At its Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on June 7th, Apple shared details about what we can expect to see later this year in macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, and HomePod Software 15. It was a firehose of announcements, but one thing became clear: Apple wants to spread its technologies across its entire ecosystem of devices. Although each platform—Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and HomePod—retains its unique qualities, nearly every feature that the company announced works across as many platforms as make sense.

Before we get into the ten features that we think you’ll most like when everything ships in September or October, we should note that Apple was surprisingly silent on one topic: future Apple silicon chips. Many observers had expected Apple to announce an M1X or M2 chip that would power professional laptop and desktop Macs. We’ll have to satisfy ourselves with the impressive performance of the M1-based Macs we have now and wait a little longer for whatever comes next.

On to the hot new features!

Account Recovery and Legacy Contacts Simplify Recovering Account Data

It’s all too common that people forget their Apple ID passwords and can’t access their accounts. Apple hopes to make that a little less stressful with Account Recovery Contacts. Specify someone as your Account Recovery Contact, and they’ll be able to help you reset your password and regain access to your account, with no need to call us or Apple for assistance.

Also welcome will be the addition of Legacy Contacts. Once this feature is available, everyone should make sure they have appropriate family members or friends set as Legacy Contacts. Then, in the event of your untimely death, your Legacy Contacts can access your account and personal information. Using Legacy Contacts will be far easier than having to provide the legal paperwork to Apple to request access to a deceased family member’s accounts.

FaceTime Gains Features That Make It Competitive with Zoom

During the last year, we’ve all spent vastly more time in videoconferencing apps for work, school, and socializing. Alas, Apple’s FaceTime has been a weak entry in that market. With the features Apple is now promising, however, it should compete well with the likes of Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet. FaceTime will finally get a standard grid view, blur your backgrounds with Portrait mode, and offer two microphone modes: Voice Isolation to cut down on background noise (for standard meetings) and Wide Spectrum to leave ambient sound unfiltered (for performances, say). FaceTime will even be able to alert you when you’re talking but muted.

More important yet is the fact that you’ll finally be able to invite Windows and Android users to FaceTime calls using standard Web links. Non-Apple users will have to use a Chrome-based browser like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Brave. Plus, when you create an event in Calendar, you’ll be able to make a Web link for the call that you can share. And when it’s time for the call, a Join button makes it easy to get in.

Universal Control Lets Macs and iPads Share a Keyboard and Pointing Device

With Sidecar in macOS 10.15 Catalina and iOS 13, Apple made it so you could use an iPad as a secondary screen for a Mac. In macOS 12 Monterey and iPadOS 15, Apple is taking that concept further. With Universal Control, if you merely set a Mac and an iPad next to each other, you’ll be able to use the Mac’s keyboard and mouse or trackpad to work between the two devices (in fact, Universal Control supports up to three). No setup is required—just move your pointer to the edge of the Mac screen and push it “through” the edge to move it to the iPad screen. You can even drag and drop content between devices.

Live Text Lets You Work with Text in Images

Have you ever taken a photo of something just to capture a phone number or address? We have, for sure. Apple’s new Live Text feature treats text in images just like text you type, so you can use functions like copy and paste, lookup, and translate. Live Text will work in Photos, of course, but also in Quick Look, Safari, and Screenshot, and in live Camera previews on the iPhone. It’s an impressive use of image recognition technologies.

Along the same lines, in Photos, you’ll also be able to use the information button on any photo to highlight recognized objects and scenes and get additional information about them. Apple says you’ll be able to learn more about popular art and landmarks, plants and flowers, books, and pet breeds.

Siri Gets Faster, More Reliable, More Private, and More Useful

Thanks to the ever-increasing power of the Neural Engine in Apple devices, Apple says it will bring all processing of Siri requests onto your device. That may not sound like a big deal, but it means that Siri should work faster, more reliably, and more privately. It will be faster because there’s no need to send speech to and from Apple’s servers for processing. It will make Siri work more reliably when your iPhone doesn’t have strong cell service and enable offline support for many types of requests. And Apple won’t know what you’re saying at all.

Other Siri improvements will include the capability to announce reminders when you’re wearing AirPods, improved conversation context so you can refer to what you just asked, and support for controlling HomeKit devices at specific times. HomeKit developers will even be able to add Siri support to their products through a HomePod.

