The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro is arguably the most controversial component of the current generation MacBook Pro (aside from the keyboard itself anyway), and if you’re a MacBook Pro user who does not like the Touch Bar experience for any reason, whether it’s poking around to find and use the touch ESC key, or the constantly changing nature of the little touch screen in lieu of a simple function key row, you can effectively disable the Touch Bar on MacBook Pro models that come equipped with the thin touch screen strip.

By disabling the Touch Bar with the method we will demonstrate here, you will effectively have a static row of keys like a regular Mac keyboard does, no matter what app you’re using or what you’re doing on the Mac. With this setting, the digital Touch Bar keys will always remain consistent with touch buttons for ESC, brightness down, brightness up, Mission Control, Launchpad, keyboard brightness down, keyboard brightness up, skip audio back, pause / play audio, skip audio forward, mute, volume down, volume up, Siri – or if you customize the Control Strip of the Touch Bar those customizations will appear instead. Regardless, you won’t have the Touch Bar frequently changing to other digital buttons and flashing colors, sliders, thumbnails, and other options on the small touch screen above the keyboard.

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Apple has sent out invitations to a “special event” scheduled for 10:00am PST on September 12 of 2018 to select members of the press (and no, we were not invited).

Typically, Apple fall events focus on the launch of new iPhones, but many active rumors suggest updated iPad and Mac hardware may appear at the event as well.

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Do you want to save an iPhone text message? Maybe you want to document and preserve a message sent to your iPhone for some purpose? Whatever the reason, you can save iPhone messages, text messages / SMS, iMessages, media messages including pictures and videos, or anything else sent through the Messages app on the iPhone.

This article will show you several methods of saving iPhone messages and text messages, one approach will cover saving messages directly on the iPhone itself, and another method will use a computer and third party software to read and save iPhone messages to export them as PDF, TXT, or a spreadsheet file.

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Apple has released a new supplemental software update for owners of the 2018 model MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. The software update is limited to the 2018 model line, so if you have a different Mac you will not find the software update available on other machines.

Labeled as “macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update 2 for MacBook Pro (2018)”, the update is said to improve “the stability and reliability” of the computer, and is therefor recommended for all users of a 2018 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to install.

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You can easily install and run macOS Mojave beta in a virtual machine right now on a Mac, and the process is surprisingly easy, plus it’s free!

This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to install macOS Mojave beta into a virtual machine environment using freely available software. It’s quite easy, so even if you have never used a virtual machine before you should be able to get it all working by following the instructions as written.

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Apple has released iOS 12 developer beta 11, alongside macOS Mojave developer beta 9. While these betas are currently limited to developers, the accompanying public beta versions are also available with slightly different versioning, labeled as iOS 12 public beta 9.

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The Files app on iPhone and iPad serves as a file system of sorts to the iOS world, complete with many commonly used file system functions. One of the more frequently used features in file systems is the ability to change how you sort files or folders, and the iOS Files app also allows for sorting of files and folders using a variety of methods, including sorting files by name, sorting files by date, sorting files by size, and sorting by tags.

The ability to sort files in the Files app on iPhone and iPad is a little hidden however, and if you open the app initially you won’t see any sorting capabilities immediately available. Instead, the iOS Files sorting functionality is hidden from initial user view, but it’s quite simple to reveal and use once you learn how.

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Have you ever wanted to know what’s going on when you startup a modern Mac? You press the power button, you see an Apple logo, and the Mac boots up into MacOS… from the average user perspective it’s about that simple, right? But what is actually happening behind the scenes after you press that power button and you’re booting macOS?

That hidden technical side of the Mac booting process is what an excellent visual diagram from Howard Oakey at EclecticLight helps to demonstrate.

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Have you always dreamt of running Windows 95 right now on your fancy modern Mac? Your dreams can now easily come true, thanks to a fun project that allows you to run a complete Windows 95 installation directly on MacOS as a self-contained native application. Yes really, running Windows 95 on a Mac is as easy as opening any other Mac app.

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If you’re trying to remove a Time Machine backup from a drive and find that it’s stuck in the Mac Trash with a specific error message stating the trash can’t be emptied because “Some items in the Trash cannot be deleted because of System Integrity Protection”, then read on to learn how to resolve this particular Time Machine backup removal problem.

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Apple has released iOS 12 Developer beta 10 along with iOS 12 Public beta 8 to users enrolled in either beta testing program for the iPhone and iPad.

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Most iPhone users send and receive messages and text messages through the Messages app. If you get a message that you’d like to forward to another iPhone (or even Android or other phone number entirely), you can use a trick to access a largely hidden message forwarding functionality that allows you to easily send forward a message from an iPhone to another contact or phone number.

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Quick Look is the ever-handy feature in Mac OS that allows you to select a file in the file system and get a quick preview of it, whether you’re in the Finder, an Open or Save dialog, or even some apps. Quick Look is a great feature with many abilities on the Mac that makes browsing around the file system much more efficient, but sometimes Quick Look can stop functioning as intended, either showing blank thumbnails and previews or erroneous previews, usually because of an issue with QuickLook cache. Typically these type of Quick Look issues can be resolved by simply clearing out and wiping the Quick Look cache on a Mac.

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Some Mac users may wish to completely disable Location Services features on their Mac. This is not recommended for most Mac owners, but turning off all Location Services functionality on MacOS can be desired for security concerns and privacy considerations, or even by systems administrators who don’t want the manage the geolocation features.

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Apple has released iOS 12 beta 9 and macOS Mojave beta 8 to users enrolled in the developer beta testing programs.

Typically a developer beta version is released first and is soon followed by a public beta release that matches the same build, even if the versioning number is behind. iOS 12 Developer beta 9 has a build of 16A5362a.

Separately, new beta builds of watchOS 5 and tvOS 12 are also available to users beta testing software on their Apple Watch and/or Apple TV.

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Want to record a phone call from a Mac? Maybe you’re interviewing someone for a podcast and want to record both sides of the conversation? Maybe you want to record a phone call for quality and training purposes? Whatever the purpose, there are several different ways to record a phone call from a Mac, but we’re going to go with perhaps the easiest method that is decidedly low tech but highly reliable.

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Safari for iPad offers a nice Split Screen View feature that allows you to view and read two websites side-by-side in the Safari browser, visible when the iPad is oriented in horizontal landscape mode. While entering into Safari Split Screen view on iPad is pretty easy, many users find that exiting and closing Split Screen View in Safari on iPad is less than obvious. This leads some iPad users to be thoroughly confused by Safari split screen mode on their tablet and think it’s either stuck enabled or can’t be escaped from, but rest assured you can close Safari Split View and leave the split web browsing mode fairly easily.

This tutorial will show you how to exit out of Safari split screen view on the iPad, which effectively turns it off. We’ll also show you how to close out of tabs that are in Safari Split View, and also discuss how to stop the iPad screen from splitting into two screens in Safari when it the device is rotated from portrait to landscape orientation.

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The Mac operating system has several system level temporary folders which contain temp files used by MacOS itself along with various Mac apps. This temp folders are not intended to be user facing, but in some rare situations an advanced Mac user may find themselves requiring to locate the temp folder and maybe even to muck around in there, whether for systems administration purposes, troubleshooting, digital forensic purposes, or another specific reason.

This tutorial will show you where the temp folders are located on Mac OS and how you can access them.

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