If you have trouble finding particular items across multiple shelves of books, labeled boxes, or anything else that’s clearly identified with a text name, take carefully composed photos that capture all the titles without glare. Later, you can search for any text in those photos to find them—tap the Search button in Photos on the iPhone or iPad, or use the Search field in Photos on the Mac. Photos highlights the search term on the found photo. (If Photos on the Mac doesn’t surface an expected photo, try again on your iPhone, which seems to get more hits on harder-to-read text.) This capability comes courtesy of Apple’s Live Text feature, which uses machine learning to identify text in photos. Think of it as the lazy person’s database!

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Research suggests that exposure to blue light fools your body into thinking it’s daytime, making it harder to fall asleep if you work late on a Mac with a bright white (which has a lot of blue light) screen. To help, a macOS feature called Night Shift subtly changes the colors of the screen as the sun sets to reduce the amount of blue light hitting your eyes. In essence, everything gets slightly warmer. To configure your Night Shift schedule—so it turns on and off automatically—go to System Settings > Displays > Night Shift. You can set any times, but Sunset to Sunrise adjusts for the sun’s movement in your location throughout the year. One warning: if you edit photos or videos, or work on graphics where specific colors matter, Night Shift’s color changes may be problematic.

(Featured image by iStock.com/PeopleImages)

Spam filters work pretty well—99% of the messages in your spam mailbox are probably spam. But it’s frustrating to miss an important message that was caught by an overeager spam filter. Here’s an easy way to find many good messages, also known as “ham,” amidst all the spam. Think of keywords that might appear in legitimate email to you: the name of your city, major employers in your area, nearby colleges, companies whose products you use, their products, and so on. Then search for those terms inside your spam mailbox, either one at a time or, if your email app supports it, as a single search with OR statements for each keyword, like this Gmail search (use your actual town name and so forth): in:spam townName OR employerName OR clubName OR companyName. Of course, your keywords will appear in some spam messages, but if the searches reveal ham messages you would otherwise have missed, they’re worthwhile. Be extra cautious around any message that wants you to click a link, log in, or provide private information. The fact that your spam filter caught a message is a red flag.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Igor Kutyaev)

Take a moment and look behind your Mac. Do you see a tangle of cables? The main downside of a mess of cables is that it’s a cluster of chaos that attracts dust bunnies. However, it’s possible for power cables—especially when tightly bundled or looped—to emit electromagnetic interference that can disrupt or degrade the signal carried by nearby data or network cables. They can also heat up, which is generally best avoided. Plus, the more tangled the cable nest, the more likely you’ll cause harm if you pull too hard while attempting to remove a cable from the tangle.

Also, consider cables that extend beyond your desk. Do you have power cables that run across the ground or Ethernet cables that loosely snake up into the ceiling? To protect both people and equipment, ensure that cables aren’t a tripping or catching hazard.

If your cables are a complete disaster, take some time to shut down your devices, disconnect all the cables, clean underneath, and reconnect them in an organized fashion, removing unused cables and replacing damaged or unnecessarily long cables with new ones.

To keep your cables under control going forward, follow these tips:

Select and reduce cables:

• Buy and use cables that are only as long as they need to be.
• When buying new cables, prefer braided cables, which catch less and last longer.
• If you have many cables, try to trim the number with judicious use of docks or hubs.
• Upgrade to wireless accessories, like the Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, that only need to be plugged in occasionally to charge.

Pay attention to cable location:

• Try to keep cables off the floor, but use a floor cord cover if it’s unavoidable.
• Attach long runs of network cabling to the wall or floor to reduce the chance of accidents.
• Run cables through raceways or inside cable trays to keep them together under desks.
• Add adhesive cable clips to the back or underside of desks without cable management options.
• Ensure cables don’t interfere with workstation ergonomics, especially with movable sit/stand desks.
• Keep power adapters away from other cables for better heat management.

Group your cables:

• Use Velcro straps or cable ties to bundle power and data cables separately.
• Avoid bundling too many power cables too tightly to avoid heat buildup.
• Label cables with their type and use so you can easily distinguish between them.
• Store extra cables in clear zip lock bags or bins, one per cable type.

Maintain your cables:

• Throw out any damaged or suspect cables right away.
• Periodically check and reorganize your cables, removing any that aren’t in active use.

You should be able to find a wide variety of cable management accessories, such as Velcro cable ties, cable labels, cable clips, and floor cord covers, at your preferred electronics retailer.

