Apple has launched the new Apple Invites iPhone app for planning social events with friends and family. Apple Invites requires iOS 18 on the iPhone, and you can also use it at iCloud.com/invites on the Mac and iPad. Event creation is limited to iCloud+ subscribers (those who pay for extra iCloud storage), but anyone can RSVP for an event, even if they don’t have the app, an Apple Account, or an Apple device. Creating an event is straightforward: simply name the event, set a date and optional time, specify a location, add a description, and pick a background. You can then invite people directly or by sharing a public link. Guests can RSVP whether they’re attending, not attending, or are unsure, and they can change their name and provide a custom response. Apple Invites may not change the world, but it’s a nice alternative to ad-infested invitation services.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Jacob Wackerhausen)

Cloud-based email services such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 dominate the market for organizational email for good reason. Dealing with the constant onslaught of spam and online attacks is hard, as those traumatized by running mail servers in the “good old days” can attest.

While email service providers excel at their primary functions of sending, receiving, and storing emails, they prioritize availability and uptime over backup and recovery. Depending solely on their built-in protection systems can leave organizations vulnerable to data loss. Although it’s exceedingly rare for email service providers to lose data due to system failures—all modern email systems are distributed and replicated in virtualized storage—they cannot safeguard against every risk. Here are some scenarios we’ve encountered where a separate email backup solution was useful:

• Recover from human error: This is the big one. People often accidentally delete important messages or clean out old messages too aggressively, inadvertently including critical conversations in a mass deletion. Backups ensure that these messages can be retrieved.
• Ease employee turnover: When employees leave, it’s essential to deactivate their email accounts for security reasons. However, information in their accounts may be vital for ongoing projects or legal purposes. Backups preserve this data for future access.
• Mitigate cyber threats: Phishing attacks are commonplace today. If an employee falls victim to one, their email account could be compromised and data lost. Worse still, the attacker could install malware—even ransomware, though that’s not a significant real-world concern for Apple-only installations—that could result in email data loss. While training employees to recognize and avoid phishing attacks is crucial, backups provide an essential safety net for anyone who makes a mistake.
• Facilitate data migration and archiving: Organizations often need to migrate email data from one system or user to another. While it’s rarely necessary or desirable to migrate everything—all the mail from the past year may be sufficient—it can be helpful to maintain archival access to historical communications.

In fact, both Google and Microsoft explicitly state that they store data for only a limited time and recommend employing a backup service. (The specifics may differ, but generally, you can retrieve a deleted email within 30 days, after which it may be recoverable for an additional 14 or 30 days.) Numerous companies provide email backup services, many of which are quite similar. The list below highlights some of the most common services, but we encourage you to reach out for recommendations based on your email service provider and organization size.

• CloudAlly offers unlimited data retention and extends its backup capabilities beyond email to encompass platforms such as Box, Dropbox, and Salesforce.
• CubeBackup focuses exclusively on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. It provides a cost-effective solution by allowing users to utilize their own local or remote storage.
• Backupify and Datto SaaS Protection are from the same company and offer the same backup capabilities, but they serve different market segments. Datto further enhances its branded services with a range of business continuity and data protection tools.
• Dropsuite provides unlimited storage and also supports QuickBooks Online backup. It features a flexible backup cadence, with email backups up to 12 times per day.
• MSP360 Managed Backup is a feature-rich solution that, while more complex and potentially more expensive than those from competitors, offers extensive customization and supports a wide range of storage providers.
• Spanning goes beyond Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 with Salesforce backups. It offers highly granular restores, enabling the recovery of individual emails. Its FLEXspend feature simplifies backup expenditures when transitioning between platforms.
• SpinBackup offers disaster recovery services at an affordable price point, and its developer, Spin.ai, provides a wide range of security solutions beyond backup, including data leak and ransomware protection.
• Synology Active Backup includes free add-ons for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 that back up cloud data to a Synology NAS. It’s an excellent solution for avoiding ongoing expenses.

