Follow These Steps When Switching to a New iPhone 18

Are you considering getting one of Apple’s new iPhone 18 models? While it’s tempting to unbox a new iPhone and dive right in, a methodical setup will save you from potential frustrations down the road. When you’re ready to transfer your data—and, for many people, that means much of your digital life—to the new iPhone, follow these step-by-step instructions. For visual learners, Apple also provides a video showing how to transfer your data and set up a new iPhone.

1. Ensure that both your current iPhone and Apple Watch (if you have one) are running the latest versions of iOS and watchOS. These updates can take a while to install, so don’t leave them for the last minute.
2. Have your login details ready: you’ll need your iPhone and Apple Watch passcodes, along with your Apple Account email address and password.
3. Back up your old iPhone to iCloud or your Mac. If you back up to a Mac, make sure you encrypt the backup (and record the encrypted backup password!) so it includes passwords, Wi-Fi settings, browsing history, Health data, and call history. For safety, consider backing up to both iCloud and your Mac. iCloud backups are typically more straightforward and avoid issues like unreliable USB cables. If you don’t usually back up to iCloud, Apple offers temporary iCloud storage for 21 days when transferring to a new iPhone, with another 21 days if your new iPhone doesn’t arrive in time. To make a temporary iCloud backup, go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone and tap Get Started under Prepare for New iPhone. The temporary backup sticks around for 7 days after you restore it to the new iPhone.
4. If you have an Apple Watch, you can transfer it to the new iPhone during setup. If the automatic transfer doesn’t work for some reason, you can manually unpair the Apple Watch from the old iPhone and pair it again with the new one. If you choose the manual route with a cellular Apple Watch, you’ll be prompted to keep or remove your cellular plan; be sure to keep the plan to continue using it after you re-pair.
5. If you ordered your new iPhone through Apple and linked it to your cellular carrier account at purchase, or bought it directly from your carrier, your phone number usually transfers automatically during activation. If the transfer doesn’t happen automatically and your carrier supports eSIM Quick Transfer, Setup Assistant will guide you through transferring your eSIM directly from your old iPhone.
6. Use Apple’s Quick Start to set up the new iPhone. Put your old iPhone nearby, follow the on-screen instructions, and use it to scan the animation that appears on the new iPhone. When Quick Start asks how you want to transfer your data, you have two main choices: iCloud or a direct transfer. Neither is especially quick, so start only when you have plenty of time. (If your old iPhone isn’t available or Quick Start fails, you can instead set up the new iPhone manually and restore from an iCloud or Mac backup.)
   • Download from iCloud: Restore from your old iPhone’s iCloud backup. This approach lets you begin using the new iPhone while apps and data continue downloading in the background. After connecting the new iPhone to Wi-Fi and choosing Download from iCloud, select the correct backup—probably the most recent one you just created.
   • Transfer from iPhone: Transfer your apps, data, and settings directly from the old iPhone, either wirelessly or with a wired connection—a wired connection can be useful if wireless migration proves unreliable, but there’s no way to know which will be faster. With a direct transfer, regardless of wired or wireless, both iPhones remain unavailable until the process finishes. For wireless transfers, keep them near each other and plugged into power.
   • Finder or iTunes: Although Apple still supports restoring your old iPhone’s data from a backup saved to your Mac, it gets the least attention these days, and we would resort to it only if the Quick Start methods failed. When you get to the Transfer Apps & Data screen on the new iPhone, tap From Mac or PC, connect the new iPhone to your Mac, open a Finder window (or iTunes on macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier), select the iPhone, click Restore Backup, and choose the appropriate backup.
7. Complete post-transfer tasks. Some app data needs to sync, so open the Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps to check for your information; it may take a few minutes to populate. Verify you can make and receive calls. You’ll need to add your payment cards to Apple Pay, and transfer or re-add any transit or ID cards that don’t appear in Wallet. If necessary, pair your Apple Watch with the new iPhone. Also, pair your Bluetooth accessories—you shouldn’t need to re-pair AirPods, which sync automatically via iCloud. Apps might ask you to log in again and grant notification permissions, and you might need to re-download content and in-app purchases.
8. If you rely on Apple’s Passwords app for passwords, passkeys, and two-factor authentication codes, everything should sync via your iCloud account, assuming you have Passwords & Keychain enabled in iCloud. 1Password and other password managers also usually sync via an online account. Two-factor authentication apps like Authy and Google Authenticator may need additional configuration—confirm that your codes appear on the new iPhone. Regardless, verify that you can log in to key accounts before wiping the old phone.
9. If your employer or school requires you to register your iPhone for access to organizational systems, verify that everything works before erasing your old phone. Authentication apps, VPNs, device-management systems, and other security services may treat the new iPhone as a new device and require you to sign in again, re-register it, or obtain approval from your IT department. Test these services on the new iPhone while the old one is still available in case you need it to approve a login or transfer an account.

Although Apple works hard to make transferring from an old iPhone to a new one as smooth as possible, some things may not transfer perfectly. We strongly recommend keeping your old iPhone for a week or so to ensure the new one can do everything the old one did. During that time, thoroughly test the new iPhone, checking each app you need. Once you’re confident the new iPhone is working well, follow Apple’s instructions for erasing the old iPhone before selling, trading it in, or giving it away.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: Getting a new iPhone 18? Don’t rush the setup. A little prep work now can save you from missing data, apps, and settings later. Here’s what to do before and after transferring from your old iPhone.

The easiest, built-in solution to this admittedly first-world problem for Apple users is Safari Reader on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, which you can use to “hide navigation menus and other distracting items.”

Apple is careful not to say that Reader hides ads—which it does, most of the time—to avoid conflict with publications that rely on advertising, some of which may even be placed by Apple itself.

Beyond hiding distracting items, Reader displays articles as a single page and automatically generates a summary and table of contents for longer articles to make navigation easier.

Even better, you can configure Safari to show articles in Reader automatically for specific websites, so you don’t have to turn it on manually for each article.

Here’s how to use it.

Switch to Reader

Since Reader’s reformatting would break many non-article Web pages, Safari offers Reader only when you’re viewing a page that it can reformat. As a reminder, Safari on the iPhone and iPad shows a brief “Reader Available” mention in the address bar when you open a Reader-compatible page.

To display a compatible page in Reader, tap the website button at the left of the address bar ➊, then tap Show Reader ➋. Safari immediately reformats the page, removing many extraneous items and potentially changing the background and font.

The reformatting can be even more significant in Safari on the Mac, where websites often add columns of ads, pop-ups over the text you want to read, and more.

When Reader decides a page is long enough and has enough headings, it automatically generates a summary and table of contents, displaying them in expandable sections at the top. This feature is, frankly, a little random. We couldn’t always predict when Reader would generate those sections, and it even sometimes varied by device.

Adjust the Look of Reader

By default, Reader uses a white background with Apple’s San Francisco sans-serif font. That’s entirely acceptable, but you can switch to a sepia, gray, or black background, choose from a selection of serif and sans-serif fonts, and increase or decrease the font size.

Tap the page icon at the left of the address bar to pick from those options.

The presentation looks a little different on the iPad (left) and Mac (right), but the options are essentially the same.

Use Reader Automatically

For websites you regularly read, it’s best to set Reader to kick in automatically. It won’t reformat pages that don’t make sense, such as section pages that contain links to multiple articles. How you enable this option varies by platform:

• iPhone and iPad: Whether or not you’re in Reader, tap the icon at the left of the address bar, tap the ••• button, scroll down in the page menu, and turn on Use Reader Automatically.
  
• Mac: When you’re not in Reader, click the website icon at the left of the address bar, choose Website Settings, and select “Use Reader when available.”
  

If you want to manage which sites use Reader automatically all together, on the iPhone and iPad, open Settings > Apps > Safari > Reader (way at the bottom), and on the Mac in Safari, choose Safari > Settings > Websites.

Helpfully, Safari syncs appropriate website settings between devices via iCloud, so once you set a site to use Reader automatically, all your other devices will default to that as well.

Switch Back to Standard View

Although Reader works well most of the time, it’s possible to run across an article with interactive elements that don’t display in Reader. If something seems wrong about an article in Reader, you can switch back to the standard presentation of the page. Just tap the page icon at the left of the address bar and tap Hide Reader.

The hardest part of using Reader is getting started. Once you’ve become accustomed to switching into it and setting it to trigger automatically for websites you visit regularly, you’ll find reading the Web easier, more relaxing, and less likely to tempt you down a rabbit hole of additional content.

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

Social Media: Tired of ads and pop-ups interrupting your reading? Safari Reader reformats Web articles for distraction-free viewing on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac—and it can even activate automatically.

