I’VE BEEN LUCKY enough to have very few major problems in my time using Macs — the occasional minor hiccup, sure, but nothing that required me to take significant steps to fix the issue. Regardless, when those annoyances occur, they can be a real pai

Get peace of mind from smart kit THERE’S MORE TO a smart home than lighting up your rooms with neat bulbs. Your Apple smart home can include cameras that spot movement, record video and send an alert to your iPhone; smart thermostats that turn off th

$169.99 From https://us.soundcore.com Features Bluetooth 5.3 with AAC, LDAC; output — 40W; IPX7 water resistance; dimensions — 8.98 x 7.52 x 3.19 inches, 3.53lbs WE LIKED THE highly affordable Space One headphones that Soundcore released recently, an

If your Bluetooth peripheral won’t connect to your Mac, turn it off and turn it on again. If that fails, click on the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar, then click the peripheral name in question to see if you can connect it this way. If this doe

Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities. If you can’t start your Mac properly, use Recovery Mode. For silicon Macs, turn on and hold the power button until you see the startup options window. Click the gear icon labeled Options, then click Co

In 1984 I got a loan to make it possible for me to buy an Apple computer. If memory serves, it was about $2,500. In 1984 money, that’s like $1 million today. (A slight exaggeration.) I had been smitten with the Apple II machines that I was using in t

WHEN WE ARRIVE home, we just need to say the word and the lights activate, the heating turns on, and Pink Floyd starts playing on our HomePods. If you didn’t know about smart home tech and Apple’s version of it, HomeKit, you might think that our hous

ONE OF OUR very favorite things about Apple–compatible smart home technology is how entertaining it is — and we mean that literally. Being able to stream music from your Mac, iPad or iPhone to your home hi–fi, or to have different music playing in di

Archer Air R5 router $139.99, Archer Air E5 extender $119.99 From https://www.tp-link.com Features Wi–Fi 6, two Ethernet ports on R5 for cable or fiber connections, smart antennas THE MODERN HOME places far more demands on a domestic wireless network

Spotify and Apple Music are the two largest music streaming services in the world, attracting millions of listeners each day. For years, their parent companies have been locked in PR, political and legal battles. Essentially, Spotify thinks the iPhon

REQUIRES macOS 13 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to make use of the new range of Keynote features IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes KEYNOTE HAS LONG been a powerful tool for creating compelling presentations, but now there are even more reasons to cast PowerPoint

Art Editor Andy streams A LOT of indie rock on Spotify and is looking forward to reading about its scrap with Apple for audience and functionality over on p6. Production Editor Rachel is certainly wowed by what you can do with smart home tech (p52),

WE ALL KNOW iCloud is pretty reliable, but what can you do if files aren’t syncing properly across your devices? What about if your storage is full? Or if you’re receiving too much spam to your iCloud email account? None of these problems are insurmo

We’ve all seen them. Those irritating error windows that pop up while you’re trying to do something on your Mac are never welcome, but if you know how to read them, they can tell you much about what’s gone wrong. Error code – 36, for example, occurs

Apple has released free updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Alongside other enhancements in v14.0, you get new in–app notifications when a user joins a collaborative document, you can hold down the Command key to select

ANOTHER WAY TO make your old Mac run faster is to declutter its hard drive — getting rid of old, unwanted apps, backing up and archiving media and files you’re not likely to need any time soon, and moving currently used media to external drives. Movi

REQUIRES ChatGPT (free, IAPs), iPadOS 16.1 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to use an AI chatbot to make life easier IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) has taken the world by storm, and ChatGPT is the best example of the capabilities of a

REQUIRES iOS 17 or later, an iPhone 12 Pro/Pro Max or later to detect people and objects YOU WILL LEARN How to make use of the advanced detection features of the Magnifier app IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes SHERLOCK HOLMES WAS often found using his trusty m

THESE DAYS, WE rely on our home networks more than ever, especially when working wirelessly, remotely or from home. Macs are easy to connect to home networks with Wi–Fi, but you can still encounter problems. Here we explore some of the more common is

ONE OF THE reasons we love our Macs so much is they just work. In general, there’s no need to worry about clashing hardware, software compatibility, or a host of other irritations that plague users of other computers. You know exactly where you are w

DO YOU HAVE too many backups, or not enough? Can you easily recover from the backups you do have? Here we talk you through how you can create and restore from Time Machine backups, and also how to clone your internal and external drives using third–p

THERE’S MORE TO Live Text than meets the eye. Although normally seen at work in its quick mode interactively recognizing snippets of text in our photos, it can also work more slowly and accurately. That’s been built into a new generation of third–par

WHAT CAN YOU do to bring an old Mac back to life? Can you make it useful again? If the hard drive is failing, or maybe just too small, you can boot your computer from an external drive. Older Macs might have user–serviceable storage or memory, so you