For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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The primary change to the 11th-generation iPad ($349) is the move from the previous model’s A14 Bionic chip to the A16, which is nearly 30% faster but still won’t support Apple Intelligence or some recent games. Apple also increased the base storage from 64 GB to 128 GB, dropped the Nano-SIM slot from the cellular models, and updated the wireless capabilities to support current protocol versions. Although the screen remains the same 10.9-inch diagonal size, Apple now refers to it as the “11-inch iPad.” It remains an excellent and affordable entry-level device.

The 7th generation of Apple’s flagship 11-inch ($599) and 13-inch ($799) iPad Air sees only a single change—swapping the previous model’s M2 chip for the M3 to increase performance, particularly for gaming and video creation. Separately, Apple introduced a less expensive Magic Keyboard for iPad Air that adds a 14-key function row and sports a larger trackpad, though it lacks the previous model’s backlit keys and trackpad haptics. The keyboard costs $269 for the 11-inch iPad Air or $319 for the 13-inch model.

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Throughout that time, users have clamored to be able to merge accounts. Apple’s response was to let devices have a primary Apple Account for iCloud and other key features, plus another specifically for Media & Purchases. Others worked around the limitation by adding the second account to a Family Sharing group. That sufficed for most people but was never ideal, and we continue to field questions from people who want to merge the accounts.

It now appears that climate change has caused hell to freeze over, as Apple recently published three support articles detailing how to migrate apps, music, TV shows, books, and other digital purchases from one of your Apple Accounts to another:

• About migrating Apple Account purchases between accounts
• Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another Apple Account
• Undo a migration of Apple Account purchases between accounts

It’s important to note that migrating purchases from a secondary account to a primary account is not exactly the same as merging them. iCloud data, account balances, and personalized recommendations in Apple’s media apps won’t transfer from the secondary account to the primary, nor will TestFlight betas for those who test apps for developers. Additionally, you will not be able to edit App Store reviews created with your secondary Apple Account after migration. The secondary account doesn’t go away, which also prevents certain other uses.

Normally, we’d tell you how to perform the migration, but because there are so many details and caveats, we recommend that you carefully read and follow Apple’s documentation linked above instead, especially since Apple may update it with new information as the feature gets more use. It explains:

• Why you might want to migrate purchases
• What happens when you migrate purchases
• What doesn’t migrate with your purchases
• What happens to your secondary account after migration
• Who can migrate purchases
• What to do before you migrate purchases
• How to migrate purchases
• What to do after migrating purchases
• Why you might not be able to migrate purchases
• What to do if you decide to undo a migration
• How to undo a migration of purchases
• What happens if you undo a migration of purchases
• What to do after you undo a migration of purchases

We’re happy to walk you through a migration, but if you can’t migrate purchases, you should call Apple Support. The list of reasons why a migration may not work is long and technical, and Apple Support may have access to internal data that will explain the problem.

If you have long chafed at having to maintain multiple Apple Accounts because of a decision you made many years ago, now’s your chance to clean up the mess. Good luck!

Ready to Migrate Your Purchases? Let’s Make It Easy.

Migrating purchases between Apple Accounts is a fantastic new option — but it’s important to follow Apple’s instructions carefully to avoid any issues.

If you’re confident handling it yourself, we encourage you to review Apple’s official guide closely, and feel free to use this blog post as a helpful starting point.

If you’d like expert assistance, the team at MacTech Solutions is here to help! You can stop by our store in Finishing Touch Plaza here in Wichita Falls, give us a call, or visit our website to schedule an appointment — although appointments are never required.

We’re proud to be your trusted local Apple experts, ready to make your tech life easier.

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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Social Media: Apple’s built-in text replacement feature expands a short abbreviation you type into something longer, but a simple menu option can prevent it from working in a Mac app. Here’s how to fix it.

The post Text Replacements Not Working on the Mac? Check This Setting first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

We’ll focus on the Mac with macOS 15 Sequoia, but these features other than Video Viewer are also available on the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Macs still running macOS 13 Ventura or macOS 14 Sonoma can get Safari 18 but miss out on the Highlights feature. Regardless of platform or macOS version, you access all these new features from the Page menu at the left of Safari’s address bar, which takes over from the previous Show Reader View button in Safari 17.

Highlights

Sometimes, when you visit a website, you just want a quick bit of information, like a restaurant’s address or a store’s hours. For those running Sequoia, once you turn on Safari 18’s Highlights feature, the Page menu icon in Safari’s address bar will show a purple sparkle if it detects information on the page that it can call out for you. Click it to learn more.

It can be hard to predict what Highlights will call out. It’s fairly reliable at showing location and business information extracted from Maps, and it may display biographical information about people on pages about them. For long articles, it may provide a quick summary you can use to see if it’s worth reading more. Apple says Highlights will also offer quick links to learn more about people, music, movies, and TV shows.

