Have you ever had the experience where an iPhone is suddenly not ringing on incoming calls, or making any sounds when a new message arrives? The mute button isn’t turned on, so what on earth is going on, right? This is surprisingly common experience for those who are more novice iPhone users, and after troubleshooting this a dozen or so times with relatives and friends (usually with young kids), it’s probably worth discussing here, if not for you personally than perhaps for the other people in your life.

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One of the more interesting features that arrived with the larger screen iPhone Plus models is the ability to view the devices Home Screen, where app icons are shown, in a rotated sideways horizontal format. This places the Dock onto the side, and kind of resembles a tiny iPad. To rotate the iPhone Home Screen, you simply need to turn the iPhone into a horizontal position, and as long as Orientation Lock is not on, it will rotate. Usually.

Sometimes the Home Screen on iPhone Plus does not rotate while other app screens do rotate, however, but the reason for this is quite simple; it’s the iPhones Display Zoom settings.

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Apple is offering to repair certain malfunctioning MacBook Pro models sold between February 2011 and December 2013. The impacted MacBook Pro models exhibit unusual graphics behavior, including distorted screen images, outright screen failures, and even sometimes unexpected system reboots.

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Apple is intending to begin production on their rumored electric car project “as early as 2020”, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

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Though most advanced Mac users will find it easiest to enable root with Directory Utility from the GUI of Mac OS X, another option is to turn to the command line. No, we’re not talking about using sudo or su, we’re talking about enabling the actual root user account, which can be appropriate for some complex situations.

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Users who sync their iPhones, iPads, and iPods to a Windows machine will find that a new update to iTunes is available to improve the experience. The update is versioned as iTunes 12.1.1. Mac users will continue to find that iTunes 12.1 remains the newest version available for OS X.

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One of the most frustrating issues that has impacted some users of OS X Yosemite are persistent wireless networking difficulties. Apple has released multiple updates to OS X aimed at addressing the problem, but for some Mac users, they either offer no help, or even worse, may add new trouble for wi-fi connections. We have offered multiple solutions to troubleshooting wi-fi problems in OS X Yosemite which many users report are successful, but for those who are continuing to experience wireless difficulties in OS X 10.10.2, another possible solution is available; simply remove the Bluetooth PAN interface from the Mac.

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Jony Ive is well known for being the design guru at Apple, and in one of the more revealing looks at the man offered by The New Yorker (a great read for designers and Apple fans in general), you’ll find a description of a rather colorful, perhaps even offensive, poster on his office wall.

(Don’t read below if you don’t like the F word, and no we don’t mean “Fun“)
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Many users who send PDF documents with sensitive data back and forth will password protect the files from their Mac so that only authorized users can read and access the data contained within the document. This is fairly common with everything from contracts to accounting and financial records, and it’s equally common to sometimes require the removal of the password encryption from that same PDF document.

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The modern versions of Facebook app for iOS make various sound effects when interface elements are interacted with in the app, from liking something to leaving comments and refreshing the feed. The little popping and squishing sounds have annoyed some people apparently that use Facebook, but some of our readers have found that you can turn these Facebook app sound effects off on the iPhone and iPad with a somewhat buried settings toggle.

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Most Mac users know what type of Mac they have, whether it’s a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, or whatever, and many know the model year of their computer too, but typically much less known is the model identifier number for a given Mac. Model identifiers are generally in the format of ModelNameModelNumber,Revision, for example, “MacBookAir6,2”. While knowing a model identifier is rarely necessary for general knowledge of your computer, it can be needed sometimes when troubleshooting specific problems, purchasing specific hardware upgrades, or just for properly referencing a specified model of a given Mac.

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We’re sharing the fun vintage inspired Mac setup of Ryan N., who has everything from Macs of days gone by to other assorted components of yesteryear like a rotary phone and a rusty old Route 66 sign. Let’s jump in to learn a bit more about this great workstation:

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Looking for a date this Valentines Day of the artificial intelligence variety? Maybe hoping for that “Her” experience? Well your iPhone may provide you some form of company, but don’t turn to Siri, for much more than a laugh at least. Unless you want to get rejected, of course. Yup, among the many amusing things you can inquire about, you can also ask Siri to be your Valentine, but she (or he, you can choose the Siri gender) is really not interested in us lowly humans.

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Apple is reportedly working on building an electric car, according to a wild new report from The Wall Street journal. And it may even be a self-driving vehicle, according to a separate report from Reuters.

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The latest versions of iOS support an optional display mode that turns everything shown on the screen of an iPhone or iPad to black and white. Called Grayscale mode, the setting is mostly intended as an accessibility option, but it has other uses beyond that as well.

This tutorial will show you how to turn your iPhone or iPad display into grayscale mode, stripping away all color from the screen. This effectively lets you run your iOS device in black and white. We’ll also show you how to turn off grayscale mode if you no longer want the iOS screen to be black and white, to return your iPhone or iPad display to full color.

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Rarely, when you plug an iPhone or iPad into a particular Lightning charger cable you’ll see a pop-up or lock screen message on the device that says something to the effect of “This cable is not certified and may not work reliably”. This usually prevents the lightning cable from charging the device as well. Though most users will never see this error, if you do see that message, there’s almost always a reason why.

We’ll cover the three most common reasons you’ll see the “not certified” message on an iOS device, and also what you can do about it.

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A simple trick that can help manage iPhone battery life is to set the battery percentage remaining to be visible. This battery percentage indicator is off by default in iOS, and while that adds an element of simplicity to the status bar, the lonely battery icon isn’t particularly informative – to me, anyway. We’re going to change this so the percentage of battery charge is always visible both on the lock screen and home screen of iOS, right alongside the battery icon. This will give you a much better idea of how much of a charge is remaining on the iPhone, and also how charged up the phone is before you head out the door.

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Have you ever needed to flatten a directory structure, moving all file contents from a directories child folders into a single folder? While you can do this manually by moving around files and folders from the file system of Mac OS X or Linux, a faster option is to turn to the command line. Maybe at one point you created a nested hierarchy of directories that you now need to undo by moving all files out of those nested folders and back into a single directory, or maybe you’re looking to simplify a directory structure, whatever the reason, this trick works quite well.

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