Apple has introduced their annual Holiday advertisement for the 2024 season, titled “Heartstrings”, and it’s an unusually moving commercial that focuses on hearing loss and the hearing aids feature of AirPods Pro 2 (which happen to be hugely discounted on Amazon right now, if you’re in the market).

In the touching and family oriented commercial, a small family is gathered around a Christmas tree opening presents, and as the father reminiscences about his daughter growing up over the years, he gets a nudge from his wife to listen to his daughter singing a rendition of “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, where he puts in his AirPods and is able to hear her clearly.

Grab a tissue, get in the holiday spirit, and watch the commercial on YouTube or below!

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One of the best features of modern MacOS versions, from Sequoia 15.0 onward, is iPhone Mirroring, which allows Mac users to interact with their iPhone and use their iPhone directly from their Mac.

iPhone Mirroring is almost entirely full featured in that you can access basically every iPhone feature from the Mac… but “almost entirely” is not entirely, because some iPhone functionality is not accessible currently with iPhone Mirroring.

One of the more prominent iPhone features that iPhone Mirroring does not currently support is Control Center, which is how you access many of the iPhone features and quick toggles for networking, Shazam, accessibility toggles, amongst many other capabilities.

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Amazon Black Friday deals continue with tons of fantastic deals on various Apple products, with particularly big discounts being offered on AirPods Pro, AirTags, select iPad models, Apple Watch, and the M3 MacBook Air lineup.

If Apple gear has a place in your holiday shopping, don’t miss these discounts while they’re available!

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If you’ve just setup a new wi-fi network or ISP, or perhaps you just joined a new wi-fi network, one of the first things you might be inclined to do is run a speed test. Speed testing helps to evaluate the performance of an internet connection, measuring download speed, upload speed, and latency, allowing you to determine if performance is optimal, or needs adjustments.

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A strange bug is impacting some iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, where they are presented with new “iCloud Terms & Conditions” to accept, but they are not able to accept them. On a Mac this is particularly annoying because the iCloud Terms & Conditions popup and screen will continuously bother you, but it’s equally annoying on iPhone, iPad, and apparently even on Apple Vision Pro too. For some, they attempt to accept the iCloud Terms and they see an error message stating “Cannot Complete Action. This action cannot be completed at this time.”

By not being able to accept and dismiss the iCloud Terms & Conditions, you’re not able to use most iCloud features, including access to Notes, Photos, Reminders, and many other features in the MacOS and iOS ecosystem that depends on iCloud, and therefore depends on being able to accept the iCloud Terms & Conditions.

If you’re experiencing problems accepting iCloud Terms and Conditions and the popups and alerts will not go away, read along to fix this problem.

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While the only Time Machine we know of is the easy to use and fantastic backup tool for Mac users, some of us have geeky dreams of digital time machines, where we can get lost in flashbacks to retro computing, like the early Macintosh days of Classic MacOS System 7. While there are ways to run System 7 in your browser or through an emulator, we’re going to present another fun option here, which is to restyle and re-theme modern MacOS (even Sequoia!) to the look, feel, and sound, of Macintosh System 7, a now 33+ year old operating system.

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Amazon has started their early Black Friday Deals on many Apple products, so if you’ve been planning on shopping this holiday season for some great deals on Apple gear, this is a great place to get started.

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AirTags are popular personal trackers, allowing you to keep track of bags, pets, luggage, even pets and people. They’re a handy Apple product that is easy to setup and use, and you can grab a 4 pack for $80 on Amazon allowing you to deploy several AirTags for multiple different purposes. Just as easy to find, through Find My or even with Siri by saying “Hey Siri, find my luggage”, for example.

Let’s check out some great uses of AirTags that you might find useful in your life.

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Apple is dropping support for iCloud backups for iPhone or iPad running iOS 8 or earlier. Additionally, Apple is also dropping support for Safari Bookmark Syncing for devices running iOS 10 or earlier, or macOS Sierra 10.12.5 and earlier.

While this will not impact the vast majority of people, there are many older model iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices still in use out there, many of which continue to run older versions of iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. Thus, these changes will undoubtedly impact some users and their older devices, and they should be aware of these changes.

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Apple has released the fourth beta version of iOS 18.2, MacOS Sequoia 15.2, and iPadOS 18.2, for users participating in the beta testing programs for Apple system software.

The primary focus of these new betas appear to be introducing additional Apple Intelligence features, including things like ChatGPT integration to Siri, Genmoji for custom Emoji creation, and Image Playground AI image generation. These Ai features are in addition to the helpful writing tools, smart replies, and summary features with Apple Intelligence that debuted in the prior .1 updates.

Aside from the new Apple Intelligence features, there are some additional new features as well, like allowing iPhone Mirroring to use Personal Hotspot, sharing functionality in Find My, a weather widget for the Mac menu bar, refinements to Settings app, and some other smaller changes and features.

iOS 18.2 and MacOS Sequoia 15.2 are expected to launch next month for all users. The most recent stable version of system software currently available is the just released iOS 18.1.1, iPadOS 18.1.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1.1.

