Are you getting ready for a new iPhone? Running out of iCloud storage space? Living with a slow internet connection? Worried about privacy? In any of these cases, you might want to exclude some apps from your iCloud backups. Doing so will save iCloud storage space, conserve bandwidth and make sure your data does not go to Apple’s servers, where it may or may not be vulnerable to decryption.

The good news is that it’s easy to exclude pretty much anything you like from your iCloud backups in iOS. Here’s how.

Apple has launched a new beta version of its iCloud web portal. It includes a new background, revamped Reminders app, and new launch screen.

The change ditches the bubble-filled blue backdrop the iCloud web portal had before. Instead, there’s now a simple minimalist white background.

A class-action lawsuit filed this week takes aim at Apple for storing some iCloud data on third-party servers.

The company is accused of breaching consumer trust to sell iCloud subscriptions. It states iCloud data will be “stored by Apple,” but offloads some of it to Amazon and other companies.

Apple is ready to pay a bigger bounty than any other tech company when it comes to finding bugs on the iPhone or other Apple products.

The iPhone-maker revealed today at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that it will now pay up to $1 million for some discovered vulnerabilities, up from the $200,000 it offered when the bug bounty program began three years ago.

August 4, 2008: Steve Jobs owns up to mistakes in launching MobileMe, spinning Apple’s bungled cloud service rollout as a learning opportunity.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs writes in an email to Apple employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

Did you know you can send regular old green-bubble SMS (and MMS) messages from your iPad? And even from your Mac? Well, you can, and it is dead easy. It’s called Text Message Forwarding, and it works by using your iPhone as a conduit to the cellular phone network.

Let’s set it up and see how it works.

The Photos app on the Mac has two options for storing your photos. You can tell it to keep the full-size originals of everything, or you can have it self-manage, keeping your master library in iCloud and storing a mixture of full-resolution and low-res versions locally to save space.

The trouble is, even when you choose the “Optimize Mac Storage” option, the Photos app’s storage can metastasize and take over your whole drive. Today we’ll see how to cap this storage, giving Photos a hard limit on how much space it can use. For instance, if you have a MacBook with a 128GB SSD, you could choose to only use 30GB for Photos — and it will never, ever use more.

Users running the latest iOS 13, iPadOS 13 or macOS Catalina betas can now sign into iCloud using either Face ID or Touch ID.

If you’re using these beta versions, visiting iCloud in Safari will present a pop-up asking if you want to log in using biometrics.

If you’ve ever restored an iPhone or iPad from an iCloud backup, you’ll know it’s a long, mundane process. But there is an incredibly simply trick you can use to make it faster.

All you need is plenty of ice.

It’s impossible to create smart Apple Music playlists directly on the iPhone. Or rather, it was impossible. Previously, you had to fire up iTunes on your Mac or PC, create a smart playlist there, and then let it sync to your iPhone over iCloud.

Even in iOS 13, this is still the case. But now there’s another way. A new iOS app called Miximum can create smart playlists, and even sync them to the regular Apple Music app. It is, as they say, a game-changer.