The result has been a democratization of development, much as happened with desktop publishing. The Macintosh and PageMaker made it possible for almost anyone to produce a newsletter or brochure, but they did not turn every user into a professional designer, illustrator, or prepress specialist. AI can now produce working software for people who could never have written it themselves, but generating code is only part of building a reliable, trustworthy system.

Today, if you have a repetitive task that’s annoying to do but doesn’t warrant hiring a developer, you can use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to help you create an AppleScript, shell script, Mac or iPhone app, or even a full-fledged Web app. However, if you’re going to dip your toe into AI-assisted development, you need to be careful. Professional developers know to watch out for numerous pitfalls, but if you’re using an AI, it’s up to you to make sure the AI takes them into account. Also, be aware that you’re still ultimately responsible for what you create with AI.

What Could Go Wrong?

In AI-powered development, there are two broad failure categories: problems with the development agent itself and problems with the finished product.

The AI world has moved past basic chatbots to agents that can look up information, change files, write and execute code, drive apps, and more. That makes them much more capable, but it also creates a situation where they could change or delete data, expose confidential data, or install software that itself creates a vulnerability.

On the other side of the equation is the finished product. If it’s local code, it could run but produce incorrect results, fill up a drive with data, overwrite important data, or cause crashes. A networked app could also generate excessive traffic, leak or expose confidential data, or serve as an entry point into your network.

Take AI Development in Steps

Professional developers aren’t born that way. They start with simple tasks and tackle more involved projects as they gain experience. With AI handling the programming for you, it can be tempting to take on a major app, but it’s safer to start with simple data analysis and local automation tools before moving on to full-fledged apps and networked systems. The process won’t turn you into a professional developer, but you’ll have a greater appreciation for all the things they have to consider.

Read-only Experiments

The best way to get started with AI development is with data analysis that would otherwise require you to build spreadsheet formulas, parse large CSV files, compare exported files, and the like. This may not seem like development, but when you drag the files into a chatbot conversation and ask it to work on them, you’ll notice that it does so by writing and executing one or more scripts, often in Python.

With this sort of AI work, you’re limited only by your data and your imagination. You could analyze an event registration or inventory spreadsheet to find trends, get a human-readable summary of errors in a massive log file, or compare data between two differently formatted CSV files to see which people appear in both.

The reason to start here is that you can easily detect errors, and nothing you do can change the data. Incorrect results may still look convincing, however, so compare them against known examples, verify totals, and spot-check the underlying records.

Local Automation Scripts

The next type of AI development to try is local automation via AppleScript or shell scripts. (If you’re uncertain how to execute a script, remember that you can always ask the AI for detailed instructions.) You could build customized scripts for batch-renaming files, creating future calendar events, manipulating images, and even reformatting HTML files.

However, because scripts can modify and delete data, you need to be more careful here. When possible, have the script create new output rather than modifying the original. Otherwise, work on a copy and ask the AI to:

• Warn you about risks or ambiguities in your request
• Preview exactly what it plans to change
• Act only after you confirm the preview
• Log what it changed
• Record enough information to reverse its actions

Standalone Mac or iOS App

Apple’s App Store contains a vast number of apps, but it’s time-consuming to search for apps that promise to do what you want and test them to see if they actually do. All too often, they don’t.

With AI and Apple’s Xcode development environment, you can now create native apps for all your Apple devices. Needless to say, even setting up Xcode is complicated, but once again, an AI agent can do much of it for you and walk you through the rest of the steps. The hard part is often figuring out where some interface control is located, so don’t be shy about pasting a screenshot into the chat and saying, “I don’t see that control—where is it?”

The sky is the limit when it comes to developing your own apps for personal or internal use. You could create an injury rehab tracker, a publishing production checker, a custom document converter, a specialized camera app that adds metadata to photos, and more. Any workflow that’s awkward or doesn’t meet your needs is a candidate. Mac apps can be shared by copying; iPhone and iPad apps must go through Apple’s TestFlight. Again, ask for help.

When it comes to safety, as long as the apps are for personal or internal use, you mostly need to focus on app reliability and data integrity. Make sure to emphasize that the AI should build and run automated tests on every change, and when you’re testing, comment on anything that seems wrong—don’t settle. Specify that data integrity is paramount, require automatic backups, and allow for manual exports.

The bar gets much higher if you plan to distribute the app more widely. You’ll need to consider your obligations regarding support, compatibility, privacy, distribution, and long-term maintenance. An AI can help with some of those issues—be sure to ask it if there are any ways that user privacy could be abused, for instance—but the buck stops with you.

If you’re contemplating selling your app, you’ll also need to confirm that the licenses for any external code, images, fonts, and other components permit commercial distribution. Be extremely cautious if you plan to build a business around an app!

Networked Systems

With great power comes great responsibility. You must be much more careful with networked systems, especially if they’ll be accessible over the Internet. But it can be compelling to build such systems—you could make an equipment checkout system, an event registration system that goes beyond Google Forms, a shared inventory system, a document submission service, or a dashboard that aggregates live data from multiple services.

The problem is that the list of considerations goes well  beyond app reliability and data integrity, including these questions:

• What data and operations must be protected? Some data may be confidential, and personally identifiable information is especially important to protect. Authentication credentials, API keys, and other secrets should never be embedded in source code, prompts, logs, or shared configuration files. Instead, store them in a system designed to manage secrets and limit who and what can access them.
• Who may perform each action, and how is that enforced? Define user roles and limit each role’s permissions to only what is necessary. You don’t want a novice support representative accidentally deleting the database.
• How do you contain hostile inputs and abusive use? Attackers will probe what happens when they submit malicious URLs, API requests, filenames, uploaded files, Web hooks, and other unexpected input. To reduce your exposure, validate all input, limit its size and complexity, and restrict how frequently users can trigger operations.
• How do you separate development, testing, and production? Once you go live, it’s essential to separate these different environments so mistakes made during development don’t take down the live system and data generated during testing doesn’t contaminate the production database. Make sure to separate data and credentials as well.
• How will the system handle simultaneous requests, retries, and partial failures? Network requests can arrive twice, overlap, or fail midway through multi-step operations. Work with the AI to prevent these sorts of issues, which can result in duplicate payments, registrations, messages, or inconsistent records.
• How will you detect and contain attacks, outages, and unexpected behavior? Decide what to log, what conditions should trigger alerts, how access can be revoked, and if it’s possible to isolate a compromised component without shutting down the entire system.

Finally, assign an owner before putting any significant networked system into use. That person must be responsible for investigating failures, restoring data, updating dependencies, renewing credentials and certificates, responding to vulnerabilities, and eventually retiring the system. An internal application that nobody maintains may become less reliable and less secure with every operating-system update, expired credential, and newly discovered vulnerability.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Boonyakiat Chaloemchavalid)

Social Media: Thinking about using AI to write code? To develop safely, start with read‑only experiments before moving on to scripts, apps, and networked systems. Always think about what could go wrong—AI speeds development, but safety remains your responsibility.

Not all everyday communications require strict privacy. Most of us prefer privacy, of course—few people want their dinner plans published for the world to see—but there are typically no consequences of exposure greater than mild embarrassment (McDonald’s again?). But even ordinary people regularly need to share information that could damage their relationships, finances, or careers if it fell into the wrong hands.

Passwords are the most obvious example because their entire point is secrecy. But other sensitive data includes credit card details, bank account numbers, tax documents, retirement planning materials, and health-related information. When you need to share such data, how do you do it securely?

Data at Rest and in Transit

Before exploring specific solutions, you need to think about how information is protected when it’s in transit between systems and when it’s stored somewhere:

In transit: To prevent eavesdropping, focus on communication channels that are encrypted between you and the destination:

• Between your app and a server: Nearly all Internet-enabled apps, including all Web browsers, use SSL/TLS to protect their connections to servers. A lock icon in a Web browser’s address bar indicates HTTPS encryption, or you can look for https at the start of a website’s URL.
• End-to-end encryption: Even better is end-to-end encryption, which ensures that not even the service provider can decrypt your traffic. iMessage (blue-bubble conversations), WhatsApp, and Signal provide end-to-end encryption protection (though WhatsApp archives are readable by other Meta apps). SMS messages are not encrypted at all, and RCS conversations only support encryption with the latest Apple and Google updates, plus carrier support. Both SMS and RCS appear as green-bubble conversations.

