Create and Name Reminders Lists to Use Them Via Siri

Do you create reminders with Siri on the iPhone? Those reminders are automatically added to your default list, which you set in Settings > Reminders > Default List. That’s great generally—“Hey Siri, remind me to update watchOS tonight at 11 PM”—but less good when you want to maintain different shopping lists. For instance, create a […]

Install Minor Operating System Updates to Maintain Herd Immunity

It seems like Apple releases updates to iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS nearly every week these days. It has been only a few months since iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra launched, and we’ve already seen ten updates to iOS and seven updates to macOS. Some of these have been to fix bugs, which […]

Call 911! Or, with an iPhone or Apple Watch, Invoke Emergency SOS.

Have you ever needed to call emergency services from your or someone else’s iPhone? Almost by definition, such calls take place at stressful times, and it can be hard to remember what to do. Or, if you’ve been in an accident, it might be difficult or impossible to navigate the iPhone’s interface. In iOS 10.2 […]

Taking Out the Garbage: Tips for Working with the Trash on the Mac

One of the great innovations of the Mac, way back when, was the concept of the Trash. Instead of deleting files immediately, you’d put them in the Trash, where they’d sit until you either took them out or removed them for good by emptying the Trash. You undoubtedly know the basics of working with the […]

Who Should Buy the New iMac Pro?

Apple’s new iMac Pro has started shipping, and it’s an astonishing machine. Put simply, it’s the most powerful Mac ever, a title it will likely retain until Apple releases a new version of the Mac Pro, promised for sometime in 2018. But for now, what’s special about the iMac Pro, and should you buy one? […]

Learn How You Can Adjust Web Site Behavior with Safari’s Site-Specific Settings

Although macOS 10.13 High Sierra was light on new features, it did bring one welcome addition to Safari—site-specific settings. Imagine that you regularly visit a blog that you prefer to read using Safari’s Reader view. Rather than invoke it each time you visit, you can now set Safari to use Reader automatically on that site. […]

Having Trouble Switching Apps on the iPhone X? Try This.

Since the iPhone X lacks a Home button to press twice for the app switcher, you’ll need to switch apps in a new way. To bring up the app switcher, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to about halfway, and then pause until the app thumbnails appear. Then you can scroll through your […]

Ransomware: Should You Be Worried, and What Protective Steps Should You Take?

Malware makes headlines regularly these days, and although Macs are targeted far less than Windows PCs, Mac users still need to remain vigilant. A particularly serious type of malware is called “ransomware” because once it infects your computer, it encrypts all your files and holds them for ransom. Luckily, despite the virulence of ransomware in […]

Five Things You Should Never Do with Passwords (and Three You Should)

Passwords are the bane of our modern existence. Nearly anything you want to do, it seems, calls for a password. As the Internet’s reach extends beyond computers and into phones, TVs, appliances, and even toys, we have to enter passwords with increasing frequency and in ever more annoying ways. To make dealing with passwords easier […]

How to Deal with macOS Server Losing Many of Its Services

For many years, Apple has sold macOS Server (previously called OS X Server) for those who wanted to run various Unix-based Internet services on a Mac. Server became popular because it put an easy-to-use graphical interface on top of the Unix apps, allowing Mac users to avoid complicated configuration files and reducing the need to […]

Here’s the Fastest Way to Set Up a New iPhone

When you’re unboxing a new iPhone, it’s time to think about how you’ll move your digital life from your old iPhone to the new one. If your old iPhone is running iOS 11, you can use Quick Start, a new iOS 11 feature that makes the transfer easy. Just turn on the new iPhone, set […]

Did You Know that Apple Pay Updates Your Credit Card Details Automatically?

File this as reason number 17 why Apple Pay is better than plastic. Let’s say your credit card expires and your bank sends you a new card with a revised expiration date. Or perhaps your bank replaces your card with one that has a new number. Either way, most credit card issuers automatically update the […]

Follow This Quick Tip to Put Calendar Events in the Right Place

Apple’s Calendar apps in both macOS and iOS let you manage multiple calendars, some of which may be private and others may be shared with family or colleagues. That’s great, but if you create a new event on the wrong calendar, you may end up oversharing with colleagues (who don’t need to know about your […]

What You Need to Know about Face ID on the iPhone X

Apple’s new iPhone X does away with the Home button, which has been a fixture since the original iPhone and has long served as the Touch ID sensor. To replace Touch ID, Apple developed a new facial recognition technology called Face ID. With Face ID, the iPhone X scans your face to authenticate you instead […]

Trading Faces: Picking a Better Face for People Photos Recognizes

Apple’s Photos app is remarkably good at identifying people in your snapshots and collecting all the pictures that contain a particular person into a group in its People view. At its top level, the People view shows a thumbnail photo for each person, picking one automatically from all the available photos. Needless to say, it […]

Merge Recognized Faces in Photos in Both iOS and macOS

An extremely welcome under-the-hood change in iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra is that Photos facial recognition syncs across iCloud Photo Library. Previously, people you identified on one of your devices remained unidentified on others. But what if Photos now identifies the same person twice, such that they have two separate entries in the […]

Teach Siri How to Pronounce Names Properly

Siri is supposed to be a competent voice assistant, but sometimes Siri can’t even pronounce your own name correctly! Luckily, it’s easy to fix Siri’s pronunciation for any name. Just say to Siri, “Learn how to pronounce Jill Kresock.” (Siri defaults to “krehsock” rather than the correct “kreesock” in this case.) Siri first asks you […]

Here’s How to Hide All Windows on Your Mac So You Can Work on the Desktop

If your Mac is anything like ours, you end up with lots of apps open, each with one or more windows that obscure the Desktop. For those people who like to save in-progress documents to the Desktop and keep current project folders there, all those windows get in the way. macOS has a solution. Open […]

Use iOS 11’s Do Not Disturb While Driving Feature

Distracted driving may not make headlines, but it’s a huge problem. In the United States in 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 391,000 people were injured and 3477 killed in accidents caused by distracted driving. Many things can distract drivers, but the most concerning—and the most avoidable—is texting. Given that the iPhone […]

What Is a Fusion Drive, and Why Should You Care?

There are two basic types of storage devices available today: hard disk drives and solid-state drives. For the lowest cost per gigabyte, you can’t go wrong with a hard drive, and they come in truly massive sizes—up to a whopping 10 terabytes. However, they’re relatively slow. For speed, you want a solid-state drive, also known […]