Troubleshooting

Though it is an unusual occurrence, a Mac may encounter a broken or damaged EFI partition which typically prevents the Mac from booting and the Mac OS system software from loading. This is usually demonstrated as a boot screen that is stuck on the  Apple logo, sometimes with or without a wait cursor that … Read More

For Google Chrome users, sometimes a webpage may crash with an “Aw, Snap!” error message. This error message frequently prevents a web page from loading at all, and it can certainly disrupt a web browsing session by the page crashing. The “Aw Snap” error message in Chrome happens for a variety of reasons, but rather … Read More

Mac users may find that a system update, installer, or package (pkg) can get completely stuck in a verification sequence, with a pop-up alert that says “Verifying ‘name.pkg’…” while showing the Gatekeeper icon and a progress bar that never updates. The effect is the package or installer won’t run as it never completes verification, making … Read More

Many users are password protecting Notes on iPhone and iPad, which offers a secondary security layer for especially personal or private data stored within the Notes app. Because the Notes app uses a different password from the general password used on the iOS Lock Screen, and different from the password used by an Apple ID … Read More

Beta testers of macOS Sierra can send feedback and bug reports directly to Apple, offering a chance to help shape the future of the Mac operating system. Reporting bugs and offering feature feedback is part of the fun of beta testing (and part of the purpose of the public betas), so if you are running … Read More

A strange bug that continues to persist in iOS for iPhone mysteriously causes all phone contacts to suddenly disappear from the Phone app on the device. Most users will never experience the missing contacts bug, but it can be disconcerting if encountered. This missing contacts bug is not subtle and seems to happen at random, … Read More

Now that iOS 10 public beta is available to install for anyone, users can run the beta system software on any compatible iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Of course since it’s beta software, users may encounter bugs, or there may be behavior that is generally unexpected or could be improved upon in the iOS 10 … Read More

Some Mac users may wish to downgrade from MacOS Sierra Beta and revert back to OS X El Capitan, this is particularly common if you have found things to be less than stable or otherwise problematic and would like to return to a more stable operating system experience – a fairly common scenario for beta … Read More

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where Bluetooth needs to be enabled on a Mac, but you don’t have a mouse or keyboard handy? This can pose a conundrum; in order to re-enable Bluetooth, you must use a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard… That may sound a little silly, but it’s a situation which … Read More

Some Mac users may encounter a stranger wi-fi issue where the wireless menu icon has an “X” in it, and the wi-fi dropdown menu says “Wi-Fi: No Hardware Installed”. Since we’re all dependent on wireless networking these days, having no functioning wi-fi connection can be very frustrating, but fortunately this is usually a really simple … Read More

The Opera web browser is perhaps best known more recently for having a great free VPN included in the browser, and while it’s generally a good web browser alternative, the latest versions include a rather annoying pop-up feature that shows up any time any text is selected in the app. Fortunately, you can disable the … Read More

The Recovery partition in Mac OS X is an important component of a system install in that it allows you to troubleshoot a computer, repair drives, restore from backups, and even reinstall Mac OS if need be. Nonetheless, in some specific situations you may find that a Mac does not have a Recovery partition, usually … Read More

Polyglots, learners, and the bilingual often want to change their Mac system language for obvious reasons, but another less obvious situation can occur if you’re troubleshooting a Mac that either originates in another country, had the language changed at some point, or is just set to a different language. Since it can be pretty challenging … Read More

Mac Safari users may occasionally experience an issue where the web browser becomes unresponsive for an extended period of time, usually accompanied by the appearance of the spinning multi-color beach ball cursor. With a little digging under the hood, this almost always corresponds with the appearance of “Safari Web Process (Not Responding)” showing up in … Read More

One of the definitive ways for an average user to determine if their Mac has a hardware problem is to run Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics, which is what we’re going to show you how to do in this tutorial. Yes, most Mac users will experience plenty of years of trouble-free computing, but sometimes … Read More

You can remove a device from the devices list on an iCloud account by using the Settings app in iOS. This can be helpful if you have gifted or sold an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or Apple Watch, already removed iCloud from that device, and now you no longer want to have that device … Read More

Installing an iOS beta onto an iPhone or iPad places an iOS Beta Software Profile certificate onto the device, which allows that hardware to receive new iOS beta builds through Software Update. If you decide you no longer want a specific device to receive beta updates however, you’ll want to remove the iOS beta profile … Read More

A number of Mac users have discovered that their computers are freezing at random after updating their computers to OS X 10.11.4 and sometimes with OS X 10.11.5 as well. The problem is rather annoying as the Mac becomes entirely unresponsive and requires a forced reboot intervention, though disabling WebGL in Safari seems to help … Read More