At rest: Stored data—whether on your computer, at remote email servers, or in the cloud—needs protection too. Two approaches help:

• Per-file encryption: Encrypt data before sending so even if an attacker figures out how to access the file, it can’t be decrypted without a password. Send the password through a completely different communication channel (called “out-of-band”)—for example, share an encrypted file via email but send the password via Messages.
• Time- or access-expiring links: Send a link to the information that expires after a short period or after a limited number of views, thereby shrinking the window during which a breach could occur.

Choosing the Right Solution

The best approach for any given communication depends on four factors:

• Audience: What are your recipients’ technical capabilities? Messages is easy and secure, but only Apple users can access it. Email reaches everyone but offers less protection. A password-protected PDF is probably easier for less-technical users than an encrypted disk image.
• Content type: Sharing a password differs from sharing a document, which in turn is different from sharing a collection of files.
• Importance: How problematic would it be if the sensitive information you’re sharing fell into the wrong hands? There’s a world of difference between the password for a club discussion forum and the credentials to your retirement account.
• Persistence: Does your recipient need to glance at something only once, or do they need to retain a copy permanently?

Eight Secure Sharing Methods

With all that in mind, here are eight secure methods of sharing information that you can employ in different situations:

1. Use a secure portal when available: Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals who regularly receive sensitive information often use secure customer portals or services like DocuSign for sending messages, documents, and files. Use whatever system they provide unless you have good reason to doubt their IT competence.
2. iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp: For quick sharing of sensitive information, these end-to-end encrypted messaging services work well. They’re particularly useful for sending information that isn’t useful on its own—for instance, send a login URL and username via email but the password separately via Messages.
3. Self-destructing links: Services like 1ty.me and One-Time Secret generate encrypted links that contain text. Once the recipient views the link, the server deletes the data, and the link self-destructs. If the recipient reports the link was already used, you know it was compromised. Be aware that some email systems automatically scan links, which could trigger premature self-destruction.
   
4. Password manager sharing: 1Password, Bitwarden, and some other password managers (but not Apple’s Passwords) offer secure sharing features that make it easy to share credentials with someone who needs to access a particular account. You can create links with expiration dates, limit access to specific email addresses, and cause links to self-destruct after being viewed once.
   
5. Password-protected PDF: For documents that could be printed, create a password-protected PDF. From nearly any app, choose File > Print, click the PDF menu at the bottom, and choose Save As PDF. In the Save dialog that appears, click Security Options, select “Require password to open document,” and enter a strong password (online services can remove weak passwords). Share the file however you like, but send the password through a different channel, preferably via an expiring link.
   
6. Password-protected disk image: For Mac users sharing files that can’t easily become PDFs, or for sharing collections of files, create a password-protected disk image. In Disk Utility, create a new compressed disk image (File > New Image > Image from Folder), choose an encryption option (256-bit for more sensitive information), and enter a strong password. Again, share the password separately, ideally via an expiring link.
   
7. Password-protected Zip archive: A password-protected Zip archive serves the same purpose and may be easier for Windows users to extract. Apps like Keka and BetterZip can create these. For the fastest approach, open Terminal, type zip -er ~/Desktop/filename.zip (with a space at the end), drag in the files you want to compress, press Return, and enter your desired password when prompted.
8. Time-expiring cloud storage links: Some cloud storage services offer links that expire after a specified time. Dropbox Professional supports this feature, enabling you to share files while ensuring that links become useless in the event of a breach.
   

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for securely sharing sensitive information. Match your approach to the sensitivity of the data, your recipient’s capabilities, and how long they need access.

(Featured image by iStock.com/metamorworks)

Social Media: Need to share passwords, financial details, or sensitive documents securely? Email alone isn’t safe enough. Learn eight practical methods—from self-destructing links to encrypted disk images—that protect your data in transit and at rest.

If you mostly ignore Control Center on your Mac, it’s worth another look in Tahoe. The big win of Control Center is that it provides quick access to numerous controls without occupying valuable space in the menu bar, a limitation that MacBook users regularly encounter. Now that you can personalize Control Center, it’s much more useful than before.

Before we explain how to customize Control Center, let’s look at the basics.

Open and Use Control Center

To open Control Center, click its icon at the right side of the menu bar or use its Fn-C keyboard shortcut. It always appears in the top-right corner of the screen (below left). You may notice a colored dot next to the Control Center icon: orange means the microphone is in use, green tells you a camera is in use, purple indicates that system audio is being recorded, and an arrow means an app is using your location.

Some controls, like Dark Mode and Screenshot, are simple buttons that you click to toggle a setting or trigger an action. You’ll also see sliders, such as for Display Brightness and Sound Volume. Many controls, such as Display, open separate panels with additional controls (below right).

Customize Control Center

To begin customizing Control Center, don’t look in System Settings anymore—instead, click the Edit Controls button at the bottom of Control Center. That displays a ⊖ button on each control, adds eight empty single-button slots at the bottom, and opens the Control library.

Once here, you can:

• Remove existing controls: Click a control’s ⊖ button to remove it from Control Center. You can always put it back later, although the lack of a label in Control Center can make it tricky to find in the Control library, because you may not know what you removed.
• Resize controls: You can usually resize a control by Control-clicking it and choosing Small, Medium, or Large. Small controls occupy a single slot; medium controls occupy two side-by-side slots; and large controls occupy four slots, either as a 2-by-2 grid or a 4-by-1 line.
• Rearrange the order: Drag controls in the grid to reorder them. You can move one only to a position where it’ll fit, so you may need to resize other controls to make space.
• Add new controls: More on this below, but in short, you add new controls from the Control library window that appears to the left of Control Center when you click Edit Controls.

When you’re finished customizing Control Center in these ways, click Done at the bottom of the Control library.

Adding Controls to Control Center

Apple gives you two ways to add controls from the Control library:

• Drag a control in the main pane to the desired Control Center spot.
• Hover over the desired control, click the green ⊕ button that appears, and choose Add to Control Center. You can also choose Add to Menu Bar to put the control there for even quicker access.

To discover what controls are available, either scroll through the All Controls collection or select a particular category in the sidebar. You can also search for controls by name.

Nearly all the controls have been added to the library in advance by Apple, but there are two exceptions:

• Third-party controls: Independent developers can create their own. For instance, Flexibits’ Cardhop provides controls for adding and searching for contacts.
  
• Shortcuts: Apple’s automation app, Shortcuts, enables you to open any app from Control Center, run any shortcut, or show a collection of shortcuts. Anything you can create in Shortcuts can be triggered from Control Center. (Don’t be intimidated by Shortcuts; you can ask any AI chatbot to help you develop a shortcut.)
  

Don’t worry about messing up Control Center while you’re experimenting with different controls. You can always reset it in System Settings > Menu Bar by scrolling to the bottom and clicking Reset Control Center.

One final tip. A little control may appear at the top of Control Center at times. It’s a privacy notification that tells you whether an app has used your location recently (like Weather), used the camera (like FaceTime), recorded your screen (like Screenshot), or engaged in some other activity Apple thinks you might want to know about. Click it to learn a little more.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/guteksk7)

Social Media: Stop wasting menu bar space. macOS 26 Tahoe’s revamped Control Center lets you add, remove, resize, and rearrange controls—including third-party ones—to fit your needs.

In April 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Operation Masquerade, which disrupted a campaign by a hacking unit of Russia’s GRU that compromised thousands of home and small-office routers. The attackers exploited known vulnerabilities in TP-Link routers to hijack DNS settings and redirect victims to fake Web pages that harvested passwords, authentication tokens, emails, and other sensitive information.

The attack was opportunistic: the GRU cast a wide net, compromising routers indiscriminately, then filtered for targets of intelligence value. Your data may not be interesting to Russian intelligence, but the same vulnerabilities can be exploited by criminal hackers seeking financial data, credentials for identity theft, or devices to conscript into botnets.

Unlike corporate networks with dedicated IT staff, home routers tend to be installed once and forgotten—sometimes for a decade or more. That old router your AV installer set up with a default password has become a security liability for you, for your employer, and for the world. Here are actions you can take to fix that, in rough order of importance.

Replace Unsupported Routers

Routers can last many years, but manufacturers eventually stop releasing firmware updates. Once that happens, known vulnerabilities go unpatched, and the router becomes ripe for attack. Check your manufacturer’s end-of-life lists (easily found with a search) to see if your model is still supported. If it’s not receiving security updates, replace it regardless of how well it still works.

When shopping for a replacement, look for routers with automatic firmware updates from a well-known manufacturer with a track record of long-term security support, such as Asus, Eero, Google Nest, Netgear, or Ubiquiti. Avoid bargain-basement devices from unknown manufacturers—any initial savings aren’t worth the security risk.