None of these suggestions are difficult to follow, and you’d be surprised how much you will appreciate having neatly organized cables in use and available when you need them.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

When your team or family shares access to a single account (such as for banking or social media, which seldom offer multi-user access), using two-factor authentication via SMS is awkward—whose phone receives the 2FA codes? One solution is to use an authentication app. Authentication apps are more secure, and multiple people can add 2FA support to the same account by scanning the QR code at setup or adding the 2FA setup URL later. (In both 1Password and Apple’s iCloud Keychain, edit the login to see and copy the setup URL.) An even better solution is to use a password manager that supports both 2FA codes and password sharing. That way, one person can set up the account with 2FA and add its login to a shared vault or collection. 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, iCloud Keychain, and others provide such features.

(Featured image by iStock.com/May_Chanikran)

Are you a 27-inch iMac owner wondering when Apple will release a new model with speedy Apple silicon? We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the answer seems to be an unequivocal “Never.” Late last year, Apple confirmed to The Verge that it would not be making an Apple silicon version of the 27-inch iMac. Technically, that leaves open the possibility of a 32-inch iMac, for instance, but that feels like wishful thinking given the $5000 cost of Apple’s 32-inch Pro Display XDR. How did we get here, and where should 27-inch iMac owners look next?

Apple introduced the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display in 2014 and updated it several times before discontinuing it in 2022. It was hugely popular due to its large, gorgeous screen and a price that made the guts of the Mac seem cheap when paired with such a nice screen. An 8-year run isn’t bad, but once Apple introduced the powerful Mac Studio and the 27-inch Studio Display (also a 5K Retina display), the company felt there was no room for the 27-inch iMac in the lineup.

Apple isn’t necessarily wrong. One of the reasons 27-inch iMac owners are so attached to their Macs is that they can’t upgrade the computer and keep using that lovely screen, which remains one of the best available. Target Display Mode (which lets you use some much older iMacs as an external display for another Mac) never supported that model of iMac, and although the $80 Luna Display dongle does let you use a 27-inch iMac as a screen for another Mac, its tradeoffs may be hard to accept.

In the new world order, an Apple silicon Mac paired with a Studio Display provides a fast, capable Mac you can swap for a newer one when necessary and an extremely nice display you can use across multiple Macs. It’s not uncommon for an external display to last a decade or more, whereas many businesses upgrade their Macs every 3 to 5 years. A Studio Display could easily outlast two or three Macs.

“But, but, but,” we can hear you spluttering, “what about the 24-inch iMac with Apple silicon?” It may seem odd for Apple to drop the 27-inch model but keep a smaller iMac around. The reason is that the 24-inch iMac is meant to be a low-cost Mac that doesn’t skimp on display quality. It has a 4.5K Retina display that’s just a little smaller than the 27-inch iMac’s 5K Retina display while matching its quality. (Those numbers refer to the number of horizontal pixels on the screen—4,480 or 5,120—although the actual resolutions nearly everyone uses are half that to get crisp text at a readable size.) A Mac mini paired with an inexpensive external display would be cheaper than a 24-inch iMac, but you would have trouble getting a comparably good display for so little. The 24-inch iMac is perfect for a receptionist’s desk or a family’s kitchen computer, and its M3 chip will seriously outperform the Intel chips in the now-discontinued 27-inch iMac.

So, let’s assume you’ve been holding onto your 27-inch iMac, but it’s finally time to move on. The calculus of what to buy has changed due to the excellent performance of the Apple silicon Macs, even on the low end, and the existence of the Studio Display. Here’s what we recommend for different needs:

• You’re on a very limited budget: Buy a 24-inch iMac. The screen isn’t quite as large, but the price/performance ratio is hard to beat for such a nice screen. The lowest-end model has fewer USB ports, which might be annoying.
• You want a basic desktop Mac with a Retina screen: Choose between a Mac mini paired with a Studio Display or a 24-inch iMac, which is comparable to the low-end Mac mini. For higher performance needs, go for the Mac mini with an M2 Pro.
• You want portability, too: The Studio Display works well with a MacBook Air (13-inch or 15-inch) for a budget solution or a MacBook Pro (14-inch or 16-inch) for a high-performance option. Using two screens also increases productivity.
• You’re willing to pay more for performance: Things get interesting here because you can use a Studio Display with a Mac mini with M2 Pro, a Mac Studio with M2 Max, or a MacBook Pro with either M3 Pro or M3 Max. The MacBook Pro options are the most expensive but offer portability and a second screen.
• You want the ultimate performance: Pair a Studio Display with a Mac Studio or a Mac Pro, both of which come with the M2 Ultra. The choice comes down to expandability: the Mac Pro offers PCIe slots and more ports.