Improved Multitasking Controls Come to the iPad

The big problem with Apple’s multitasking options on the iPad has been remembering how to use them. With iPadOS 15, Apple hopes to solve that with a new menu that will appear at the top of apps, with buttons for entering full screen, Split View, or Slide Over.

Apple also added a new multiwindow shelf that appears at the bottom of the screen at launch and provides a Dock-like view of all the open windows in that app. If you ignore it, it fades away quickly, but it should help you remember which windows you have open and access them quickly.

The iPad Finally Gets the App Library and Home Screen Widgets

Last year, in iOS 14, Apple introduced the App Library and Home Screen widgets. The App Library holds all your apps so you can declutter your life by removing them from the Home Screen. And Home Screen widgets let you add app-specific widgets that provide at-a-glance information. Sadly, iPadOS 14 didn’t include those features.

iPadOS 15 rectifies that oversight, adding both the App Library and Home Screen widgets, complete with some larger widget sizes for the larger iPad screen. They’ll work just like on the iPhone. It’s about time!

Locate Lost AirPods Pro and AirPods Max with Find My Network Support

As it stands now, you can theoretically find AirPods using the Find My app. However, it shows only the last position of the AirPods at a general level, and you have to get within range of them to play a sound. In the future, however, the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max will support the Find My network, so other people’s devices can report their location generally, and once you get within Bluetooth range, you can play a sound to locate them.

Hopefully, that will happen less often thanks to new separation alerts that, when enabled, will alert you when you leave an Apple device, AirTag, or Find My-compatible item behind.

Private Relay Protects Safari Traffic for iCloud+ Subscribers

Apple has been adding lots of privacy-protecting features over the past few years, but Private Relay goes even further to ensure that even your ISP can’t track where you go on the Web and sell that data to advertisers. Private Relay encrypts your Safari traffic and passes it through two Internet relays. No one—not even Apple—can then use your IP address, location, and browsing activity to create a detailed profile of you. Everyone who pays for extra iCloud storage will transition to the new iCloud+ for the same cost and will get Private Relay for no additional fee.

While we’re talking about iCloud, Apple also says that you’ll be able to get custom domain names for iCloud Mail addresses and invite family members to use the same domain with their iCloud Mail accounts.

Use AirPlay to Send Audio or Video to Your Mac

Many people have discovered how neat it is to use AirPlay to display photos or videos from an iPhone or iPad on a TV attached to an Apple TV. Macs could also broadcast their displays to an Apple TV. But what you couldn’t do is use AirPlay to send audio or video from another Apple device to a Mac. With macOS 12 Monterey, that will become possible, enabling you to use a Mac’s large screen to play a video, share a Keynote presentation, and more.

Apple’s upcoming operating system releases boast many other new features, and we plan to explore more of them once everything ships in a few months. We’ll let you know when it’s time to update!

(Featured image by Apple)

People talk about “the cloud” all the time these days, but what do they really mean? There’s no agreed-on definition, which can render some conversations nearly inscrutable. We can’t pretend to have the final answer—if there will ever be such a thing—but here’s how we think of “the cloud.” (And now we’ll stop quoting it.)

At a basic level, many people seem to equate the cloud with anything that’s online or with the Internet as a whole. That’s not incorrect, since everything in the cloud does take place online and is on the Internet, but it’s also not helpful.

Cloud Services Replace Local Hardware and Software

It’s more useful to think of the cloud as a way of referring to services made available over the Internet as a replacement for hardware or software on your Mac. These services largely fall into three broad categories: storage and backup, data syncing, and apps.

• Storage and backup: To add storage directly to your Mac, you’d connect an external hard drive or SSD. Cloud-based services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive all provide the same basic function—more space to store data. Of course, they also go further, providing syncing between your devices and sharing with other people. Plus, just as you probably use Time Machine to back up to an external drive, you can use Backblaze to back up to the cloud.
• Data syncing: Before the cloud was a thing, syncing your contacts, calendar, and email between two Macs generally required either special software (like ChronoSync) or going through the export/import dance. Cloud-based services for such bits of data—including Apple’s iCloud syncing for Calendar and Contacts and Google Calendar—make it so the same information is available on all your devices all the time. They often provide a Web-based interface as well so you can access your data from someone else’s computer.
• Apps: An app like TextEdit runs on your Mac, but cloud-based apps like Google Docs provide app-like functionality while running in a Web browser. These days, many things that can be done directly on a computer can be done in a Web browser: word processing, spreadsheets, image editing, video streaming, video chat, and more.

