How-To - page 7

Families with a tradition of watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown can enjoy the classic Peanuts Halloween special on Apple TV+ for free this weekend. And it’s available to subscribers of Apple’s streaming service at any time. 

It can be viewed on a very wide variety of streaming boxes, like Roku and Amazon Fire, not only Mac or iPhone.

UPDATE: Sorry, the free weekend is over. But look below for when the Peanuts Thanksgiving and Christmas specials stream for free and add them to your calendar.

Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus in iOS 18 that judges on the fly which notifications seem important, using Apple Intelligence.

Setting up a Focus mode by hand is a bit of a chore. You need to know exactly which contacts and apps you want to silence and let through. You need to keep maintaining them as you add new contacts and download new apps.

Reduce Interruptions is a new Focus mode that’s a slightly smarter Do Not Disturb. There’s no work necessary. And, if you do have a highly customized existing Focus, you can add its smarts on top of your existing rules and customizations. Here’s how to make the most of it.

You can create a photo memories movie using the Apple Photos app, powered by Apple Intelligence. Just type in a prompt, it’ll browse through your collection, and create a bespoke video set to music of your choosing. It’s a fun way to put together a memory movie. And you can be very specific with the kinds of prompts you give it.

The new Photos app powered by Apple Intelligence also has a more powerful search feature. Here’s how it all works together.

It’s easy to rename multiple files at once on a Mac using the Finder’s batch rename tool. If you have a big series of pictures, videos, screenshots or documents in a series, you can use this feature to rename them all in a similar format and sequence.

You don’t have to take on such a tedious task by hand.

You can easily remove any object from a photo using the new Apple Intelligence Clean Up tool.

As the graphic designer among my friends, I’ve always been asked to Photoshop things out of my friend’s pictures. A romantic shot in a gazebo, with a phone sitting on the handrail in an obvious spot. A group photo from a fun night out, with someone’s tote bag sitting by their feet. A picture from a big conference, with an ugly lanyard around someone’s neck.

Now, you have the power to clean up your own photos — a chance to make your almost-perfect shots perfect. Here’s how it works.

A hot feature of Apple Music playlist collaboration. In advance of a party, road trip or any kind of themed event, you and others organizing the music can build a playlist together.

This isn’t to be confused with a similar feature, SharePlay, which lets people in the same room add songs to a live queue. SharePlay is more ephemeral; it lets others nearby play songs in the car or to a Bluetooth speaker without passing around your unlocked phone.

A shared Apple Music playlist is saved and can be replayed at any time. To find out everything you need to know about Apple Music playlist collaboration, keep reading or watch our quick how-to video. 

Those tiny, cryptic symbols on clothing tags and car dashboards can confuse anyone. However, your iPhone camera can quickly decipher the meaning of laundry symbols and dashboard icons. You don’t need to look up a guide or Google their meaning. Just take a picture and your iPhone will tell you.

While in my testing the iPhone didn’t identify every single symbol, the feature will do in a pinch. And if you want to use a third-party app for the best possible results, I can recommend two that I found on the App Store that can help you.

You can set up your Apple TV to control volume on a separate sound system, like a sound bar. It may not work out of the box, but poking around in Settings, you can use the convenient volume buttons built into the Siri Remote.

If you have a separate sound system or an older television, the volume buttons on your Apple TV remote may not work directly. You don’t have to keep two or three remotes sitting around — you can make it all work from just one. It just takes a little setup. 

Set up scheduled, automatic Apple Cash payments to send money to your friends or family on a regular basis. You can use this to pay back your housemates for bills, send your kids some money or pay back personal debts.

Whatever the reason may be, Apple Cash is a fast and easy way to send money. I even have a pro tip for scheduling a singular payment in advance. Here’s how to set up recurring payments.

The new Apple Sports app gives iPhone users a handy tool for tracking sports scores and stats. Previously buried inside Apple News, the constantly updated sports data becomes much more accessible when delivered via a dedicated iPhone sports app.

You can choose which teams and leagues you follow, get live updates on scores (and betting odds), and tap to open live coverage of the game in a streaming app.

The official Apple Sports app is available on the App Store now. Here’s how to use it.

Apple added several nifty new features to Safari in iOS 18. The iPhone’s redesigned web browser boasts an all-new Page Menu. Plus, two big new features help surface what you’re looking for on the web.

The last big Safari redesign for iPhone, which arrived three years ago, moved the address bar to the bottom of the screen by default. It also shoved several useful features into a menu in the address bar, which made it difficult to discover them. Apple tries to reverse that second problem in the new Safari.

Here’s what’s new in iOS 18 in Safari on iPhone — keep reading or watch our video.

iOS 18 is getting a bunch of cool new accessibility features this year, including bringing eye tracking to the iPhone for the first time. You also can feel haptic music, control your phone with custom voice commands, use your phone in the car without suffering from motion sickness, and improve the accuracy of Siri and dictation.

Check out our video to see it in action or keep reading below.

With Hurricane Milton taking aim at nearly the entire Gulf Coast of Florida, with a probable late Wednesday landfall, evacuees and others might want to make sure they download iOS 18 — specifically to get the new Messages via satellite capability.

That way, if power, Wi-Fi and cellular coverage all get knocked out, you can still communicate via satellite on your iPhone with family and friends. And of course you’ll also have the option of using the related Emergency SOS via satellite if you need to reach emergency services.