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Apple has issued iOS 18.1.1, iPadOS 18.1.1, iOS 17.2.2, and iPadOS 17.2.2, for iPhone and iPad users. These updates are relatively small but contain important security fixes, making the software updates important for users to install onto eligible devices.

Separately, Apple also released MacOS Sequoia 15.1.1 with the same set of security patches, along with visionOS 2.1.1.

No new features or other changes are expected in these security updates, as those will be arriving likely next month with iOS 18.2 when it finishes beta testing.

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Apple has released MacOS Seqouia 15.1.1, a small software update focused on important security fixes for the Mac. No new features are included, but several actively exploited security issues are patched, making these important updates to install on your Apple devices.

Separately, Apple has also released iOS 18.1.1 for iPhone, ipadOS 18.1.1 for iPad, visionOS 2.1.1, along with iOS 17.7.2 and iPadOS 17.7.2, all with the same security patches.

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Data loss is one of the most terrifying experiences to encounter in our digital lives, and so it’s no surprise that iPhone and iPad users who encountered a recent issue with iCloud Notes disappearing from their devices caused significant distress. But Apple has now officially acknowledged the disappearing iCloud Notes problem, and has provided a solution to those affected.

For some background, a fair number of reports began to surface from some iPhone and iPad users, who, either after updating their iPhone or iPad to a new version of iOS/iPadOS system software, or after accepting the new iCloud Terms & Service agreement, suddenly discovered their Notes were missing from their devices. Given how many people rely on the Notes app to store critical information, it’s easy to see why Notes going missing is problematic. Some users had discovered a few troubleshooting tricks to fix the issue, however, and a variation of one of those troubleshooting tips is basically what Apple has issued as their official resolution.

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Window Tiling on the Mac has gotten much better since MacOS Sequoia, and it’s now easier than ever to arrange and tile windows on your screen.

With Window Tiling, you can split windows, send windows to the left or right, quarter windows on your display, and much more. There are multiple different ways to access the new and improved Window Tiling features on the Mac, so familiarize yourself with them and you’ll be a master in no time.

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The Apple Pencil is a great accessory for iPad users, but obviously you can’t use an Apple Pencil if it’s lost, and it’s not particularly useful if it’s missing.

Fortunately there are a few tricks that you can employ to help you find a lost Apple Pencil, so you can be back to your writing, scribbling, doodling, and whatever other work you enjoy with the stylus. The tips we’ll show you here work regardless of which Apple Pencil model you have, whether you have the original Apple Pencil, Apple Pencil 2nd gen, or Apple Pencil Pro. We’ll show them in order of ease and efficacy, so read along and let’s find your missing Apple Pencil!

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Some iPhone users have noticed Bluetooth connection problems after updating their device to iOS 18, often presenting as dropping connections, or as an inability to connect to Bluetooth devices, whether those Bluetooth devices are speakers, hearing aids, headphones, car stereo systems, or even gaming controllers.

Often you can resolve Bluetooth issues by simply toggling Bluetooth, restarting an iPhone by turning it off and on again, or by turning the Bluetooth device itself off and on again. But we’re going to assume you already tried that, unsuccessfully, and you’re still having issues with Bluetooth connections in iOS 18. In that case, read along for a tried and true method of resolving Bluetooth issues on iPhone.

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Many iPhone users have discovered that Wi-Fi is turning itself on automatically on their iPhone, usually after they install a system software update to iOS, restart the iPhone, or turn the iPhone back on. This is frustrating to many iPhone users because not everyone wants to have wi-fi turned on for any number of reasons, but it’s a particularly common complaint amongst users who are bringing a personal iPhone into an area whether it’s work, business, or personal, that has some kind of wi-fi network that is public, corporate, healthcare, or a government network, that they do not wish to join. A common obvious solution to not joining a wi-fi network is to keep wi-fi turned off (or forget the network), but again, many users have discovered that iPhone turns wi-fi on by itself.

Let’s discover why the iPhone wi-fi is turning itself on automatically, and what you can do to prevent that. And yes this often applies to iPad users and iPadOS as well.

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The iOS 18 update is a fun one with some intriguing new features, mostly for visual tweaks like adding dark mode icons and color hues, and of course there’s Apple Intelligence AI features if your iPhone is new enough to support those features. One of the other major changes in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 for iPhone and iPad is the redesigned Control Center, which is now customizable, but also which has changed how some of the toggles and switches work, and the Bluetooth toggle is causing some confusion.

One of the more prominent changes to Control Center in iOS 18 has to do with toggling Bluetooth off and on again, an adjustment that many iPhone and ipad users need to make frequently for various reasons, whether they’re connecting to an external speaker system, car stereo system, or any other device that connects via Bluetooth. But as many users have discovered, if you tap on the Bluetooth switch in iOS 18, you end up at a Bluetooth device selection screen, instead of disabling Bluetooth. This new change to the Bluetooth toggle behavior in Control Center is causing a fair amount of confusion with some iPhone users, so we’re going to clarify how the feature works now so that you can easily disable Bluetooth and re-enable Bluetooth at any time.

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