The powerful new M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air series come equipped from the Apple factory with some pretty nice looking wallpapers, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy a new iPad just to enjoy the appearance on your current devices.
The M2 iPad Air wallpapers feature bright shiny colorful abstractions based upon the color the devices that vaguely spell out ‘AIR’, while the M4 iPad Pro wallpapers are dark black yet still feature colorful abstracts that spell out “PRO” in a similarly discrete fashion. Whatever they say and whatever your device, they look pretty neat.
sysmond, which as you may have surmised from the process name, is short for System Monitor Daemon, is part of Activity Monitor. Thus, if you use Activity Monitor to keep a watch on your Mac system resources, processes, CPU usage, Energy use, Disk, Network, and critical to our discussion here – Memory usage, you may find that sysmond is using a lot of system resources in and of itself.
Let’s dig into sysmond a bit to learn more about what it is, and why it sometimes uses a very large amount of CPU, and how you can correct that.
Do you miss iTunes for Mac? Do you really miss Aperture for Mac? Do you have fond memories of iPhoto in MacOS? What if you could run any of these three now defunct apps in modern MacOS Sonoma? With the help of an app called Retroactive, you can do exactly that, installing iTunes, Aperture, and iPhoto, onto modern Macs running MacOS Sonoma (or Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina).
If you use Numbers for iPad regularly, you’ll almost certainly benefit from knowing these keystroke combinations to perform various actions within the Numbers app. So grab your iPad keyboard and launch the Numbers app, and get learning!
We’ve got a broad range of keyboard shortcuts for Numbers on iPad to learn and master, and you’ll be glad to know many of these.
If you’re an Apple Watch user, you should know about a convenient feature for iPhone that helps you to easily find a misplaced Apple Watch. Much like how you can ping an iPhone with Apple Watch to find an iPhone, you can now go the other direction too, by pinging your Apple Watch from your iPhone, which will cause a sound to play from the Apple Watch.
Pinging a lost Apple Watch from iPhone is super easy, but curiously enough, the feature is not available by default on iPhone even after it has been setup and paired with an Apple Watch. Instead, you have to manually enable this feature first, and we’ll show you how to do that, and how to use this handy ping feature to help find a misplaced Apple Watch by using your iPhone.
Mac users, iPhone users, and iPad users, should all be aware that updating to macOS Sonoma 14, iOS 17, or iPadOS 17, may silently enable iCloud Keychain on their devices. Essentially this means that by updating to the latest iOS, iPadOS, or MacOS, you may be unintentionally enabling the feature and thereby uploading your saved keychain and login information to Apple’s iCloud servers. If you like and use this feature, obviously that’s not an issue, but if you don’t use iCloud Keychain and don’t want to use it, having it enable itself after updating system software may be considered problematic, or a nuissance.
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.