Right now, the M-series chips are a little confusing. The original M1 is available only in an inexpensive 13-inch MacBook Air model sold exclusively through Walmart. The previous MacBook Air (13-inch only), Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro all use variants of the M2, whereas the newer MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models sport M3 variants. Until recently, we expected Apple to standardize the rest of the line on the M3, but then the iPad Pro came out with an M4 because of yield issues with the M3 fabrication process.

It now seems probable that some models will skip the M3 entirely in favor of the M4, but don’t get too caught up in the latest and greatest. There’s more performance to be gained in the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions of the chips than in the next generation, so for now, the M2 Ultra remains the fastest chip for most processor-intensive tasks.

Regardless of what Mac and display combination best meets your needs, you’ll enjoy vastly better performance than was available with the 27-inch iMac, and the Studio Display is every inch as good a monitor. And maybe you can sell your 27-inch iMac on eBay.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Artificial intelligence dominates the tech news these days, but it’s hard to separate the hype from the reality. Every large company seems to have some major AI initiative in the works. Even Apple, which tends to stick to its own path, has started to tout features previously described as relying on “machine learning” as being “AI.” If you can get past the hype, AI has plenty of good uses now.

Despite Apple’s recent relabeling of features as using AI, when most people think about AI, they’re thinking of “generative AI” systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot or Adobe’s Firefly artbot. These systems generate impressively good text and images from scratch based on user prompts. Ask ChatGPT to write an excuse for your sick kid, and you’ll get fluid, correct English. With Firefly, describe an image—“silhouettes of male and female runners with bright colors and black background”—and you’ll get images that match pretty well.

How do they accomplish this magic? Chatbots use statistical models to predict the next word based on training datasets that contain hundreds of billions of words—think autocomplete on radioactive steroids. Artbots work a little differently, but they also use statistical models to create images based on having been trained to identify numerous images.

Enough background. How can you make the most of today’s leading chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Meta AI, Pi, and Le Chat Mistral) and artbots (Adobe Firefly, Microsoft’s Copilot Designer, NightCafe, Meta AI, and Midjourney)?

Identify Good Uses of Generative AI

It’s essential to recognize that the effectiveness of generative AI for a particular task is highly individualized. What works for one person may not work for another due to varying skill levels, requirements, and preferences. With that in mind, here are three ways to evaluate tasks that might be a good fit for generative AI.

• Skill levels: The less skillful or knowledgeable you are about a subject, the happier you’ll be with generative AI’s results. You can think of an AI chatbot as a C+ student—its work will get a passing grade, but it won’t fool an expert. But we’re all happy to do or receive C+ work in many parts of our lives—no one is above average in everything.
• Requirements: Are you looking for something definitive—precisely what you have in mind—or would you be happy with an open-ended set of results? AI chatbots and artbots generate statistically likely results, so if you’re not caught up in things being just right, you’ll probably like what you get. Don’t expect them to read your mind, however.
• Preferences: It’s best to think of an AI chatbot as an assistant, because you must be willing to go back and forth with it. And that means you have to be willing to work with an assistant who is dumber than they seem, entirely reactive, unpredictable, and inconsistent. (On the plus side, chatbots are also tireless, imperturbable, incredibly well-read, and non-judgemental.)

To sum up, the best tasks for generative AI are those where you know little or aren’t particularly skillful, don’t have specific expectations about what you’ll get, and are willing to interact with a potentially annoying helper.

Get Better Results from Generative AI

These recommendations will help you get better responses from AI chatbots:

• Set the stage with detail and expectations: Unlike Web searches, chatbots work best when provided with more than essential keywords. Instead, tell the chatbot a little about yourself, provide background about the topic, and lay out your expectations. ChatGPT even lets you provide instructions to apply to all your chats. Additional detail helps the chatbot’s statistical model better predict what you want.
• Iterate repeatedly and push harder: You don’t have to provide all that detail up front. Chatbots retain context—they know what has been said in the chat—so after your initial prompt, you can and should keep pushing the chatbot to refine and improve its answer. Don’t be shy to ask, “What’s missing from this?” or “How could this be improved?” While it’s always best to be polite, there’s no harm in asking a chatbot to do better. Pretend you’re a coach or therapist and keep asking probing questions.

Remember, unlike a search engine, where each search stands alone, working with an AI chatbot is a conversation. Right now, that’s less true of AI artbots, but we’re moving in that direction.

