Some MacOS Sequoia users have discovered various networking issues with their Mac since installing the MacOS Sequoia 15 system software update. The reported network problems can range from and include random intermittent connection issues with MacOS Sequoia, inability to connect to the internet, unusually slow internet, DNS resolution failures, problems with VPN services, problems with third party firewalls, problems with the native firewall, problems with the Messages app not working behind a firewall, problems with third party security software, and many other variations of these complaints.
Amazon Prime Day is happening, offering fantastic discounts on tons of products and goods. You will need an Amazon Prime membership (it’s free for 30 days, so if you just want to do some holiday shopping and not pay for membership you can do that too), which is handy anyway since it offers access to Amazon Video, prioritized shipping, and great discounts. While you can shop for just about anything on Amazon and get great Prime Day discounts, we’ll highlight some of the best deals on Apple products and related gear that’s available right now.
Apple Watch SE 2nd gen – $170 (down from $249)
Apple Watch SE 2nd gen is available at a whopper discount from Amazon, and is a great entry level Apple Watch if you just want a fitness tracker for your activities, along with the standard array of Apple Watch features. One thing to keep in mind is that Apple Watch SE 2nd gen doesn’t have ECG capabilities or an oxygen reader, but the latter was removed from later model Apple Watch anyway due to an ongoing patent dispute, but if you don’t care for those features, you can save some serious cash and get the SE 2.
The iPad 9th gen is one of the best deals on Prime Day, at just $199, down from the original $329 retail price. The 9th gen iPad is the last iPad model with a Home button, which could make it preferable for those who are accustomed or prefer the Home Button, and making it a great gift for anyone who fits that bill too.
Amazon is also offering nice discount on the 13″ and 11″ iPad Air M2 models, if you want the latest and greatest, a beefier processor, larger screens, and Apple Intelligence support:
If you prefer the smaller size of iPad Mini, the 6th gen model is available at a whopping $150 discount. One thing to keep in mind with iPad Mini is that it’s likely to be updated soon with a processor that supports Apple Intelligence, so while this is a great deal, if you want Apple Intelligence support you might want to hold off until the refresh happens at some point.
The M3 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is available at a $250 discount on Amazon in both the 13″ and 15″ display sizes. This is a great price for a really great laptop, one I use myself, and the one that I generally recommend to family and friends as well.
If you want a nice portable Mac laptop and don’t have the need for more storage, RAM, or CPU power, the base model M2 is available at huge discount. For some of you who may be debating an iPad vs MacBook, this is a great laptop alternative to many iPad models since it comes with more storage than base model iPads plus you get a built-in keyboard, trackpad, and the much more powerful MacOS.
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iOS 18.1 beta 6, iPadOS 18.1 beta 6, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 6, are now available to download for those participating in the beta testing programs for Apple system software. These beta builds are assumed to be finalized by the end of the month, and will bring Apple Intelligence AI features to compatible devices.
The initial Apple Intelligence features include capabilities like summarization, writing tools, smart replies, and some new Siri features, though other AI features that were announced as part of iOS 18 or macOS Sequoia are likely to arrive in a later OS update as they are not included in iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, or macOS Sequoia 15.1. Apple Intelligence has strict system requirements, requiring an M1 or better chip for Mac or iPad, and an iPhone 15 Pro or better for iPhone. Other hardware will be able to install the iOS/iPadOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 updates, but simply won’t include the Apple Intelligence features.
Apple has released MacOS Sequoia 15.0.1 as a software update to Mac users running the Sequoia operating system. The update includes bug fixes and security enhancements, and is therefore recommended for all MacOS users running Sequoia to install.
For Mac users who are running MacOS Sonoma or macOS Ventura, you’ll find Safari 18.0.1 update available instead.
Separately, Apple has also released iOS 18.0.1, iPadOS 18.0.1, watchOS 11.0.1, and visionOS 2.0.1, also with bug fixes and security updates.
Apple has released iOS 18.0.1 for iPhone and iPadOS 18.0.1 for iPad. The purpose of these small updates is to fix various bugs and resolve a variety of security issues that were present in the 18.0 releases of iOS/iPadOS.
