Mac users may occasionally find themselves wanting to clean install macOS Big Sur onto a Mac. A clean installation of macOS Big Sur basically means the entire hard drive – including the system itself, all data, all apps, user accounts, literally everything – is erased, and then a fresh clean install of macOS Big Sur is installed onto the Mac. In this way it’s sort of like a factory reset or a fresh start, or what PC users sometimes refer to as reformatting, because there will be nothing left on the Mac at all, and booting it up will be similar to booting up a new Mac, with zero user data or other stuff.

A clean install is generally for advanced Mac users only, and is otherwise not recommended unless you’re giving away a Mac or transferring ownership, and have fully backed up your data. Because it erases the entire hard disk and all data on the Mac, it will cause complete data loss intentionally, so without sufficient backups the

Before proceeding, be certain you have a full backup of the Mac, and any or all important data. Failure to have sufficient backups will result in permanent data loss.

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Apple has released the seventh beta version of macOS Big Sur 11.3 to users enrolled in the public beta and developer beta testing programs for the Mac.

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How’d you like to start a timer, right from Apple Watch?

The Apple Watch might be the best thing to happen in personal fitness in a long time, but where the wearable really shines is in making it super easy to do things that we do multiple times a day, week, or month. Checking the time is obviously one of those things, but so is starting timers. And starting a timer on an Apple Watch is both useful and easy.

Sure you can use your iPhone to start a timer, and you can start one with HomePod as well, but doing it on your Apple Watch means you’ll be able to see the timer’s status at any moment, just by lifting your wrist. You’ll also get a tap on the wrist when the timer comes to an end, too.

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The seventh beta version of iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 has been made available to users in the beta testing programs for iPhone and iPad. The new beta build is 18E5198a and is available to both developer beta and public beta users.

Additionally, Apple has released the seventh beta of watchOS 7.4 and tvOS 14.5, though a new build of macOS Big Sur 11.3 beta is not available (yet anyway).

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If you send a lot of photos back and forth in messages, you may be wondering how you can save them all to your iPhone or iPad for later use, backups, sharing along, or whatever else.

It turns out that all the photos and videos that are shared over iMessage are not saved to your iOS or iPadOS photo library. Therefore, in order to make sure you don’t lose the photos you’ve received (especially if you plan on deleting a messages thread), you’ll need to save these photos to your iPhone or iPad library.

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Do you want to use Google Sheets to view and edit CSV files for data analysis? Or perhaps to import or export contacts? If so, you’ll be pleased to know that Google Sheets has native support for CSV files. With how widely used Google Sheets is throughout the workplace and educational worlds, knowing how to perform tasks like this can be undeniably useful.

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How’d you like your Apple Watch to speak the time to you? Sounds convenient, high-tech, and useful, right?

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Want to play Fortnite on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac again, in 2021? You can play the popular game entirely for free, despite the ongoing dispute between Apple and Epic, thanks to GeForceNow. Best of all, it works impressively well, and with high graphics settings too (possibly even better graphics than you’d be able to run natively on your hardware).

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By default, Sidecar for Mac sets iPad to be on the right side of the Mac display, but what if you want to change the iPad position to be on the left side? Or to the top, or bottom of the Mac display? Or perhaps you want the iPad display to be a little bit up or down? Much like you can change positions and orientations of other external displays on Mac, you can also change the iPad Sidecar position side on Mac too.

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Your iPhone can serve as an alarm clock to make sure you’re on time for events, routines, work, school, or anything else. If you’re trying to wake up early enough, or fit a schedule, or traveling and need a wake-up, using the iPhone as an alarm clock is undeniably useful since most people have their iPhone with them all the time anyway.

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Have an iCloud email address that you’d like to forward the emails from automatically to another email address? Many of us have multiple email addresses that are used for various different purposes, but if you’d like to have your iCloud emails automatically forward to another address, you’ll find that’s pretty simple to do.

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If you’re one of those countless people who use Netflix to watch movies and TV shows on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, you’ll be pleased to know that you can indeed use subtitles while watching any Netflix content, as long as they’re available anyway.

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The Medical ID feature of iPhone has been a part of the Health app for years now, but now it’s potentially even more useful, by allowing users to automatically share their Medical ID while making emergency calls from their iPhones.

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Need to make a disk image from a CD or DVD right on a Mac? Many Mac users continue to have and use DVD and CD media, whether it’s movie collections, proofs, music collections, files and data backups, old media, medical imaging, or anything else. Despite the fact that no Mac ships with a DVD/CD drive at this point, that doesn’t mean users still don’t need to use the media and occasionally may want to create a disk image file from one of those disks.

We’ll show you how you can easily create a disk image file (dmg) on the Mac, turning any CD or DVD into the DMG using Disk Utility.

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Want to mute all inbound calls, messages, and alerts from a contact that is pestering your iPhone? Whether you’re getting annoyed by spamming phone calls or text messages, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s fairly easy to mute a specific contact on your iPhone to silence calls and mute notifications from them. And yes, silencing someone this way is different from blocking them.

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The sixth beta versions of macOS Big Sur 11.3, iOS 14.5, and iPadOS 14.5 have been made available to users enrolled in the beta testing programs for Apple operating systems. Both public beta and developer beta builds are available.

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Want to get competitive with your Apple Watch? You can challenge a friend, family member, coworker, or anyone else with an Apple Watch to an activity competition!

Competition is always a good way to spur people on to achieve a goal, and that’s most definitely the case in terms of exercise. Sure, you can compete with yourself, set fitness goals, and gain your own achievements but competing with a friend adds some much-needed spice. And you can do it all from your Apple Watch.

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If you use iTunes or macOS Finder to locally back up your iPhone or iPad, you could run into a situation where you forgot the devices backup password, and you’re no longer able to use this backup to restore your device. That’s not a great feeling, but don’t panic quite yet because if you find yourself unable to remember the encrypted device password, read along for some help.

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