As important as an email backup solution is for protecting against data loss, we urge you to proceed carefully when selecting one. If you end up with data that exists solely in a particular solution, legal retention requirements or the inability to export data in a non-proprietary format may lock you into paying for it indefinitely. Ideally, keep all data live so you can transition to a different solution to meet changing needs. Again, please contact us for help picking the most appropriate solution for your needs.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Rasi Bhadramani)

In iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 Sequoia, Apple removed a standard feature of the Calculator app that allowed users to press the = button multiple times to repeat the last mathematical operation. Following user complaints, the company reinstated this feature in iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS 15.3. Now, to calculate the compound interest from investing $1,000 at 5%, you can multiply 1000 by 1.05 and press = repeatedly to see how your investment would grow. (To open the history sidebar on the Mac, choose View > Show History; on the iPhone, tap the hamburger button in the upper-left corner.)

(Featured image by iStock.com/drasko)

The devastating losses caused by the Los Angeles wildfires have underscored the need to protect data from catastrophic events. A traditional offsite backup—periodically moving a hard drive to another location—might not have sufficed in areas affected by wildfires, where many structures were destroyed. An online backup using a service like Backblaze or CrashPlan is often a better solution, although it can become costly for multiple Macs, and some individuals and organizations are uncomfortable storing their data online, even with encryption.

What about a safe? Would storing one or more backup drives in a safe provide adequate protection? Possibly, but the details are critical. Some safes are designed solely to guard against theft, focusing on preventing thieves from opening the door. However, paper ignites at 451ºF (it chars around 387ºF), and most house fires reach temperatures between 800ºF and 1200ºF, so you may think that all you need to do is look for a “fireproof” safe. That’s a good start, but paper is actually much more resilient than magnetic and optical media.

Fireproof safes come with ratings that indicate the internal temperature they can maintain, with the most common being:

• Class 350: Safes maintain an internal temperature of 350ºF, suitable only for paper.
• Class 150: Safes keep the interior below 150ºF, which should protect magnetic media.
• Class 125: Safes maintain temperatures under 125ºF, appropriate for optical media.

It is also important to determine how long the safe can maintain that temperature. Generally speaking, a fireproof safe is rated for 1 or 2 hours, indicating it can maintain the specified internal temperature for at least that duration. Time ratings represent minimums, not maximums, so the actual protection time may be longer.

In most cases, the protection time is likely to be longer. That’s because safes are tested in furnaces at temperatures that can be two to three times hotter than the average house fire. For example, Underwriters Laboratory (one of several independent testing labs) conducts tests at 1700ºF or 1850ºF. Additionally, while a house fire may burn for several hours, the average fire will consume everything near the safe within 20 minutes and then move on.

Wildfires are a different story. In extreme conditions, wildfire temperatures can range from 1500ºF to 2200ºF, approaching or exceeding the testing conditions. Wildfires also last longer, so a safe in a destroyed building may remain in embers for hours or even days before it can be recovered.

While temperature over time is the main factor to consider when researching a fireproof safe, also look for two other variables being mentioned as well:

• Water resistance: Where there’s fire, there’s usually water. Thousands of gallons of water, some of which will undoubtedly affect the safe. Not all fireproof safes are waterproof, so verify whether a specific safe can withstand being doused by firefighters.
• Impact protection: If the floor collapses, a safe on an upper story could fall a considerable distance. If you are considering such a location, ensure the safe can withstand the impact. To simulate realistic fire conditions, the test may involve withstanding a 30-foot drop onto a concrete floor, followed by reheating.

Finally, remember that if your safe is in a fire, the heat will cause its insulation to swell up, rendering the lock useless, regardless of its type. Typically, you will need to hire a locksmith to access the safe using instructions from the manufacturer.

If you’re going to trust your data to a fireproof safe, do your research to ensure that whatever you buy will meet your needs for fire, water, and impact protection. It won’t be cheap—depending on the size and other factors, a good fireproof safe can cost many hundreds or even thousands of dollars. However, this is one area where you definitely shouldn’t cut corners.

