A fair amount of MacBook Pro 2010 (and some 2011) users are reporting stability issues with their NVIDIA 330M equipped Macs and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, with problems including kernel panics, random system crashes, blank or black screens, inability to wake from sleep, external displays not working, and assorted other headaches. The Macs most … Read More

Many users who upgraded to Mac OS X Lion discovered that their Wi-Fi connections were dropping periodically for no apparent reason. We published a reasonably thorough walkthrough with tips on fixing OS X Lion’s wireless dropping issues and that’s a recommended starting point because most tips are easy and less complicated, but among those was … Read More

You can now select any number of files from the Mac OS X desktop or a folder and create a new folder containing those selected items. This is a wildly useful Finder trick for file management and organization, since you can quickly group a collection of files by selecting however many you want to within … Read More

A Mac Pro with two extra NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 video cards and 16GB of RAM is driving these three displays, making one heck of a Mac setup. The left screen is hosting a Windows 7 virtual machine in Parallels full time, while everything else is all Mac OS X. Also pictured: an iPad 1 … Read More

If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s … Read More

You may know already that iOS has the same underlying unix architecture as Mac OS X, and because of this you can SSH into an iPhone or iPad just like you would connect to any other Mac or unix based machine. As it turns out for us nerdier users, this ability is disabled without a … Read More

If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold … Read More

Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only. First off, you have to use a PNG … Read More

Want the iCloud.com beta background image as your desktop wallpaper? I did too, so I grabbed the background image file from iCloud’s springboard, tiled it, and put a similar shadow on it with Photoshop. The result is this 2000×1080 PNG file, ready to be set as your desktop background Click here or the image above … Read More

iCloud Beta is now live for developers to access, and we know what the pricing plans look like, but average users are left just looking at screenshots for now. Just kidding! If you want to check out iCloud’s very iOS-like Springboard and web apps, and you don’t have a developer account, you can use this … Read More

In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal. Turn Off … Read More

Launchpad is the app launcher in Mac OS X that is quite like the iOS Home Screen, showing a series of app icons and names on a simple screen making it very easy to launch whatever apps you want to open. It’s a nice utility and feature built into the Mac, but it does have … Read More

Resume is that feature of Mac OS X Lion that causes apps windows to reappear after you have quit and then relaunched the app. It’s a great feature but not one that we want all applications to use, so here is how to disable Resume on a per app basis.

One of the many understated features in Mac OS X is the ability to natively convert audio to m4a directly in the OS X Finder – without any additional downloads or add-ons. Yes, an MPEG audio encoder is built directly into Mac OS X since versions 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 (and beyond of course), … Read More

If you don’t use Safari’s new Reading List feature in Mac OS X Lion, you probably don’t want that little eyeglass icon cluttering up your bookmarks bar. It’s easy to hide though, here’s how: Go to the Safari menu and open Preferences Click on the “Bookmarks” tab and uncheck “Include Reading List” If you don’t … Read More

Having more RAM is one of the cheapest Mac upgrades you can get for a performance boost, and with prices this low there’s little excuse to not have 8GB if your Mac supports it. Here are two great deals on RAM upgrades for some of the most recent Macs. This 8GB 1333MHz kit will fit … Read More

A 27″ iMac always makes for a great desktop. This one is a Core i5 with an SSD, and an external HP 23″ display is attached to extend the screen real estate even further. I am so accustomed to using a Mac with an additional screen that it would be almost impossible to have a … Read More

The Mac now has the highly desirable “Cut and Paste” file feature throughout the Mac OS X desktop and Finder, allowing users to truly cut and paste to move the selected documents or folders to a new location, rather than just making a copy of them. In this sense, the cut & paste ability behaves … Read More