Some M2 MacBook Air users have discovered their MacBook is running slow from time to time, perceiving what feels like dramatically reduced performance. Usually when this happens, the MacBook Air slows down when the Mac is running on battery power, but the workload being performed is not particularly abnormal or even demanding; maybe it’s a Safari browsing session with a few work apps open simultaneously, for example.
We’re going to assume you’ve run through the standard performance troubleshooting steps for MacOS of things like making sure there are no crashing apps, unresponsive apps that need to be force quit, or apps pegging CPU in the background, Messages isn’t slowing the Mac, and that the Mac hard disk is not out of disk storage – each of these will also slow down any Mac. The situation we are focusing on here is specific to MacBook Air (and MacBook Pro) laptops that feel unusually slow when running on battery power.
If you’ve accidentally closed tons of Safari tabs on iPad or iPhone and want to restore them, or you lost all of your Safari tabs by trying to create a Safari Tab Group (a surprisingly common occurrence, what a feature bug), you are probably desperately wondering how you can recover and reopen all closed tabs in Safari and restore them all to your iPhone or iPad.
Apple has released the third beta versions of iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3, and macOS Sonoma 14.3 to users participating in the beta testing programs. There’s also a new tvOS beta version for those interested in that.
You can install and run macOS Sonoma in a virtual machine, for free, with the use of UTM. UTM runs on Macs, iPhones, and iPads, but we’re going to focus specifically on installing macOS Sonoma in a UTM virtual machine running on a Mac.
Yes this means you can run a virtualized macOS Sonoma installation atop macOS Sonoma, macOS Ventura, or even macOS Monterey, depending on the version of system software the host operating system is running.
This tutorial will walk through the complete set of steps to install macOS Sonoma into a virtual machine, using UTM on the Mac.
Amazon is back with some great deals on select Apple hardware, offering hefty discounts on Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch SE, MacBook Air 15″, and the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro M3 series. Take a look!
Apple Watch Series 8 for $289 (down from $399)
Apple Watch Series 8 may be the prior generation, but it’s still a fantastic Apple Watch and you can get it for a great discount right now from Amazon. Featuring a 41mm display, GPS, fitness tracking capabilities, blood oxygen reader, ECG app, water resistance, an always-on display, and much more.
If you want the latest and great, Apple Watch Series 9 is discounted to just $349 in select colors and band size combinations, down from the MSRP of $399. Apple Watch Series 9 offers a 41mm display, fantastic fitness tracking capabilities, a heart rate monitor, blood oxygen reader, ECG capability, crash detection, fall detection, ovulation tracking, always-on display, GPS, pinch gesture support for interacting with the Apple Watch with just one hand, and a powerful new chip to make the watch faster than ever before.
Apple Watch SE 2 features a 40mm screen, fitness tracking functionality, sleep tracking, crash detection, a heart rate monitor, and is water resistant, making it a fantastic entry-level Apple Watch for just about anyone.
MacBook Pro offers more power with the M3 chip, and more ports, including MagSafe charging port, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SDXC card slot, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. The brand new MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip is available in both 16″ and 14.2″ display sizes, and discounted by up to $300 in select RAM and storage configurations.
The 15″ MacBook Air M2 models feature the powerful M2 processor, SSD storage, a 1080p FaceTime webcam, Touch ID, backlit keyboard, and a great slim lightweight design, and is available in the popular Midnight Blue and Starlight at a nice discount. Be sure to clip the on-page coupon to get the final discounted price when added to your cart.
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One way you can improve your Mac experience is by adding some handy tools and items to your Mac menubar item. And, coincidentally, some of the best free utilities available for Mac, are also menubar items.
We’re going to cover four of the best free menubar apps for Mac, which are sure to improve not only your menubar experience, but your Mac experience too. And if we missed an essential menubar tool that is part of your Mac workflow, share it with us in the comments!
Many people use Google Maps to find out about businesses, parks, locations, and destinations, by reading the reviews. While it’s one thing to browse through all of the reviews and read them, it can be very useful to narrow down reviews for something specific, like a keyword. Thus, it’s a desirable capability to be able to search reviews on Google Maps for a keyword match.
Searching reviews is incredibly useful if you’re wondering about something specific. For example, you can search a restaurants reviews for “burrito” if you’d like to read specifically reviews mentioning that.
Searching reviews on Google Maps is easy but it may not be obvious to everyone, so here’s how you can do it.
The official ChatGPT app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac includes a voice feature, letting you speak with the chat bot and hear answers back from high quality voice options. Voice chat with ChatGPT lets you have hands-free interactions with ChatGPT, and can be very useful for a wide variety of purposes.
