How-to

Looking to transfer money natively on your iPhone without needing a third-party app or service? Follow along for a look at how to set up Apple Pay Cash and the various ways to use it.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple released macOS High Sierra to the public back in September, bringing notable changes such as Apple File System, Safari 11, and more. One change that’s proved to be more of an annoyance, however, relates to the media keys. No longer do they control just media apps like iTunes and Spotify, but rather they control any sort of video and audio playback.

If you’re like me, that’s come as more of a bother than a real feature, but a new third-party tool aims to restore media keys to their previous glory…

Expand
Expanding
Close

You can easily spend between $100 and $200 on a Wi-Fi digital photo frame, but these often have clunky interfaces for syncing photos and the displays can be quite poor. A better solution may be repurposing an old iPad or putting your current iPad in photo frame mode for special occasions.

Apple used to include a handy photo slideshow button on the iPad lock screen years ago, but this feature was abandoned with iOS 7 and later. While I’d love to see this feature return in the future, it’s possible to create a Wi-Fi digital photo frame mode for your iPad using built-in features in iOS today.

Expand
Expanding
Close

With the latest version of iTunes, Apple buried the interface for making ringtones on the Mac. It’s still possible but a lot more cumbersome to manage.

A little-known secret is that you can actually make custom alert ringtones for iOS on your iPhone itself, using GarageBand. Here’s how.

Expand
Expanding
Close

The iPhone X ushers in a major change to the way we interact with our devices due to the lack of a Home button. In order to accommodate an almost bezel-free display, Apple eschewed the Home button and replaced its functionality with several new Screen Edge Gestures.

The presence of these new gestures present new learning opportunities for navigating throughout the iOS UI.  We’ve been using the iPhone X for a day now and have already largely adapted to the new interface methods.

Watch our hands-on video walkthrough as we step through many of the new gestures you’ll need to know to fully navigate the iOS interface sans Home button.
Expand
Expanding
Close

It can be tricky to clean debris out from under Apple’s latest butterfly keyboards found on its MacBook and MacBook Pro models (or any keyboard for that matter). While it’s more difficult for crumbs, dust, etc. to creep your underneath Apple’s butterfly keys, the downside is when stuff gets stuck, it’s tough to clean it out.

Expand
Expanding
Close

When I first wrote about using solid state drives (SSDs) to radically improve the performance of older Macs, high-capacity SSDs were just beginning to become affordable. Replacing a Mac’s 500GB or 1TB hard drive with a same-sized SSD required at least $250 back then, but the benefits were tremendous: even an aging machine became markedly (5x) faster, silent, and — unexpectedly — more fun to use. All for much less than the price of a new Mac.

Today, high-capacity SSDs are more affordable than ever. Replacing your old 500GB hard drive with a same-sized SSD from a reputable manufacturer costs only $150, while 1TB drives are under $330, each $100 less than only a couple of years ago. Once unthinkably huge 2TB and 4TB SSDs are now commonly available, too, albeit at eye-watering prices.

With this week’s release of macOS High Sierra, Apple has officially made SSDs its preferred Mac storage solution, introducing the new APFS standard to further optimize SSD performance over Fusion and traditional hard drives. So this is a perfect time to revisit the topic of SSD upgrades; if you held out before, now’s the time to jump in!

Expand
Expanding
Close

watchOS 4 introduces a new Siri watch face on Apple Watch that intelligently updates to show you relevant content throughout the day. The Siri watch face pulls data from 14 different sources by default, but customizing these sources can help remove information from the timeline that you don’t need and make the watch face more useful.

Expand
Expanding
Close

The 69th annual Emmy Awards take place tonight at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. The show is sure to be packed full of controversial winners and acceptance speeches, skits, and much more. Read on for a full breakdown of how to stream the 2017 Emmys live on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV…

Expand
Expanding
Close

When Apple launched the iPhone 7 Plus, one of the biggest features was the dual-camera system’s Portrait Mode. The mode gives images a DSLR-like background blur, albeit with some hiccups occassionally. Sometimes the effect looks unnatural or just blurs key areas of the photo.

On iOS 10, if you didn’t have the option to keep the normal photo enabled under Settings, you might’ve lost a perfectly good moment. It may not have been perfect on day one, but Apple has been making improvements to the effect over various iOS updates.

On iOS 11, photographers will now be able to disable the depth effect even after the photo has already been taken without managing the setting. Let’s take a look how.

Expand
Expanding
Close

This year tvOS joined macOS and iOS in offering a free public beta version of upcoming software updates, and Apple released the first tvOS 11 public beta for testing early last week. There aren’t a ton of flashy new features in tvOS 11, but there are a few nice improvements that you can start using now. Here’s how to start using the tvOS 11 public beta on your Apple TV and what you can expect:

Expand
Expanding
Close

I recently acquired the base model Mid 2017 5K iMac, and I have a post in the works that explains my reasoning for that decision. In a nutshell, I believe that this machine, at $1799, is by far the best bang for your buck as far as Macs go.

That said, it’s not perfect. One of the weakest points of the base model 5K iMac has to do with its stock RAM configuration. With only 8GB of RAM, the system struggles right out of the gate, and will start writing lots of data to disk in fairly short order. Thankfully, it’s ridiculously easy and relatively cheap to upgrade the 5K iMac’s RAM. In this brief video tutorial, we’ll show you how.
Expand
Expanding
Close