Keep Firmware Updated

Router firmware updates patch security vulnerabilities, and the GRU attack exploited a known vulnerability that had an available fix. Enable automatic firmware updates if your router supports them—many modern routers do. If yours doesn’t support automatic updates, set a monthly reminder to check manually. Because new vulnerabilities are discovered regularly, keeping a router secure is an ongoing process, not a one-time task.

Change Default Passwords

Every router ships with default administrator credentials—often printed on a sticker on the device itself. These defaults are widely known and easily found online. Change the admin password immediately after setup to something strong and unique, and store it in your password manager.

Similarly, change the default Wi-Fi network name (SSID) and password. Use WPA3 for wireless traffic encryption if available; most modern routers support compatibility mode that lets older devices connect while newer ones benefit from stronger security. Never use WEP or leave your network open.

Turn Off Remote Management

Many routers offer a remote login option that allows access to the administrative interface from elsewhere on the Internet (rather than within the router’s own network). Unless you specifically need this capability, deactivate it to reduce your exposure to external attacks. This setting is different from the app-based management provided by some modern routers, which uses a secure account and an outbound connection initiated by the router to enable remote access. App-based management is safe as long as your account password is strong, unique, and protected with two-factor authentication.

Check DNS Settings

As seen in the recent attacks targeting some TP-Link routers, attackers who gain access often change DNS servers to redirect you to malicious websites without your knowledge. Verify that your router’s DNS settings are either obtained automatically from your ISP or point to a reputable service such as Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8), or Quad9 (9.9.9.9). Unfamiliar IP addresses in these settings are a red flag that your router may have been compromised.

Optional Security Improvements

If you make sure you are using a router that’s still receiving security updates, are installing those updates, and have changed the default admin and Wi-Fi passwords, you’ve achieved an entirely acceptable level of security. With a little more time and effort, you can increase security further:

• Disable WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup): If your router supports this push-button pairing feature, turn it off to protect against known vulnerabilities that haven’t been patched for over a decade.
• Segment your network: If you have Internet of Things (IoT) devices—such as cameras, smart TVs, or smart home gear—consider creating a separate network for them. If one is compromised, network separation prevents it from accessing your computers or phones. However, some devices need to be set up or controlled by an app on the same network, so you may need to keep such devices on your main network.
• Consider your ISP gateway: Many ISPs provide gateways that combine the modem and router hardware. If you use an ISP-provided router, make sure you can control the necessary security settings. If you instead prefer to use your own router, make sure to turn off its routing (switch to “bridge mode”) and Wi-Fi features to avoid creating another entry point to your network.
• Monitor your network: Periodically review which devices are connected to your network if your router’s admin interface or companion app makes that possible. Unfamiliar devices could indicate unauthorized access (though it’s more likely you didn’t realize some device connects to Wi-Fi because they seldom identify themselves well).
• Back up your network settings: To simplify reconfiguring your router or setting up a new one, create a backup of key settings. It could be as simple as a set of screenshots.

Home network security isn’t complicated, but it does require some thought at setup and occasional attention. If you’d like help with your network or a pointer to the routers we currently recommend, get in touch.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Igor Nikushin)

Social Media: Russian military intelligence recently exploited vulnerable home routers to steal passwords worldwide. You can keep your home network secure by replacing unsupported hardware, enabling automatic updates, and changing default passwords.

Text expansion speeds up typing words or phrases that you use regularly, and it’s especially helpful for character combinations that your fingers find awkward—just try touch-typing “Hyundai IONIQ 5” or “acetaminophen.” Apple has long offered text expansion capabilities in macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, and third-party utilities take them even further.

Configuring and Using Text Expansion

To configure the built-in text expansion on the Mac, look in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements; in iOS and iPadOS, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. In each, a text replacement consists of a shortcut and a replacement phrase.

Then, in almost any app, type the shortcut, followed by a space or a punctuation character, and its phrase will replace it. If text expansion doesn’t work in a Mac app like Mail or Safari, make sure Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement is selected.

If you’re signed into the same Apple Account on all your devices, text expansions sync between them automatically. So, you can type omw and tap the Space bar to have “On my way!” typed out for you, regardless of what device you’re using.

Tip: To create replacements more quickly, you can export a list of text replacements, edit the list, and re-import it; Apple provides instructions. This export/import capability also lets you share text replacements with someone else.

What Text to Expand

Replacements can be as short or long as you like—up to about 1900 characters—and can contain anything you can type from the keyboard, including spaces, returns, symbols, accented characters, and emoji. It can be hard to know where to start, but once you try text expansion, possibilities quickly become obvious. A few common categories include:

• Your email address, phone number, and postal address
• Boilerplate text for common email replies (“To subscribe to our mailing list…”)
• Email signoffs (“Sincerely, your close personal Internet friend…”)
• Frequently shared URLs or email addresses (https://www.apple.com/feedback/)
• Long scientific, medical, or technical terms (esophagogastroduodenoscopy)
• Proper nouns with unusual spelling, capitalization, or accents (Zoë Saldaña)
• Words you consistently misspell or mistype (teh)
• Unix commands with arguments (ls -la)

Shortcuts are usually shorter than their replacements, but you can also use text expansion to simplify entering individual characters that are hard to access.

• Commonly used emoji (🙄 or 👍)
• Special characters (½ or →)

One helpful convention is to start shortcuts for special characters with a colon. For example, :roll for 🙄 or :tu for 👍. The colon prefix makes these shortcuts easy to remember and prevents accidental expansions. Make sure not to create shortcuts that you’ll also want to type normally. It might seem like a good idea to use mm for “Mickey Mouse,” but that will get in the way of writing about 35mm film.

Third-Party Text Expansion

With such a useful feature built into macOS and iOS, why would you want to spend money on a third-party utility like TextExpander (macOS and iOS), Typinator (macOS and iOS), or TypeIt4Me (macOS)?

Apple’s built-in text expansion works well for most everyday uses, but it has some limitations—its interface is cramped, it doesn’t work in every app, and you can’t include formatted text or images in your expansions. Third-party utilities fill those gaps.

They can include styled text and graphics in expansions, insert the current date and time, respect case when expanding abbreviations, include the contents of the clipboard in expanded text, automatically fix common typos, and much more.

So think about which bits of text you might want to expand automatically, and give Apple’s built-in text expansion feature a try today! If it seems constraining after a while, a third-party app can take text expansion to the next level.

(Featured image generated by Adam Engst with ChatGPT)

Social Media: Tired of typing the same email address, phone number, or tricky words over and over? Text expansion on Mac and iOS can save you keystrokes every day.

To access the controls, you either lightly press the Camera Control or swipe along it. From there, lightly double-press to enter a setting, swipe to adjust it, and lightly double-press again to go back. A full press takes a photo no matter where you are in the controls.

While the Camera Control’s default configuration provides access to everything it can do, that can be overwhelming for people who want to take quick snapshots without inadvertently changing settings like exposure and depth. We recommend taking a spin through the options in Settings > Camera > Camera Control to configure it for your needs. Here’s what each option does and when you might want to change it.

Launch Camera

Although most people use Apple’s Camera app, you can configure the Camera Control to open other camera apps as well. (Plus, if you want to disable the Camera Control entirely, select None.) Apps must be specifically designed to work with the Camera Control, so not all third-party camera apps will appear in this list.

Click to Open Camera

By default, a single click on the Camera Control opens the Camera app. If you often find yourself accidentally opening the camera—perhaps when pulling it from a pocket—you can switch to Double Click, which requires two presses to launch the app.

Require Screen On

The Require Screen On switch provides another way to reduce inadvertent camera activations. When selected, pressing the Camera Control opens the Camera app only if the screen is already on. If it’s not, the first press of the Camera Control turns on the screen and a second press opens the Camera app. Leave this switch off if you want one-click access to the camera even when the iPhone’s screen is off—ideal for the fastest shots.

Customize Controls

Along with launching the Camera app and taking a photo, the Camera Control lets you access and adjust numerous camera-related settings using its touch-sensitive surface. If you often find yourself accidentally enmeshed in camera settings when you just want to take a photo, consider turning off Camera Adjustments entirely.

But for those who like tweaking settings, the Camera Control provides a shortcut that doesn’t require tapping the screen. In the Customize screen, you choose which settings appear when you lightly press the Camera Control while using the camera.

Above the list of controls, you’ll find a gesture setting that determines how you access them—via a light press, a long swipe, or both. You can choose one or both, but turning both off blocks access to the controls entirely.