Specifically, iOS 18.0.1 aims to resolve some issues with touch screens and camera functionality on iPhone 16 models, patches a bug where Messages would crash if you shared an Apple Watch face, and resolves an issue with performance and memory allocation on some iPhone models. There are also a handful of security fixes included as well. The full release notes are shown further below.
Separately, you’ll find software updates for MacOS Sequoia 15.0.1, watchOS 11.0.1, visionOS 2.0.1, and Safari 18.0.1 for MacOS Sonoma and Ventura.
If you use the Reminders app to keep track of things you need to do or be reminded of, on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, then you might appreciate having Reminders easily available in the Mac menu bar.
That’s exactly what the aptly named Reminders MenuBar does, it’s a free tool that places a fully interactive Reminders functionality behind a menu bar icon on MacOS, where you can quickly add new reminders, mark reminders as completed, and scroll through your list of reminders to see what else is on tap.
Some iPhone users have discovered that cellular data is not working on many apps after they have updated to iOS 18. For example, you might be driving and discover that you can no longer stream music from Music app, or can’t listen to podcasts from Spotify, or load reels on Instagram, or watch TikTok, but only when you’re on cellular data, and after updating an iPhone to iOS 18.
This is a common enough complaint that there are multiple posts about it on the Apple Support forums and elsewhere on the web, and I personally also encountered this issue after updating to iOS 18 as an iPhone as well. After updating to iOS 18, my cellular data worked with apps in a small range, but then all cellular data quickly stopped working at all if I drove just barely outside the city. This is understandably frustrating, but the behavior also gives a clue as to what might be wrong, and how to resolve the issues where apps are not working with cellular data after installing iOS 18.
For many users who experience difficulty with cellular data and iOS 18, the resolution to this problem is actually fairly simple.
The iOS 18 software update has been popular for iPhone users thanks to the addition of some great new features that allow for more Home Screen customizations, Dark Mode icons, icon tinting, and Control Center customizations. But if there’s one thing that has seemed to be the focus of complaints with iOS 18, it is the Photos app.
Photos app got a dramatic redesign in iOS 18, and a fair amount of iPhone users wish they could undo these changes and revert back to the prior Photos app design. While you can’t quite do that, you can make some adjustments to the Photos app that will help it behave closer to it did before the confusing redesign in iOS 18. One of the best improvements you can make is to simply change the Photos ordering to sort by recently added instead of capture/creation date, but there are even more customizations you can make that will further improve the Photos app experience and better suit it to how you use the Photos app.
The Photos app in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 got a major redesign that is confusing some users and bothering others, creating a “Who Moved My Cheese” scenario for iPhone and iPad owners who have been accustomed to the longstanding behavior of the prior Photos app. One of the major frustrations for some users is that Photos app defaults to sorting by the creation date of photos and videos in the library now, rather than sorting by date added. With sorting by creation date enabled, if someone AirDrops you a handful of photos from a gathering a week prior, that media is going to be tucked away back in time in your Photos library, making them harder to find, rather than at the very bottom of the camera roll, as most users have come to expect where new photos and videos added to their device should appear.
While it may not be obvious, there is a way with iOS 18 to sort Photos by Recently Added, instead of by Date Captured (creation date, the new default setting), and this little adjustment alone resolves many complaints you might hear about the new Photos app.
Command Line Tools are an optional component of Xcode that bring a variety of advanced utilities to the Mac command line, including compilers, debuggers, and other essentials for software development and command line tinkering. But not everyone has to be a developer to require Command Line Tools be installed on their Mac, because the suite is necessary as a prerequisite for installing things like the popular Homebrew package manager, and cask.
Whether you recently installed MacOS Sequoia or are running Sonoma, installing Command Line tools is pretty straight forward.
By now it’s fairly likely you have either heard about or updated to iOS 18 on iPhone or iPadOS 18 on iPad, and you might be wondering about some of the new features.
While there are some major new features along with many small changes and mini features here and there, there are a handful of features in particular you might find to be most compelling or useful, and that’s what we’re aiming to cover here.
The Messages app for Mac is incredibly useful in that it allows Mac users to seamlessly communicate over iMessage with other Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and it allows Mac users to send text messages to Android users too, but the latest versions of Messages on the Mac are known for randomly using high amounts of CPU and slowing down a Mac, even if the Messages app is in the background and idle.
