This latest MacBook Air might look familiar on the outside. But when you get to work, you’ll quickly discover that the M4 is a totally different beast. M3 to M4 is the biggest leap in performance since Apple’s original switch from Intel processors to Apple silicon.
I put the latest MacBook Air through its paces for this hands-on review — read what I learned below or watch our video.