I’VE BEEN LUCKY enough to have very few major problems in my time using Macs — the occasional minor hiccup, sure, but nothing that required me to take significant steps to fix the issue. Regardless, when those annoyances occur, they can be a real pai

Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities. If you can’t start your Mac properly, use Recovery Mode. For silicon Macs, turn on and hold the power button until you see the startup options window. Click the gear icon labeled Options, then click Co

DO YOU HAVE too many backups, or not enough? Can you easily recover from the backups you do have? Here we talk you through how you can create and restore from Time Machine backups, and also how to clone your internal and external drives using third–p

If your Bluetooth peripheral won’t connect to your Mac, turn it off and turn it on again. If that fails, click on the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar, then click the peripheral name in question to see if you can connect it this way. If this doe

Get peace of mind from smart kit THERE’S MORE TO a smart home than lighting up your rooms with neat bulbs. Your Apple smart home can include cameras that spot movement, record video and send an alert to your iPhone; smart thermostats that turn off th

In 1984 I got a loan to make it possible for me to buy an Apple computer. If memory serves, it was about $2,500. In 1984 money, that’s like $1 million today. (A slight exaggeration.) I had been smitten with the Apple II machines that I was using in t

Spotify and Apple Music are the two largest music streaming services in the world, attracting millions of listeners each day. For years, their parent companies have been locked in PR, political and legal battles. Essentially, Spotify thinks the iPhon

$169.99 From https://us.soundcore.com Features Bluetooth 5.3 with AAC, LDAC; output — 40W; IPX7 water resistance; dimensions — 8.98 x 7.52 x 3.19 inches, 3.53lbs WE LIKED THE highly affordable Space One headphones that Soundcore released recently, an

ONE OF OUR very favorite things about Apple–compatible smart home technology is how entertaining it is — and we mean that literally. Being able to stream music from your Mac, iPad or iPhone to your home hi–fi, or to have different music playing in di

RESEARCHERS HAVE DISCOVERED an “unpatchable” vulnerability, dubbed GoFetch, in Apple’s M–series chips. The researchers say the problem cannot be patched directly because it is a fundamental design flaw in the micro–architecture of modern chips — incl

Art Editor Andy streams A LOT of indie rock on Spotify and is looking forward to reading about its scrap with Apple for audience and functionality over on p6. Production Editor Rachel is certainly wowed by what you can do with smart home tech (p52),

WE ALL KNOW iCloud is pretty reliable, but what can you do if files aren’t syncing properly across your devices? What about if your storage is full? Or if you’re receiving too much spam to your iCloud email account? None of these problems are insurmo

$99.99 From www.ikmultimedia.com Features USB–C audio and power, direct monitoring, aux input, Loopback internal mixing, bundled apps Needs macOS 10.6 or later, iOS device with USB–C port or Lightning via optional adapter ALONGSIDE ITS PRO audio gear

Apple has released free updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Alongside other enhancements in v14.0, you get new in–app notifications when a user joins a collaborative document, you can hold down the Command key to select

ANOTHER WAY TO make your old Mac run faster is to declutter its hard drive — getting rid of old, unwanted apps, backing up and archiving media and files you’re not likely to need any time soon, and moving currently used media to external drives. Movi

THERE’S MORE TO Live Text than meets the eye. Although normally seen at work in its quick mode interactively recognizing snippets of text in our photos, it can also work more slowly and accurately. That’s been built into a new generation of third–par

REQUIRES macOS Sonoma or later, Bartender 5 ($16, www.macbartender.com) YOU WILL LEARN How to use Bartender 5 to reorder and reorganize your menu bar IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOUR MAC’S MENU bar is a good place for apps to store icons providing quick

$149.99 From https://us.creative.com Features Bluetooth 5.3, AAC, aptX Lossless; wireless charging case; IPX5 water resistant THEY SAY THAT “the only constant in life is change”, and that’s certainly true when it comes to digital technology. However,

REQUIRES macOS 13 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to make use of the new range of Keynote features IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes KEYNOTE HAS LONG been a powerful tool for creating compelling presentations, but now there are even more reasons to cast PowerPoint

We’ve all seen them. Those irritating error windows that pop up while you’re trying to do something on your Mac are never welcome, but if you know how to read them, they can tell you much about what’s gone wrong. Error code – 36, for example, occurs

TECHNOLOGY IN THE computer industry tends to change so quickly that it’s often hard to keep up with all the latest developments. That’s not the case in other industries, though — it took almost a century for electric cars to provide an alternative to

WHAT CAN YOU do to bring an old Mac back to life? Can you make it useful again? If the hard drive is failing, or maybe just too small, you can boot your computer from an external drive. Older Macs might have user–serviceable storage or memory, so you