If you sometimes have trouble configuring your AirPods, here’s the trick. The AirPods settings screen is available only when the AirPods are connected to your iPhone, so you must open their case or put them in your ears. Once you do that, a new item with the name of the AirPods appears at the top of the Settings app. Tap it to switch between Noise Cancellation and Transparency, configure what the press-and-hold action does, and start ear tip tests.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Vasily Makarov)
When we share data with others, we do so intentionally—a law firm sending a client legal documents, for instance. But those documents shouldn’t include ancillary information that might reveal other, more sensitive details. Because all digital files contain metadata—additional information about the file or its contents—it’s worth knowing what you could share inadvertently and learning how to avoid doing so.
Much metadata is innocuous, like file type and file size. However, some common file types contain additional metadata that can reveal information that you might not want to share. In this situation, the most common file types are Microsoft Office documents and PDF files. Let’s look at each and how you can see what metadata is there and remove it before sharing.
Metadata that you might want to remove from Microsoft Office documents falls into two broad categories: reviewer information, like comments and tracked changes, and document properties.
The first thing to do when removing metadata is to use File > Save As to make a copy of your file and work on the copy. This automatically removes or resets some metadata and allows you to delete other metadata without worrying about losing it from your original.
If you use change tracking in Word or comments in any Office app, you may want to remove those before sharing a document to prevent recipients from seeing internal conversations or information about who worked on the document.
To remove change tracking and comments in Word, click Review in the toolbar. Next, click the arrow next to the Delete button in the comments section and choose Delete All Comments in Document. Finally, click the arrow next to Accept in the change tracking section and choose Accept All Changes and Stop Tracking. Browse through the document to make sure accepting all changes didn’t do something unexpected, and then save.
Excel and PowerPoint lack change tracking but let you add comments. Like Word, PowerPoint’s Review toolbar offers a similar menu associated with the Delete button; choose Delete All Comments in Presentation to clear the comments. In Excel, switch to the Review toolbar, choose Edit > Select All (comments can be deleted only from selected cells), and click the Delete button in the toolbar.
To see what metadata is in the document properties of a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, choose File > Properties, and look in the Summary, Statistics, and Custom tabs. Generally speaking, these won’t contain anything damning, but they may reveal information like the names of people associated with the document. Don’t assume there’s no metadata here just because you didn’t add anything manually—document control systems can add metadata you don’t expect.
The three Office apps offer different approaches to removing personal information in the Summary and Custom tabs, and the process is extremely different than in the Windows versions. (For Windows, refer to Microsoft’s instructions.) Here’s how you remove personal information:
Information in the Statistics tab is generally cleared or reset by using File > Save As, so you don’t need to do anything more to clear it.
If you’re truly concerned about not revealing additional information in shared Office documents, think about what might appear in headers and footers, footnotes, text that’s white (and thus invisible), hyperlinks, and macros. Finally, remember that you can hide text in Word, columns and rows in Excel, and slides in PowerPoint—that hidden content may reveal sensitive information if it’s allowed to remain in a shared document. In PowerPoint, you may also want to check for presenter notes you don’t want to share; choose View > Notes.
Another way to remove a great deal of metadata from Office documents is to share a PDF of the document instead. By “printing” to PDF, anything that’s invisible automatically disappears. However, PDFs have their own metadata that you might want to review and remove. How you go about it depends on which apps you have available: Adobe Acrobat Pro or just Apple’s bundled Preview.
First, to view metadata in Acrobat Pro, choose File > Properties and click the Description tab (left). In Preview, choose Tools > Show Inspector and click the leftmost General Info tab (right).
Adobe Acrobat Pro provides several tools for redacting content (replacing it with a black box) and removing hidden content and metadata. To access them, click the Tools tab at the top of the screen and click Redact to display a pair of buttons on the secondary toolbar. Redact Text & Images lets you redact content, but you’ll most likely want to use Sanitize Document, which removes metadata and a boatload of possible hidden data.
It’s easiest to click Remove All, but you might prefer to click Selectively Remove and look at what Acrobat Pro finds before clicking the Remove button in the Hidden Information tab.
For those who rely on Preview for working with PDFs, there’s a simple process for removing metadata and anything else lurking in a PDF that’s good enough for most situations.
Choose File > Print, and then choose Save As PDF from the pop-up PDF menu at the bottom of the Print dialog. This may seem counterintuitive, but as with any other document type, printing in this way creates a PDF that contains only the visible information in the original, ensuring that all hidden data and metadata are removed.