The available controls include:

• Exposure: Brightens or darkens the overall scene
• Depth: Adjusts background blur intensity
• Zoom: Switches between zoom levels
• Cameras: Switches between the front camera and the rear cameras
• Styles: Changes the active Photographic Style
• Tone: Adjusts the mood by lightening or deepening tones

You can turn each setting on or off and drag them into your preferred order. If you rarely use Tone but frequently take selfies, for instance, you might turn off Tone and move Cameras to the top of the list. Fewer options mean faster access to the ones you actually use.

Don’t feel shy about using only one or two controls, or about turning off the adjustments completely. There’s nothing worse than missing a great photo because you’ve inadvertently gotten lost in the controls.

One final note: enabling the Clean Preview switch hides the Camera app’s on-screen buttons and overlays—like the shutter button, zoom controls, and mode switcher—while you’re making adjustments using the Camera Control, giving you an unobstructed view of the scene.

Lock Focus and Exposure

When enabled, this option lets you lock both focus and exposure. Lightly press and hold the Camera Control, and then keep your finger on it to maintain those focus and exposure settings as you reframe the shot. (You’ll see AE/AF LOCK at the top of the viewfinder.) This option can be useful when shooting a subject against a bright background or in changing light conditions—the camera won’t readjust as you reframe. Release your finger to unlock. If you’ve never needed this feature, leave it off to simplify Camera Control behavior.

Launch Visual Intelligence

There are two more settings at the bottom of the Camera Control settings screen. Outside of actively shooting a photo, pressing and holding the Camera Control provides access to Visual Intelligence, the Apple Intelligence feature that lets you point the camera at an object and learn more about it. It can be a quick way to ask ChatGPT about something you see or do a Google search for similar items, but if you don’t find it useful, turn it off.

Accessibility Options

This option is a shortcut to Settings > Accessibility > Camera Control, where you can adjust the pressure sensitivity and timing for the light press, light double-press, and double-click gestures. If you find the Camera Control too sensitive or not responsive enough, these options let you fine-tune it to match your preferences.

Overall, we like how the Camera Control makes it easier to take photos quickly, but from what we’ve seen, many people get confused by the many possible adjustments. If that’s you, turn them off so the Camera Control becomes a straightforward shutter button.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: The Camera Control on the iPhone 16 and later is more than a shutter button—it’s a touch-sensitive shortcut to zoom, exposure, depth, and more. Here’s how to configure it so it works for you or doesn’t get in your way.

Taking advantage of the Action button isn’t hard, but there are obstacles. The Ring/Silent switch had only one function, whereas the Action button offers so many options that it’s easy to fall prey to decision paralysis. Also, because the Action button is configurable, it behaves differently even if you leave it set to Silent Mode. The Ring/Silent switch was a physical switch that also showed its state with an orange indicator. With the Action button, you can’t tell at a glance if Silent Mode is on, and activating it requires a relatively long press-and-hold. Finally, the Action button’s ultimate power lies in its Controls and Shortcuts options, but many users are unaware of the wide-ranging possibilities these unlock.

So let’s look at how to make the most of the Action button. To configure the Action button, go to Settings > Action Button and swipe through the choices. The choice on screen when you exit Settings will be active. Although there are no bad choices here, many of the options Apple provides can be activated just as easily through Control Center or Siri, so you might not want to dedicate the Action button to them.

• Silent Mode: Toggle call and alert sounds on and off. This is the default setting, but unless you regularly need to toggle the ringer, it’s not worth dedicating the Action button to such a seldom-used option. You can toggle Silent Mode in Control Center just as easily.
• Focus: Activate or switch Focus modes such as Do Not Disturb. We recommend using Focus sparingly because it can block desired notifications, but if you’re a fan, the Action button might be a good way to switch between them. Focus modes are also easy to select in Control Center and turn on with “Siri, turn on Do Not Disturb.”
• Camera: Launch the Camera app. If your iPhone has the Camera Control (as do all Action button-equipped models except the iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max and iPhone 16e), the Camera Control is the best way to open the Camera, but the Action button might still be helpful for opening the Camera app to a specific mode: Photo, Selfie, Video, Portrait, or Portrait Selfie.
• Visual Intelligence: Launch Apple’s AI-powered object recognition feature. Again, pressing and holding the Camera Control (if available) is a better way to access Visual Intelligence.
• Flashlight: Turn the flashlight on or off. This may be a good choice if you use the flashlight regularly, but if so, you’re probably already accustomed to tapping its icon on the iPhone’s Lock Screen. If your hands are too full, try “Siri, turn on the flashlight.”
• Voice Memo: Start recording audio in the Voice Memos app. If you use Voice Memos heavily, you may like this use of the Action button. Alternatively, just say, “Siri, record a voice memo.”
• Recognize Music: Use Shazam to identify music that’s playing nearby or on your iPhone. Another way to invoke Shazam quickly is to ask, “Siri, what’s playing?”
• Translate: Starts listening to translate between the default languages you set up in the Translate app. This use of the Action button is a great shortcut if you’re traveling in another country and need quick translations, but most people don’t need it every day.
• Magnifier: Launch the Magnifier app to make it easier to see tiny text and small objects. Those with low vision may particularly appreciate this use of the Action button, but the Magnifier app is also easily accessed from a Control Center button or by saying, “Siri, open Magnifier.”
• Controls: Invoke any Control Center control. Here’s where things get interesting! Starting with iOS 18, iPhone apps can create controls in Control Center. With the Controls option, you can choose any available control, so you could have the Action button start a ChatGPT conversation, add a task to TickTick, create a new event in BusyCal, or myriad other options. We strongly encourage you to scroll through the available controls to see if any catch your interest.
  
• Shortcut: Activate any custom Shortcut for personalized actions. The previous Controls choice is brilliant, but what if you want even more options? With Shortcuts, you can create custom actions that can even leverage multiple apps to do exactly what you want. For instance, you could create a shortcut that takes a photo of an expense receipt and sends it to a specific email address, all triggered by a long press on the Action button. The sky is the limit here.
  
• Accessibility: Quick access to accessibility features like VoiceOver, Zoom, Speak Screen, Apple Watch Mirroring, Live Captions, Conversation Boost, and more. Don’t assume these options are only for people with disabilities; many have broader utility.
• No Action: The final option is No Action, which is useful only if you accidentally press the Action button frequently and don’t want it to do anything.

So there you have it! If you’re not currently using the Action button, take a spin through the available options to see which can make a difference in your everyday iPhone experience.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Social Media: Your iPhone’s Action button can do much more than toggle Silent Mode. Try it for quick translations or voice memos—or explore the many options in Controls and Shortcuts to trigger nearly any action with a long press.

Unlike last year, when Apple was releasing new Apple Intelligence features with each macOS 15 Sequoia update, the company launched nearly all the promised new features in Tahoe with version 26.0. There’s no need to wait for the more personalized Siri upgrade Apple promised for 2026—we won’t know how good it is until it ships.

Tahoe is now stable and polished enough for most users to upgrade with confidence, particularly on Apple silicon Macs. While there are some minor concerns—such as dissatisfaction with Liquid Glass, higher baseline resource usage, a few battery and performance issues, and the removal of Launchpad—none are deal-breakers. Of course, Apple will continue releasing macOS updates in 2026. You can expect macOS 26.3 in January, 26.4 in late March or early April, and 26.5 in May, along with several security and bug-fix updates in between.

Although Tahoe is ready for prime time, you can still delay the upgrade as long as you’re running macOS 14 Sonoma or macOS 15 Sequoia and are staying current with Apple’s security updates. Older macOS versions no longer receive security fixes, making them more vulnerable to attacks. Possible reasons to continue delaying include:

• You’re too busy: The upgrade process will take a few hours, plus some additional time to configure everything properly afterward. When you’re ready to upgrade, aim for when a little downtime won’t be a problem.
• You rely on incompatible software: Most modern apps should now be updated for Tahoe—Adobe recently qualified its Creative Cloud apps. But if a necessary app is known to have issues, you’ll need to wait for an update or find an alternative that works.

Despite the visual changes from Liquid Glass, using Tahoe remains straightforward—it’s still macOS. Even if you’re not an immediate fan of Liquid Glass, Tahoe has new features that might appeal to you. Control Center is now fully customizable, and you can make folders easier to identify by assigning them colors and badges. Spotlight has become an even better app and action launcher, and it now includes access to your clipboard history, a feature previously available only with third-party software. The Phone app has come to the Mac, allowing you to make and take phone calls on your Mac as long as your iPhone is nearby. Live Translation automatically translates text in Messages, provides translated captions in FaceTime, and offers real-time spoken translations in the Phone app.

Before You Upgrade

Once you’ve decided to upgrade to Tahoe, you have three main tasks:

• Update apps: Make sure all your apps are up to date. If you regularly delay updates, now’s the time to let them complete so you have Tahoe-compatible versions.
  