Cloud Services Rely on “Cloud Computing”

Apps on your Mac use its processor and memory. You might also have used a network server; you use the apps on the server over the network, but they’re running on that particular server. In contrast, cloud services run on massive clusters of computer resources spread across many computers and even multiple data centers. When you’re typing into Google Docs, the processing resources that make that possible don’t come from a single computer dedicated to you—they’re provided to you and millions of others simultaneously by Google’s worldwide computer clusters.

Pros of the Cloud

There’s a lot to like about the cloud and what it makes possible:

• It’s accessible from nearly anywhere: As long as you have a high-speed Internet connection, you can access cloud-based services from anywhere in the world. And while not everywhere in the world has high-speed Internet access, it’s becoming more widely available all the time. Heck, you can now use the Internet on many commercial airplanes.
• It’s somebody else’s problem: That’s not entirely true, of course, but using a cloud-based service means the staff of the data center deals with failing computers or hard drives, network problems, and other maintenance. You just need a functional computer and Internet connection.
• It’s easy to switch devices and even platforms: Moving to a new iPhone or iPad is nearly trivial these days, thanks to being able to restore from an automatically created iCloud backup. And if you use Gmail, for instance, it would work just the same if you wanted to switch from an Android phone to an iPhone.
• It’s more flexible: If you decide to try a cloud service, it’s usually just a matter of setting up an account or signing in with an existing one. There’s no need to download and install software, or to clean up after the installer. Plus, if you need more storage space or additional features, it’s usually just a matter of upgrading an account and paying more—you don’t have to buy another hard drive or a whole new app.
• Costs are lower and more predictable: Many cloud services are entirely free, like Gmail and Google Docs, whereas others rely on monthly or annual subscriptions. Generally speaking, such subscriptions cost less than buying equivalent desktop software and all their upgrades. Whether or not a cloud app is cheaper, it’s a predictable expense you can build into a budget.

Cons of the Cloud

Of course, not everything about the cloud falls into the silver lining category. Some problems include:

• You can’t control when apps are upgraded: With desktop software, you can pick and choose when to upgrade, at least to some extent. Cloud apps, on the other hand, are upgraded whenever the developer wants, sometimes at inconvenient times or in major ways that might be hard for you to use. On the other side of the equation, you don’t have to spend time downloading and installing upgrades, or even thinking about whether to install them.
• You have limited control over your data: Although well-run cloud services are significantly less vulnerable to failure, damage, or theft than your Mac is, there’s no avoiding the fact that you can’t do much to prevent such problems. Backing up cloud-based data can be challenging, as can exporting it for use elsewhere.
• Subscriptions can add up: Any one cloud service may be reasonably priced, but if you end up with 10–15 subscriptions, the total annual cost may seem exorbitant. To be fair, major software packages used to cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and we all use many more apps and services than we did in the past.
• Security is a concern: While cloud providers may do a better job than you could of guaranteeing uptime and even backing up data, the fact remains that everything on the cloud is protected by passwords. If you reuse passwords or rely on weak ones, you could be in for a world of hurt. That’s why we always bang the drum for relying on a password manager for strong, unique passwords and turning on two-factor authentication whenever possible.
• Privacy can be a problem: Many free and ad-supported cloud services—most notably Facebook and Google—make their money by collecting data about you and using it to sell advertisers access to you. One reason to pay for a cloud service is that then you’re the customer, and as the saying goes, if you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

We’re not here to sell you on the cloud in general or scare you away from using it. In today’s world, there’s almost no way to avoid it, nor should you try to do so. Hopefully, now that you have a better idea of what the cloud really is, you can make more informed decisions about which cloud services can improve your technological life and which ones won’t.

(Featured image by Jordan M. Lomibao on Unsplash)

So you’ve gotten your COVID-19 vaccination. Congratulations, and thank you for nudging the planet closer to the herd immunity needed for life to return to normal! It’s a good idea to take a photo of your card as a backup before filing it with your other important papers, just in case. (If you lose the original, you may be able to get a new one from the site where you got the vaccine or through your state’s Immunization Information System.) However, we do want to offer a note of caution. Resist the urge to post that photo—or one of you gleefully brandishing your card—on social media. The cards include your name, date of birth, vaccine location, and other personal information that could be used to steal your identity, and any digital miscreant worth their salt is already trawling through your social media feeds for as much personal information as they can find.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Over the last decade, and particularly during the last year of pandemic life, documents have become more likely to arrive in email or as downloads than on paper. If you need to return a signed document on paper, it’s easy to print and sign it before popping it in the mailbox. But what if you need to send it back via email or another online method? You could print, sign, scan, and return the scanned document, but that’s both tedious and wasteful.

