VMWare Tools is an optional toolkit to install into a Windows virtual machine in VMWare that allows you to have easier sharing of files between the host Mac operating system and the Windows virtual machine, as well as some other useful features like time syncing between host and client, being able to pass data back and forth between the host and client, additional customization options, and more.
VMWare Tools isn’t necessary to simply run a VM, and it’s not needed for everyone, but advanced users, or those who want to have easy options to share files between a Windows VM and the host MacOS might particularly appreciate these features, and want them installed in VMWare Fusion on their VM.
We’ll show you two ways to install VMWare Tools into a Windows VM in VMWare; using the easy installer, and by installing it manually by ISO file.
ChatGPT for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, all include a very impressive Voice Chat feature, that lets you have voice chats and full on conversations with the advanced AI Large Language Model. One of the fun ways to customize Voice Chat with ChatGPT is to change the voice to something you prefer, and there are multiple options available to choose from.
We’ll show you how you can easily change the voice of that used in conversation mode of ChatGPT on iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Amazon is back with offering some great deals on the M1 iPad Air M1 model, taking $200 off the $599 MSRP, bringing the final price to just $399. To round it out, there’s also nice discounts on the compatible Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil, so you can get a full iPad Air setup at a great deal price.
Plus there’s some great deals on upgraded M3 MacBook Air models, AirTags, and AirPods, so check those out too. Stock changes quickly at Amazon with varying colors, so keep that in mind as you’re browsing, and you can always check back again later to see if a particular color or option is available.
iPad Air M1 5th generation for $399 (Save $200, 33% Off)
Amazon is offering a huge discount on the M1 iPad Air, bringing the 5th gen model down to just $399 from the $599 MSRP. iPad Air 5th gen features a speedy and power efficient M1 chip, 10.9″ Liquid Retina Display, 64GB storage, 12MP front and 12MP back cameras, Touch ID, all day battery life, and full compatibility with Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil 2. The discount is available in Silverlight, and stock on other colors is shifting quickly.
The freshly released M2 iPad Air is also available at a small discount, but the M1 iPad Air is much cheaper and most users likely won’t notice any performance difference between the M1 and M2 models, so if you’d rather save a couple hundred bucks and put those savings towards accessories, that makes a lot of sense.
iPad Magic Keyboard for $249 (From $299)
You can save 16% on the iPad Magic Keyboard 11″ model, which works great with the iPad Air 5th gen. The iPad Magic Keyboard is arguably the best accessory you can get for an iPad, as it completely transforms the tablet into a laptop-like experience, with a fantastic trackpad and keyboard (with backlighting). Plus with the pass-through charging capacity for USB-C, you free up the port on the M1 iPad Air. You can get the deal price in either Black or White colors.
The Apple Pencil 2 is available at a whopper discount and works great with the iPad Air 5th gen. Apple Pencil is perfect for taking notes, doodling, drawing, sketching, or just interacting with your iPad with a stylus. It charges magnetically by snapping to the side of your iPad Air.
You can build an entire M1 iPad Air bundle with Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil for just $728!
15″ M3 MacBook Air 16GB / 512GB for $200 Off
The M3 MacBook Air 15″ upgraded model with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD can be had at a $200 discount on Amazon, while the M3 Air 13″ is available at a $150 discount:
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If you use a lot of tabs when browsing the web with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, or any other Chromium based browser, you might want to enable an optional feature that asks to confirm whether or not you wish to close any browser window with multiple tabs open. This can help to prevent you from losing active browsing sessions and tabs that you might not want to close, and help to prevent accidental browser tab loss.
This trick works the same in any Chromium based browser, including Chrome, Edge, Brave, and others, so whatever you use as your default web browser on Mac (or PC) you can make this change.
If you’re a Safari user, as many of us are, you might be interested in actually searching the web with Google and then seeing a list of actual web link results, without seeing any of the new AI junk, video and image recommendations, knowledge panels, related searches, suggested searches, or the other junky clutter that dominates basically every modern Google search. Indeed, once upon a time, a default search on Google actually returned web-only results! You can have that good-old web search experience again with Safari, whether you’re on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and it’s pretty simple as you’ll see in a moment.
