Glenn Fleishman

How to restore macOS settings and startup items on a new Mac

Apple has improved macOS’s upgrade process tremendously over the years. With recent releases, it’s rare something goes pear-shaped and prevents an upgrade from completing. However, you can sometimes wind up in an in-between state, as one reader…

How to format a USB thumb drive for both Mac and Windows

For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory. It used to occupy a lot of attention. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to…

How the iPhone 14 Pro is good enough to take down a pricey mirrorless camera

For the first time since the iPhone camera resolution increased from 8MP to 12MP with the iPhone 6s, Apple has finally added a denser sensor: the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max have a new 48MP main sensor for primary photography. That’s a big leap. The…

How to add tags to Notes and Reminders entries for smarter organization

Hashtags became a useful way to track tweets across topics many years ago on Twitter. They spread to other social networks and into organizing apps. Apple brought hashtags (as plain old “tags”) to Notes and Reminders with iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS…

How to keep a family member or colleague from messing with a shared Calendar

You can share a fully editable calendar via iCloud with other people in your family or at work, school, or in groups so you can have a collective place to coordinate appointments and share information about them. But that’s a two-edged sword: if…

How to activate and set up your iPhone 14’s cellular service with eSIM

Table of Contents Apple has gone all in on the eSIM (embedded SIM), a programmable internal version of the SIM (subscriber identity module) card used to ID your phone to cellular networks. With the U.S. models of its iPhone 14 series, Apple has…

How to use Wi-Fi instead of cellular in weak coverage areas for your iPhone

Wi-Fi Assist can help you with weak Wi-Fi coverage for your iPhone or cellular-equipped iPad by switching to cellular data when the current Wi-Fi network isn’t performing consistently. But what about the reverse? If you live in an area with poor…

How to move a child’s Apple ID account to their ownership when they become adults

As hard as it is for me to believe, my older child recently turned 18. The age of majority in the U.S. means that they are now able to take charge of–and are personally responsible for–a lot more of their life that my spouse and I managed for them.…

How to resize disk partition in macOS

Apple made it easier to resize partitions–logical divisions of a disk drive into separate mountable volumes with different properties–several releases of macOS ago. A Macworld reader resized their main volume to 369GB to set up a Boot Camp partition,…

How to fix your network when you see ‘Another device is using your IP address’ on a Mac

Internet networking involves a lot of alchemy, and I confess to occasionally dropping an eye of newt (or an IP of newt) into a boiling pot to fix problems on my local network. There’s a particular message that macOS displays in limited cases that is…

How to blur the background for video calls on your Mac

Apple didn’t hide Portrait mode in macOS Monterey with M-series Macs, but it sure didn’t highlight it. This background-blur option appears only in Control Center and only when you have video input active. That can be a built-in camera in a laptop or…

How to use the new Passkeys on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac

“Passkey” is Apple’s name for a simplified login process to websites that arrives in its full glory later this year with macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16. A passkey relies on broadly supported industry standards to let you carry out an…

How to troubleshoot balky Bluetooth on your Apple devices

If you were to survey people about their top technology frustrations, you might expect to find Bluetooth on the list, even though Wi-Fi often tops it and Bluetooth is nowhere to be seen. Why is one wireless standard “worse” than the other? People…

How to use a Mac laptop or iMac with a broken display

If you have a Mac laptop or iMac with a display that’s been damaged or no longer turns on, but you’re sure the computer is still functioning, a repair may not be required to extract all its data or continue using it. (In fact, without a paid…

How to block Safari from asking to open a bookmark file every time it launches

If you launch Safari and see a message asking about a bookmark, there’s a simple solution that may have eluded you—it’s obscure. Some readers see “Confirm the file you want to load for bookmark ‘file name’” when they launch Safari. It recurs every…

How to control Universal Clipboard

Apple introduced Universal Clipboard in 2016 as a glue that connects what you copy and paste across all your iCloud-linked devices. Copy some text on an iPhone, and you can paste it on a Mac. AirDrop works as a more general case for the same things,…

How to use Apple TV to access photos on a Mac

One of the joys of taking photos in the digital future we already live in is that we have something close to an infinite depth: huge online storage in the form of SSDs (expensive, but fast) and hard drives (very cheap, but slow). It’s a natural…

Does Wi-Fi Assist affect your cellular bill?

The Wi-Fi Assist feature added back in iOS 9 and available on iPhones and cell-equipped iPads backfills a low-quality Wi-Fi network, supplements one that you have a weak connection to, or covers outage gaps when your broadband service goes down. But,…

How to turn off Precise Location on iPhone and iPad apps

A modern smartphone uses navigational satellites—sometimes drawing from multiple orbital systems—as well as cellular towers, Bluetooth hints, and Wi-Fi router locations to produce an awfully precise location. My family’s iPhones are often tracked not…

Tune Find My for Travel Tracking to Avoid Annoying AirTag and Apple Device Alerts

Apple’s AirTag offers compact and inexpensive tracking of your items through low-power, short-range Bluetooth networking signals. It’s a perfect item to drop into your suitcase or other checked bag while traveling during this summer’s explosion of…