(Featured image based on originals by iStock.com/phive2015 and Hanna Plonsak)

Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in October 2024 and expanded its extensive collection of AI-powered features with its December updates. The company’s January 2025 releases of macOS 15.3 Sequoia, iOS 18.3, and iPadOS 18.3 enhanced the feature set in several notable ways. Remember, Apple Intelligence features operate only on a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16, or an iPad with an A17 Pro or M-series chip.

Although Apple still considers Apple Intelligence to be in beta, the January operating system releases enabled it by default. From Apple’s perspective, this makes sense because so many features depend on Apple Intelligence, and the company aims to ensure a consistent user experience for everyone. Those features include:

• Photos: Clean Up, natural language searching, and improved Memory movie creation
• Text and Writing: Writing Tools with ChatGPT integration for any app
• Communication: Priority messages in Mail, Smart Reply and summaries in both Mail and Messages
• Notes and Phone: Audio transcription summaries
• Creative Tools: Genmoji and Image Playground for image generation, Image Wand for Apple Pencil sketches
• Focus: Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing and Reduce Interruptions Focus
• Notifications: Summaries for busy apps and conversations
• Siri: Enhanced capabilities, but primarily ChatGPT integration
• Camera: Visual Intelligence lookups (iPhone 16 only)

Apple Intelligence requires up to 7 GB of storage space (we see it occupying 5 GB in macOS 15.3 and 5.75 GB in iOS 18.3), so if your Mac, iPhone, or iPad is low on space, you may want to turn it off to free up room for photos, movies, and apps. Do that in the Apple Intelligence & Siri section of System Settings or Settings. However, you might not notice recovered space until your device decides to reclaim it. To check your space usage on a Mac, navigate to System Settings > General > Storage > macOS, and on an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > General > iPhone/iPad Storage > iOS/iPadOS.

Assuming you intend to keep it enabled, what can you expect from this third update to Apple Intelligence features?

Changes to Notification Summaries

Notification summaries have proven to be Apple Intelligence’s most controversial feature. They have generated blatantly incorrect news summaries and misidentified spouses, resulting in complaints from major publications and widespread mockery. In response, Apple has temporarily turned off notification summaries for all apps in the App Store’s News & Entertainment category.

Apple also italicized all the text in notification summaries to better distinguish them from standard notifications. Previously, the only indicator of a summarized notification was a tiny icon.

Finally, Apple made it easier to manage settings for notification summaries from the Lock Screen. On an iPhone, for instance, you can swipe right to reveal an Options button, tap it, and then tap Turn Off AppName Summaries. You can also report a concern with a summary—Apple solicits feedback as part of the Apple Intelligence beta.

Visual Intelligence Adds Scheduling and Plant and Animal Identification

Apple Intelligence enhances the new Camera Control button on iPhone 16 models, enabling it to respond based on what’s in the viewfinder. Initially, it could only ask ChatGPT about what it saw or conduct a Google image search. Now, when you press and hold the Camera Control, Visual Intelligence can also detect whether you’re pointing at a poster or flyer and suggest creating a calendar event. Additionally, if it identifies a plant or animal within the frame, it will recognize it and provide more information with a tap.

Genmoji Become Available on the Mac

iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 introduced the custom emoji Apple calls Genmoji, but macOS 15.2 did not include this feature. With macOS 15.3, the Mac has now caught up. The functionality remains the same—you describe what you want to see in a few words, and the Genmoji can be based on a picture of a person. The Genmoji you create are essentially stickers, but you can use them just like regular emojis.

To create one, open the emoji picker, type a few words of description, and click Create New Emoji. You can then experiment with different descriptions and scroll through Apple Intelligence’s variants before clicking Add to save your Genmoji and insert it wherever you’re typing.

