Apple has released macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 as an update for Mac users running the Sonoma operating system.

The software update includes bug fixes and security enhancements, and appears to resolve the USB hub and external monitor issues that some Mac users were experiencing with macOS Sonoma 14.4 update.

Separately, macOS Ventura 13.6.6 is also available for Mac users running the Ventura operating system. These updates are concurrent with the already released iOS 17.4.1 and iPadOS 17.4.1, which were released the week prior.

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The Apple Watch may be small and on your wrist, but believe it or not the Apple Watch also has a keyboard. Yes, even with the small screen, you can use a full size QWERTY keyboard on Apple Watch to type things out, whether it’s a quick response to a message, or an email.

In addition to the keyboard feature, there are other ways to type on Apple Watch as well, including Dictation, and by using iPhone keyboard. Let’s check out these great features to empower your Apple Watch usage.

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Mac users have the option of using either the Light theme or Dark mode theme of MacOS, or they can have the system theme change with the time of day automatically on a schedule. But what if you prefer one theme over the other for some apps, but not others? What if you want some apps to be Dark mode themed, while others you want to be Light mode themed?

While this is a somewhat niche scenario, you can mix and match your MacOS apps into both Dark mode and Light mode simultaneously, with the help of a free third party tool called Gray.

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The Personal Hotspot feature on iPhone turns your iPhone cellular connection into a wi-fi hotspot that other nearby devices and computers can use to access the internet. It’s one of those really great features available for iPhone that allows you to work from just about anywhere that you have a cellular connection, and can also be used as a backup internet connection if your primary service goes down. But have you ever wondered how secure an iPhone Personal Hotspot connection is? Is it more secure to use Personal Hotspot instead of the free coffee shop wi-fi?

With the reasonable concerns there are around internet security, it’s not unreasonable to ask how secure a Personal Hotspot connection is that’s created by the iPhone (or cellular iPad, for that matter).

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Timers have arrived on the Mac with the addition of the Clock app coming to modern versions of MacOS. This is exciting if you’ve long wanted to use a timer on your Mac, whether to set a timer for a project, for your own pomodoro or work, cooking something, how long a break should take, or anything else you might want to use a timer for. Before you could use Siri to set one, but now it’s a dedicated feature within the Clock application, bundled with MacOS.

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Apple has issued iOS 17.4.1 update for iPhone, and iPadOS 17.4.1 update for iPad. The software updates include unspecified bug fixes and security enhancements for iPhone and iPad.

Additionally, iOS 16.7.7 and iPadOS 16.7.7 is available for older iPhone and iPad models, and there’s an update available for Apple Vision Pro’s VisionOS 1.1.1, for users who have the spatial computing headset.

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The Mac login screen and lock screen displays a prominent large clock, with the date and time visible over the wallpaper or screensaver. While many users appreciate having the time and date right there at the login screen, other users may wish to hide the clock, date, and time, from the MacOS login screen.

If you want to have a more minimalist Mac login screen and hide the lock screen clock, read along and you’ll achieve that result quickly.

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The “Find My” feature is a location tracking service available from Apple for most Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, AirTags, and more. Find My is unique in that it can be used to share your location, keep track of your people’s locations like your friends, family, and loved ones who share their location, but also as a way to locate lost or stolen devices.

With the Find My service, you can quickly see where a person, AirTag, or a device is on a map, and if its your own device, you can lock it down, make it play a sound, or even erase it.

But what if your or your loved one is traveling internationally? What if you’re using an Apple device abroad? Does Find My still work abroad, in other countries? What if the person or device is on a boat in the ocean, or on a cruise, in another country?

These are all reasonable questions to ask, and that’s what we’re here to discuss.

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Apple is opening a new store in the Jing’an district of Shanghai, China, this spring, and to celebrate they’ve released a really beautiful wallpaper of unfolding white and yellow flower petals in the shape of an Apple logo.

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If you use your iPhone as an alarm clock, as many iPhone owners do, you may have discovered that if the iPhone alarm is sounding and ringing continuously on it’s own, eventually the iPhone alarm turns itself off automatically.

While this may be confusing if you’re used to old analog alarm clocks that will ring endlessly until directly turned off, the iPhone alarm stopping on its own is actually intentional behavior.