Happily, Apple has made it easy to digitize your signature such that you can quickly apply it to digital documents without them ever hitting paper. It’s not difficult to set up, and once your signature is in the system, it remains available for repeated use. Even better, it syncs automatically to all your other Apple devices signed in to the same iCloud account, so it’s available wherever you need it. The process varies a little depending on which Apple devices you have available.

Create Your Signature on an iPad or iPhone

You can create a signature on an iPad or iPhone with your finger or a rubber-tipped stylus, but you’ll get the best results with an Apple Pencil on an iPad. Follow these steps:

1. Open any PDF in any app, such as this IRS Form 1040 in Safari.
2. Tap the share icon and tap Markup in the share sheet.
3. In the Markup toolbar, tap + and then Signature.
4. Tap Add or Remove Signature and then tap + to add a signature.
5. In the New Signature panel, sign your name. (You can rotate an iPhone to landscape orientation if that’s easier.)
6. If you don’t like your signature, tap Clear and try again.
7. When you have a good signature, tap Done.
8. Close the PDF—there’s no need to save it.

Create Your Signature on a Mac

On a Mac, you create signatures in Preview in one of several different ways. You’ll get the best results from using the camera to scan your signature on a piece of paper, with an iPad and Apple Pencil as the next best. The trackpad approach is the least successful.

1. Open any PDF in Preview, such as the aforementioned IRS Form 1040.
2. Choose Tools > Annotate > Signature > Manage Signatures. (You can also click the Signatures button on the Markup toolbar.)
3. Click Create Signature.
4. Click Trackpad, Camera, or iPhone or iPad to create your signature:
   • Trackpad: Click the Click Here to Begin button and sign your name with your finger or a rubber-tipped stylus—after you click, lift your finger or stylus and start writing your signature at the left side of the trackpad. Press any key on the keyboard when you’re done, or click Clear and try again if necessary. (Tip: press any key to start and clear too.)
   • Camera: Sign your name with a black pen on a white piece of paper. Hold it up to the camera, just above the blue line, for automatic recognition. If necessary, click Clear and try again. For best results, use a full-size piece of paper and a fairly thick pen, like a Sharpie.
   • iPhone or iPad: Click Select Device and pick an available iPhone or iPad. The entire screen of the device becomes a signing surface—you can use whichever orientation is easier. Sign your name using your finger, a rubber-tipped stylus, or for best results, an Apple Pencil on an iPad. Tap Clear if you need to try again.
     
5. When you’re finished, click Done.
6. Close the PDF.

Although most of us have only one signature, Apple lets you create and sync as many signatures as you like. That could be useful if you have to sign documents for your boss or a member of your family (with their permission, of course).

Once you’ve digitized your signature, you can add it to any PDF form that you receive, either using Markup from an iPhone or iPad share sheet, or in Preview or the Markup tools on a Mac.

(Featured image by energepic.com from Pexels)

When you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS usually includes the associated formatting, so the words you paste may end up in 68-point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That’s often undesirable. More commonly, you want the text to take on the styling of the text where you’ve pasted it. In most Mac apps, there’s a quick trick to achieve this goal. Look on the Edit menu for the Paste and Match Style command (sometimes called Paste and Match Formatting, Paste Text Only, or Paste without Formatting) to paste the text such that it matches the style of the surrounding words in the destination. Apple’s standard keyboard shortcut for this is Command-Shift-Option-V, though some apps use Command-Shift-V. If you regularly need this capability in an app that lacks native support for it, consider using a clipboard utility app, like Keyboard Maestro, to make your own universal Paste Text Only hotkey.

(Featured image based on an original from Pixabay)

Nine Reasons to Put Your Mac’s Pointer in a Corner

If your Mac is like ours, it’s a busy place, with oodles of open windows and lots of icons lying around. If you want to display the Desktop or see a single app’s windows, you may find yourself clicking around or using keyboard shortcuts, but did you know that you can access many of the Mac’s special views with just a flick of your wrist—no click necessary?

A long-standing but little-known feature called Hot Corners makes this possible. The key to unlocking Hot Corners is in System Preferences, in either the Desktop & Screen Saver or Mission Control pane. In either one, click the Hot Corners button to set up your hot corners.