We expect at least one more major release related to Apple Intelligence, likely in early March, coinciding with the .4 operating system updates. If Apple’s engineers meet their targets, these releases will enable Siri to access and leverage your personal information for more context-aware responses. Siri will also be able to perform actions within apps. Additionally, Apple has promised priority notifications to ensure that we are quickly alerted to the most critical messages while minimizing distractions from less important ones.

In the meantime, explore the Apple Intelligence features currently available and see if they enhance your Apple experience.

(Featured image by Apple)

You can now work directly with PDFs received in the Mail app using a little-known feature in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Tap a PDF attachment in a message and use the Markup and Form Fill buttons at the bottom to access the PDF markup and filling tools. After modifying your PDF, tapping the Done button gives you options for what to do with the PDF: include it in a reply, create a new message with it, save it to Files, or discard the changes.

(Featured image by iStock.com/chanakon laorob)

Apple provides a handy ecosystem-wide feature that replaces a typed abbreviation—say “eml”—with text you specify, like your email address. (Seriously, copy that one so you don’t have to type your email address repeatedly.) These automatic text replacements sync via iCloud so you can use them on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Find them on the Mac in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements and on the iPhone and iPad in Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. They’re great, but it can be mysterious when they stop working on the Mac. The culprit? A menu item being turned off. So, if text replacements aren’t working in a particular app, choose Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement to turn them back on.

(Featured image by iStock.com/tookitook)

In macOS 15.2 Sequoia, Apple added the option to display the current weather conditions in the menu bar but hid the switch deep in the bowels of System Settings. To turn this option on, open System Settings > Control Center, scroll to the bottom, and in the Menu Bar Only section, for Weather, choose Show in Menu Bar. A new item with the current conditions at your location will appear in the menu bar; click it to see the forecast and access other locations in Apple’s Weather app.

(Featured image by iStock.com/trangiap)

Social Media: In macOS 15.2 Sequoia, you can display the current weather conditions in your Mac’s menu bar. Here’s how to enable that feature.

By default, Microsoft Office apps—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—try to save files on Microsoft OneDrive as a way of promoting the company’s cloud storage. If that’s undesirable, you can easily keep your files locally on your Mac or in a different cloud storage location. In the Save dialog, click the On My Mac button to switch to a standard Save dialog showing all your other storage options. There’s no way to set On My Mac as the default location, but the Save dialog automatically remembers your last saved location. That should be sufficient most of the time, although it’s not unheard of for an Office update to flip the Save dialog back to OneDrive.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/pzAxe)

For many, Apple’s AirPods are just another pair of earbuds: a convenient way to listen to media. But with the latest versions of iOS and automatically applied firmware updates, the AirPods Pro 2 have become significantly more interesting.

They have long had noise cancellation features, which we find helpful in open office environments and for turning down the volume on everything from airplanes to vacuum cleaners. The more recent addition of Adaptive mode, which bridges between Transparency and Noise Cancellation modes and changes with your surroundings, makes them useful in dynamic urban environments. The Loud Sound Reduction feature can be a godsend at concerts where the music would otherwise be painfully loud. Personalized Volume adjusts the volume of media in response to your environment, and although it can be a bit disconcerting, Conversation Awareness drops the media volume and reduces background noise when you start speaking to others.

However, the newest and most important feature of the AirPods Pro 2 comes with iOS 18.1: Hearing Health. Many people don’t realize they have hearing loss, so Apple now provides a clinically validated Hearing Test and a clinical-grade Hearing Aid feature that can compensate for mild to moderate hearing loss. Even if you don’t think you have any hearing problems, we recommend taking Apple’s hearing test so you have a baseline to compare against future tests.

Here’s how to check your hearing and get started with the hearing assistance and protection features. Before you start, make sure you’ve paired your AirPods Pro with your iPhone and haven’t been exposed to loud noises for at least 24 hours. (It can take that long for your hearing to return to normal.)