OpenAI recently announced that an official ChatGPT app for Mac was coming with ChatGPT 4o support, complete with some pretty cool features like a keyboard shortcut to open a ChatGPT query from anywhere (kind of like Spotlight, but for ChatGPT), screenshot capabilities, ability to initiate discussions based on photos (for example, provide a picture of a plant and let ChatGPT determine what it is and how to care for it), and a very advanced voice conversation feature that blows Siri, Alexa, and every other voice assistant completely away. But part of the announcement from OpenAI was that ChatGPT for Mac was “coming soon”, and so it’s not available to download for all users, and even if you do manage to download the ChatGPT app for Mac (from a friend, social media link, or found on ChatGPT forums), you’ll be presented with a “coming soon – you do not have access to the desktop app yet” error message.
However, thanks to a super goofy little trick, you can immediately gain access to ChatGPT for Mac, and use it right now! Yes this means you can download ChatGPT for Mac right now, and skip the waitlist to use it right now too.
Amazon is back with some more great deals on the MacBook Air series, taking $200 off the 15″ model and $150 off the 13″ model, both with the upgraded 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD configurations.
Remember when you used to use Google search and it would only return a list of links for web results, letting you easily find what you’re looking for? Google was once the best way to search the web, but as almost all Google users have noticed, the web search engine has become less of an engine to search web pages and links and turned into more of a clutter-filled mess with AI regurgitation, so-called “knowledge panels”, ‘related questions and queries’ instead of matching results, unwanted video and photo results when you want web results, and all sorts of other rubbish clutter that degrades the search experience.
While it is frustrating to see what was once the best search engine in the world turn into a cluttered mess with crummy results and rewritten AI content without compensating the original sources and often with deep bias and dubious accuracy, the good news is that you can use a search modifier for Google to make it actually search the web again, and give you actual web results.
Apple has released a small bug fix update for iPhone and iPad versioned as iOS 17.5.1 and iPadOS 17.5.1. The update specifically aims to fix a very strange bug where deleted photos would randomly reappear on some users devices. Sometimes the photos that reappeared on user devices were deleted many years prior, raising serious questions about just how those photos were stored and deleted on iPhone and iPad.
According to the release notes accompanying iOS 17.5.1, the deleted photos were reappearing due to “database corruption” but it’s unclear what exactly that means, and if that’s only related to iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 or something broader with iCloud or with the on-device Photos library. Regardless, it’s probably a good idea to update to iOS 17.5.1 if you are concerned about ancient deleted photos reappearing on your device.
Separately, tvOS 17.5.1 is also available for Apple TV.
Apple Music may be a modern offering from Apple, but a super fun project from developer Mario Guzman offers a very nostalgic interface to Apple Music, giving it a QuickTime lookalike appearance from 2005. Aptly named QuickTune, you’ll find QuickTune has a super simple and fun retro brushed metal interface to interact with Apple Music on your Mac.
If you’ve been a Mac user for long enough, you likely have fond memories of the brief but beloved brushed metal interface of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), and perhaps you even once used QuickTime Player to play music and videos sometime around 2005. With QuickTune, you can relive that experience, but with the conveniences and modern playlists you’ve already curated with Apple Music.
There are numerous options to run Windows 11 simultaneously with MacOS, and one great app option that is newly free is VMware Fusion Pro 13.
VMWare Fusion Pro makes it particularly simple to download, install, and setup Windows 11 in a virtual machine on the Mac, but if you’re new to virtualization and virtual machines, it may sound like a complicated process.
Not to fret, this walkthrough will detail the necessary steps to install Windows 11 into VMware Fusion Pro on a Mac, entirely for free.
There are many websites that have audio that you may wish to stream from a web browser to a Sonos or Homepod, or any other AirPlay compatible speaker system. For example, maybe you’re on a website for a podcast or music that you want to stream to another speaker in the room or house.
This is pretty easy, but if you’re looking for a way to AirPlay music directly from the Chrome, Edge, Brave, or any Chromium-based web browser, you might not know how it works from a glance. Not to worry, we’re going to show you how easy it is to AirPlay an audio stream from a Chrome-based web browser running on Mac to an AirPlay speaker, like a Sonos or HomePod.