The Hot Corners dialog displays a pop-up menu for each of the four corners of your screen. Choose an action in one of those menus, and that’s what happens when you move your pointer to that corner. A hyphen, the default, means nothing happens.

Here’s the scoop on each action. To exit these special views, switch to another app, press the Escape key, put the pointer back in the hot corner again, or just move the mouse.

Mission Control

Use a hot corner to enter this bird’s-eye view of all your Mac’s open windows. Once you’re in Mission Control, you can switch to any window by clicking it. (Preview a window by hovering over it and pressing the Space bar.) You can also set up spaces in Mission Control—a space is a view that contains only windows from the apps assigned to that space. Click the plus sign in the top-left corner and then drag windows up into the new space. Switch to a space by clicking it in the top bar.

Application Windows

For an overview of all open windows for a particular app (Safari, in this case), use a hot corner to invoke Application Windows. This view displays thumbnails of all open windows in the current app. For some apps, like Pages, you’ll also see thumbnails of recently opened documents at the bottom of the view. Click any thumbnail to switch to it.

Desktop

If you like storing documents for in-progress projects on your Desktop, you’ll love the hot corner that invokes Desktop view. It moves all open windows aside, letting you focus on the icons on the Desktop. The windows return when you switch to an app.

Notification Center

Since you can so easily open Notification Center by clicking the date and time (in macOS 11 Big Sur; in earlier versions of macOS, click the Notification Center icon) in the upper-right corner of your menu bar, it may not be worth wasting a hot corner on it. In Big Sur, Notification Center combines the Today and Notifications views from previous versions of macOS, with iOS-like widgets underneath the most recent notifications. You can control which apps can display notifications in System Preferences > Notifications. To add, remove, or rearrange widgets, click the Edit Widgets button at the bottom of Notification Center.

Start Screen Saver

Screen savers are more than just eye-candy you can use to personalize your Mac—they also serve to conceal the contents of your screen from people who might walk by when you’re not there. The Start Screen Saver hot corner shows the screen saver immediately, overriding the setting for how long the Mac must sit idle before the screen saver turns on (in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver). It’s helpful if you’re working on something sensitive that you don’t want anyone to see, but you need to leave your desk to chat with a co-worker or use the bathroom. Depending on your setting for “Require password after sleep or screen saver begins” in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, you may have to enter your password to turn off the screen saver.

Disable Screen Saver

If you usually have your screen saver set to turn on automatically after just a minute or two, it may come on when you would prefer it didn’t. This could happen, for example, while you are pondering a complex idea or thinking about what to write. To disable the screen saver temporarily, use a Disable Screen Saver hot corner.

Launchpad

If you like using iOS, giving Launchpad a hot corner might make opening apps on your Mac easier. Apple designed Launchpad to look and work like the Home screen on an iPad or iPhone—just click an app to launch it. To see more apps, scroll horizontally—with a trackpad, swipe with two fingers; with an Apple Magic Mouse, swipe with one finger on the mouse surface. Just like in iOS, you can drag the apps around to put them in the order that works best for you.

Put Display to Sleep

Those who are concerned about energy usage might like this option. Toss your pointer in the associated hot corner, and your screen goes to sleep immediately, consuming less power than a screen saver. It lets you override the “Turn display off after” slider in System Preferences > Energy Saver. As with the screen saver, you may have to enter your password to wake the display when you come back.

Lock Screen

The Lock Screen option has roughly the same effect as Start Screen Saver and Put Display to Sleep in that it instantly displays the Mac’s login screen, preventing anyone from seeing what’s on your Desktop and requiring your password again.

Add Modifier Keys

If you find yourself triggering a hot corner accidentally, try adding a modifier key so its action activates only when the pointer is in the corner and the key is pressed. To set this up, open the Hot Corners dialog, open the corner’s pop-up menu, and press a key (Shift, Control, Option, or Command). The key’s symbol appears in the menu. Keep the key down and choose the desired action.

The best way to set up your hot corners depends on how you use your Mac, of course. Our favorites are Start Screen Saver because it’s a quick override of the screen saver settings and Desktop because it removes screen clutter that gets in the way of using the Desktop.