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You can turn your iPad into a portable HDMI display with the help of a neat app named Orion, plus a USB-C Capture Card.

How this works is really straight forward; you connect the USB-C Capture Card dongle to the iPad Pro USB-C port, then you connect your device to that dongle via HDMI, that you want to use the iPad as a display for, then open Orion, and you’re good to go.

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A process named fileproviderd may be discovered by some Mac users, usually seen in Activity Monitor when someone has discovered that their Mac feels like it’s running slower than usual. There, fileproviverd may be using high amounts of CPU, and by using heavy system resources, the Mac slows down.

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Universal Control is one of the most useful features available for Mac users who have multiple Macs and iPads that they’d like to control with a single mouse and keyboard, it works really well and offers a great experience once it’s setup and working. But, like so many other recent changes to the Mac that arrived with the redesigned System Settings experience, not every Mac user has been able to find the settings for Universal Control since updating MacOS to Sonoma or Ventura.

Where are Universal Control settings in System Settings on MacOS Sonoma and Ventura? How do you find them now? Reasonable questions, and with such a handy feature you’ll want to know how and where to make adjustments. We’ll show you three different ways to get to these now, since they’re a little harder to find than before.

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While there are some command line wizards out there who never need to look at references, search manual pages, defer to command lists, LLM queries, or web searches, the rest of us mere mortal commands line users can be helped by a really great tool called cheat. The cheat command is able to provide a cheatsheet with usages, flags, and options for using varying commands, which should be useful for just about anyone who finds themselves in the Terminal. And the examples provided by cheat are what is commonly used, making it much more helpful and intuitive than a man page.

Like all Terminal and command line tasks, this is aimed at more advanced users, though the utility of the cheat command is obviously beneficial to those who are less familiar with the command line or who are simply learning to use the Terminal as well.

Let’s dive in and learn how you can install cheat on your Mac, and use cheat to generate command line cheatsheets for command reference.

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Some Mac users are discovering that USB-C hubs and external monitors are no longer working with their Mac after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.4. This issue can apparently impact anything connected to the USB Hub as well, leaving the USB hub devices undetected by the Mac, including keyboards, mice, external displays, SD card readers, cameras, external hard drives and storage devices, and basically any other USB accessory that connects to the USB-C hub and then to the Mac.

Many Mac users rely on dongles and USB-C hubs (like this) to expand their port options, particularly after Apple started removing ports from their laptop lineup of computers. This includes all modern models of MacBook Air, which only have two USB-C ports, and many MacBook Pro models, many of which also only have two USB-C ports. Many users of the newest MacBook Pro models with more hardware port options continue to require USB-C hubs, as well as many Mac users with iMac, Mac mini, or even Mac Pro.

If you’re a Mac user who relies on a USB-C hub to expand your port options, and you have not yet updated to macOS Sonoma 14.4, you may wish to hold off on the system update until this issue gets resolved.

If you’re already impacted by this USB Hub issue, read on to find a potential fix, as well as a workaround.

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If you’re shopping for a loan, let’s say for buying a car, you’ll undoubtedly have a few loan options. Comparing loans can be intimidating and daunting, and it’s hard to know which option is right for you, or which loan may make the most sense for your particular situation, especially when the pressure is on to make a decision. But thanks to the Numbers app on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, you can easily compare loans, directly from your device.

All you have to do is input some data into a free Numbers spreadsheet on your Apple device, and you’ll be able to do a quick loan comparison.

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If you are a Mac user, you might be interested in some specific keyboard shortcuts tricks that can make your MacOS computing experience more efficient and maybe even be more productive too.

Here are six useful Mac keyboard shortcut tips that will improve most people’s MacOS experience, usage, and workflow.

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Compressing images can be a necessary task for many Mac users, whether they’re getting ready to post an image to the web, share a photo through email or messages, or they’re simply trying to compress and reduce the file size of an image for any other purpose.

There are several ways to compress images on the Mac, thereby reducing the image file size, and we’re going to show you two of the easiest ways to get this done in MacOS. And best of all, these two approaches can be stacked together, providing significant image compression that can dramatically reduce the size of an image file. Let’s check it out.

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