MacOS Sonoma 14.4 update has been released by Apple for Mac users running the Sonoma operating system.

The macOS Sonoma 14.4 update includes cutting edge new Emoji icons like a mushroom, lime, phoenix, broken chain, and shaking heads, along with new versions of existing Emoji icons that face the opposite direction. Additionally, there’s support for podcasts transcripts, and a handful of bug fixes and security updates.

Additionally, Mac users running MacOS Ventura and Monterey will find small updates available as well, and Apple has released other system software updates including iOS 17.4, ipadOS 17.4, watchOS 10.4, tvOS 17.4, and visionOS 1.1.

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If you are working out with Apple Watch, or wearing gloves of any kind with Apple Watch that may cover your wrist or rub against the device, it’s a good idea to lock the screen of your Apple Watch to prevent accidental input and touches.

While the Apple Watch touch screen is pretty good at disregarding some accidental touch or unintentional tapping or swiping, you may find that in certain conditions the screen is being activated and doing things you don’t want it to do. This can happen commonly if you’re engaged in certain workouts or activities that put you and the Apple Watch in contact with water, sweat, gloves, or even some clothing.

To prevent accidental touch activity on Apple Watch, the simplest thing to do is lock the screen while you’re engaging in the activity that is triggering unintentional device input.

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Apple has released updates to older iPhone and iPad models as iOS 16.7.6, iPadOS 16.7.6, iOS 15.8.2, & iPadOS 15.8.2. These software updates are available specifically for devices that are not running iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4.

Specifically, iOS 16.7.6, iPadOS 16.7.6, are available for iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPad Pro 9.7″ (first gen), iPad Pro 12.9″ (first gen), iPad 5th gen, and iPad 6th gen.

iOS 15.8.2 and iPadOS 15.8.2 are available for iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone SE, iPod touch 7th gen, iPad mini 4th gen, and iPad Air 2.

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Apple has released iOS 17.4 update for iPhone, and ipadOS 17.4 update for iPad.

The iOS/iPadOS 17.4 updates feature new Emoji icons including a phoenix and mushroom, a podcasts transcription feature, a handful of bug fixes and security updates, along with some minor additions and changes. European users also gain some specific new capabilities that allow them to add apps from outside the App Store, but users outside the EU zone will not have those options.

Separately, macOS Sonoma 14.4, watchOS 14.4, tvOS 14.4, and visionOS 1.1 are not yet available, but are expected to launch in the near future.

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Apple has released an RC build for macOS Sonoma 14.4 for Mac users who are engaging in the beta testing program for macOS. The RC build for Sonoma 14.4 arrives alongside RC builds for watchOS 10.4, tvOS 17.4, and visionOS 1.1, roughly a week after the RC builds for iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4 became available.

There is speculation that iOS 17.4 might debut as early as tomorrow, or at least sometime this week, and presumably Sonoma 14.4 and the other OS updates will arrive concurrently.

macOS Sonoma 14.4 is set to include new Emoji icons like a shaking head and mushroom, a Podcasts transcription feature, along with a few bug fixes and security updates.

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Budgeting is a critical part of life and financial management, allowing you to easily allocate your income and manage expenses. While anyone can overcomplicate the budget process, it doesn’t have to be that way, and thanks to Apple software that is freely available for iPhone, Mac, and iPad, you can easily setup a budget in no time at all.

Some people may enjoy setting up a budget, while others may creating a budget to be overwhelming or stressful, but it doesn’t matter which camp you fall into, because the Numbers app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offers a free built-in budget spreadsheet that is super easy to use. That’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to configure here, let’s get to it and build your budget spreadsheet.

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Apple has released fresh updates to the MacBook Air lineup of computers, bringing the powerful M3 chip to the popular Mac laptop, along with some other nice new features.

According to Apple’s press release announcing the products, the new M3 MacBook Air is up to 60% faster than the M1 model, and up to a whopping 13x faster than Intel MacBook Air models, making this a fantastic upgrade for Mac users venturing into the world of Apple Silicon hardware. You’ll also see up to 2x faster wi-fi speeds, thanks to Wi-Fi 6E support.

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Arc is an interesting new take on the web browser, aiming to be more like a little mini operating system than just another browser app. It has some fascinating features and a little bit of a learning curve, but once you get the swing of things, you may find you really appreciate the reimagined browser experience.