• Clear space: Tahoe may require up to 25 GB of free space to upgrade, and the Tahoe installer itself can take up to 17 GB, so we recommend ensuring you have at least 50 GB free. Don’t cut this close—you should always have at least 10–20% free space for virtual memory, cache files, and breathing room. Check by choosing System Settings > General > Storage; in earlier versions of macOS, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click Storage. System Settings provides quick ways to free up space. For iCloud Drive users, another easy way to save space is to Control-click large folders and choose Remove Download to “evict” the local versions of those files temporarily; Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive have similar features.
  
• Make a backup: Never install a macOS update or upgrade without first making sure you have at least one current backup. Ideally, you should have a Time Machine backup, a data-only duplicate, and an Internet backup. This way, if something goes wrong, you can easily revert.
  

Upgrading

After finishing those tasks, make sure you won’t need your Mac for a few hours. There’s no way to know precisely how long the upgrade will take, so don’t start an upgrade if you need your Mac soon.

To start the upgrade, go to System Settings > General > Software Update in Sequoia, Sonoma, or Ventura (System Preferences > Software Update in previous versions of macOS), click the Upgrade Now button, and follow the prompts. For more help, see Joe Kissell’s ebook Take Control of Tahoe.

After You Upgrade

One reason to set aside ample time for your Tahoe upgrade is that cleanup tasks typically follow. We can’t predict exactly what you’ll encounter—it depends on your current macOS version and the apps you use—but here are a few scenarios we’ve seen before:

• macOS may prompt for your Apple ID password and your Mac’s login password. If you have multiple Macs, you may also need to approve the upgrade from another Mac signed in to the same Apple Account. Don’t worry that malware has compromised your Mac—these authentication prompts are normal.
• Some apps may request additional permissions even if you previously granted them. Again, that’s okay.
• If you use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac and apps (and you should; it’s great!), you may need to re-enable that feature in System Settings > Touch ID & Password (or Login Password on a Mac without Touch ID). In older versions of macOS, it was located in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General.
• If you use Gmail, Google Calendar, or other Google services, you might need to log in to your Google account again.
• Websites that remember your login state will likely require you to log in again. However, if you’re using a password manager like Apple’s Passwords or 1Password, that’s easy.
• You might need to re-enable text message forwarding to your Mac. You do this on your iPhone by going to Settings > Apps > Messages > Text Message Forwarding.

With the housekeeping done, it’s time to check out all the new features in Tahoe!

(Featured image by Apple)

Social Media: When should you upgrade to macOS 26 Tahoe? There’s no rush to install it today, but we believe it’s safe for those who want to take advantage of the new features. Here’s what to do before, during, and after the upgrade.

Here’s how to configure Reminders to get your attention at the right moment, whether through time-based alerts, location triggers, or when you chat with someone in Messages. Particularly helpful is the new alarm feature in iOS 26.2 that ensures you can’t miss time-based alerts. We’ll focus on the iPhone here, but the iPad and Mac interfaces are similar.

Time-Based Notifications

The most straightforward way to be reminded is at a specific date and time. When creating or editing a reminder, turn on the Date and Time switches to set when you want to be notified. You can also enter natural language times in the title, such as “tomorrow at 3 PM”—tap the autocomplete suggestion to convert it to the actual notification time. Voice commands via Siri also work especially well, such as “Siri, remind me to call my mother at 8 PM.” When the time arrives, you’ll receive a standard notification banner on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch.

For recurring tasks, after setting a date, select an option from the Repeat menu: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom intervals. Recurring reminders are perfect for routine tasks such as taking out the recycling or submitting weekly reports. (Medication reminders are often used as an example of recurring reminders, but they’re more effectively handled in the Health app.)

Early Reminders

Although reminders are seldom as time-sensitive as calendar events, where you can set multiple alerts ahead of the actual event, it can still be helpful to receive an additional notification to prep for the reminder’s time. For instance, you might want an early notification a week before “Cancel free trial subscription” to evaluate whether you want to keep the service.

After setting a date and time for a reminder, choose an item from the Early Reminder menu to receive an additional notification minutes, hours, or even days before the scheduled time. This gives you a heads-up that something is coming due without replacing the original notification at the scheduled time.

Alarms in iOS 26.2 and iPadOS 26.2

For most reminders, it isn’t important that you start the task as soon as the notification appears. It doesn’t matter exactly when you cancel the free trial, as long as it happens before the renewal date, so a notification that remains on the Lock Screen is sufficient. But for other tasks, missing a notification would be a big problem. If the turkey needs to go in the oven at 2 PM so it’s ready for Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t want to get distracted by the football game and miss the notification.

To help, Apple added an alarm feature in iOS 26.2 and iPadOS 26.2 that lets Reminders trigger full-screen alarms that behave like those in the Clock app. It’s essential for critical reminders that absolutely cannot be missed. Alarms only work for the person who created the reminder, even if the reminder is on a shared list.

To enable an alarm for a reminder, set a date and time, then turn on the Urgent switch. (It doesn’t appear to be possible to enable Urgent via Siri.) When the reminder comes due, instead of a simple notification banner, you’ll see (and hear) an alarm on your iPhone (and Apple Watch) with options to dismiss or snooze it for 9 minutes. The alarm will continue to sound until you respond, making it much harder to ignore than a standard notification. You can even reschedule snoozed alarms if necessary.

This feature can be a lifesaver for time-sensitive tasks like picking up a prescription before the drugstore closes, joining crucial meetings, or any reminder where a simple banner notification isn’t enough. We hope Apple adds alarms to the Calendar app as well.

Location-Based Reminders

Reminders can also be triggered based on where you are. Location-based reminders are ideal for tasks like “Pick up dry cleaning” when you’re near the cleaners or “Defrost the chicken for dinner” when you arrive home.

Turn on the Location switch when creating a reminder to choose from options like:

• Current location
• Saved locations like Home and Work
• Custom locations
• Getting In or Getting Out (of a car; these options require a CarPlay or Bluetooth connection to your vehicle)

For the location options, you can request alerts when you arrive or leave. To set a custom location, search for an address or point of interest. You can adjust the geofence radius to control how close you need to be for the reminder to trigger.

Screenshot

When Messaging Someone

If you associate something you want to remember with a particular person, Reminders can notify you when you’re communicating with them in Messages. It’s perfect for things you want to mention but aren’t important enough to warrant starting a conversation—“Ask John about their new puppy.”

When editing a reminder, enable When Messaging and select a contact. The next time you open a Messages conversation with that person, a notification will appear reminding you of the task.

Choosing the Right Alert Method

Each notification type serves different purposes:

• Time-based notifications work well for scheduled tasks and deadlines, with early reminders for advance warning and alarms for critical tasks that can’t be missed.
• Location-based reminders are ideal for errands and place-specific tasks.
• When Messaging ensures you remember to discuss something with a specific person.

By combining these options, you can ensure that essential tasks receive the attention they deserve and are delivered in the way most likely to prompt action.

(Featured image by iStock.com/champpixs)

Social Media: Apple’s Reminders app offers more than simple notifications—from location-based alerts to the new alarm feature in iOS 26.2, here’s how to make sure you never miss an important task.

We’ll look at five invisible characters that shape how text behaves: the regular space, non-breaking space, tab, hard return, and soft return. You already use regular spaces and hard returns, but understanding the other three—and when to employ them—can help you create cleaner, more professional documents and troubleshoot layout problems.

How to See Invisible Characters

Nearly every text editor, word processor, and page layout app includes an option to show “invisibles” (the term may vary, but the concept is the same). When Show Invisibles is enabled, you’ll see dots, arrows, paragraph marks, and other symbols that represent normally invisible characters. They typically appear in a color different from the default text color, such as the blue characters in the screenshot below.

Regular Spaces Versus Non-Breaking Spaces

Everyone knows what a space is—it’s a breakable separator between words. By “breakable,” we mean the next word can wrap down to the next line of text. A regular space expresses the default intent: separate words and allow normal line wrapping.

However, there are situations when you want two words to stay together because it could be confusing if the second one wraps down to the next line. In those situations, you can use a non-breaking space—inserted by pressing Option-Space on the Mac or (usually) Control-Shift-Space in Windows, and represented in HTML by  . Word processors usually distinguish non-breaking spaces from regular spaces when showing invisibles—for example, Microsoft Word uses a small open circle for non-breaking spaces and a dot for regular spaces.

When would you use non-breaking spaces?

