Whether you travel for the holidays or as part of your everyday life, going online on the road typically means being vulnerable to threats. Snoops and identity thieves love public Wi-Fi networks. For protection and peace of mind on the go, your best bet is a VPN.

Steve Jobs’ on-stage iPad pitch to customers saw him relaxing in a luxury chair. His brief to Apple engineers actually building the iPad? “I want a single piece of glass I can use to read email on the toilet.”

That’s according to Imran Chaudhri, a 21-year Apple veteran, now chairman and president of Humane. Chaudhri was responding to a recent article about the iPad’s origins which appeared in the New York Times.

Apple has given the App Store boot to an app which transformed your iPhone into an iPod Classic, complete with virtual clickwheel.

However, the Rewound app’s developers say that they aren’t planning to go quietly into the night. Instead, they’re aiming to release a web app for their creation.

iPhone 11 packs Apple’s most impressive cameras to date. They’re some of the best available in any phone today. So you might be surprised to find they were just eliminated in round one of a blind camera test.

A photo taken on iPhone 11 Pro secured just 30% of the votes when up against a snap from the OnePlus 7T Pro — a handset that costs $400 less.

The Apple TV App is now available on Fire TV Edition Smart TVs in the U.S., slowly increasing its availability on various third-party streaming players and televisions.

The addition includes built-in Alexa voice-command support to ask for AppleTV+ programs and to open the Apple TV app.

Facebook owns the top 4 most downloaded apps of the last decade, analytics firm App Annie reports.

The app analytics platform runs down its list of the most downloaded and highest grossing apps of the past decade. This covers both iOS and Android. While Facebook may have had a tough time PR-wise recently, there’s no doubting its levels of downloads dominance.

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania might be the next U.S. city that Apple plans to expand its footprint in.

According to a new report from local newspaper, Apple is reportedly in talks with real estate developers to move into the free 90,000 square-feet at the historic Pittsburgh Athletic Association building on Fifth Avenue in Oakland.

One of the best features of Apple Pay is finally starting to roll out to more public transit systems in the U.S. next year.

After being adopted by Washington D.C. and New York City this year, Apple Pay with Express Transit mode will reportedly be adopted by Philadelphia and San Diego next year, with other major cities planning to support it out by 2023.

A promised update to Photoshop on iPad debuted today. A notable new feature employs artificial intelligence to enable users to easily select the subjects of images. The latest version also makes accessing cloud storage much faster.

This is the first in a planned series of improvements for the iPad version of this professional image-editing software

If you have a Mac with a Touch Bar, do this right now. Hold down the Option key (⌥), and tap the volume icon in the Touch Bar. For non-Touch Bar-using readers, this is what happened: The Mac’s Sound Preferences launched instantly.

This is such a typical Mac feature that it should be obvious. But when I shared this tip with fellow Touch Bar aficionado and Cult of Mac writer Graham Bower, he was all like, “Oh!” and, “That’s pretty neat!”

So, what other tricks can be done with the Option key and the Touch Bar?

This iPhone security post is presented by Dashlane.

Will Apple’s Face ID kill the password? One might assume that if the biometric advance of Touch ID didn’t do it via fingerprint, the more-advanced facial recognition of Face ID incorporated in recent iPhones just might. However, experts tend to agree passwords aren’t going away anytime soon. We’ll get into the reasons why below, which will help explain why password-management security apps like Dashlane remain crucial to your online security.

In an effort to combat online bullying, Instagram is rolling out a new feature today that warns users when their captions might be considered offensive.

The new feature gives users the chance to pause and reconsider their words before posting, but it doesn’t completely prevent people from posting inappropriate captions.

This is what you can expect to see:

The 2019 Mac Pro is famously assembled in the United States. Apple CEO Tim Cook took President Trump on a tour of the plant in Texas where these powerful computers are put together.