We’ve covered various tips for fixing high CPU use in Messages for Mac and the related sluggish performance before, but we’re going to cover another quick tip here that quickly fixes Messages when it’s using large amounts of system resources on a Mac when idle.
If you have recently installed iOS 18 on iPhone, or iPadOS 18 on iPad, and you’re not thrilled with the experience, or maybe you’ve encountered something that is incompatible with your workflow, you can still downgrade from iOS 18 back to iOS 17.
Specifically, currently you can downgrade an iPhone or iPad with iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 back to iOS 17.7 or iPadOS 17.7, but this technique will only work for as long as iOS 17.7 is being signed by Apple. Thus, if you’re motivated to downgrade, you’ll want to act relatively quickly, since you never know when Apple will stop signing past releases.
Apple has released the 5th beta versions of iOS 18.1, macOS Sequoia 15.1, and iPadOS 18.1, with Apple Intelligence support.
The Apple Intelligence features that are included with these releases are mostly Writing Tools, summaries, and new Siri features, which allow you to do things like summarize emails, offer Smart Replies in Mail and Messages, and re-write selected text into different tones and styles. Absent from these system software versions are other Apple Intelligence features like AI image generation with Image Playground, and Genmoji to create your own emoji. Those AI features are likely to come later, perhaps in iOS 18.2 and MacOS Sequoia 15.2, or later. It’s important to remember that Apple Intelligence has very strict system requirements particularly for iPhone, requiring iPhone 15 Pro or better, and an M1 or better chip on iPad or Mac.
Another notable feature inclusion with MacOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 5 and iOS 18.1 beta 5 is that you can now drag and drop files and data between iPhone and Mac when using iPhone Mirroring, one of the most useful features included in MacOS Sequoia.
If you are enrolled in the developer or public beta testing program you can download iOS/iPadOS 18.1 beta 5 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta 5 right away from Software Update.
A fair number of Mac users have discovered that the Apple Music application will seemingly spontaneously open itself at random, and even play music, without being prompted to do so. That Apple Music will randomly open itself and even start playing music is highly undesirable behavior for many Mac users, and thus it’s reasonable to want a solution to this potentially embarrassing or just outright annoying problem.
We’re going to explain why Apple Music opens randomly on a Mac, and offer four different ways to stop or prevent this behavior.
Now that MacOS Sequoia is available for all Mac users to update and install, you might be wondering which of the many new features and changes are particularly enticing, and that you might actually use. Rather than overwhelm you with a list of twenty seven trillion new things that you will quickly forget about, here we’ll focus on six of the most significant new features in macOS Sequoia that you should try out, and that you’re likely to use on a regular basis.
Apple has issued the fourth beta version of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1, each with Apple Intelligence features that were not available in the initial public release of iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia 15.0. The fourth developer beta version also matches the first public beta version of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS 15.1 with Apple Intelligence.
Users who are enrolled in the beta testing programs can download the beta 4 updates right now to their eligible devices.
Apple Intelligence AI features include functionality to perform tasks akin to ChatGPT (and in many cases, is being performed by ChatGPT itself), with tools that allow for things like rewriting emails to be more professional, summarizing data on screen or webpages, generate AI artwork, and more.
iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1 will technically run on any device that supports iOS/iPadOS 18 or macOS Sequoia 15.0, but the Apple Intelligence AI features are much more strictly limited. For iPhone, Apple Intelligence is only available on iPhone 15 Pro or better, whereas for iPad you must have an M1 chip or better, and Macs must also have an M1 chip or better. While this may be disappointing to many users, it’s worth remembering that basically every model device is able to run ChatGPT through the dedicated app, or OpenAI website.
Apple has released iOS 17.7 and iPadOS 17.7 as software updates for iPhone and iPad, containing important security fixes that make these updates recommended to install.
While most attention is on the freshly released iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 software updates for iPhone and iPad users, Apple has also released security updates for users who are staying on iOS 17 or iPadOS 17. If you’re not yet prepared for iOS 18 or maybe you’re simply waiting to install it for some other reason, then you should install iOS/iPadOS 17.7 to get the relevant security patches.
