The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro changes dynamically depending on what application is open and what action is going on within Mac OS. Or at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Rarely, the Touch Bar stops working, will get stuck and become unresponsive, maybe even display an erroneous button, or show a blank button that doesn’t do anything. Typically the Touch Bar gets itself back in working order once the troubled application in question becomes responsive, exited, or the app is force quit, but sometimes you may need to manually force the Touch Bar to refresh and reload.

We’ll show you how to relaunch Touch Bar on a Mac, as well as how to target just the Control Strip portion of Touch Bar to force that to refresh.

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Many iPhone users send and receive pictures in Messages app for iOS, but have you ever wanted to save a photo from Messages app to your iPhone or iPad? Maybe it’s a picture you received from someone else that you want to save locally, or perhaps it’s a photo you took with the camera directly from Messages app.

Saving pictures from Messages to iPhone and iPad is really easy in iOS 12 and earlier versions, we’ll show you two different ways to accomplish this. Once an image has been saved locally, it can be found in the Photos app of iOS along with your other pictures.

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Ten years ago today, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced iPhone to the world.

In a highly anticipated keynote presentation, Jobs famously announced what seemed like three different products: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device… of course this was soon to be revealed as all contained within the same device; the iPhone. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Apple has released the latest beta version builds of each of their operating systems, including beta updates to MacOS Sierra, iOS 10.2.1, watchOS 3.1.3, and tvOS 10.1.1.

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For those MacBook Pro owners with higher end models that include dual video cards (integrated and discrete GPU), you’re likely aware that Mac OS and certain apps will switch between the two graphics cards as is determined necessary. The idea behind this is for apps to use the integrated GPU when attempting to conserve power and battery life, and to use the discrete GPU when attempting to maximize graphics performance at the expense of battery and increased power consumption.

Generally speaking GPU switching is a great feature that should not be modified or adjusted in any way, but some advanced Mac users may wish to disable the automatic graphics card switching feature on MacBook Pro models.

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Apple is running a new iPhone 7 Plus commercial called “Take Mine”, the advertisement emphasizes the devices Portrait Mode camera feature.

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The Health app on iPhone is primarily used to track fitness and activity, and likely much more once the Apple Watch and other sensors connect to the device, but another handy and lesser known feature is called Medical ID. Medical ID can be filled out on your iPhone to show important information about the iPhones owner, and it can be checked on another users iPhone too – assuming they placed appropriate details.

Medical ID can show an iPhone owners name, birthdate, medical conditions, medical notes, relatives and partners, emergency contact information, blood type, whether you’re an organ donor or not, weight, height, and other details you want to add as well.

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Emojifying words and messages is one of the many new fun features of Messages in iOS. With a simple trick, you can choose words to replace them with Emoji icons, converting a generic text message into a colorful message intermixed with Emojis.

The Emoji text replacement tool works on iPhone and iPad as long as you have a modern version of iOS. Let’s review how to use this playful new component of Messages in iOS.

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The built-in trackpad on MacBook Pro and MacBook functions as the primary input method of the Apple laptops, but if you primarily use an external mouse or external trackpad you may occasionally find the built-in trackpad receives input you’d rather the Mac ignore. With a simple settings adjustment you can do exactly that, ignoring any input from the internal built-in trackpad when an external mouse or trackpad is connected to the Mac.

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Did you use Vine? If so you’ll likely want to download all of your Vine videos before they disappear for good. We’ll show you how to download any and all video archive from the Vine service, it’s pretty simple and can be done with any web browser, there’s no need to break out curl or derive a DIY solution like what was once necesssary. And yes, if you never used Vine from your iPhone or Android, this will be totally irrelevant to you.

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Many Mac users have apps installed on their Mac which take up considerable storage space but generally go unused. Accordingly, Mac users can free up storage space on their computer by tracking down large Mac apps and deleting them.

The latest versions of MacOS offer a very easy way to track down large applications, see when they were last used, and offers a simple way to delete the apps from the Mac, all from a unified Storage Management tool.

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Need to place an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus into DFU mode? Now that the iPhone no longer includes a clickable Home button, you might be wondering how to place the iPhone 7 models into DFU mode, and that’s exactly what we’ll show you how to do.

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Want to mute audio blasting from a browser tab in Google Chrome? Of course you do! Few things are more annoying when browsing the web than autoplaying video and autoplaying audio that starts when you load a web page.

Rather than frantically trying to locate the offending media source of blasting, a better approach is to mute the tab, which will silence any and all audio coming from the webpage, whether it’s in a video or embedded movie, or an audio track, or otherwise. This is a great tip whether you use Google Chrome sporadically or if you set it as your Macs default browser (and yes a similar feature is available for Safari too).

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Have you ever received a picture message on your iPhone and you wanted to share that photo with someone else? There are a few different ways to forward photo messages from an iPhone, we’ll show you the easiest and quickest method to pass along a picture message from your iPhone Messages app to send along to another contact.

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Mac users can respond to Messages faster than ever by replying directly from a message notification, without ever having to open the Messages app. This effectively means that you can have an entire conversation through the message pop-ups in Mac OS without using the Messages app, though keep in mind the experience will be limited for multimedia messages of pictures and video, leaving this tip best for replying to normal text based communications.

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Pages for Mac has gained the ability to use Tabs, allowing for tidy document management within the Pages app when having multiple documents open simultaneously.

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If you have some picture(s) you’d rather not shown alongside your regular photo album in Photos for Mac, you can hide those photos and then use a special Hidden Photos album to contain the hidden images and browse them separately. These hidden pictures will be self contained and separate from the regular album views, though they can still be easily accessed from the Photos app on Mac. We’ll show you how to hide photos, and then how to access the Hidden album, and how to unhide pictures as well.

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Restrictions on iPhone or iPad prevent a user from making many changes to the devices settings and allow the disabling of various iOS features, including some apps, functionalities, to disallow certain content types, and the ability to prevent making in-app purchases or buying from the App Store. Restrictions are very commonly used by parents to make a kid friendly iPhone or iPad, and iOS restrictions are also frequently used in academic and public environments to limit a device in various ways.

Restrictions are an excellent feature of iOS, but what happens if you forget the Restrictions password in iOS? Can you reset a forgotten Restrictions passcode on iPhone or iPad? How do you remove a Restrictions passcode if you don’t know the password? These are all valid questions, be sure to read thoroughly below to learn how to work with the scenario of a lost restrictions password.

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