Take a Hearing Test

The Hearing Test has three parts: setup, the actual test, and presenting the results. In the setup phase, the iPhone guides you through finding a quiet place to take the test, inserting your AirPods Pro correctly, and testing the fit.

The fit test is important because the AirPods Pro silicone ear tips help block outside noise, allowing the earbuds to boost or lower the volume of particular sounds or frequencies to improve audio clarity. The AirPods Pro come with four sizes of ear tips, from extra small to large (medium is the default), and the fit test helps you determine which ear tip best combines efficacy and comfort.

To start the test, open the iPhone’s Settings app and tap the name of your AirPods Pro—that option appears only when the case is open or they’re in your ears. In the AirPods screen, tap Take a Hearing Test. The test involves tapping the screen every time you hear a pulse of three tones. As a game, it’s boring but not easy—most people will probably be able to hear the first few tones, but subsequent ones become significantly more difficult to discern. Don’t worry if you miss a tone because you’ll have multiple chances to hear each one. The test focuses first on one ear and then the other.

At the end, the test presents your results. dBHL stands for decibels Hearing Level and indicates the softest sounds you can hear at various frequencies. If you have little to no hearing loss—dBHL under 20—there’s no need to do anything more. dBHL numbers between 20 and 40 suggest mild hearing loss and indicate that you may have difficulty hearing soft or distant sounds, such as whispers or quiet conversations. Numbers from 41 to 55 indicate moderate hearing loss, which can make it difficult to understand normal speech, particularly in loud environments. For higher levels of hearing loss, or if you’re experiencing noticeable problems, consult an audiologist.

Turn On Hearing Assistance

If your hearing test suggests mild to moderate hearing loss, the AirPods Pro Hearing Aid feature can help. It uses the hearing test results to adjust what you hear to improve voice and audio clarity. You can turn it on at the end of the hearing test if indicated, or at any time in Settings > AirPods Pro > Hearing Assistance. (If your results indicate little to no hearing loss, the trick to turning on the Hearing Aid feature is to tap “Learn About Hearing Aid” at the end of the test or by selecting a hearing test result and then tapping Next.)

Apple has created a particularly flexible solution here. In the Hearing Aid section, you can control whether the AirPods Pro adjust external sounds for greater clarity. To tweak the specifics, tap Adjustments and use the amplification, balance, tone, and ambient noise reduction sliders. The Conversation Boost switch enhances face-to-face conversations by focusing on the person in front of you.

Also helpful is Media Assist, which uses your hearing test results to improve music, podcasts, and other audio played through the AirPods Pro. Separate switches let you apply it to Music and Video along with Calls and FaceTime.

Improve and Protect Your Hearing

If you own a pair of AirPods Pro 2, we highly recommend that you take a hearing test and try the Hearing Aid feature. Even if you have little or no hearing loss, you may find that the Media Assist option makes your music sound better. It’s easy to test—just play a song you love (turn it on from Control Center) and toggle Media Assist on and off while it plays.

Also, we’ve started wearing the AirPods Pro in situations where we might not have thought to in the past. It’s obvious that the Noise Cancellation mode would be helpful on an airplane, but we also use it to block unwanted noises to aid our concentration at work. We’ve also found that Transparency and Adaptive modes can be helpful on city streets and in loud restaurants. Plus, because Loud Sound Protection is automatically enabled in Transparency and Adaptive modes, it lets us enjoy front row seats at a concert without worrying about our hearing or suffering from ringing ears the next day.

We know that AirPods Pro aren’t for everyone. Many people prefer the AirPods 4, which provide some noise cancellation without blocking the ear canal with silicone ear tips. But they can’t compete with the AirPods Pro for noise cancellation and lack the new Hearing Health features. Between the Hearing Test and Hearing Aid features and how the AirPods Pro can protect and enhance hearing, we think they will become a more common sight among older adults who otherwise wouldn’t consider wearing earbuds in public. If you have questions or concerns about your hearing, give them a try.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Julija Matuka)