Not only can you get ChatGPT to answer your questions about a particular subject or topic by voice, but you can continuously engage with it in a conversational way, making it a super useful assistant to have around when you’re engaging in various tasks.
For example, maybe you’re in the kitchen and want a assistant chef to guide you through a recipe, or create a recipe entirely on the fly with a limited series of ingredients. Or perhaps you have the curiosity of a four year old and you just want to continuously ask questions about a particular subject, and follow the answers up with more and more questions. ChatGPT Voice Chat can easily do all of that, and more.
If you haven’t used voice chat with ChatGPT yet, we’ll show you how to get started.
If you have an iPhone with iCloud, and you also have a Windows PC that does not have iCloud setup, you may still want to copy the pictures off of the iPhone to the PC. This is a common situation that not everyone is familiar with, so we’re going to take the opportunity to demonstrate how you can transfer photos from iPhone to a Windows PC, without using iCloud.
The latest versions of iPhone and iPad system software include a feature that offers predictive typing, with typing suggestions shown inline as light gray words that are ahead of your cursor as you type. For example, if you’re typing “how ar” you might see the inline prediction suggest “how are you” as a way to complete typing that sentence, where you can just hit the spacebar and complete the inline typing.
Some users really like the Inline Typing Prediction feature on iOS and iPadOS, whereas other users may not like the feature, or even find it annoying. If you wish to disable inline typing predictions on iPhone or iPad, read along and we’ll show you how.
While the big holiday discount shopping season is over, that doesn’t mean you have to pay full price for some desirable Apple products. Amazon continues to offer nice deals on a variety of Apple gear, including taking $50 off just about every Apple Watch model.
Apple has issued the second beta versions of iPadOS 17.3 for iPad, iOS 17.3 for iPhone (which has since been pulled), and macOS Sonoma 14.3. The new betas are available to download now for any user actively enrolled in the appropriate beta testing program.
Update: Just kidding, iOS 17.3 beta 2 has been pulled because it was bricking some iPhones during the software update – gotta love beta testing system software eh?! macOS Sonoma 14.3 beta 2 and iPadOS 17.3 beta 2 remain available, and a new version of iOS 17.3 beta 2 will likely be released soon.
Most Mac users will likely see battery stats in the menu bar of MacOS, and head to System Information to investigate cycle count, but some users who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to be able to retrieve battery information from the Terminal.
One way to find battery life information is with the pmset command, but another approach uses the ioreg command, which is what we’ll cover here. By using ioreg, we will retrieve the current battery capacity, maximum battery capacity, and the cycle count of the battery on the Mac as well.
The latest versions of MacOS offer an inline predictive text feature, which attempt to predict what you may want to type text. You’ll see this appear when typing in many Mac apps as there are words appearing in lighter gray in front of what you are presently typing, which you can complete typing of by hitting the space bar. This is kind of like an autocorrect on steroids, as it attempts to predict what you’re going to type next on the Mac, and for some users they really like this feature, whereas other users may not like inline predictive typing.
We’ll show you how to turn off the inline predictive text feature on Mac.
Want to run Linux on your M1 or M2 Mac? You can now run Fedora Linux on most Apple Silicon Macs, including all models of M1 and M2 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Studio, or iMacs. Fedora Asahi Remix is the first full Linux distribution to support the M1 and M2 processor series of Macs. Presumably support for the M3 Macs will arrive soon, along with support for Mac Pro.
When Threads debuted from Meta (FaceBook), it was intricately linked to Instagram, and initially when you went to delete or deactivate a Threads account, it had the unfortunate side effect of also deleting the related Instagram account. But that is no longer the case. Now you can choose to delete a Threads account without impacting your Instagram account, and you can also deactivate a Threads account without impacting or leaving Instagram too.
Running Linux on a Mac can be a big ordeal, but not with virtualization. By using UTM, you can run Linux in a virtual machine atop MacOS, contained entirely within an app. This allows you to explore and experiment with Linux, without having to go through any complex installation process or setup, it’s just a matter of downloading a preconfigured virtual machine and launching it with UTM. It’s as easy as it gets.
If you’re looking to experiment with running Linux on a Mac, but you don’t want the significant commitment that involves running Fedora Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac which formats your Mac to remove macOS and install Linux instead, then UTM and a virtual machine is a good alternative.
Remember when MacOS (then called Mac OS X) was skeuomorphic, with a three-dimensional looking user interface elements that were fun to look at? Apple called that interface “Aqua”, but over time has slowly flattened and squished the aqua interface out of MacOS and into the flat bright white iOS-ish like interface instead.
If you miss that old classic menu bar style on your Mac, that looked kind of 3D and embossed, you can get it back again with a free app called Lickable Menu Bar.