Distraction Control

Every website wants you to SUBSCRIBE TO A NEWSLETTER! and WATCH OUR VIDEO! and SHARE THIS ARTICLE! It’s exhausting. In Safari 18, Apple has added a feature that can help you turn down the volume on websites that constantly try to lure you into doing something other than what you intend. Distraction Control lets you remove annoying parts of a Web page. It works on nearly anything on the first use, but Apple warns that “hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that updates frequently.” (That’s what most people want, of course, but such a capability would anger advertisers and publishers whose business models rely on ads.)

To clean up a Web page, click the Page menu and choose Hide Distracting Items. Then, move the pointer over areas of the screen you want to remove—if Safari can identify an item as a discrete object, it will gain a blue outline. Click it to make it disappear in a cloud of digital dust. Additional clicks will remove more items; Safari keeps count in the location bar. Click the Done button in the location bar to save your changes, or click Cancel if you were just testing. As you can see in the right-hand sidebar of the Yahoo page in the image below, the result is a cleaned-up view with much less distraction.

Redesigned Reader

Another way to eliminate distractions when reading on the Web is to use Safari’s Reader mode. When you click the Page menu and select Show Reader, Safari reformats the text and images in an article, removing extraneous ads and gewgaws. Once you’re in the redesigned Reader, click the Page menu icon again to access the customization options that let you choose from four color themes, nine different font faces, and various zoom levels

With Apple Intelligence on a Mac with Apple silicon, Reader also offers to summarize long articles. It may also provide a table of contents if the article contains appropriate headings, but it’s hard to predict when that will work.

Video Viewer

Finally, those who watch a lot of Web video will appreciate Safari 18’s new Video Viewer, available only on the Mac. Whenever you’re watching a video embedded in a Web page, clicking the Page menu reveals a new Video Viewer command. Choose that to expand the current video to fill the Safari window, overwriting whatever else might have been on the page so you can focus on the video.

Once you’re in the Video Viewer, switching to another tab in Safari or another app whose window obscures at least half the Video Viewer window causes Safari to switch to Picture in Picture, moving the video to a small window that floats above all other apps. You can resize that window and move it to any screen corner while it’s open, and it remembers its size and location for subsequent uses. Although multiple tabs and windows can use Video Viewer simultaneously, only one can be in Picture in Picture at a time.

Even if these changes aren’t world-changing for everyone, they make Safari an ever more capable Web browser, so it’s worth giving them a try to see if they’ll improve your Web experience.

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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You may need some of that new hardware to take advantage of Apple Intelligence. Its features work only on a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPad with an A17 Pro or M-series chip, or an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16. Intel-based Macs and older iPhones and iPads can’t play.

Although we have no problem with recommending that you upgrade your iPhone and iPad to iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1, we recommend more caution when it comes to upgrading your Mac to macOS 15.1 Sequoia. There aren’t any general showstoppers, but you shouldn’t upgrade until you’re confident your particular workflows are fully compatible.

What will Apple Intelligence do for you if you upgrade? Here’s what you need to know.

Writing Tools Everywhere

The Apple Intelligence Writing Tools will help you craft and polish your prose—or just make your email sound more professional. Writing Tools provides three core functions:

• Proofread: The Proofread tool will significantly reduce spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes in your text. While it may not match up with a human proofreader, using it will make your text cleaner.
  
• Rewrite: If you’re unhappy with the tone of your text, use the Rewrite tool to improve it or make it friendlier, more professional, or shorter. Even if you don’t adopt the complete rewrite, some of its phrases or word choices might take your writing up a notch.
• Summarize: A straight summary might be useful for condensing text, and specialized summaries can list key points, make a list, or create a table. These features are probably most useful when working with text you’ve been given and need to edit into shape.

Writing Tools are available in nearly all apps that accept text. Either look for an Edit > Writing Tools menu or Control-click a text selection and look in the Writing Tools submenu. Right now, Apple apps like Mail and Notes provide proofreading controls that let you see (and revert) each change independently. With the Rewrite and Summary tools and Proofread in other apps, you have to compare the original and the rewrite manually, with your only options being to replace the selected text or copy the suggested revision.

Photos Enhancements

Photos benefits from Apple Intelligence in three ways as well:

• Clean Up: Many a great photo suffers from a random bystander or distracting telephone pole. Clean Up removes people and objects from your photos, either identifying them automatically or working from your manual selection. It’s not perfect, but Clean Up is a hugely welcome addition to Photos.
  
• Descriptive search: We’ve been able to search for objects in photos for several years now, but with Apple Intelligence, you’ll be able to find photos and videos based on more extensive and natural descriptions, like “Halloween in 2014.”
• Descriptive memory movies: The Memories feature in Photos automatically creates movies based on photos it thinks you might want to see together. With Apple Intelligence, you can describe the photos you’d like it to include.