Good Uses for Generative AI

AI has innumerable possible uses, limited mostly by your imagination. Here are a few that have worked well for us:

• Brainstorming: Have you ever needed to come up with a name for a program, product, or service and found your mind utterly blank? Or maybe you’re writing and can’t put your finger on precisely the word you want? Ask an AI chatbot! With a little direction, they’re great at coming up with a bunch of possible names or words. You may not get exactly what you want, but the chatbot’s suggestions will help you think in new directions.
• Coding: An AI chatbot won’t turn you into a professional programmer, but it can help you write a small AppleScript to automate a task like adding sequentially numbered calendar events to every Monday for the rest of the year. Chatbots are also good at helping you use powerful but complex Unix tools for reformatting text like sed, awk, and grep. But perhaps our favorite real-world use is getting help with devilishly complicated spreadsheet formulas that do lookups as part of their calculations.
• Talk to documents: Some AI chatbots (and services like ChatPDF) enable you to have conversations with long documents. That sounds weird, but it’s much easier to ask a few questions about how a hundred-page report affects your business, for instance, than to slog through the entire thing. Such systems provide page references to support their answers, so you can (and should) verify what you’re told.
• Drafting difficult email: Some email messages are hard—no one likes having to reprimand an employee, express condolences to a business associate, or announce layoffs. But such messages are essentially genres—if you’ve seen one corporate merger announcement, you’ve seen them all. If you seed your prompt with plenty of appropriate details, an AI chatbot can generate a credible first draft that you can tweak to improve accuracy and make it sound like you instead of an overeager college student. Never send an AI-generated email without taking an edit pass.
• Evaluating ideas: It’s always a good idea to talk through ideas and decisions, and conversations with AI chatbots can help you think about them. Should you ask for a raise or try for a promotion? What are the pros and cons of moving to a new location? Does it make more sense to rent or buy? An advantage of AI chatbots is that you can tell them to respond like a particular type of professional, such as a lawyer, financial advisor, or life coach. Of course, all chatbot responses are just statistically probable, so they won’t compete with those from actual professionals, but they’re a good start.

AI-Powered Searching

Finally, let’s look at AI-powered search engines like Perplexity and Arc Search (on the iPhone), and increasingly prominent AI-generated summaries in Google, Bing, and Brave Search. They blur the distinction between search engines and chatbots. Search engines focus on providing answers to questions, either link to or summarize their sources, and include the most recent information. In contrast, chatbots focus on conversation, generate answers from scratch, and always have some date after which their knowledge stops.

When might an AI-powered search engine be more effective than a traditional search engine’s list of links? Try one in situations like these:

• Searches for easy but non-obvious answers: If you want to know who held the mile world record before Hicham El Guerrouj, for instance, an AI search engine will just tell you, rather than make you read a Wikipedia page about the world record progression. It could even tell you who has come the closest to his world record in the last decade, which would be difficult to determine otherwise.
• Searches for answers to idle questions: If you don’t want to spend a long time reading source materials and don’t care much about the answer, an AI-powered summary will be efficient.
• Searches that require assembling information from multiple sources: Imagine that you want to know how many people live in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. With a traditional search engine, you’d need to find each city’s population independently (or a list of major US city populations) and add them manually. An AI-powered search engine could find them all and add them for you.
• Searches where you don’t quite know what you’re looking for: When you’re starting to explore a topic, an AI-powered search engine can suggest additional searches as you home in on aspects of the topic that especially interest you.

Google’s recent addition of AI-driven summaries quickly drew mockery for suggesting the addition of glue to pizza and encouraging the ingesting of rocks. But remember, humans say incorrect things all the time, often intentionally. In fact, both of those examples were triggered by jokes and could have come up in traditional searches as well, but in contexts that were clearly silly.

Regardless of whether information comes from an AI chatbot, an AI-powered search engine, a Facebook post, or the woman next to you on a plane, you have to discern whether it’s likely to be right. AI can be helpful in many ways, but it won’t do your thinking for you.