The Apple Watch doesn’t just take your step count — it has three activity rings that track different levels of energy you burn throughout the day.

New to watchOS 11, you have additional options for customization and for taking a break when you need it. You can have different goals for each ring for different days of the week, so it can fit your workout schedule. When you want a rest day or if you fall ill, you can take up to a month-long break without losing your streak.

If you’re all-in on the fitness tracking, you can add widgets that show your rings on your Apple Watch face and widgets on your iPhone. Or, on the other hand, if you find it a bit annoying, you can turn off all the notifications so they won’t bother you anymore.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Apple Watch activity rings.

Apple Intelligence makes its debut with 10 new features — and some of it is fantastic. Apple Intelligence has some genuinely impressive new features, and some of it will have a big impact on daily life.

Apple Intelligence is the name for Apple’s next-generation AI and machine learning-powered features that are coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac. These first 10 features are available in iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 right now. Some of the biggest features like Visual Intelligence, Image Playground and the all-new Siri aren’t here (and might not ship for a while) but Apple has still managed to make a good first impression.

Here’s what you can expect. Keep reading or watch our video to see it in action.

The iPhone’s Action button replaces the former ring/mute switch, and while it can fulfill the same purpose, there’s much more you can do with it. Apple gives you a bunch of options out of the box if you want instant access to your flashlight, camera, Shazam and more.

You pick the function, and it’s just a button push away. You can even turbo-charge the Action button by running a shortcut.

Setting up the Action button to do your bidding is easy. And once you do, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy quick access to your favorite feature.

Most of us store thousands of pictures and videos on our iPhones. If you want to create a bulletproof backup, you need to know how to transfer photos from iPhone to an external hard drive, SSD or flash drive. It’s easy, assuming you have the right software and (and possibly an adapter). 

If you want to make your iPhone easier to use, you can customize its Control Center to gain faster access to the buttons and toggles you rely upon to perform frequent tasks. Plus, you can remove all the junk you never touch from the iPhone Contol Center, putting the vital controls you actually use front and center.

Keep reading to find out how and why you should customize the iPhone Control Center to make the device your own.

In iOS 18, you can hide and lock apps on your iPhone. You can hide apps so they’re completely invisible, and you can lock all kinds of apps so they require Face ID to open.

Why would you want to? Maybe you have sensitive content you don’t want anyone to see, or you don’t want anyone to know you’re using dating or hookup apps. Hiding apps is also good for staying off social media or away from addictive games. Plus, it’s a great way to declutter your Home Screen. You can really clean things up without deleting apps you may want to keep.

There are, however, a few essential apps on your phone that can’t be hidden. Here’s how it all works.

In iOS 18, Apple’s Messages app gains five great new features that will make texting all the more fun. New message effects let you bold text in iMessage and animate it for extra emphasis. If you’re the forgetful type, you can schedule your messages to send later — automatically. You can reply to a message using any emoji you like. Finally, texting will get easier with your friends on Android — and in the middle of the Gobi desert.

Watch our video or keep reading to see the best new Messages features after you upgrade to iOS 18. (You can find the new iPhone operating in Settings > General > Software Update.)

So, you accidentally disabled Bluetooth on your Mac, and now you can’t use your wireless mouse or trackpad. You could dig out a wired mouse to reenable Bluetooth, but that’s a lot of effort. Instead, just use your keyboard to turn on Bluetooth on your Mac without a mouse.

We’ll show you how to get out of this computing pickle.

You can read the time without even looking at your Apple Watch using a little-known feature called Taptic Time. Hold two fingers on the screen and you’ll feel it tap the time out on your wrist.

This is handy if you’re in a meeting and you need to know the time, but you don’t want to look rude checking your watch. Or maybe you’re in the middle of a presidential debate.

Whatever the situation may be, turning this feature on and familiarizing yourself with it may come in handy.

What do the buttons on the Apple Watch do? The Apple Watch borrows a lot from the iPhone, but the biggest difference between the two devices comes down to the way their buttons work. They do different things whether you click, double-click or hold them down.

In watchOS 10, Apple changed a lot of these features. The software update added a new Widgets view, assigned Control Center to the side button, and changed what double-clicking the Digital Crown does. (For older devices, consult our article about what Apple Watch buttons do in watchOS 9.)

Here’s a guide to the buttons on the Apple Watch.

If you’re one of the many people frustrated by the Photos app redesign in iOS 18, you can fix it to make it easier to use again. Apple’s updated design replaces the Photos app’s tab bar for navigation with a single, scrollable list view.

You scroll up for your photo library, and scroll down to browse your collections, people and albums. But its default layout makes it hard to find a few useful features, like Hidden and Recently Deleted. There’s only one library view now, but it’s sorted by Date Captured by default — a lot of people prefer to sort by Recents.

It’s possible to revert some these changes to “fix” the Photos app in iOS 18 and make it easier — or at least more comfortable — to navigate. However, the changes aren’t obvious. Here’s how to restore your sanity.

If you love your iPad, there’s no reason to buy a second computer. Add a few accessories and you can quickly transform an iPad into an iMac mini — a small desktop computer easily up to personal use.

I use an iPad as my primary computer, so I have some recommendations for items to take your tablet to the next level.