Universal Control allows a single mouse and keyboard on a Mac to control additional Macs and iPads, simply by dragging the mouse cursor over to those screens or devices. It’s a fantastic feature for Mac users who have several Macs and an iPad or two, and it can really help propel productivity to a new level.

We’ll walk through which devices support Universal Control, how to enable it, and how to use the excellent feature on Mac and iPad.

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Wondering how you can check the health status of an SSD drive in your Mac? Thanks to a third party app called DriveDX, determining the health of a Mac SSD and other disk drives is easier than ever.

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Apple has released macOS Monterey 12.3 to Mac users running the Monterey operating system.

Notably, macOS Monterey 12.3 includes support for Universal Control, the hotly anticipated feature that allows a single mouse and keyboard to to control multiple Macs and iPads. To use Universal Control with macOS Monterey and iPad, all connected devices must be running macOS 12.3 or later, and iPadOS 15.4 or later. The feature is enabled by default.

MacOS Monterey 12.3 also includes other small refinements, dozens of new Emoji icons, and bug fixes, making it recommended for all Mac users running the macOS Monterey operating system. Note that macOS Monterey 12.3 removes Python 2 from macOS, so you’ll want to make Python 3 the default or find an alternative solution if you rely on python.

Separately, Apple released iPadOS 15.4 for iPad, iOS 15.4 for iPhone, tvOS 15.4 for Apple TV, and watchOS 8.5 for Apple Watch.

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Apple has released iPadOS 15.4 for iPad, along with iOS 15.4 for iPhone, and macOS Monterey 12.3 for Mac.

iPadOS 15.4 includes support for Universal Control, the feature which allows sharing a mouse and keyboard between a Mac and iPad, support for Face ID with a mask, a gender neutral Siri voice option, iCloud Keychain notes, an Apple Card widget, along with dozens of new Emoji icons including a troll, pouring glass, coral reef, pregnant man, person with crown, beans, and much more.

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Apple has released iOS 15.4 for iPhone, and iPadOS 15.4 for iPad. The new software updates for iPhone and iPad include a variety of new features, along with security enhancements and fixes.

iOS 15.4 includes iCloud Keychain notes, official support for using Face ID when wearing a mask, a gender neutral Siri voice option, an Apple Card widget, a stalking warning during AirTags setup, support for COVID EU digital vaccine passports, support for contactless payments using tap-to-pay, and dozens of new Emoji icons.

Additionally, macOS Monterey 12.3, watchOS 8.5, and tvOS 15.4 are also available.
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If you use WhatsApp as your primary messaging app, chances are that over time your photo library can become cluttered with images and videos from WhatsApp. This shouldn’t be a concern however, since WhatsApp makes it easy for users to manage the content shared via the app.

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Apple released new green color options for iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 at the March 8 event, and aside from the enclosure being green colored, the green iPhones also include new green default wallpapers. How harmonious!

But you don’t have to order a green iPhone just to get the green wallpapers.

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Do you watch a lot of YouTube videos on your iPhone and iPad? If you’re someone who likes to fiddle around with the video quality settings rather than sticking to the one that’s automatically set by YouTube, you may have noticed that things have changed in the YouTube app on iPhone and iPad.

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Want to password protect your important Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents, right from your iPhone or iPad? Thanks to a handy feature in the iWork productivity suite, you can easily encrypt your documents, right from iOS or iPadOS (or Mac), requiring the proper password to be entered before the documents can be opened by anyone.

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If you want to remove the entire Shortcuts menu bar icon, you’ve probably already tried dragging the item out and removing it the typical way, only to find it not disappear. It turns out if you want to remove the Shortcuts menu bar item on MacOS, you’ll need to take a few extra steps.

We’ll show you how to remove the Shortcuts icon from the menu bar on Mac, and also show you how to remove items from the Shortcuts menu if you simply want to declutter the Shortcuts menu or have found repetitive entries in there.

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Do you want to make sure your important documents created in Pages, Keynote, or Numbers are safe and secure? If so, you may want to encrypt them with a secure password, which will protect the document from unauthorized access. If you’re looking to password protect your iWork documents, macOS makes it pretty easy.

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Apple has released a RC (Release Candidate) build of macOS Monterey 12.3, iOS 15.4, and iPadOS 15.4 to users who are participating in the beta testing programs for system software.

The RC builds typically indicate the final version of system software is just around the corner. Apple stated at the March 8 event that iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, and macOS 12.3 will be released next week.

Additionally, RC builds of watchOS 8.5 and tvOS 15.4 are available to users beta testing those system software versions.

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Apple held an event today where it unveiled a variety of new products and updates to existing hardware, including a new desktop Mac, new external display, a revamped iPhone SE, and an updated iPad Air.

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If you use the Gmail web client from a web browser, no matter what device you’re on, you may be interested in making an email signature for use with Gmail.

When you create an email signature for Gmail on the web, it will also carry over to using the same Gmail account with the Gmail app on iPhone, iPad, or Android (but not the default Mail app on iPhone, where Mail app signatures are handled separately).

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If you spend a lot of time in and out of Zoom meetings, you may have experienced an awkward situation where someone’s microphone is defaulting to being unmuted when they join a Zoom meeting, and something personal or unprofessional gets broadcast out to the entire meeting.

To avoid this embarrassing situation yourself, you can toggle a setting in Zoom to automatically mute your microphone upon joining a meeting, which prevents you from having to quickly toggle mute as soon as you join a meeting if you aren’t quite ready to talk, or if you have other stuff going on around you. This is a nice privacy feature that many users will appreciate, particularly if they’ve had an open microphone hiccup in the past.

We’ll cover how to set Zoom to automatically default to muting your microphone whenever joining a Zoom meeting, whether you’re using Zoom on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, or Windows.

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If you’re an iPad, iPad Pro, or iPad Air user, and you are trying to draw with your finger on the iPad on Notes app (or elsewhere with Markup) but find that it’s not working, there’s a simple explanation and solution to this problem.

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Have you ever wanted to quickly send a message on WhatsApp to a random phone number that you haven’t added to your contacts? And perhaps you just want to send that text through WhatsApp without adding them to contacts? You’ll be happy to know this is possible, with a bit of a workaround, thanks to the good old Shortcuts app on iPhone and iPad.

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Do you want to stop your HomePod Mini or Homepod from installing updates automatically? Perhaps you prefer to manually update HomePod, or you’re the kind of person who likes to make sure there aren’t any user reports of issues before updating your devices? Fortunately, Apple gives users the option to disable automatic updates for the HomePod mini and Homepod, if desired.

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