We’ve been hearing reports of an uptick in the scam phone calls that claim to be from Apple. If you answer, an automated message tells you that your iCloud account has been breached and asks you to call a provided 1-866 number. Do not call the number! Apple will never call you unprompted. Unfortunately, the…
Apple’s workhorse desktop Mac, the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display, hasn’t seen an update since March 2019—nearly a year and a half ago. Happily, the company has finally released a new version of the popular iMac, outfitting it with 10th-generation Intel processors, increasing its RAM and storage capacities, and improving its audio and video…
If you have 20/20 vision or are still wondering why your parents have reading glasses, count yourself lucky. But if you’re like many people—over 60 percent of the population by some estimates, including most people over 45—reading the tiny text on your iPhone or Apple Watch might be impossible if you don’t happen to have…
On the Mac, scroll bars are essential for both orienting yourself and navigating within a Web page or document window. But they may not appear unless you hover the pointer over the right spot or start scrolling with a gesture on a trackpad or a turn of a mouse scroll wheel. If that bothers you,…
Sure, you know that the Space bar in the iOS virtual keyboard types a space character. But did you realize that if you tap it twice, it inserts a period? (Probably, but if not, now you do.) That’s to make it easier to provide proper punctuation, which will have the added benefit of irritating your…
The pandemic has forced large numbers of those who are still employed—nearly half the American workforce, by some estimates—to work from home. And while that has actually improved productivity for many people, partly due to eliminating time-consuming commutes, remote work comes with its own challenges. Here are three of the top problems we’ve been helping…
Every so often, I hear from a Mac user with a seemingly impossible problem: a document window in (some) app is opening somewhere outside of the screen, or “when I open (some) app, nothing happens”. What maybe happening, the window is effectively invisible and they can’t work with it in any way because the window…
Whenever you tap a link to open a Web page on your iPhone or iPad, it automatically opens a new tab. Having hundreds of tabs open won’t cause any problems but can make working with tabs clumsy. You can close all tabs—touch and hold the tab button and then tap Close All X Tabs—but you…
Apple recently released iOS 13.5, incorporating a new Exposure Notification API in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The Exposure Notification API could lower contact tracing costs, reduce the spread of COVID-19, prevent life-changing health consequences, and save lives. At worst, it won’t prove particularly effective. In neither case does it pose any threat to…
Need help with something? Speaking as the people who are sometimes on the other end of those requests for help, we have some suggestions on how to get the support you need as quickly as possible. For instance, think about what we have to do if we receive an email message along the lines of…