(Featured image by Norbert Levajsics on Unsplash)

If you’re using QuickBooks Online with the service’s Mac app to manage your business’s accounting, you may have seen a message like the one below announcing that Intuit has stopped updating the QuickBooks Online app. This doesn’t affect your QuickBooks Online account, which you can and should use via a Web browser at qbo.intuit.com now. Even if the QuickBooks Online Mac app continues to work, which it likely will for some time, we recommend that you delete it and switch entirely to a Web browser. It’s not safe to use an unsupported app for financial records because Intuit won’t be fixing any security vulnerabilities going forward.

(Featured image based on an original by RODNAE Productions from Pexels)

Have you heard the term technical debt? It’s what you incur whenever you delay upgrading software and hardware for too long. It’s like forgetting to brush your teeth regularly and putting off dental checkups. There may be no immediate downside, but the ongoing maintenance and low cost of regular cleanings will likely save you from painful and expensive fillings and root canals.

It’s easy to start down the path toward technical debt. Perhaps you rely on an out-of-date productivity package, an industry-specific program that gets infrequent updates, or an accounting package that isn’t being developed for the Mac anymore. There’s no reason you have to act as soon as you realize you’ve been painted into a technical corner, but the longer you put off the upgrade, the faster the technical debt meter increases.

Here’s what happens. Because of the old app you need, you can’t upgrade to a new version of macOS. No problem, except that prevents you from running the app on a new Mac, since new Macs seldom support older versions of macOS. That’s not a problem either, until the old Mac dies and you need to replace it. Or, perhaps the Mac doesn’t fail, but it becomes clear that it’s far slower than any Mac you could purchase today. Worse, when you are forced to replace that Mac due to poor performance or hardware failure, you’re suddenly faced with an additional expense for new software on top of the new hardware. Old software is a ticking time bomb.

There’s another aspect to technical debt that you have to keep in mind. The older your systems are, the more work it will take to keep them running. That work may come out of time you could spend on other projects or with your family, or it could end up generating consulting expenses. Is it sensible to avoid the monthly cost of Adobe Creative Cloud if it means that you’re paying a consultant regularly to solve the kinds of problems that become ever more common with an older Mac that can still run the ancient Adobe Creative Suite 6?

In short, the deeper your technical debt, the more you’ll eventually pay in three categories:

• Loss of productivity: Modern Macs are vastly faster than models from years ago, and new app features can provide significant productivity boosts as well.
• Unscheduled upgrades: Murphy’s Law ensures that an old Mac or peripheral will fail at the worst possible time, usually when you’re facing a deadline or when the expense is hard to swallow.
• Support costs: Just as taking care of your teeth reduces the likelihood of dental surgery in the future, keeping up with upgrades eliminates the need for long hours of heroic data migration or recovery later.

We’re not saying that you have to buy the latest and greatest immediately. But you can employ some smart strategies to ensure that you never fall too deep into technical debt. Before we get into them, be aware that everything we’re going to discuss here will cost money. Sorry, but technology is essential to modern life and business—it’s not a luxury. However, follow our advice, and you will have more predictable costs and may even pay less overall.

Software

In the past, you paid for a software license once and could choose to pay a (usually discounted) upgrade fee every year or two. Licenses were typically expensive—it wasn’t uncommon for apps to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Such licenses still exist, but many apps have moved to a subscription model, where you pay monthly or annually. The overall cost is usually roughly similar to the licenses plus upgrades of yesteryear, but many people dislike subscriptions because they feel locked in.

We empathize—subscriptions add up for us too—but on the plus side, they offer a predictable cost and guarantee that you’ll always have the latest version, usually along with free technical support.

For software still sold on a license basis, we recommend assuming that you’ll upgrade at least every two or three years. Any longer than that and you’ll have to start making accommodations that will cut into productivity or increase support costs.

The worst-case scenario to avoid is depending on an app or system that’s so old that you have to buy used hardware to replace anything that fails. Bite the bullet and pay for a new app, transition consulting, and hardware, or else you’ll find yourself paying non-stop to keep an ancient system running.

Hardware

Smart businesses upgrade their Macs on a schedule rather than dealing with each computer on an individual basis. Research has shown that the sweet spot to swap out a Mac is in the 3–5 year timeframe. Hardware problems start to increase after that point, performance lags compared to current machines, and resale value drops.

If you don’t already have one, make an inventory of all your Macs, including the date they were purchased, and use it to work up a replacement schedule. Larger companies tend to do this programmatically—they pay less attention to what each employee does or what their needs are—but there’s no reason you can’t prioritize some systems over others to optimize performance and smooth out the overall expense.