Although all Mac users have Preview, there is another common option for removing metadata from PDFs—online tools. They’re easily found, but we urge caution. If you’re concerned about the recipient of your PDF being able to see metadata or hidden content, why would you trust a free online service with that information? If you want to head down this path, stick with sites headquartered in the European Union, which has stronger privacy regulations than other parts of the world. For instance, Metadata2Go, which displays all the metadata in a file, is in Germany, and Sejda, whose Edit PDF Metadata tool can remove all metadata, is based in the Netherlands.
One last thought. If you’ve gotten to this point and are thinking that you need an enterprise-wide solution to removing metadata, look for services like Adarsus’s MetaClean, which can automatically remove metadata from files sent as email attachments or stored on file servers.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Imilian)
Do you have a child starting college soon? It’s likely that your kid has been relying heavily on a computer throughout high school, but if it was a school-provided laptop or shared family computer, now’s the time to get them something of their own. Even if they had their own laptop throughout high school, if it’s old or unreliable, college is a good excuse to bring them up to date. If you haven’t been paying close attention to Apple’s Mac lineup, you might wonder which model makes the most sense.
First, don’t buy anything without first checking with the college. Many college departments have specific requirements based on the software students use in their classes. Generally, these revolve around processor type, amount of RAM, and storage space. Current Macs should meet or exceed all those requirements. Second, see if the college provides access to education pricing—most will—to save a few hundred dollars off the prices listed below. Regardless, Apple often has a Back to School offer.
Colleges often specify—and students usually prefer—laptops instead of desktop machines. Although the M1 24-inch iMac is an excellent machine with a gorgeous screen, it’s too big and unwieldy for the nomadic lifestyle of the typical college student. The same applies to an M2 Mac mini or Mac Studio with an external display. Students can take a laptop to class daily, and bringing it home on breaks is a lot easier. A student accustomed to taking notes on an iPad with a keyboard and Apple Pencil might be able to use that along with a desktop Mac, but most students should focus on laptops.
In the past, deciding which model was best for a given student was more challenging, but Apple’s move to the speedy and power-efficient M1 and M2 chips makes the decision easier. We see three primary scenarios:
Regardless of which laptop you decide on, you’ll have to pick a processor, amount of memory, and storage capacity:
To our thinking, the most obvious choice for a Mac that’s likely to last for four years of college would be either the 13-inch or 15-inch M2 MacBook Air with a 10-core GPU, 16 GB of memory, and 512 GB of storage. Be sure to budget for AppleCare+, too; it’s almost guaranteed that some mishap will befall a student laptop, and AppleCare+ covers up to two incidents of accidental damage every year.
You’ll need to have some conversations with your child to find out what they think they’ll need—and be sure to double-check that against the college’s recommendations—but if you have any questions after that, don’t hesitate to contact us.
(Featured image by Apple)
If you need to convert images to JPEG, PNG, or (unlikely) HEIF, try this hidden Finder feature: Control-click an image in one of those formats or other common image formats like TIFF, GIF, or PSD, and choose Quick Actions > Convert Image. A dialog lets you choose the destination format, the image size, and whether you want to preserve metadata. For straight conversions, stick with Actual Size, but if your goal is to shrink the file as well, you can choose a smaller image size. Leave Preserve Metadata selected unless you want to remove things like location metadata for privacy reasons. You can even select multiple files to convert them all at once.
(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/marekuliasz)
At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June, the company unveiled the upcoming versions of its operating systems: macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and tvOS 17. They won’t be available until September or October of 2023, and even once they ship, we recommend waiting a few weeks before upgrading your smaller Apple devices and holding off on macOS upgrades for a couple of months.
Regardless, it’s worth considering how these operating systems might impact your plans to buy new hardware in the next six months. Any Apple device you purchase now—or have bought in the last five years—can run the new operating systems. But some devices that can run the current macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16 won’t be upgradable to their replacements later this year. More importantly, some older devices that can be upgraded won’t support all the new features.
Here’s what you’ll need and compatibility gotchas to keep in mind.
For macOS 14 Sonoma, Apple has dropped support for Mac models released before 2018. That works out to five models across the iMac, MacBook Pro, and MacBook product lines. If you rely on one of those Macs and want to run Sonoma, think about when it would make sense to buy a new Mac, perhaps in early 2024. By then, all new Macs will likely ship with Sonoma. These Macs can run Sonoma:
The specific 2017 Mac models that are stuck at Ventura are:
Unsurprisingly, some new features in Sonoma require sufficient processing power that they work only on Macs with Apple silicon—one of the M1 or M2 chips.