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Sports fans will be pleased to know that Apple has released an Apple Sports app for iPhone, which offers real-time score information, live stats, and betting odds.

Apple Sports intends to be fast, direct, and features a simple user interface that is not overengineered. Given some of the other sports apps out there with very busy interfaces and sluggish performance, Apple Sports could be a welcome addition to many iPhone users home screens. And if you were wondering, the app is not available for iPad or Mac, yet anyway, Apple Sports is iPhone exclusive.

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The latest versions of Safari for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, support a handy feature that allows you to quickly identify who sent you a particular link or webpage that you have open in the browser.

This ‘sent from’ link feature is useful if you engage in a lot of exchanging of URLs between friends, coworkers, family, or colleagues, and you end up with a lot of tabs open.

By including a “from (sender)” badge at the top of Safari, users can immediately identify where a particular link came from.

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Apple has canceled their ambitious decade-long car project, codenamed Project Titan, according to a report from Bloomberg.

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Apple has issued Release Candidate builds for iOS 17.4 and iPadOS 17.4, along with beta 5 of macOS Sonoma 14.4 and tvOS 17.4. Separately, a new beta of VisionOS 1.1 is available for Apple Vision Pro beta testers.

Beta updates and RC builds are available to any users who are actively participating in the Apple beta system software programs.

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iPad may display a warning message on the screen if it gets too hot, becoming unusable until the iPad cools down again. This happens if the iPad is overheating, and there are various reasons this can happen.

The specific message on screen is “Temperature – iPad needs to cool down before you can use it.” And this is accompanied by a red thermometer icon in the middle of an otherwise darkened screen. You may have seen this on iPhone too, but obviously we’re focused on the iPad overheating here.

We’re going to review some of the most common reasons an iPad may overheat, and what measures you can take to potentially resolve the problem.

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Rarely, a Mac can experience a memory leak which causes MacOS to run out of memory. When this happens, it’s fairly obvious because not only does the Mac become unresponsive, but you see an error message on the screen that says “Your system has run out of application memory. To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using.”

This error message is presented inside of a Force Quit window, where you can see what apps are open and using the most amount of memory.

Let’s discuss what causes the Mac to run out of application memory and present this particular error message, and how to fix it.

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Modern versions of MacOS no longer support HFS, meaning that new Macs can no longer read, mount, or write to classic HFS drives. But a fair amount of longtime Mac users continue to have older Macs and old Mac hard drives that are in HFS format, way back from the days of Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, and early Mac OS X, and thus may wish to mount, read, and copy files from those old classic HFS volumes, to their modern Mac.

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While you should get in the habit of frequently saving your documents as you work in them, including in Microsoft Word, things don’t always go as planned. Many modern Mac apps will automatically save progress as you work in them, and Microsoft Word is one of them. Thanks to a feature called AutoRecovery, which saves a recovery file of your data every 10 minutes in the background as you work, you may be able to recover files and documents from Word in the event that Word crashes or even the entire Mac crashes.

This tutorial is going to show you how to use the AutoRecovery feature of Microsoft Word on a Mac, and, if that fails, a way to manually access auto recovery files from Microsoft Word in the MacOS file system using a hidden directory. These tricks should help you to recover unsaved Word documents from your Mac.

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Some Mac users may occasionally stumble into a oddly worded error message when attempting to launch an application that states “Not authorized to send Apple events to System Events”, and, when clicking OK to dismiss the error, nothing happens – the app does not launch on MacOS. If you attempt to open the app triggering this error message again, you will see the error message again, but again the Mac app will not launch.

The full text of this Mac error message is usually “Not authorized to send Apple events to System Events. Not authorized to send Apple events to System Events. (-1743)” Repeating itself twice in the same error message, to add to the confusion.

What is this “not authorized to send Apple events to system events” error message on the Mac, and how do you fix it? That’s exactly what we’ll show you here.

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Microsoft Edge is a great web browser alternative that is available for MacOS, iPhone, iPad, and obviously Windows, and Android too. Not only is it fast and offers free access to ChatGPT 4, but if you regularly use different computing platforms, you’ll appreciate that you can sync your browser data across all of your devices, whether it’s another Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, Android, or iPad.

If you’re a fan of Microsoft Edge for Mac, you may want to make it your default web browser. While you can change your default web browser through System Settings, Microsoft Edge offers a more direct way to become your new default browser when you click links from anywhere else on the Mac.

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