• Numbers with units: The most common use of non-breaking spaces is to keep numbers with their units, such as “1 TB” or “72 ºF.”
• Names with titles, and initials with surnames: Non-breaking spaces are also useful for names with titles, such as “Mr. Spock,” and for people who go by their initials, such as “J. K. Rowling.”
• Short phrases that function as a single unit: Some short phrases are conceptually one piece and should not be split across lines. This includes dates (“January 19”), times (“9:41 AM”), version numbers (“iOS 26”), and textual references (“Figure 4”).

If you are using page layout software, check whether it has character styling that keeps words together, such as Adobe InDesign’s No Break style.

Tabs Versus Spaces

Because spaces separate words, many people overuse them to increase visual separation between words and to align text, such as in a résumé with a job title on the left and the associated dates on the right.

Unfortunately, spaces work poorly for aligning text because most fonts are proportional, meaning a lowercase i is thinner than an uppercase W. Therefore, spaces can’t align text perfectly—not because spaces differ in width, but because the characters before them do. Ragged alignment in a printed document is easily noticeable and looks unprofessional.

The simple solution is to use a tab, which aligns to a fixed position marked by a tab stop. Pressing the Tab key inserts a tab to the next tab stop, which can usually align text to the left, right (shown below), center, or decimal point. Most apps have a few default tab stops, and you may never need anything different. However, you can usually customize the behavior and location of the tab stops. First, put your insertion point in the paragraph you want to work in, or select a swath of paragraphs. Then, either use the ruler to customize the stops or use dedicated tab controls, such as in Microsoft Word’s Format > Paragraph > Tabs dialog. More advanced users will want to customize tab stops within paragraph styles.

Although we can now use tables and layout tools for much of what tabs were necessary for in the early days of word processing, tabs remain useful in some situations, such as:

• Horizontal placement: If you want your signature to appear below a letter on the right, you could right-align the entire line, but a right-aligned tab stop gives you more control over where the signature appears.
• Simple lists: For a short contact list that includes name, phone, and email, setting a few tab stops could be easier than inserting and formatting a table.
• Quick outlines: When creating a quick outline, such as an agenda with left-aligned times and indented session titles, use tabs to create indentation. This preserves the outline structure and makes it easier to adjust later.

If you’re trying to align text rather than separate words, a tab expresses that intent far better than spaces ever can.

Hard Returns Versus Soft Returns

Most people understand hard returns, which separate one paragraph from the next. Pressing Return (Mac) or Enter (Windows) creates a hard return. For example, you’d put a return between a heading paragraph and the following body paragraph. Less well-known are soft returns, which start a new line within a paragraph, but do not end the paragraph. An important side effect of a soft return is that whatever paragraph formatting is applied to the paragraph will continue to apply to the new line. To type a soft return, type Shift-Return or Shift-Enter. (In HTML, paragraphs are marked with a pair of

tags, while soft returns use the
tag.)

The most common reasons to use soft returns include:

• Multi-line formatting: Some blocks of text are conceptually single paragraphs displayed across multiple lines. Think of postal addresses, poetry, and song lyrics.
  
• Maintain numbering or outline level: In lists and outlines, hard returns increment a list number or add a new outline entry, whereas soft returns insert a line break without creating a new number or outline entry. (HTML uses

tags to denote list items, but you can still use
tags within list items.)


• Narrow layouts: Soft returns are often necessary to force text down to the next line in columns, sidebars, captions, and callouts. They are a helpful supplement to non-breaking spaces.
• Intentional formatting: In multi-line headings, captions, and labels, aim to keep lines roughly equal in length, with the last line slightly longer than the others. Use soft returns to adjust line lengths as needed.
  

In short, use hard returns to separate paragraphs that are standalone units of text. Use soft returns to add line breaks within a chunk of text that is conceptually a single paragraph.

When Invisible Characters Cause Problems

Understanding non-breaking spaces, tabs, and soft returns is important because they can appear in your text without you noticing. Someone might have intentionally added them, or you might have accidentally included them by copying and pasting from PDFs or the Web. Some common invisible character issues you might encounter while formatting include:

• Short lines: If a line appears unusually short, it could be caused by a soft return moving text to the next line or a non-breaking space causing two words to wrap down together.
• Fragile alignment: If aligned text shifts when you change fonts or alignment, it’s usually because spaces are being used instead of tabs.
• Text gaps: If there’s unexpected white space between words, check if a tab is there instead of a space.
• Broken list numbering: In an automatically numbered list, broken numbering may be explained by a soft return being used instead of a hard return. Fix it by deleting the return between the misnumbered line and the one above, pressing Return to insert a new hard return, and repeating as needed.

Remember, you don’t have to type with invisible characters showing, but if your text has mysterious white space or odd line wrapping, you can likely resolve those problems quickly by viewing invisible characters and making sure they are doing what they should.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Fabio Principe)

Social Media: Spaces, tabs, and returns seem simple—but using the wrong invisible character can wreck your document’s layout. Learn when to use non-breaking spaces, tabs, and soft returns to create cleaner, more professional documents.

As always, reality lies between the extremes. AI is just another technological tool, like spreadsheets, email, and the searchable Web. Like them, casual usage won’t automatically increase an organization’s productivity. At best, many people have begun using AI chatbots as a smarter search engine, and while that’s a fine start, it’s unlikely to make a notable difference. Many others are technology skeptics who are uncomfortable with any new technology, let alone one as fuzzy as AI. Even those who are interested and capable are often overwhelmed by their existing work and don’t have time to learn yet another tool.

So how do you set up an organization to make effective—even transformative—use of AI?

Get Buy-In from Management

Ideally, the desire to adopt AI would come from the top of the organization, with leadership discussing and modeling the kind of usage they want to see. But what’s absolutely essential is lower-level management creating the culture, resources, and time necessary for employees to experiment with AI.

Evangelize from the Bottom, Don’t Mandate from the Top

Although management must be on board, a CEO memo mandating immediate AI adoption won’t have the desired effect. Unlike many other technologies, AI solutions tend to be highly specific rather than one-size-fits-all. Frontline employees know where they’re wasting time with inefficient workflows, and they have first-hand knowledge of what customers want, so they’re more likely to be able to leverage AI tools when they are involved in the development and deployment. Solutions created without their participation likely won’t benefit the business’s bottom line, customers, or employees.

Centralize Testing and Support

A top-down approach does make sense for tool analysis and testing. The explosive growth of the AI market means that there are numerous similar options for any desired workflow. To save time, avoid future chaos, and reduce tool jumping, it can be helpful to have a single IT team evaluate the numerous possible tools, make recommendations, suggest best practices, establish basic data handling and privacy guidelines, and provide support.

Adopt a Documentation Mindset

A key to automating workflows with AI is being able to document the necessary tasks clearly first. Some organizations already have a documentation mindset, where they write everything down, define processes, and record decisions. If that’s not the case for your organization, it’s better to focus on building such documentation before creating automation tools that are unlikely to deliver the desired results. Consider using AI to help with documentation, such as by interviewing people who understand the workflows and using AI to extract an outline from the transcript of the recording.

Think of AI Tools Like a Junior Employee

The hard part of using AI is defining your goals and determining where AI can make a difference. It’s much like training a new hire. What are you trying to achieve by hiring them? What do they need to learn to do their job? What level of excellence do you expect? What common mistakes and pitfalls should they avoid? You can only automate something if you have a clear idea of what success entails and precisely what’s necessary to achieve it.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, successful AI implementation comes down to defining what you want to achieve, giving people the time they need to explore possibilities, and providing guidance rather than mandates.

(Featured image by iStock.com/FabrikaCr)

Social Media: Casual AI use won’t impact your organization. To see real productivity gains with AI projects, avoid top-down mandates and instead empower frontline teams, document workflows, and centralize support.

Your desires will undoubtedly differ from everyone else’s, but the key to automating file-related actions in the Finder is a longstanding macOS technology called folder action scripts. In essence, you attach a custom AppleScript to a folder, and whenever the folder’s contents change, the script runs. Anything you can do with AppleScript, you can automate with a folder action script.

Don’t panic at the sight of the word “AppleScript.” Although creating a folder action script requires creating an AppleScript, we don’t expect you to write an AppleScript or even know much about it. You can get an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to write the actual code—all you need to do is explain what you want to the chatbot, copy and paste code into Script Editor, and link the script to the desired folder.

Two warnings: always start with test files in a test folder before letting a script work on real files in a real folder, and be doubly cautious about scripts that move files to the Trash.

Let’s get started! We’ll use the CSV renaming script as an example.

