Whether or not an IPSW firmware file is signed determines whether or not you can use that IPSW to update iOS or whether or not you can downgrade iOS to a prior version. Put simply, if an IPSW firmware file is not being signed by Apple through their servers, it can not be used to place onto an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

This leads to a fairly obvious question; how do you know if a particular IPSW iOS version is being signed by Apple or not?

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Picture in Picture mode is one of the more useful features available in the latest version of MacOS, essentially it allows you to pop open a little hovering video player that is unobtrusive as it floats over the screen. This is great whether you’re watching a game, tutorial, TV show, or a movie while working (or just pretending to work).

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Capturing Live Photos with the iPhone camera is a lot of fun, but when you share those moments with friends through Instagram or Facebook the “Live” aspect of the photo disappears and only the still picture posts to the service instead. Of course, we want to post the Live Photo the Instagram or Facebook, rather than just the normal picture, and that’s exactly what we’ll show you how to do.

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The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are great phones that are said to get even better battery life than predecessors. But not everyone notices that increase in battery life, and some users may feel like their iPhone 7 battery is draining a little faster than it should. Additionally, many iPhone owners may already be satisfied with how long the iPhone 7 battery lasts, but they’d like it to sustain a charge even longer.

If you want to improve battery life on an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus, read on.

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Want to delete your Snapchat account? Welcome to the club! OK but really, if you want to permanently delete your Snapchat account you’ve likely looked around in the Snapchat app and gone nowhere, that’s because you have to go through a series of steps to deactivate and then delete an account on every teenagers and millennials favorite service.

We’ll walk you through how to permanently delete any Snapchat account.

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Some Mac users may need to reinstall their current macOS system software; typically this is necessary only as a troubleshooting technique, though there may be other reasons to reinstall Sierra or High Sierra as well. The method we are going to outline here will reinstall macOS system software versioned as High Sierra or Sierra without formatting or erasing the Mac, instead only macOS Sierra 10.12 system software will be reinstalled (or macOS High Sierra 10.13, whichever is applicable). The obvious advantage to this approach is that it aims to preserve user files, apps, documents, data, pictures, and customizations, while only reinstalling Mac OS system software itself.

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Universal Clipboard is one of the greatest features available with the latest versions of macOS and iOS which allow you to copy and paste between devices across platform or devices. For example, you can copy a link on a Mac and then paste it into an email on the iPhone, or copy a picture on the iPhone and paste it into a document on the Mac. You could also copy something from an iPhone and paste it over to an iPad, or from one Mac to another, and vice versa.

Universal Clipboard is part of the Continuity set of features and it works seamlessly, allowing you to copy text, images and pictures, even video, between Macs or iOS devices. If you aren’t yet using this feature, you really should be, so let’s cover the requirements and how it works.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of macOS Sierra 10.12.1 to users enrolled in the beta testing programs.

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Did you know you can handwrite messages and notes in Messages for iOS 10 on your iPhone? With this feature you can scribble out a little note or sketch a simple drawing and send it along to any recipient.

Unlike some of the more obvious new Messages features in the latest versions of iOS that have buttons and toggles immediately visible in the Messages app, the handwriting ability is a little hidden. We’ll show you how to reveal the handwriting option so that you can send doodles and notes over iMessage.

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Apple has released the third beta version of iOS 10.1 to users participating in the beta testing programs.

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The new iPhone models don’t have a physical clicking Home button, and instead it senses pressure and gives haptic feedback instead, similar to how 3D Touch works on the screen and on Mac trackpads. If you decide you want to change how that Home button click feels, you can adjust the Home button click strength and feedback in a settings option of iOS.

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Rarely, the Mac App Store may report erroneous app download statuses or even offer a malformed file leading to an app that doesn’t launch or is partially downloaded. These situations are almost always the result of an interrupted or corrupted download, but can occur in some other scenarios as well.

Sometimes simply deleting the app in question can resolve any surrounding difficultly, but on some occasions that isn’t possible or isn’t effective. These type of unusual errors can typically be resolved by manually clearing out the Mac App Store cache, and then re-downloading the app, or re-visiting the Mac App Store. This tutorial will walk through completing that process.

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Spotlight, Safari, Siri, Maps, and other apps on the Mac use your location during searches to help suggest particular activity. For example, if you’re searching in Spotlight for “coffee” on the Mac, you may find that nearby coffee shops are displayed, allowing you to search local listings directly from Spotlight search in Mac OS. These are known as location-based suggestions.

Using location for search suggestions is obviously useful for many reasons, but some users may rather not have their location accessed for suggesting various search items and activities, thus we’ll show you how to disable location-based suggestions on the Mac (or turn the feature on if you do want access to this ability).

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Having an iPhone screen full of notifications from messages, calls, and apps can be a little obnoxious. Fortunately the latest versions of iOS on the newest iPhone models support a great little hidden feature which allows you to immediately clear all notifications from an iPhone.

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If you have bought an iPhone 7 Plus or iPhone 7 for AT&T, you’ll find the device does not come unlocked. Fortunately, if you paid in full for the iPhone 7 you can easily unlock it with AT&T by using a simple iTunes process.

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The Notes app in iOS now allows you to share notes with other iPhone, iPad, and Mac users over iCloud. This Note sharing feature is extremely useful, enabling other invited people to view and edit the same shared note that you are using in a collaborative fashion, and of course other people can invite you to view and change their notes as well. The use cases for this are vast and cooperative notes are easily one of the more useful features added to the Notes app in quite some time, so let’s review how to share Notes with other people using the latest versions of iOS.

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Apple is now automatically downloading macOS Sierra to Macs that are running a prior version of Mac OS X and which are compatible with Sierra. While this may be convenient to some users, not everyone may want to have macOS Sierra show up unexpectedly, or use their bandwidth to download a large file without explicit approval, thus we’ll show you how to stop macOS Sierra from automatically downloading to a Mac.

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The all new Messages app in iOS is quite busy and full of new features and abilities, and a major new component is the wild world of Message stickers and apps. Stickers are basically little images and icons you can slap all over a message thread, and iMessage apps can be everything from simple photo manipulations to full fledged games, all embedded in the Messages app of an iPhone or iPad. They can be chaotic or a lot of fun, maybe even a bit of both, so let’s review how to download, install, and use Messages stickers and Messages apps in iOS 10, iOS 11, or later.

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