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).

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Some Mac users who have updated to macOS Sierra have felt their computer is running slower than it should be. If you have noticed a performance hit after upgrading to macOS Sierra, there is likely a good reason for it, and it’s even more likely to have a simple solution.

Read on to learn why macOS Sierra may be running slow (some MacBook users notice their Mac is hot and fans are blasting away too), and what you can do about it.

Read more »

Apple has released the second beta versions of iOS 10.1, watchOS 3.1, and tvOS 10.0.1.

Additionally, the public beta version of the earlier released macOS Sierra 10.12.1 beta 3 is available.

Read more »

Apple redesigned some fundamental features with iOS 10 on iPhone and iPad, including where the music controls are found in Control Center, slide-to-unlock, and the newly hidden Shuffle and Repeat controls in Music app itself.

If you’re new to iOS 10 and thought that Control Center removed the music controls, it’s likely because the new way to access play, pause, skip, and adjust volume is easily overlooked. Not to worry, accessing Music from Control Center is really easy once you learn where to look!

Read more »

Apple has released macOS Sierra 10.12.1 beta 3, the new build arrives as 16B2338c.

Read more »

For the vast majority of Mac users, macOS Sierra is a nice upgrade that goes without a hitch. For a small number of users, macOS Sierra presents a unique variety of problems that are impervious to all troubleshooting attempts, even reinstalling Sierra or a clean install. If you fall into the latter camp, or just decide that macOS Sierra just isn’t working out for you, you can downgrade from macOS Sierra to OS X El Capitan or Mavericks by using a Time Machine backup made beforehand.

Read more »

The Apple Watch battery lasts a while, and most users will place the Apple Watch onto the charger or into Night Stand mode if they’re letting it sit for a while, but sometimes you might want to actually turn the Apple Watch off completely. Maybe you’re putting the watch into longterm storage or sending it off, or maybe you aren’t using it, whatever the reason, powering it off can be appropriate.

This article will show you how to turn off Apple Watch, and also how to turn it back on again.

Read more »

One of the great new Safari features in new versions of iOS is the ability to search through your browser tabs using a keyword. For those of us who basically live in a web browser with a billion tabs open, this is incredibly useful, as it makes retrieving and narrowing down Safari tabs significantly faster on an iPhone or iPad since you can just search for a keyword match.

This tutorial will demonstrate how to use this excellent Tab Search feature in Safari for iOS.

Read more »

Want to hide the Siri menu icon but still have Siri enabled on the Mac? This approach offers a way to reduce menubar clutter on a Mac, while still retaining the Siri assistant functionality and each of its useful commands. With the Siri menu bar icon hidden, you can still access Siri on the Mac by using the defined Siri keystroke or through the Dock icon.

This tutorial will show you how to both hide the Siri menu bar icon on the Mac, and how to show the Siri menu bar button on the Mac.

Read more »

One of the many new features in iOS 10 is facial recognition software, which automatically scans every photo on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, determines what is a person, who has a unique face, and then automatically sorts those pictures into a “People” photos album for each unique face.

The face recognition aspect of iOS Photos is pretty accurate, but sometimes it can erroneously identify the same person as multiple different people. This is particularly true if you style your hair differently, alternate between wearing a hat or not, gain or lose weight, have facial hair and then shave, and any other scenario where someone’s face appearance changes.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to merge different faces in the People photo album of iOS, which is the simplest way to correct any inaccurate People album face sorting. This process also seems to make the Photos People face recognition album more accurate, as it appears to learn from face merging what the same person may look like under different scenarios. Let’s walk through how to merge faces in the Peoples album of iOS 10, and we’ll also discuss the Peoples face feature a bit more and how it can not currently be turned off.

Read more »

Now that macOS Sierra has Siri built directly into the Mac operating system, you’re probably wondering what exactly you can do with the handy virtual assistant on your computer.

It turns out that Siri has many abilities unique to the Mac, which you can’t perform on an iPhone or iPad with the virtual assistant. Of course nearly all of the traditional Siri commands from iOS work in macOS as well, which is just one of many reasons we think Siri is one of the features in macOS Sierra that you’ll use most.

Read more »

Newer iPhone models include a feature called Raise to Wake which is enabled by default, and much as it sounds, it wakes the display as the iPhone is physically raised, whether from a surface or out of a pocket. It’s a nice feature that completely removes the need to press any buttons to wake the display of an iPhone, but not all users may want to use Raise to Wake.

If you want to disable Raise to Wake on an iPhone, here’s what you’ll need to do.

Read more »

Gatekeeper in MacOS is now stricter than ever, defaulting to only allow options for apps downloaded from either the App Store or the App Store and identified developers. Advanced Mac users may wish to allow a third option, which is the ability to open and allow apps downloaded from anywhere in macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, MacOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, macOS Sierra, macOS High Sierra, and MacOS Mojave.

Read more »