None of the text of this article was generated by AI.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Blue Planet Studio)

A popular feature of iOS 16 was the Photo Shuffle option for customizing the iPhone Lock Screen. It used machine learning to select photos in four categories—People, Pets, Nature, and Cities—and rotated through them when you tapped, on lock, hourly, or daily. If you didn’t like the automatic selection, you could pick photos manually, but it was clumsy. In iOS 17 (and iPadOS 17, which also added customizable Lock Screens), you can now point the Lock Screen’s Photo Shuffle wallpaper at an album. Touch and hold the Lock Screen, tap Customize, tap the blue ⨁ button to create a new wallpaper, select Photo Shuffle, select Album, choose the desired album from the pop-up menu, set a frequency, tap Use Album, and tap the Add button at the top. Then tap Set as Wallpaper Pair or Customize Home Screen to choose a different image for the Home Screen wallpaper.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

By default, the battery icon in your Mac laptop’s menu bar shows how full your battery is. Clicking it reveals the exact percentage, but you can also set macOS to display the battery percentage next to the icon. The setting isn’t where you might expect in System Settings > Battery. Instead, you’ll find it in System Settings > Control Center, where you need to turn on both “Show in Menu Bar” and “Show Percentage.”

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

One of the ways companies protect critical account information is by remembering the devices you use to log in as “trusted devices” or “authorized devices.” Those logins will usually have been protected by two-factor authentication or another mechanism that guarantees the device is being used by you, its owner. Subsequent logins from those devices may be more convenient for you due to requiring only a username and password, and trusted devices may automatically receive two-factor authentication codes. That’s how Apple ensures you are who you say you are when you log in to your Apple ID on a previously unseen device.

Although trusted devices can help increase your security, they can also reduce it. If an attacker were to gain access to one of your trusted devices, they would have a better chance of breaking into your accounts or masquerading as you when setting up new accounts. As a result, it’s important to audit your trusted devices occasionally and make sure you still control all of them. The first time you do this, you may be shocked to see that a Mac you last used years ago could still be receiving Apple ID verification codes. Removing unused trusted devices from an account makes it more secure with no downside.

We can’t provide a comprehensive list of services that track trusted devices, but many of you use two high-profile ones: Apple and Google. In addition, most password managers with online accounts also rely on trusted devices—we’ll look at 1Password here, but if you use another password manager, look through its settings to see if it maintains a list of trusted devices.

Remove Trusted Apple Devices

Apple gives you access to the list of all your current Apple devices in System Settings > Your Name on the Mac and in Settings > Your Name on the iPhone and iPad. (You can also log in to appleid.apple.com, click Sign-in and Security in the sidebar, and click Account Security.) Some of the devices shown may not be trusted devices—there isn’t much to worry about with a HomePod, and some old Macs may not be logged in. Click or tap any device to learn more about it—the 27-inch iMac in the screenshot below is trusted and can receive Apple ID verification codes.

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t display the date the device was last used, which can help identify ancient devices. So look for any devices that you don’t immediately recognize as being in use—particularly Macs, iPhones, and iPads—and remove them from your account. Don’t worry about inadvertently removing a device you do use—at worst, you’ll have to log in to your Apple ID again the next time you use it.

Remove Trusted Google Devices

You can quickly load Google’s list of trusted devices by logging in to your Google account at myaccount.google.com/device-activity. To navigate there manually, go to your Google Account at myaccount.google.com, click Security in the sidebar, scroll down to find the Your Devices tile, and click Manage All Devices. Google says it keeps track of sessions (whenever you sign in) on trusted devices for only 28 days, but the sessions shown on “unknown device(s)” below are far older than that. Google helps by displaying the location and date of most sessions.

Click a session to learn more about it, including the date you first signed in on that device. For devices you no longer use, click Sign Out to remove access to your Google Account.

Remove Trusted 1Password Devices

To remove old trusted devices from 1Password, start by logging in to 1Password.com, clicking your name at the top right, and choosing My Profile—you can also navigate directly to my.1password.com/profile. As you can see, 1Password provides information about each trusted device and browser, showing its IP address, location, operating system version, and last access time.

It’s easiest to click Deauthorize Inactive Devices, at which point 1Password will ask if you want to deauthorize all devices that haven’t been used in the last 60 days. If you prefer a more targeted approach, click the gear next to a device or browser you want to remove and click Deauthorize Device in the dialog that appears.

Again, the only harm that could come from deauthorizing a device you still use is that you will have to log in to 1Password again.

After you’ve audited your Apple, Google, and password-manager trusted devices—and any other accounts you may have that maintain such lists—there’s no need to check again right away. Once a month or once a quarter would be sufficient for most people.

That said, if you ever notice any unusual account activity, look at your trusted device lists to ensure you recognize everything. If there’s a device you don’t recognize or one that was used at an unfamiliar place or at a time when you were otherwise occupied, immediately remove it and change that service’s password.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Ildo Frazao)