If you’re unsure which Mac you have, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu.
With iOS 17, Apple has maintained the same cutoff date as Sonoma, supporting all iPhone models released in 2018 and later. That means you’ll be able to run iOS 17 on these iPhones:
Practically speaking, these iOS 16-compatible devices won’t be able to upgrade to iOS 17:
Several new iOS 17 features have more restrictive system requirements.
If you can’t remember which iPhone model you have, go to Settings > General > About and look next to Model Name. This works for the iPad, too.
It’s more involved to determine whether your iPad can upgrade to iPadOS 17 because there are four different iPad model types with varying capabilities. These models can run iPadOS 17:
While that list encompasses a lot of iPads, a simpler way to look at it is that only three iPad models that can run iOS 16 won’t be able to upgrade to iOS 17:
Because Apple extended overall iPadOS 17 compatibility somewhat further back than it did with iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, quite a few iPadOS 17 features work only on select models:
The Apple Watch has a simple upgrade story: every model compatible with watchOS 9 can also run watchOS 10. That means everything from the Apple Watch Series 4 up through the Apple Watch Ultra, including the Apple Watch SE. (Look in the Watch app on your iPhone if you can’t remember which model you have.)
Two of the new features promised for watchOS 10 work only on specific models:
As with the Apple Watch, the Apple TV upgrade situation is easy to understand: tvOS 17 will run on the Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K (1st and 2nd generation), just as with tvOS 16.
However, note that the promised option to let you use the mic and camera from an iPhone or iPad for FaceTime calls on the Apple TV works only if you have an Apple TV 4K (2nd generation). That might be the first real reason to upgrade from an older Apple TV.
(Featured image by Apple)
For most of us, our Mac’s screen is wider than it is tall, so longer Web pages and documents often benefit from more room from top to bottom. To maximize the amount of usable vertical space and reduce the need to scroll as much, you can set the Dock to hide automatically and appear only when you move your pointer to the bottom of the screen. A better approach is to position your Dock on the side of your screen where it’s less likely to use space you’d prefer to have available for content. Many people prefer the right side, but you can also try the left to see how it works for you. The easy way to move the Dock is to Control-click its separator bar and choose the desired side from the Position on Screen menu.
(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/MikeLaptev)
Let’s say you use 1Password (or another third-party password manager) on an iPhone or iPad. When that’s the case, it’s easy to end up in a situation where your device will present passwords from both 1Password and iCloud Keychain, possibly along with another app. That won’t break anything, but as you can see in the screenshot below, dueling password managers can be confusing, particularly if one doesn’t have up-to-date passwords. To make logging in easier, go to Settings > Passwords > Password Options and select just one app in Allow Filling From. For instance, if you’re using 1Password, turn off iCloud Passwords & Keychain and all the other apps.
(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Kostiantyn Filichkin)
Apps are everywhere these days, but it can be hard to remember that many exist in multiple versions. You can often run the same app on a Mac, an iPhone or iPad, and in a Web browser, each of which has benefits.
Generally speaking, Mac apps:
iPhone and iPad apps:
Web apps:
The key takeaway is that there’s no either/or situation here. For any app you depend on, it’s usually best to use the native Mac app on your Mac, the native iOS app on your iPhone or iPad, and the Web app whenever the native Mac or iOS app doesn’t fit the bill. Web apps are particularly welcome when you’re away from your Mac and need a full-fledged interface with a keyboard such that an iPhone version won’t suffice. Web apps can also be lifesavers when you need to get something done but are having trouble with the native versions.
Here is a list of apps that run natively on your Apple devices and are accessible in any standard Web browser. It’s far from comprehensive but should give you a feel for what apps you can use in different forms, often with almost no loss of functionality or access to stored data. Note that you’ll almost always need to log in to use a Web app, so make sure you have access to your stored credentials in a password manager.
