Back in 1979, the original Sony Walkman had an odd feature. If you pressed an orange button on the end, a built-in mic would connect to the user’s headphones, letting them hear what was going on in the outside world. This may be the first case of technology being used to mitigate the bad manners surrounding personal audio.

Now, in iOS 12, this type of feature is back — and way more useful than it was in music’s greatest-ever decade. Live Listen is a new iOS 12 feature that pipes live audio from the iPhone’s mic directly to your AirPods. Why? Well, it’s an accessibility feature, but it can be used for much more.

It’s 2018, and yet Safari still won’t show you website icons aka. favicons in its tabs. But that is — finally — about to change. In both iOS 12, and in macOS Mojave, Safari will finally display these favicons, and all you have to do is toggle one setting. Who cares? Well, being able to identify the site you want from a whole mess of tabs is a lot easier if you can spot that site’s colorful logo as an icon, instead of having to read few letters of truncated text when trying to identify it.

Almost a year after it was first announced, AirPlay 2 is finally ready and running on iOS. AirPlay 2 lets you stream audio from your iPad or iPhone to more than one speaker at the same time (something that has always been possible on the Mac). And if you use AirPlay 2 with a pair of HomePod speakers, you can choose to treat them as the left and right speakers of a stereo pair, giving a much bigger-sounding audio picture.

Here’s how.

Over the years, the Twitter app has changed significantly. What started as a container for Twitter’s mobile website has grown into the jumbled mess that it is today.

During that time, many third-party Twitter clients blossomed, providing a more streamlined, logical experience. While many faded away, a select few managed to stick around. For several years now, Tweetbot has been one of the best Twitter clients on iOS. It offers a clear design, simple gestures, and provides a better Twitter experience.

When you’re working on playing at your Mac, it’s too easy to just push through the current task, which — at the time — seems like the most important thing in the world. “It’ll only take five more minutes,” you tell yourself, as your carpal tunnels tighten, your back stiffens, and your upper arms atrophy.

What you need is a break. Just two minutes taken every half hour should do you. The problem is remembering. Luckily, there’s an app for that.

Cult of Mac Watch Store is proud to feature a growing and evolving collection of the best Apple Watch bands and accessories on the market. And, we’re excited to announce the latest addition to our curated collection of Apple Watch bands: Las Vegas-based Carterjett.

The result of this creative collaboration is Carterjett’s collection of well-made, great looking Apple Watch bands well-suited for sweat and outdoor activity yet stylish enough to take you into the evening. Best yet, these Apple Watch bands are easy on the wallet.

Apple’s AirPort routers introduced one game-changing new feature to the world: easy backups. Time Machine is Apple’s automatic backup utility, and it made backups easy enough for non-nerds to use regularly.

The easiest way to use it was to buy a Time Capsule, a wireless AirPort router with a hard drive built in. Before Time Capsule, nobody backed up. After Time Capsule, anyone could keep hourly, daily and weekly backups without even thinking about it. But now that Apple has stopped making Time Capsule, and AirPort routers in general, how do you keep using Time Machine?

Split view on the iPad is amazing. Two apps, side-by-side, open up all kinds of neat shortcuts. You can drag text, links, and pictures from Safari into notes apps, emails, Pages documents and so on. The Mac is less in need of such a mode, because screens are bigger, and you can already place two windows side-by-side, but on a little MacBook, where every 1/64th inch counts, Split View is a great feature. Here’s how to use it.

It’s time to stop using that useless 6-digit passcode on your iPhone. Now that cops around the U.S. are going crazy for the GrayKey, a little box that can crack your iPhone’s passcode in hours, it has become clear that the iPhone’s regular six-digit numerical code is no longer secure. And now these boxes are available, it won’t be long before they’re in the hands of the bad guys, too, if they’re not already.

The good news is, it’s super easy to change your passcode to something a lot better. The bad news? There isn’t any, unless you have the cops trying to break into your iPhone, in which case you’ve got plenty of bad news already.

Left to its own devices, the Dock on your Mac is little more than a list of running apps, plus a trash can. You probably already know that you can force apps to stick around in the Dock for quick-launching, and that you can drag any folder to the Dock and just click it to see inside. But did you know that you can add special folders that show you your recent documents, applications, your favorite items, and more?

The recent documents folder is worth the price of this tip alone (which is $0 BTW), because it keeps track of all your recently-used documents, anywhere on your Mac, and gathers them into one place. If you’re the kind of person who has a desktop cluttered with pretty much all your documents, then fast access to that file you were using one moment ago — and you swear it was right here, oh God where has it gone — is a lifesaver.

Here’s how to add it.