Top stories - page 365

The Courant Carry is a lightweight and sleek phone powerbank that holds 8,000mAh. Even better, it’s wrapped in pebble-grain Italian leather so it looks outstanding, which is very important for an accessory intended to be carried everywhere.

It can wirelessly charge every iPhone released since 2017. And the Carry itself can be charged without cables.

Does the functionality of this external battery live up the the appearance? Read on to find out.

Ensure your AirPods always have a safe place to stay with the brilliant Wrist Fit Adapter for Apple Watch. It slides onto almost any band and carries your beloved buds wherever you go.

And it’s just $15!

Apple’s AirPods are brilliant. They’re incredibly convenient, sleek and offer pretty good sound. They also add a layer of functionality you don’t get with many other Bluetooth headphones or earbuds. And I’m not even talking about the new AirPods Pro.

So, now that Apple expanded the AirPods line to include both the standard AirPods, and the pricier (although more feature-packed) AirPods Pro, choosing the right option might not seem so clear. How do you choose the AirPods that are best for your life?

Despite the endless disappointments with iPadOS 13, there’s still no way I’d switch to a MacBook right now. MacBooks (and MacBook Pros) were always the gold (or aluminum?) standard for laptops — reliable, well-designed and long-lasting. Reviewers would even recommend that PC users buy a Mac and install Windows on it via Boot Camp. But today, MacBooks problems abound.

Apple’s laptops are a sorry bunch. And it’s not just the troublesome butterfly keyboard. Every week, I read tweets and blog posts about freelancers and employees of big companies alike losing valuable time as their MacBooks go back for repair for the third or fourth time. So what is happening? What are the biggest problems with today’s MacBooks? And can these MacBook problems be fixed?

Public beta testing just started for iOS 13.3, along with the iPad equivalent. This adds an important feature to Screen Time, but the main benefit of this pre-release version is it apparently fixes a serious memory-management problem introduced in iOS 13.2.

Did you know that you can scan paper documents into the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad? The app turns them into PDFs, and trims them to make them look as if you scanned them in a proper scanner. Maybe you read our how-to article on scanning into the Notes app, and you already know this. But in iOS 13, things get better: You also can search those scanned documents.

That’s right. You can scan a sheet of paper into Notes, and anything printed on it will become searchable, as if you typed it in yourself. Let’s see how to search scans.

Want to hear a secret about Apple TV+? Don’t tell the critics but … Apple’s TV shows are actually pretty good!

From The Morning Show to See, the general public seems to agree with me. But you wouldn’t know it from reading reviews from professional critics.

This year’s Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) Creative Summit is right around the corner, and you might just want to keep an eye on it. Its description promises “some surprises from the Apple product team.”

Is it finally time for the all-new Mac Pro to make its debut?

You’ll find some of the most interesting, important and entertaining information in books. But with all the books out there, and all the things vying for your attention and time, it can be hard to get through even a single book. That makes these condensed book breakdowns essential for anyone who wants to stay in the know while on the go.

Parents will soon be able to limit when their children use an iPhone or iPad to talk to their friends, thanks to a long-awaited new Screen Time feature. Communication Limits were supposed to come earlier, they debuted in the first iOS 13.3 beta that launched today.

You can add almost endless faces to your Apple Watch, and switch between them with a simple swipe on the screen. Maybe you have a carefully-crafted fitness face, an elegant, complication-free evening face, plus faces for shopping, hiking, commuting, and so on. But is this really an optimum strategy?

After a months or so using the Apple Watch Series 5, I’ve settled on something way simpler, and probably good enough for 90% of Apple Watch use cases. I call it the “Two-Face Mullet Strategy,” and you’re going to love it.

Sorry, cows: I love leather iPhone cases. They add a layer of warmth on top of the iPhone’s cold metal-and-glass construction that can’t be beat. And, unlike most thermoplastic polyurethane cases, a good leather case looks sophisticated and, dare I say it, grownup.

Woolnut’s leather iPhone 11 Pro case takes things a step further, adding a pebbled look that reminds me of vintage gear from the ’60s. It’s so freaking manly I can almost smell the English Leather and Old Spice.

