The stock Messages app on iPhone and iPad lets you send iMessages and SMS text messages too. But the great thing about iMessage is that you can communicate endlessly with other Apple users with iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, entirely for free, through the encrypted iMessage protocol. But what if Messages is not working on your iPhone or iPad? That’s when you’ll want to try out some troubleshooting steps to resolve the problem, and get iMessages working again as intended.

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If you use iPad with a Smart Keyboard or Magic Keyboard, you may find the default Globe key functionality of bringing up the Emoji picker to be not your preference. And perhaps you might want to replace the Globe key to serve as Escape key functionality instead, since these keyboards lack ESC by default.

If you’d like to remap the Globe key on the iPad Smart Keyboard to function as an Escape key, or perhaps you find yourself occasionally (or frequently) hitting the globe key on accident and want to disable it, you’ll be pleased to know iPadOS allows this customization.

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Twitter; whether you love it, are addicted to it, or you hate it (or perhaps a combination of all of the above), you may get to a point where you want to block someone on Twitter. Maybe one of your Twitter followers is being obnoxious with their replies, or perhaps random people are spamming you, or even stalking your profile. Well, you can resolve such issues by blocking these Twitter users with just a couple of clicks.

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Apple has released the first beta versions of iOS 14.3, iPadOS 14.3, watchOS 7.2, and tvOS 14.3. Both developer beta builds and a public beta version are available.

Users who are actively enrolled in the beta testing programs for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, or tvOS, can find the new versions available to download and test on their eligible devices now.

Separately, Apple released the final version of macOS Big Sur for Mac users to download.

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If you send and receive audio messages with the Messages app on iPhone or iPad, you might be interested in saving those audio messages, which must be done manually. Unlike photos and videos, the stock Messages app does not automatically save the audio messages on your iPhone or iPad, but with a a simple trick, you can save the audio messages you want to keep.

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Many Mac users are currently unable to download macOS Big Sur. This could be due to overwhelmed servers, or a number of other issues. If you’re experiencing problems trying to download macOS Big Sur, whether it’s an error message, a failed download, or an incredibly slow download, you’re not alone.

We’ll go over a few common error messages that may be seen when attempting to download macOS Big Sur, with possible remedies as well when available.

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Apple has released macOS Big Sur to the general public. All Mac users with a compatible machine are able to download and update to macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 right now.

MacOS Big Sur 11 features a revamped user interface with updated visual elements that have more white space and brighter colors, in addition to new icons, a redesigned Dock appearance, a refreshed look for the menu bar and menus, along with other smaller visual changes. You’ll also find updated system sounds with macOS Big Sur, along with a handful of new wallpapers.

MacOS Big Sur also brings Control Center to the Mac for the first time, and includes an overhauled Notification Center. Safari has many improvements too, including instant foreign language translation capabilities, a customizable start page, privacy reports, and more. The Messages app has also been updated to gain new features like mentions, in-line replies, pinning, and a refreshed look. Of course these are just a handful of the many other smaller changes, new features, and updates brought to the Mac with macOS Big Sur.

If you haven’t done so already, consider preparing for macOS Big Sur with some simple tips that can help to make your update easier.

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The official release of macOS Big Sur is here today, November 12, and if you’re thinking of installing the latest and greatest macOS release then you might want to take a few preparations first before jumping ahead with the major Mac system software update.

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How often have phone calls interrupted what you were doing while using your iPhone? Maybe you were reading an article, or writing an important email, and suddenly the whole screen is taken over by an incoming phone call. Sure, you can send the call to voicemail but that may be rude on undesirable, depending on who is calling. Regardless, we’ve all been there at some point, but this shouldn’t be an issue anymore because of the compact call interface that has been introduced to iPhone in iOS 14 and later.

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Apple has released a second Release Candidate for macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 to Mac users involved in the Big Sur beta testing programs.

The second release candidate build of 20B28 is perhaps likely to match the final shipping version of macOS Big Sur, which is scheduled to debut to the general public on November 12.

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Apple has released the first Apple Silicon Macs, beginning a likely multi-year process of divorcing the Mac line from Intel CPU architecture. The new Macs include a base-model MacBook Pro 13″, MacBook Air 13″, and Mac mini, each with the new M1 Apple chip.

The new Apple silicon Macs maintain their existing chassis and hardware design, meaning the differences are entirely in the internal components and performance.

Let’s check out a quick overview of the new hardware.

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Scrolling through days or weeks of Messages conversations on iPhone or iPad to find that one photo you’re looking for is such a tedious process. However, if you use iMessage for texting your friends, family, and colleagues, there’s a neat trick to quickly access all your media and browse through all photos that have been exchanged.

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Do you use Facebook as your primary social media platform to stay connected with your friends, family and colleagues? If so, you might be interested in the Dark Mode feature that Facebook has to offer.

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Do you want to combine a few different videos into a single video on your iPhone or iPad? Perhaps you’ve recorded and captured a handful of video clips and you’d like to make a montage? With the iMovie app that’s available for iOS and iPadOS devices, combining movie clips into a single video is a fairly simple and straightforward procedure.

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Ever wished you could see the transfer progress and speed of copying files at the command line? If you’re familiar with the command line of Mac OS, Linux, or any other Unix operating system, you likely use the ‘cp’ or ditto commands to copy files, directories, and other data. The ditto and cp command is great, but one downside is that cp does not include a progress indicator, and that’s what we’re going to resolve here by creating an alias to use an rsync command with a progress indicator to copy data at the command line.

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Wi-Fi Calling is great iPhone feature that allows you to make regular phone calls over your Wi-Fi network. It comes in handy when you’re indoors but your cellular signal strength is poor, or even nonexistent. Assuming wi-fi calling is enabled on your iPhone, your carrier will automatically switch to the active Wi-Fi connection to improve the call quality and ensure uninterrupted phone calls.

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Most iPhone users know that you can enable or disable Live Photos directly from within the Camera app on iPhone every time you take a photo. But you also may notice that if you turn off Live Photos in the camera app by toggling the button, the next time you use the Camera app the Live Photos feature is back on again. This is because the default behavior of the Camera app is to automatically reset the have Live Photo turned on, even if you turned it off the last time you used the camera on the iPhone (or iPad for that matter).

Fortunately there’s a solution to this, and a somewhat hidden feature allows you to take a photo on iPhone without having to turn off Live Photo every time you use the Camera app. Instead, the Live Photos setting will be maintained as what you last left it, each time you open the app. Basically this lets you to completely turn off the feature if you want to.

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The Messages app on iPhone and iPad allows you to play games directly within the app itself, in addition to what you’d typically expect with sending and receiving regular text messages and iMessages. Does playing games like chess, checkers, cup pong, battleship, darts, mini-golf, amongst many others over iMessage sound fun to you? Then read on to learn how it works!

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