Before we get into the list, we want to call out two special categories:
Again, this list is by no means comprehensive, but you can use it as a starting point for thinking about the apps you use. If you’ve been relying solely on a Web app, some quick searches should reveal whether it has a native Mac or iOS version that might be faster and smoother. It’s also equally worth investigating if one of your native apps has a Web version that you could turn to in a pinch.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Rudzhan Nagiev)
We’ve seen an uptick in attacks on Facebook accounts that generate email messages like the one below. It’s saying someone is attempting to reset your Facebook password in order to access your account. If you didn’t ask to reset your Facebook password within the past 5 minutes, do not enter the provided code! In fact, do nothing with a message like this, since you can’t easily tell if it’s a legitimate message from Facebook or a phishing attack. As long as your email account hasn’t been compromised, you have nothing to worry about, but consider any such messages as encouragement to have strong, unique passwords for your email account and any social media services. Also, we highly recommend turning on two-factor authentication for these accounts. Of course, if you get a second message saying that your password was reset, immediately secure your account.
(Featured image by iStock.com/Nicholas77)
Social Media: If you receive unexpected password reset email messages from Facebook, don’t worry—but don’t click anything! Use them as encouragement to ensure your email and social media passwords are strong, unique, and protected with two-factor authentication.
For the most part, the days of Mac versus PC are over. Common apps now exist on both platforms, and when they don’t, there are plenty of alternatives in nearly every app category. Plus, many apps either run entirely on the Web in any browser. Large organizations now regularly run “employee choice” programs that allow people to pick the platform where they’re the most comfortable.
But the fact remains that there are many more Windows-based PCs out there than Macs, and particularly for an old or unusual app, or for software needed for specific hardware peripherals, sometimes the only available option is a Windows app. What’s a modern Mac user to do? Here are a few possibilities.
The cheapest approach to running Windows software on a Mac is to use Apple’s free Boot Camp. However, it comes with a number of limitations compared with the virtualization software we’ll discuss next:
The main advantage of Boot Camp over virtualization software is that it provides the best performance for Windows apps because no resources are being shared with macOS. Also, a few apps, primarily games, won’t run on a virtual machine.
Given that Intel-based Macs are on the way out, we recommend the Boot Camp approach mostly if you have an extra Intel-based Mac that can be dedicated to your Windows task.
Shortly after Apple switched Macs from PowerPC processors to Intel chips in 2006, virtualization apps appeared, notably Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox. Because Windows runs natively on those same Intel chips, virtualization software can create a virtual machine (VM) that Windows runs on just as though it were running on a physical PC. A few of the significant advantages of virtualization software include:
The main downside of virtualization software is that its performance can’t be quite as good as Boot Camp because it must share some CPU and RAM resources with macOS. Plus, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion aren’t free, although VMware Fusion offers a free personal license. VirtualBox is free but more complicated, and it’s not yet compatible with macOS 13 Ventura.
Parallels Desktop (starting at $99.99) and VMware Fusion (starting at $149; free for personal use) provide the best user experience for most Windows needs if you have an Intel-based Mac.
When Apple introduced the first Macs based on Apple silicon, people wondered what would happen to virtualization software, which could no longer just pass the software commands down to an Intel chip. The solution was to create a new virtualization engine that leverages the M-series chips’ hardware-assisted virtualization to run Arm-based virtual machines. (Apple’s M-series chips are based on the Arm architecture, which differs from the x86 architecture used by Intel chips.)
The upshot is that the latest versions of Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion can run on M-series Macs, but you can install only Arm-based operating systems, not Intel-based operating systems. Luckily, Microsoft makes Windows 11 on Arm, a full-fledged version of Windows that can run most Windows apps, even those designed for Intel chips.
In early 2023, Microsoft announced that it is officially supporting Windows 11 on M-series Macs when run in Parallels Desktop. Although VMware Fusion can run Windows 11 on Arm Insider Preview—a beta version—installation is challenging. We recommend sticking with Parallels Desktop for an experience that’s significantly easier and officially supported.
Virtualization enables you to run Windows not just on a Mac, but also in the cloud. Microsoft’s Windows 365 service is another alternative that lets you stream Windows to any device with a Web browser. While the concept of Windows 365 is compelling, the pricing is not. The cheapest plan costs $31 per user per month, or $372 per year, for a virtual PC with 2 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of storage. Parallels Desktop is about a quarter the price.
We know, we know. The entire point of running Windows on a Mac is so you don’t have to buy a PC. But there are situations where it makes more sense to purchase an inexpensive PC than to fuss with virtualizing Windows on a Mac. Perhaps multiple people in your office need access to your essential Windows app, or maybe some hardware device can be controlled only from a PC. In such cases, a dedicated PC may be the better part of valor. Contact us for configuration and buying advice—the PC world can be a confusing place for those accustomed to buying from Apple.
(Featured image based on originals by iStock.com/manaemedia)