How-To

One of the most dramatic ways you can customize your computer is to remap your Mac keyboard keys. You can make it your own with custom functionality, powerful keyboard shortcuts and advanced features. 

Using the free app Karabiner Elements, switching out one key for another is super-easy. It’s a must-have if you use a PC keyboard with your Mac. You can also go one step further, making custom keyboard shortcuts.

But if that sounds too fiddly to do yourself, you can simply install some customizations made by the Karabiner Elements community. Someone might have set up a rule for your specific keyboard! 

Here’s how to get started. 

Your Apple Watch has a web browser built-in, although it’s somewhat hidden. While Apple doesn’t have a full Safari app for the watch, you can still open links from Messages — so you can text yourself as a hack to browse the web. Or, you can install the μBrowser app for a dedicated user experience with bookmarks and even complications. 

Admittedly, it’s not a fantastic experience. The screen is less than two inches tall, so many pages don’t render properly. It’s not especially speedy, either. If your watch is within range of your iPhone, it’ll use the slow Bluetooth connection with your iPhone as a relay instead of connecting to the Wi-Fi network directly, in order to save power. 

But having a web browser on your Apple Watch occasionally comes in handy, especially if you have a cellular model and left your phone at home. 

Apple kicked off a very generous signup incentive for new Apple Card customers, offering enough Bonus Daily Cash rewards to effectively cover the cost of a pair of AirPods Pro 3.

But it’s important to read the fine print. This promo isn’t a trick, but getting a free pair of earbuds takes a lot more effort than simply signing up for a credit card.

If your iPhone is always blowing up with junk and spam, you can stop notifications dead in their tracks. You may not know that you can entirely disable notifications per-app and turn off different types of notifications to keep them from cluttering your phone. 

I’m not afraid to disable all notifications from an app if it crosses me one time too many. For others, I allow notifications on the Lock Screen, but disable them from Notification Center, so they’re more temporary. 

Here’s how you can do it, too. Check out our quick video.

The HomePod operating system occasionally needs updating, because the device is a lot more than a simple speaker — it’s a computer. Here’s how to make sure your Apple smart speaker has the software version released this week. The new HomePod Software version 26.5 is a simple bug-fix update, but it’s still worth installing. Who wants bugs? 

If you depend on automatic updates, it’s possible your smart speaker hasn’t yet installed the update. Here’s how to do so manually.

The colorful Pride Luminance wallpaper and watch face add beautiful color gradients to your iPhone and Apple Watch. You can download them both after updating to iOS 26.5 and watchOS 26.5.

Since they’re part of Apple’s annual Pride collection, they come with a bunch of preset styles for various pride flags. But you can customize the Lock Screen wallpaper and the Apple Watch face however you want. With a light and dark shade of the same color, the vertical stripes and gradients shimmer and animate when you swipe up to unlock your phone. Or you can go to the other extreme, picking up to 12 colors from the Luminance palette.

This is easily the best Pride wallpaper Apple has produced yet — in fact, it’s a great wallpaper, period. Check it out in our quick video or keep reading.

Since I spend a lot of time using Safari on my iPhone, any new tips and tricks I learn can feel life-changing. Apple’s mobile web browser proves absolutely instrumental to my iPhone usage (and odds are, it does for you, too).

Here are a few of my favorite hidden features. These Safari tips will help you browse the web faster, clean up your experience and restore tabs you accidentally close. I also have a handy shortcut you can download at the end.

Keep reading or watch our video.

If you’ve noticed that the iPhone’s autocorrect has been especially bad over the last few months, you’re not alone. It appears that iOS 26.2 introduced a bug that made the keyboard much more frustrating to use. Luckily, the solution is simple. You can learn how to reset autocorrect on your iPhone really quickly. 

First, you need to update to iOS 26.4, the release that fixed the iPhone’s autocorrect bug. Then, resetting your keyboard dictionary will get rid of any bad patterns it may have picked up since December. 

Keep reading or watch our quick video.

There are two types of iPhone owners in the world: Those with a carefully manicured, minimalist Home Screen of perfectly arranged icons, and those with random icons spilled haphazardly across the screen.

If you find yourself among the latter group, you might think that it’s too late for you — that making a beautiful, aesthetic Home Screen is beyond your creative ability. 

Well, cleaning up your iPhone’s Home Screen is a lot easier than clearing out your basement or organizing your kitchen junk drawer. A Home Screen that works better and looks better comes down to just a few simple tips. You can set one up in just minutes.

Here’s how.

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.

Hide Distracting Items is not an ad blocker per se. But if pop-ups and other items that cover the page with no obvious close button pester you (like a cookie banner) Hide Distracting Items can come to the rescue. Here’s how to use it — keep reading or watch our video.

If you use Final Cut Pro, you’re well aware of how much storage one of its libraries can eat up. Producing weekly videos and podcasts for Cult of Mac, disk space is a never-ending battle for me — and I even splurged on a 2TB hard drive!

The third time I ran into this problem, I tried digging deeper into Final Cut Pro settings to see if there was a better way. I found a bunch of settings that help stop the 800-pound, hard-drive-eating gorilla.  

Then, I opened up the Final Cut Pro library bundle itself, and found even more folders, many gigabytes in size, that I could clear out. 

Here’s how Final Cut Pro users can reclaim some storage from a runaway video library. 

You can easily connect your Apple Watch to exercise equipment, like a treadmill at Planet Fitness, to record more accurate health data inside the Fitness and Health apps on your iPhone. After all, if you’re working out, you want to make sure your Apple Watch gives you credit for it.

Here’s how.