But the situation is reportedly quite different if you place an order in Europe.

macOS 10.15 Catalina is ruthless about launching unknown apps. Unless your app comes direct from the App Store, or the app’s developer got the app notarized by Apple, it won’t launch. Double click on it, and you’ll see a warning — and nothing else. There’s no option to say you trust the app and launch it despite Catalina’s warnings.

But you can still launch those apps. It’s just that Apple hides the controls in the hope that you’ll give up. It’s petty, and it shows a lack of respect for you, the user. However, it’s also dead easy to fix this problem. Let’s see how to launch any app on macOS Catalina.

Priced at $4.99 per month for more than 100 games, Apple Arcade is already a great deal. But an annual subscription makes it even more wallet-friendly.

Apple recently added the option, bringing Apple Arcade in line with Apple Music and Apple TV+ which already offer cheaper annual subscriptions. According to the new pricing, Apple Arcade will set you back $49.99 per year. That works out at $4.19 per month.

It only took 20 years, but Steve Jobs’ estate finally owns the rights to SteveJobs.com. It won its claim after claiming the previous owner was “cybersquatting” by holding onto the trademark, but doing nothing (good) with it.

The previous owner of the website was a South Korean man. He claimed that he has been going by the name of Steve Jobs Kim since 1999.

Apple News and ABC News will join forces to provide up-to-the-minute coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

ABC videos, live-streams, and more will be available inside the Apple News app — alongside data and analysis from FiveThirtyEight. It all kicks off with the Democratic primary debate on February 7, 2020.

Your Mac is only as good as the apps on it. So if you’re looking to boost the utility, productivity, and fun you get out of your Mac, this bundle of 13 top Mac apps is an easy and affordable way to do it.

Time magazine’s pick of the “10 best gadgets of the 2010s” is out, and perhaps unsurprisingly, three of them are Apple products.

iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods were all chosen as some of the “most important and influential gadgets” of the decade. Other products include the Nintendo Switch, Tesla Model S, and the Amazon Echo.

Activist shareholders will use Apple’s annual meeting in 2020 to push Apple on why it removed a mapping app used by protesters in Hong Kong.

Beijing reportedly pressured Apple to remove the app from the App Store. At the time, Tim Cook defended Apple’s decision to pull the app after saying it had received “credible information” that the app was being used to help commit violence against individuals and property.

A lawsuit from plaintiffs from the Democratic Republic of Congo claims that Apple is among the companies willfully exploiting the use of underage labor for cobalt mining for lithium-ion batteries.

It claims that “young children” are being forced to work full time dangerous mining jobs. They are “regularly maimed and killed” by hazards such as tunnel collapses.

This week we import photos from SD cards straight into Lightroom for iPad, make loops with L7 Looper, find the next bus or subway ride with Transit for Apple Watch, and more.

The 2019 Mac Pro: It’s a powerhouse workstation that looks like a cheese grater. And it’s the most upgradeable Apple computer in years. But you’ll pay for all that computing muscle: It starts at $5,999 and pairs with a Pro Display XDR, which starts at $4,999. Maxed-out, this monster costs an eye-watering $53,000. Even adding wheels costs $400. Still, it’s not the most expensive Mac ever — not by a long shot!

Find out more in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. You’ll also get — for free! — the rest of this week’s top Apple news stories, plus plenty of reviews and how-tos. Grab it now (or get the stories in your browser below).

Also, don’t miss your shot at winning one of 10 copies of Leander Kahney and David Pierini’s new book, The Cult of Mac, Second Edition. Enter our giveaway now! (The book’s also available now for preorder, just in case you don’t win.)

When it comes to our mobile phones, dead batteries are the great equalizer. That’s certainly true of the new iPhone 11. They are high-capacity and high-power devices, so the more you need and use them, the quicker they’ll go kaput. Not so with this slim wireless battery case.

Sandmarc, a top producer of high-quality smartphone lenses, now has a line of mounting cases for its lenses to fit on the iPhone 11 series.

Many smartphone lens makers had to rethink their mount designs after Apple rolled out new iPhones with square camera bumps. The two Pro models have three cameras in the module and companies got busy making new mounts and cases.