Troubleshooting

Typically you can download anything from the Mac App Store without incident, that’s the way things are supposed to work. Sometimes things aren’t so hunky-dory, and one of the more peculiar errors from the App Store is the incredibly vague “We could not complete your purchase – Unknown Error” message.

When you set up a new Mail account in Mac OS X, you typically enter the service provider, email address, and the email accounts password once, then everything just works, right? Well, generally, but sometimes things aren’t so simple, and a frustrating issue that some users encounter is Mail app repeatedly asking for their password, … Read More

Ever needed to reboot an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch that doesn’t have a functioning power button or a Home button? It’s tricky if not impossible, right? Even with the Assistive Touch on-screen buttons and variety of workarounds for a failed power button, rebooting an iOS device without working hardware buttons is a challenge, but … Read More

From time to time, Apple will offer free out-of-warranty repair services for devices and hardware that are determined to be dysfunctional or defective. For example, many users experienced the failure of their iPhone 5 lock / power button, and Apple later determined that some of the devices manufactured were susceptive to power button failure, thus … Read More

The mouse and trackpad are pretty essential to desktop Mac users, so if the input devices start acting up with mystery clicks, clicks not registering, erratic motions, and other weird behavior, you have good reason to be frustrated. This article will troubleshoot unusual mouse and trackpad behavior that may be happening on a Mac. Things … Read More

Some Mac users who partitioned their Macs to dual boot between the beta OS X Yosemite builds and stable OS X Mavericks releases have discovered a disconcerting issue; their Mavericks partition seems to have vanished and been replaced by an “OS X Installer” partition, forcing them to be stuck in OS X Yosemite. The obvious … Read More

Mac users who are dealing with particularly complex or troublesome issues with Mac OS can turn to an advanced diagnostics tool available from the command line in Mac OS X. The tool, called sysdiagnose, offers detailed technical analysis and reports of a huge variety of components of OS X and the Mac hardware, making it … Read More

Now that OS X Yosemite is in open public beta and generating considerable interest from Mac users, a fair amount of complaints or frustrations have surfaced both in our comments and around the web on forums. Whether it’s a pestering bug, a beloved feature that has gone missing or that was tweaked in Yosemite, something … Read More

With the OS X Yosemite public beta now available to download, some users are experiencing a handful of issues when trying to actually download and install the release.

Have you ever seen the Temperature Warning on the iPhone before, saying “iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it”, appearing seemingly out of nowhere? If you’ve ever left your iPhone outdoors on a hot sunny day for too long, you probably have. And if you haven’t seen that warning, let’s try to … Read More

iCloud Activation Lock is a feature that allows users to lock down an iPhone (or iPad) and require the entry of an Apple ID before the device becomes usable again. It’s part of the excellent Find My iPhone service and is extremely useful for many reasons, but it can also be a real pain if … Read More

If you regularly make backups of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to the computer with iTunes, you may rarely run into an error when iTunes reports it’s unable to backup the iOS device. This is usually accompanied by a very vague error message like “iTunes could not back up the iPhone “(name)” because the … Read More

The device Usage statistics shown in iOS Settings > General > Usage offer a quick look at how much capacity is available, actively being used by apps, and their respective data and caches. Similarly, usage data is also available to track app cellular data usage. Sometimes these usage statistics will appear blank though, showing a … Read More

If you’ve ever reset an iPhone to factory default settings or restored a device to set it up as new, you may have run into this “Activation Error” message when going to set up the iPhone again. The accompanying message is somewhat vague and not particularly helpful, saying “Activation request could not be completed. If … Read More

My iPhone 5 camera completely stopped working recently, and appeared to stay that way despite forced resets, killing camera apps, and every other traditional troubleshooting trick in the book. What do I mean by stopped working? I mean the Camera app loads, but the camera viewfinder shows nothing at all just a black screen, and … Read More

The Mac issues a warning when an attached disk, drive, or volume has not been ejected properly, this is to insure against data loss on the drive in question, and it is good advice to follow. Of course the next obvious question for so many newcomers to the Mac platform is how on earth to … Read More

Some iPhone users have experienced a very annoying issue; their iPhone will randomly turn itself off, despite having battery charge remaining. Sometimes this is just a matter of the iPhone battery indicator not updating properly, sometimes it’s software related, and sometimes it’s actually related to the battery hardware itself. If you’re experiencing the random shutting … Read More

If you’ve ever launched the App Store in iOS to discover the “Updates” tab is empty, but you know for certain that an app update is widely available, you may have run into a peculiar and frustrating bug within iOS. Unlike the Mac App Store with Command+R, there is no easy way to ‘refresh’ the … Read More