It may make sense to shuffle some Macs around instead of treating each one independently. For instance, if one employee does a lot of video work, upgrading them every year to the most powerful Mac available might improve their productivity significantly, and their old Macs can be handed down to other employees.

Maintenance

Regular maintenance also plays a role in avoiding technical debt. It’s essential to keep up with Apple’s operating system and security updates, for instance, because failing to do so could result in a breach that would be costly to remediate.

Monitoring software can also be useful in providing early warning of failing drives, reporting on backup status, clarifying which of your Macs are up-to-date, and much more. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about a service like this.

Don’t dismiss physical maintenance as a way of reducing technical debt. Keeping Macs free of dust can prevent them from running hot, which shortens the lifespan of various components. Ensuring that every Mac has at least a surge protector, if not an uninterruptible power supply, can also go a long way toward protecting sensitive electronics from damaging power surges and sags.

In the end, avoiding technical debt just means making a plan for regular upgrades and maintenance and sticking to it. Do that and you’ll both have predictable expenses and save money in the long run. And hey, make that dentist appointment too, eh?

(Featured image by Anna Shvets from Pexels)

We’ve all gotten that panicked “Where are you?!?” text message at some point. Sometimes it’s an easy question to answer, but at other times, the answer is “Well, right here, wherever that is.” That’s unsatisfying, of course, but using Messages on your iPhone, you can do better. Tap the person’s name at the top of the conversation, tap the Info button, and in the screen that appears, tap Send My Current Location. Messages immediately sends a little thumbnail map showing where you are, and if the recipient taps it, they can see a larger map, get directions, or open it in Maps. It’s a brilliant little feature!

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

After a long day of video calls, you might feel like your brain has been wrung out like a wet washcloth—we certainly do. It’s exhausting to stare into a computer for hours every day while participating in meetings or classes. This condition is called Zoom fatigue, and it’s a recent affliction for most of us because the pandemic has dramatically increased the popularity of video calls. We don’t mean to beat on Zoom here—this condition plagues people who use Cisco WebEx, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and other videoconferencing software too.

But there are techniques you can employ to reduce Zoom fatigue. Researchers at Stanford University have identified four reasons why video calls are so tiring and offer suggestions on making them less so. They include:

• Close-up eye contact is overwhelming. You usually sit about an arm’s length from your computer display, and if one person is on screen at a time, their head may be close to life-size. You’d never be that near someone’s face in real life unless they were a close family member, and even then, you wouldn’t hold that position for long. Shrink your window or switch to gallery view so you’re talking to postage stamps rather than feeling like someone is up in your face.
• Looking at yourself is psychologically harmful. We all have mirrors, but can you imagine staring into one for hours every day? Only a pathological narcissist would do that. Worse, constantly seeing your own image can make you worry about your appearance and what others think of you. Once you’ve verified that you’re properly framed and don’t have salad in your teeth, hide your preview or switch to a view that doesn’t include you.
• Sitting perfectly still is difficult. This is hardest on kids, but even adults have trouble staying sufficiently still to remain perfectly framed in a video window. When you’re on a standard phone call or in an in-person meeting, you might pace around the room or at least adjust your position in your chair. Try turning off your camera when possible—most calls work just as well without video—or position it so you can fidget or pace in person. Another solution is Apple’s Center Stage technology on the new M1-based iPad Pros, which automatically pans and zooms to keep you in the picture as you move around.
• Video calls make you constantly think about call mechanics. There’s nothing natural about interacting with multiple people on a screen, so we’ve all come up with behaviors (some of which we just recommended!) to smooth over the cracks in the system. For instance, your brain has to expend extra effort to help you stay framed in the video window, worry about how you look, use exaggerated facial expressions so people know you’re paying attention, and use techniques like a thumbs-up to indicate approval without unmuting. The solution is to turn off your camera and hide the video window so your brain can take a break and focus on just the audio content of the call.

You’ll notice that most of the recommendations for reducing the mental strain of video calls come down to eliminating video. It shouldn’t be surprising because talking on the phone isn’t nearly as tiring, even when you’re on a conference call with a couple of people. There’s no question that video can help convey information that would be lost in a phone call, and it’s nice to see far-flung friends and family, but there’s no rule that video calls are the best form of communication for all situations.

We’ve started to put these recommendations into practice ourselves, and we encourage you to do so as well. And if you need support for why you’re turning off your camera or asking for audio-only calls, send people a link to this article.

(Featured image by Anna Shvets from Pexels)