Step 1: Create a Script with AI Help

When working with an AI chatbot to write an AppleScript, it’s helpful to be as specific as possible. Here’s the prompt we started with:

Write an AppleScript that I can use to make a folder action script for my Downloads folder. I want it to detect a newly downloaded file that has a .txt extension and present me with a dialog with two buttons asking if I would like to change the filename extension to .csv (the default) or leave it as .txt.

Paste that into the chatbot of your choice, and it will return a script. Copy it to the clipboard—chatbots usually include a button to copy just the text of the script, so you don’t have to select it manually.

Step 2: Save Your Script

Now you need to turn that script into something functional. Follow these steps:

1. Open Script Editor, which you’ll find in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder.
2. Choose File > New to create a new script.
3. Paste the text of the script from the chatbot into the script.
4. Click the hammer icon in Script Editor’s toolbar to check for syntax errors. If there are none, the text turns from all purple to various colors, as shown below. (We’ll assume the script is correct for now; more on how to fix errors in Step 4 below.)
   
5. Choose File > Save, and in the Save dialog, navigate to ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ (that’s the Library folder in your user folder). If the Folder Action Scripts folder doesn’t exist within Scripts, press Command-Shift-N (while still in the Save dialog) to create a new folder. Be sure to name it exactly Folder Action Scripts.
6. Still in the Save dialog, choose Script from the File Format pop-up menu and click Save to save the file.

Step 3: Connect Your Script to a Folder

To open the Folder Actions Setup app, you may be able to Control-click the desired folder (such as a Test folder on your desktop) and choose Folder Actions Setup from the pop-up menu; it might also be in a Services submenu. But the easiest way to open it is with Spotlight. Press Command-Space, type Folder Actions Setup (or enough of the name for Spotlight to find it), and press Return. Once you have the app open:

1. Select the Enable Folder Actions checkbox at the top.
2. Click the + button under Folders with Actions, and open the Test folder in the file dialog.
3. Click the + button under Script, then select the script you just saved—the list is sorted alphabetically, so you may need to scroll.
   

A folder can have multiple folder action scripts linked to it, though be aware that they can interact with one another in unexpected ways. You can disable a script by deselecting its checkbox or remove it entirely by selecting it and clicking the – button. To make changes to a script, select it and click Edit Script to open it in Script Editor.

Step 4: Test Your Script

This is the moment of truth—did the chatbot get it right? Create a text file in TextEdit and save it on the desktop with a .txt extension. Then drag it into the Test folder and see if you’re prompted to rename it to .csv. If so, you’re done!

But what if it doesn’t work? What to do depends on how it failed:

• Script Editor complains about syntax errors: Report the error to the chatbot by taking a screenshot like the one below and pasting or dragging it into the chatbot text entry field. It will analyze the screenshot to identify the error and try to provide you with revamped code that fixes the problem.
  

• Nothing happens: First, verify that the folder action is enabled in Folder Actions Setup and that the correct folder is listed. Then return to the chatbot and say exactly that. “I dropped a .txt file in my Test folder, but nothing happened.” It will analyze the code it previously wrote and attempt to address whatever is causing it to fail.
• You get a permissions request: The first time a folder action script runs, macOS may ask for permission to control the Finder or access certain folders. Click Allow when prompted.
• You get some other error: Just as with code errors in Script Editor, your best bet is to take a screenshot of the error and paste it into your chat. Be sure to add any additional information that might shed light on the reason for the error.
• The wrong thing happens: If something else happens, but it’s not what you want—like more files being acted on than you intended—go back to the chatbot and describe precisely what happened and how that was wrong, reiterating the results you want to achieve.

It’s not uncommon to go back and forth with the chatbot several times to end up with an AppleScript that works as you want. If you still have trouble, ask the chatbot to add debugging alerts that show you where the process breaks down.

Other Useful Folder Action Ideas

Once you’ve mastered the basics, consider these automation possibilities:

• Automatically resize images added to a folder to specific dimensions
• Sort downloaded files into subfolders based on file type
• Add a timestamp or custom prefix to every file added to a project folder
• Play a sound or send a notification when files matching certain criteria appear
• Back up critical files by copying them to a second location whenever they’re added to a watched folder

There’s undoubtedly a DIY aspect to all this, but folder action scripts are both a practical use of AI chatbots and a relatively easy way to automate file-based workflows that are tedious or time-wasting when done by hand. If you’re attracted to the idea but uninterested in fussing with chatbots, Script Editor, and Folder Actions Setup, look into Noodlesoft’s Hazel, a $42 utility that provides an easy-to-use interface for automatically organizing files on your Mac.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Poca Wander Stock)

Social Media: Automate Mac file chores like moving, renaming, or tagging files with folder action scripts that run whenever files change. You can even get an AI chatbot to write the script for you.

Unified View

The Phone app has traditionally featured a toolbar with buttons for Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad, and Voicemail, along with a separate Search field. iOS 26 retains this layout as Classic view (below, left) and introduces a new Unified view (below, right) that aims to simplify the interface by reducing the toolbar to four buttons: Calls, Contacts, Keypad, and Search, with the Calls screen combining favorites and recent calls. You can switch between these views by tapping the Filter button in the top-right corner and choosing the preferred layout. The Filter menu also lets you specify which calls appear below, including voicemail.

Call Screening

A new Call Screening feature, configurable in Settings > Apps > Phone > Screen Unknown Callers, intercepts incoming calls from unknown numbers and prompts the caller to “state their name and reason for calling” before the iPhone even rings. If the caller responds, you’ll see a transcript or snippet of their response, allowing you to decide whether to answer or ignore the call. In our experience, it mainly causes spammers and telemarketers to hang up instantly, which is equally effective.

Unknown Call Lists

The Phone app has long been able to silence calls from unknown numbers—those not in your contacts or numbers you haven’t called—and send them directly to voicemail. This feature, now called Unknown Callers, remains available in Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Filtering, as does the previous Silence Junk Callers option, now called Spam. What’s new is that when these options are turned on, lists for Unknown Callers and Spam appear in the Filter menu, so they don’t clutter your Calls list. You can delete calls from unknown callers, mark their numbers as known, or add them to Contacts so they aren’t silenced next time.

Spam Voicemail Reporting

With most spam calls going to voicemail, your inbox may fill up with unwanted messages. You’ve always been able to delete them, but now, when you view a voicemail from an unknown number, a Report Spam button appears. Tap it to report the voicemail to Apple and delete it. We don’t know if reporting spam voicemails will make any difference, but it’s more satisfying than just deleting them.

Hold Assist

The Phone app’s new automatic Hold Assist feature is somewhat hard to test, but we hope it works when you need it. When Hold Assist Detection is enabled in Settings > Apps > Phone, Apple says that if you’re placed on hold by a customer service agent, the Phone app can detect hold music, silence it, and notify you when the agent comes back on the line. You can also manually tap the More button, tap Hold Assist, and then see a transcript of the hold message while you wait. Tap Pick Up when you’re ready to talk.

Live Translation in Calls

If you need to call someone who speaks a different language (as long as it’s English, French, German, Portuguese, or Spanish), the new Live Translation feature might be helpful. Once you’re on the call, tap the More button, then tap Live Translation, and choose the languages for From and To. We highly recommend testing this feature before you actually need it, as it can take a few minutes to download a new language for the first time. After that, tap Start Translation to hear spoken translations and have your voice translated for your caller. You’ll also see a transcript of both sides of the conversation.

Type to Siri During Calls

If you desperately need to use Siri during a phone call, you can now activate Type to Siri. Make sure it’s turned on in Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > Talk & Type to Siri, and then double-tap the bottom edge of the iPhone to open a Siri text entry field.

Screen Sharing and SharePlay in Calls

When you’re on a call with someone using iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26, you can now initiate Screen Sharing or SharePlay with that person during the call. Access these features from the More button. Screen Sharing can be helpful for explaining how to perform an action on the caller’s device or troubleshoot a problem, and SharePlay lets you and the caller listen to the same audio or watch the same video in a supported app.

Call History

When you view a contact from within the Phone app (not the Contacts app), a Call History option appears, and tapping it shows your call history with that number, which could go back years.

Phone App Comes to macOS, iPadOS, and visionOS

Wait, did we just say you could be on a call with someone using the Phone app on a Mac or iPad? Exactly! With macOS 26, iPadOS 26, and even visionOS 26, the Phone app has expanded to the iPhone’s sibling platforms. It looks and works very similarly, with the benefit of displaying more information at once. To use one of these Phone apps, your iPhone must be on the same Wi-Fi network and signed in to the same Apple Account.

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

Social Media: iOS 26 supercharges the Phone app with call screening, live translation, and hold music detection. But that’s not all! You can make calls from a Mac or iPad, share your screen during calls, see a contact’s call history, and more.