Displaying items by tag: Explainer

Family life is all about togetherness, but keeping track of who’s doing what when can be tough. Apple’s Family Sharing service makes it easy to share apps, media, and more within a family of up to six members, and it provides a few helpful digital housekeeping capabilities, such as locating your kid’s misplaced iPad. Here’s [R30;]

Junk calls are one of the great annoyances of the modern world. You’re minding your own business when your iPhone vibrates in your pocket. You pull it out, curious as to who’s calling, but don’t recognize the number. You may notice that it’s in the same exchange as your phone number, suggesting that it’s a [R30;]

Malware makes headlines regularly these days, and although Macs are targeted far less than Windows PCs, Mac users still need to remain vigilant. A particularly serious type of malware is called “ransomware” because once it infects your computer, it encrypts all your files and holds them for ransom. Luckily, despite the virulence of ransomware in [R30;]

It seems like Apple releases updates to iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS nearly every week these days. It has been only a few months since iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra launched, and we’ve already seen ten updates to iOS and seven updates to macOS. Some of these have been to fix bugs, which [R30;]

Passwords are the bane of our modern existence. Nearly anything you want to do, it seems, calls for a password. As the Internet’s reach extends beyond computers and into phones, TVs, appliances, and even toys, we have to enter passwords with increasing frequency and in ever more annoying ways. To make dealing with passwords easier [R30;]

Apple’s new iMac Pro has started shipping, and it’s an astonishing machine. Put simply, it’s the most powerful Mac ever, a title it will likely retain until Apple releases a new version of the Mac Pro, promised for sometime in 2018. But for now, what’s special about the iMac Pro, and should you buy one? [R30;]

Apple’s new iPhone X does away with the Home button, which has been a fixture since the original iPhone and has long served as the Touch ID sensor. To replace Touch ID, Apple developed a new facial recognition technology called Face ID. With Face ID, the iPhone X scans your face to authenticate you instead [R30;]

There are two basic types of storage devices available today: hard disk drives and solid-state drives. For the lowest cost per gigabyte, you can’t go wrong with a hard drive, and they come in truly massive sizes—up to a whopping 8 terabytes. However, they’re relatively slow. For speed, you want a solid-state drive, also known [R30;]

A major change in macOS 10.13 High Sierra is the switch to Apple’s new Apple File System, or APFS. With any luck, you’ll barely notice the change, just as almost no one did earlier this year when Apple updated millions of iOS devices to APFS with iOS 10.3. But let’s unpack what APFS is, why [R30;]