Apple has just begun beta testing the next updates for iPhone and iPad. It’s not known yet if iOS 13.3 and iPadOS 13.3 fix the serious memory management problem introduced in the previous version, introduced last week.

In addition, watchOS 6.1.1 also just entered beta testing.

You’ve got your amazing new AirPods Pro, and now you have a set of perfectly good (if a little waxy) AirPods Normal just taking up mental space.

Should you keep them as spares? I guess that’s the safe route (just in case you misplace the Pros). But how about giving them away to a friend or family member? Today we’ll see how to unpair AirPods from your iCloud account so you can do just that. (Plus how to clean them before you pass them along.)

With the holiday season approaching, maybe you could make someone very happy.

Don’t settle for the basic bands that ship as standard with your new Apple Watch. These leather straps from Clessant add a dash of luxury that will separate your new wearable from all the others.

Hand-crafted from the finest materials and available in a variety of styles, they’re smart, outrageously stylish, and unlike anything you’ll find in the Apple Store.

The Apple Watch running cadence setting arrived in watchOS 5, but if you didn’t notice, you’re not alone. It tends to get buried in the myriad stats Cupertino provides for runners. Plus, there’s a lot of confusion about what it actually means and whether it’s useful.

But when you understand what your running cadence is telling you, it can help make you run faster and reduce your risk of injury. So it’s definitely worth taking the time to get your head around it. Here’s our handy guide.

Learning languages is a lifelong endeavor, and there’s no single way to do it. Many language-learning apps revolve around one concept or approach, so they’ll limit the amount of progress you can make. But with a variety of technologies backing its lessons, Mondly offers powerful tools for learning languages.

If you’ve been enjoying Apple TV+ and wondering why your vision is suddenly better, it’s not that you’re getting younger. It’s that Apple’s new service streams the highest-quality 4K content yet.

That’s according to new tests that measure the bitrate of video streams. They reveal See has the highest bitrate so far, closely followed by The Elephant Queen.

The world moves at lightning speed. There’s more content created now than at any other point in human history. Valuable information whizzes past so quickly it’s nearly impossible to even identify it all, let alone consume and internalize it.

So with all that going on … how do you possibly find time to read?  And we don’t mean pulpy bestsellers, either. We’re talking about the latest in business strategy and training to stay abreast of what’s taking the corporate world by storm and how you can use that knowledge to advance your own career.

You mainline it, of course.

Stressed? On edge? Struggling to block out the annoying construction work down the street? Or do you just hate silence, and the way it reminds you that your life is tick-ticking away? Then you need some room-filling ambient sounds.

How about a nice, relaxing rainstorm to help you fall asleep? Or some white noise to fill the space left by your grownup children when they left you behind to start their own lives? If you have a HomePod running iOS 13.2 or later, your smart speaker stands ready to help blank out the soul-bleeding silence of your empty life. You just need to ask.

Just Mobile is offering crazy discounts on some of its best iPhone cases. You can now bag its Quattro Air for iPhone XS for just $7.95 when you buy through the Cult of Mac Store.

That’s $27 off the usual price!

After finally bringing Photoshop to iPad, Adobe says it will roll out a new smartphone camera app with a slew of creative lenses and AI powers that come at the point of capture.

The upcoming Adobe Photoshop Camera seems to borrow the lens-swapping feature of Hipstamatic. Adobe promises it will give users “Photoshop-grade magic right from the viewfinder.”

Instead of a source of distraction and stress, what if your phone could actually become a tool for staying mindful and relieving stress and anxiety?

The Aura Health meditation app provides short mindfulness exercises every day, straight from your phone. And, unlike most meditation apps, it uses machine learning to tune into your specific patterns and needs.

A futuristic post-apocalyptic world in which a virus has robbed humanity of its eyesight and reduced the human race to a few million people. Even speaking of sight in this world is heresy. Add in muscular man mountain Jason Momoa and a Game of Thrones budget and you’ve got See.

What did I make of the first episode of Apple TV+’s fantasy series? Read on to find out….

Apple today confirmed a $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing crisis in California.

The company hopes its commitment will accelerate and expand new housing production, jump-start long-term developments, and help first-time buyers purchase new homes.