Stay Safe in 2026 with These New Year’s Resolutions
We’re approaching the end of 2025, so we encourage you to consider your New Year’s resolutions. For many people, the new year offers an opportunity to reflect on habits we’d like to adopt or solidify. Although we support reducing social media use and making other positive lifestyle changes, we’d like to suggest a few additional […]
Create Reminders to Return Calls Directly in the Phone App
Apple introduced a neat new feature in the Phone app in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 (but not macOS 26): callback reminders. Whenever you miss a call and think, “I’d better call this person back later,” you can now create a reminder to do that right within the Phone app. Swipe left on any call, […]
Clean Up Your Mac’s Login Items for Better Performance
If you use certain apps or documents regularly, you can ensure they’re ready to go after a restart by manually adding them to your Login Items list. Some login items are also added automatically by apps that want to be available at all times. Either way, when the Mac boots, it automatically opens all login […]
Spotlight Gets Brighter in macOS 26 Tahoe
Spotlight has been a staple on macOS for decades, and at various points in its history, Apple has added new search capabilities. However, the revamp that Spotlight enjoyed in macOS 26 Tahoe is the most significant change in a long time. Here are the new features you’ll experience in Tahoe. Filterable Interface Apple has refocused […]
Messages Now Offers Shared Conversation Backgrounds
A potentially surprising and fun new feature in Messages in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 Tahoe is conversation backgrounds. To set one, tap the person or group icon at the top of the conversation, then tap Backgrounds, select an image, and tap the blue checkmark to save. What you might not realize is […]
Automate Your Mac with Folder Action Scripts
Do you repeatedly find yourself wanting to do something in the Finder with every file of a certain type? Perhaps you regularly download files from a particular website that come in with a .txt extension, even though they’re CSV files that should have a .csv extension? Or maybe you want to rename files according to […]
Reminders (Finally) Adds Time Zone Support
Apple’s latest operating systems have eliminated a longstanding annoyance for frequent travelers: the lack of time zone support in Reminders. If you had set a reminder to alert you at 9 AM Eastern and then traveled from Virginia to California, your alert would go off at 6 AM, which is likely unhelpful and potentially sleep‑disrupting. […]
Five Ways to Protect Against Forgetting Your Apple Account Password
One of the big wins of using a password manager is that you don’t need to remember or enter most passwords—the app does that for you. Even those passwords that must be entered manually can be looked up if you forget them. However, people who don’t use password managers regularly forget passwords and have to […]
Backups: Trust but Verify
It’s easy to assume your backup app—whether it’s Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Backblaze, Retrospect, or something else—is quietly doing its job. But it’s possible for a bug to corrupt backups or for a destination disk to fail silently, such that you can’t restore backed-up data. We’ve seen this happen! For peace of mind, set […]
Don’t Miss Calls and Texts: How to Use New Phone and Messages Filtering
Spam is one of the many banes of modern existence. While we receive more email spam than anything else, interruptions from unwanted phone calls and text messages are even more annoying. Apple has added various features over the years to help control spam calls and messages, but none have completely solved the problem. The problem […]