You can easily hide photos and videos on your iPhone to keep secret and/or illicit images out of your main Photos library. Hiding items from the camera roll makes sure nobody except you can see your embarrassing pictures, salacious nudes or old selfies with your ex.

Apple introduced the Hidden photo album years ago in iOS 8. But after Apple redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18, you can no longer find it at the bottom of the Albums tab — because the tab bar is gone. But in iOS 26, it’s back again!

Here’s what hiding photos does to your iPhone, how you can stash those incriminating or mortifying pix, and where to find them.

The Apple Passwords app makes it easier than ever to save login details for your apps, start using passkeys and create shared groups.

The time of using the same password on all your internet accounts is over. Apple’s password manager is free, syncs everywhere (even with Windows PCs) and is incredibly easy to use. It creates strong passwords and automatically fills them in, so you never need to.

Here’s how it works.

You can easily remove any object from a photo using Apple Intelligence’s free Clean Up tool on your iPhone, Mac or iPad. It works fairly well — but it’s good to know its limitations.

As the only graphic designer among my friends, I’ve frequently been asked over the years to Photoshop unwanted elements out of pictures. Take, for example, a romantic shot of a couple in a gazebo, with a phone sitting on the handrail in an obvious spot. The image might look a lot better if you delete that stray device.

Or imagine a group photo from a fun night out, with someone’s dumpy tote bag sitting by their feet, or a picture from a big conference that shows an ugly lanyard around someone’s neck. With Apple Intelligence’s free Clean Up feature, anyone can make the tote bag and the lanyard disappear, right from their iPhone.

Now, you have the power to clean up your own photos — a chance to make your almost-perfect shots perfect in an instant. 

You can record a phone call on your iPhone for future reference using a built-in tool. This feature is a great way to refer back to a previous conversation. Who said what? What date did they say? What exactly did you agree to?

If your device supports Apple Intelligence, you’ll get transcriptions of the phone calls, too. They’ll go in a Call Recordings folder in the Notes app.

If you used a shady call recording app before, you can bid it adieu. There’s a convenient button built right into the Phone app. Here’s how it all works.

Each morning I wake up and check my sleep score on my Apple Watch. And then I wonder if it’s doing me any good. It’s certainly adding stress and hassle to my day.

That’s why I’m thinking of turning it off. Maybe you should, too.

The daily games hiding inside the News app are my favorite puzzles to play. Some are digital versions of classic games like crossword puzzles and sudoku. Others are entirely new.

All five games are available to all Apple News+ and Apple One Premier subscribers. Here’s how to play each of the daily word games in Apple News+ on iPhone. Check them out in this quick video.

iMessage effects can add extra meaning, emotion and fun to your texting. In Apple’s Messages app, you can add bold, italics, underline and strikethrough text, just like in a formatted document. You can even choose from a bunch of cool, animated effects, including full-screen blasts of lasers, confetti and fireworks.

Apple’s text message effects can make quite an impression. You can make congratulations more bombastic (to rejoice in someone’s finest moments). Or, you can use formatting and effects to convey sarcasm, stress and sorrow more clearly.

These text effects are fun and incredibly useful. Keep reading below or watch our video.

Apple Music Classical is an iPhone app specifically designed to deliver a great experience browsing and listening to instrumental music. Apple carefully curated its catalog of millions of tracks, tagging them by composer, work, movement, instrument, orchestra, artist and more.

Why does there need to be a separate app for classical music? Apple says it succinctly on its support page: Classical music “has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces.” This app “is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.”

This is how to discover, find, add and listen to music in Apple Music Classical.

If you know how to schedule texts on iPhone, you can make sure you never forget to send a reminder, birthday greeting or early morning message for someone in a different time zone. You can schedule a whole slew of texts up to a week in advance, with links, photos, attachments and more, using the iPhone’s Send Later feature.

This can save your bacon if you’re the type of person who forgets to text someone later. And it’s really easy to do, once you figure out how to use the somewhat hidden feature. Watch our quick video.

You can FaceTime with Android and Windows friends, too — you don’t need to leave them out of the loop. You need to jump through some extra hoops, naturally, but you can video chat with your whole family and friend group. 

While there’s no FaceTime app for Android or Windows, if you have an iPhone, you can initiate a group call by creating a link. Others can join the call from their web browser. It will be end-to-end encrypted, just like regular FaceTime calls, for maximum privacy. 

Here’s how it works. 

If you forgot your new iPhone passcode, you can reset it with your old one up to three days later. This can save you hours of trying to remember the new passcode, or worse, resetting your phone from a backup.

You just have to tap Forgot Passcode? on the Lock Screen after you enter it several incorrect times.

Keep reading for a detailed walkthrough. And don’t worry — if you change your passcode intentionally to keep someone out, you can instantly expire your old one.

The Camera Control button on the iPhone opens the Camera app, takes pictures and can even adjust camera settings on the fly. It offers a quick shortcut to using one of the most popular and important iPhone features.

By default, it’s a simple button to quickly take pictures, but there’s so much more you can do with it — if you choose. The physically clicking button also accepts touch input when you swipe your finger along it. And it utilizes pressure sensitivity and haptic feedback for you to adjust different camera settings. 

Learn how to master the iPhone’s Camera Control button in our guide below, or watch our quick video.

A year into owning an M4 Pro Mac mini, it began feeling slow. With dozens of Chrome tabs and numerous other apps running in the background, everything felt more sluggish than it should. 

I was already convinced I needed an upgrade. Turns out, I just needed to do a little spring cleaning.  Here’s what I did to speed up my slow Mac mini.