Microsoft Defender SmartScreen is a feature in the Microsoft Edge web browser for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android (and it’s also in the Windows operating system, in case you have a PC or run it in a virtual machine) that aims to protect your computer or device from malicious sites and downloads.
Because of the way that Microsoft Defender SmartScreen works, you may find that it occasionally interferes with trying to access certain websites or downloads, so there are some users that may with to disable Defender SmartScreen in the Edge browser.
The Apple Watch is a nifty gadget that many of us are fans of, but one of the curious things about Apple Watch is that it doesn’t have an obvious battery percentage remaining indicator, unlike the iPhone, iPad, Apple Pencil, AirPods, or Mac. Furthermore, it’s not necessarily obvious how to check how much battery life you have left on Apple Watch.
We’re going to demonstrate several different ways that you can check the battery life remaining on your Apple Watch.
If you are going to sell, return, or give away a Mac, you almost certainly want to factory reset the computer first. Performing a factory reset on a Mac will erase all data on the Mac, and return it to a clean slate as if the computer were brand new, without any data or personal files on the computer at all.
Erasing a Mac and returning it to factory defaults has never been easier, thanks to the addition of a “Erase All Content & Settings” feature introduced in newer versions of MacOS system software. Gone are the days where you had to manually erase and then reinstall system software, now you can simply let MacOS handle the task for you by choosing to erase and factory reset the Mac through a handy built-in feature.
Read along and you’ll be erasing all data on a Mac and it will be factory reset in no time.
VMware Fusion Pro is now available for free for personal use, according to a blog post on the developers website.
VMware Fusion Pro is powerful hypervisor software that allows you to create and run virtual machines on your Mac, enabling the capability to do things like run a virtualized Windows installation atop MacOS, or run Linux alongside MacOS, or similar situations where you’d want to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. We frequently cover virtual machines and some of the neat things you can do with them, and VMWare Fusion Pro offers another virtualization option alongside UTM, VirtualBox, QEMU, and Parallels.
We’re going to walk through the process of downloading and installing VMWare Fusion Pro for free, using the new personal use license.
macOS Ventura 13.6.7, macOS Monterey 12.7.5, and Safari 17.5 are now available as software updates for Mac users who are not running the macOS Sonoma operating system and the just released MacOS Sonoma 14.5 update.
macOS Ventura 13.6.7, macOS Monterey 12.7.5, and Safari 17.5 focus on security fixes and are not expected to include any significant changes, bug fixes, or new features.
Amazon is back with some really great deals on select Apple products. Leading the way is the fantastic M1 iPad Air for just $399, discounted 33% from the $599 MSRP – sure it was just replaced by the M2 Air model but that is $599, so simply getting the last-gen saves you $200! Next up is the fantastic Apple Watch Series 9 for just $299, discounted $100 from the $399 MSRP. You’ll also find good deals on M3 MacBook Air, and AirPods, so check them out!
M1 iPad Air for $399 (down from $599)
The M1 iPad Air features a 10.9″ retina display, 64GB storage, 12MP cameras on front and rear, Touch ID, and fantastic battery life. You can take $200 off this fantastic iPad by choosing select color options (currently blue and purple, but stock changes quickly).
As of this writing the bigger discount is available for blue and purple colors, but check stock and you might find the other colors available at $200 off as well, otherwise they’re available at $449 for $150 retail.
Apple Watch Series 9 for $299 (down $100)
Apple Watch Series 9 is deep discounted by $100 right now from Amazon, available in various color options and band sizes. The Apple Watch Series 9 has a 41mm display, heart rate monitoring plus an ECG, crash and fall detection, always-on display, ovulation tracking, GPS, one-handed pinch gesture support, a faster and more energy efficient chip, and fantastic fitness tracking capabilities.
The M3 MacBook Air 15″ can be had at a $100 discount on Amazon. The MacBook Air 15″ features a 15.3″ Liquid Retina LCD display, the powerful M3 chip, great battery life, a 1080p FaceTime camera, support for two external displays when in clamshell mode, a MagSafe Charger, two thunderbolt / USB-C ports, Touch ID, backlit keyboard, and more:
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