• September 17, 2024

    What You Need to Know Before Switching to a New iPhone

    Are you planning to upgrade to a new iPhone 16? It’s exciting, we know, but it’s best to proceed deliberately when setting up your new iPhone to avoid causing yourself headaches. Follow these instructions when you’re ready to transfer your data—and, for many people, much of your digital life—to the new iPhone. Apple also has a Read more
  • September 5, 2024

    Five Quick Tips to Ease iPhone and iPad Text Editing and Amaze Your Friends

    A friend recently expressed astonishment when she saw us using trackpad mode while editing text on an iPhone. (It works on the iPad, too!) So, even if you already know these tips, do your friends a favor and show them:
    • Tap once to position the insertion point at the start or end of a word.
    • Touch and hold to reveal the magnifier and move the insertion point within words ... Read more
  • August 29, 2024

    Use High-Quality Cables for Optimal Performance and Safety

    Apple’s prices for Thunderbolt, USB-C, and Lightning cables often seem unnecessarily high. $69 for a Read more
  • August 13, 2024

    Missed an Alert? Check Notification Center

    iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all let you specify whether any given app should show no notifications, temporary banners, or persistent alerts: look in Settings > Notifications and System Settings > Notifications. Temporary banners appear briefly and then automatically disappear, which is appropriate for notifications requiring no acknowledgment. But what if you see a temporary banner only as it’... Read more
  • August 6, 2024

    Be Careful When Scanning Unknown QR Codes

    QR codes, those square, blocky codes you scan with your iPhone’s camera to load a Web page, have become ubiquitous. So much so that we seldom pause before scanning any QR code we see. But if you think about it, that’s the same as clicking random links in emails or texts, which is a terrible idea from a security perspective. “Quishing” (QR code phishing) isn’t commonplace yet, but some sources s... Read more
  • July 22, 2024

    Remember the Magnifier App When You Need to Read Tiny Text

    Trying to make out a tiny serial number or some fine print you can barely read can be frustrating. Years ago, Apple added a magnifier mode to its accessibility options and turned the feature into a standalone app in iOS 14. You can find the MagnifierRead more
  • July 13, 2024

    Apple Explains Its Approach to Device Longevity

    We Apple users tend to believe that our devices usually last longer—both physically and functionally—than Windows PCs and Android smartphones. For instance, Apple’s current operating systems work on nearly all Macs, iPhones, and iPads introduced in 2018 and later, albeit with some feature loss on the oldest devices. In a white paper entitled “Read more
  • June 4, 2024

    Quickly Catalog Books or Other Named Items on Shelves

    If you have trouble finding particular items across multiple shelves of books, labeled boxes, or anything else that’s clearly identified with a text name, take carefully composed photos that capture all the titles without glare. Later, you can search for any text in those photos to find them—tap the Search button in Photos on the iPhone or iPad, or use the Search field in Photos on the Mac. Pho... Read more
  • May 28, 2024

    Apple’s iCloud Keychain Password Management Is All Many People Need

    Apple’s iCloud Keychain Password Management Is All Many People Need

    We constantly recommend using a password manager like 1Password, BitWarden, or Dashlane. But many people resist ... Read more
  • May 16, 2024

    Display an Album of Photos on Your iPhone or iPad Lock Screen

    A popular feature of iOS 16 was the Photo Shuffle option for customizing the iPhone Lock Screen. It used machine learning to select photos in four categories—People, Pets, Nature, and Cities—and rotated through them when you tapped, on lock, hourly, or daily. If you didn’t like the automatic selection, you could pick photos manually, but it was clumsy. In iOS 17 (and iPadOS 17, which also added... Read more