The amount of time it takes to complete a Time Machine backup depends on a variety of things, like the amount of data being backed up, the destination drive speed, the speed of the internet connection if the backup is going to a Time Capsule, whether it’s the initial backup or a delta backup of changes made, amongst a variety of other factors. You’ll typically get an idea of how long a Time Machine backup should take to complete after it has ran a few times on a Mac, so if you discover suddenly that the Time Machine backup is taking an extremely long time or is backing up unusually slow, follow the troubleshooting steps below to speed things up.

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The Apple TV has a Settings app complete with a myriad of options that are more than sufficient for most users to customize and tinker with their device, but did you know there is a hidden Advanced Settings section in tvOS as well? This is a little known feature that seems to contain options that are mostly pertinent to Apple internal testing, but there are a few potentially useful user-facing settings as well.

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Most iPhone and iPad users will use the same Apple ID and iCloud account repeatedly on the same device and across other devices, as they should, since that is how they are designed to work. Nonetheless sometimes you may buy an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch on the used market and discover that someone has made and used so many different Apple ID or iCloud accounts on the device that an error message shows up when going through the device setup, saying that the device is “no longer eligible” to make an account. The exact error messages are “Account Limit Reached: This device is no longer eligible for creating a free iCloud account” and “This device is no longer eligible for creating an Apple ID”.

If you see an “Account Limit Reached” or “no longer eligible” message when trying to setup an iOS device, or when trying to create an account on a specific iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, then here is what you can do to fix it.

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As Instagram continues to grow with pictures of just about anything imaginable, you may find yourself browsing and searching for photos of, well, anything. Instagram keeps track of the searches you make in the app, and when you return to the search tab and search field, you’ll find your prior search history is visible. That’s helpful for quickly returning to a prior search, but sometimes you may want to clear that search history in Instagram as well.

Fortunately, Instagram allows deletion of the prior searches, so you can wipe away the search history all of those iffy keywords, hashtags, and user names that you don’t want showing up in the search section of the app anymore.

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If you use the Mail app on a Mac, it’s fairly likely that you regularly delete emails that you determine to be unnecessary, junk, or that simply aren’t needed. Typically this is a selective process where particular email messages are removed as needed, but in some situations you may want to go all out and delete every single email that is in a particular Mail account, or even remove all emails from the entire Mail app on a Mac, without removing the associated email account from Mail app. In other words, while the email messages are removed from Mail, the email account remains in Mail on the Mac so that it can continue to be used.

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Apple has started running a fun new iPhone commercial focusing on the hands-free Hey Siri feature, as it’s being used by none other than Cookie Monster from Sesame Street fame.

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If the average iPhone user has a complaint about their device, it’s almost always that the battery of iPhone doesn’t last as long as they’d like it to. While this is less of a concern with the larger iPhone Plus models, the fact is that all iPhones can run out of battery during the course of usage throughout the day, though depending on individual usage the iPhone battery life may drain down faster, or slower too. There are no shortage of tips to preserve battery life of iOS devices, many of which actually work, but another option is to use Low Power Mode, which is an excellent feature included in modern versions of iOS.

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The Health app on iPhone is able to track steps and mileage, and if you have an Apple Watch it will keep track of your heart rate, active calories with a pedometer, and other fitness data as well. When you open Health app, the Dashboard offers an overview of activity for the day, week, month, and year, but there isn’t an obvious way to drill down and get more specifics, since tapping on an individual stat just opens the “All Recorded Data” screen which is not exactly user friendly and feels a bit like stumbling into a jumbled data entry job for SQL or an excel spreadsheet.

But it turns out there is a super easy way to get specific details about any of the tracked items in Health app, on a per hour or per day basis! It’s just not well known, as it’s basically hidden without an obvious cue to do so; all you have to do is rotate your iPhone. Here’s how this works:

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Apple has released OS X 10.11.4 beta 7 to Mac users in the developer beta testing and public beta testing programs. The new build arrives as 15E64a and includes bug fixes and feature improvements to the beta release.

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Apple has released the 7th beta version of iOS 9.3 to users in the public beta and developer beta testing programs.

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Code signed applications allow security conscious users to verify the creator and hash of a particular app to help confirm it has not been corrupted or tampered with. This is rarely necessary for average Mac users, particularly those who obtain their software from the Mac App Store or other trusted sources since the apps are certified, but verifying the digital signature of an app can be extremely helpful for users who get apps from third party sources.

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Many Mac users like to keep a watchful eye on their system stats, including processor utilization, memory usage, disk activity, network usage, CPU temperature, fan speed, and perhaps battery stats. The Activity Monitor Dock icon offers one way to do this, but it’s on a limited basis, so if you’d rather see all kinds of system resource activity in a single control panel you may appreciate these two Notification Center widgets for Mac OS X.

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Though most iPhone and iPad users likely don’t closely follow Android news, a new beta version of the next Android OS release came out recently, and long with it arrived a pretty nice default wallpaper too.

The Android N default wallpaper image is of some distant hills or a mountain range silhouetted against a pink dusk sky, the type of scene you’d see if you were out past suppertime in an area without light pollution. So why not appreciate the imagery and set it on your iOS device or Mac as the background picture?

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Having used a relatives computers recently I discovered their Google Chrome web browser was constantly throwing a “Your connection is not private” error message on many web pages, thereby preventing the page from loading unless they chose to ignore and reload the ‘not private’ page. The “not private” message can be a little disconcerting, so it’s no wonder it can alarm some users. Interestingly, this error was turning up both on their Mac OS X Chrome browser, as well as a separate Windows computer that was also using the Chrome web browser, and they were convinced they had been the victim of some elaborate hack.

Well, rest assured there was no hack. It turns out this is a remarkably simple error message to fix in Google Chrome, and so if you experience the “your connection not private” error message on any computer, you can quickly resolve it regardless of the error being encountered on a Mac or Windows PC.

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The zipping zooming flying around animations strewn throughout iOS are activated when opening and closing apps, switching app screens, tapping settings, and doing just about anything else on an iPhone or iPad. This motion eye candy causes some users to experience nausea, but aside from that they also make the device feel a bit slower since performing just about anything on an iPhone or iPad has to render and draw the eye candy animations on screen. One common trick is to enable the faster fading transitions in iOS instead by turning on Reduce Motion, but if you want to completely disable animations for a while, you can rely on a bug in iOS instead.

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iPhone and iPad users have long been able to zoom into still photos and pictures on their devices, and now with the latest versions of iOS, you can zoom into and out of videos and movies that are playing as well.

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The Pangu group has released a new jailbreak for 64-bit iPad and iPhone devices running iOS 9.1, including iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

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Plist files contain preference specifics and properties relevant to a particular application or portion of Mac OS X system software. Depending on where the plist file is located and what function they serve, they can either be in XML format, binary format, and sometimes even json. For users who need to modify a plist file or convert the file format to or from XML and binary, you can do so easily in the OS X Terminal with the help of the plutil command.

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