Notification Summaries

Apple has long been sensitive about how distracting our devices can be due to numerous apps posting notifications throughout the day. Apple Intelligence tries to help by summarizing lengthy individual notifications and groups of notifications. Notification summaries probably won’t rock your world, but it can be nice to have a sense of what’s going on with a group of notifications before you wade into an involved conversation. If you don’t like the summaries for particular apps, turn them off in Settings > Notifications > Summarize Previews.

Mail (and Messages) Enhancements

Speaking of summaries, in Mail, the most welcome Apple Intelligence change is to replace each first-line snippet in message lists with summaries of the message or conversation content. It makes scanning email for important messages easier.

Other Apple Intelligence changes include moving priority messages—those that require a quick reply—to the top of the message list and the option to summarize long messages or conversations using a Summarize button at the top of the message pane. Both Mail and Messages also offer a Smart Reply feature that suggests reasonable replies. They’re like tapback responses on steroids.

Audio Recording, Transcription, and Summarization

Apple Intelligence offers major advances for the Notes and Phone apps: audio recording, transcription, and summarization. Be aware that the Phone app alerts participants when you start recording—just joke, “For quality assurance…” before tapping the record button.

The big win comes with Notes (on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac), which can record a meeting and provide a transcript for later searching and summarization. The clearer the audio, the better. It stumbles on many names and doesn’t differentiate between speakers, but transcripts can be hugely helpful. You can keep a transcript in its recording (left), where you can jump around in the audio by tapping the associated text, or you can use the ••• button to export it to its enclosing note (middle) or tap a button to get a summary (right).

Siri Enhancements

Apple has promised a lot for Siri but hasn’t delivered much. A new interface replaces the animated circle with a glowing light and the option to type your query rather than speak it. However, the only functional improvement from Apple Intelligence so far seems to be Siri’s awareness of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac user guides. If you’re unsure how to accomplish a built-in task, try asking Siri.

What’s Coming Next

Welcome though they may be, the initial wave of Apple Intelligence features won’t set the world on fire. But Apple has big plans for Apple Intelligence, with new features slated for release in December 2024 and more coming in 2025. Things you can look forward to in a few months include:

• ChatGPT will make its promised appearance, bringing world knowledge into Writing Tools and Siri.
• You can jazz up your conversations in Messages with original Genomoji merely by describing the emoji you’d like to see. “Penguin on a surfboard,” anyone?
• The Image Playground feature will let you generate original images in various styles, though none are photorealistic on purpose—no deepfakes from Apple.
• Image Wand will enhance your Apple Pencil sketches by turning them into polished images, and if you circle an empty space, Image Wand will create an image from the surrounding area.
• Writing Tools will let you describe a specific change you want to apply to your text, like adding more descriptive words to a blog post. We hope Apple puts more thought into the workflow so it’s easier to compare the before and after.
• The Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 line will tap Apple Intelligence to help users learn about objects and places in the iPhone’s viewfinder.

Further out, Apple says that Priority Notifications will surface your most important notifications, and Siri will learn how to draw from your personal context, take action in numerous apps, and gain awareness of onscreen information. We’re still curious to see how Apple will integrate a more intelligent Siri into the HomePod and Apple TV.  

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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• Tap once to position the insertion point at the start or end of a word.
• Touch and hold to reveal the magnifier and move the insertion point within words ➊.
• Touch and hold the Space bar to turn the entire keyboard into a virtual trackpad that lets you move the insertion point above ➋. On the iPad, you can also touch and hold with two fingers anywhere on the keyboard.
• Double-tap to select a word; keep dragging to select more text, one word at a time ➌.
• Triple-tap to select an entire paragraph.

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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For more information on all the great Apple products and features, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227). Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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Stay away from bargain-priced cables from no-name Chinese manufacturers, and if you see a supposedly genuine Apple cable selling for a too-good-to-be-true price, consider the possibility that it’s counterfeit. Apple created a detailed page that explains how to identify counterfeit or uncertified Lightning accessories.

Why spend more on cables? Inexpensive cables are likely to wear out sooner, but the main concern is that many modern cables carry power along with data. A short circuit could result in hardware damage and, in extreme cases, could generate sparks, smoke, or even fire. While fires are extremely unusual, it’s easy to find reports online.

When it comes to damaging hardware, USB-C is much less of a problem than a decade ago, thanks to Google engineer Benson Leung. After a bad USB-C cable fried his Chromebook, he embarked on a one-man crusade to identify good and bad USB-C cables. Due in part to his efforts, Amazon started prohibiting listings of USB-C cables and adapters that weren’t compliant with the USB-C specs. You may still encounter bad cables Amazon hasn’t identified or dodgy cables sold through other retailers, but the danger is lower than it used to be, particularly with cables from name brands.

Although Apple has now standardized on USB-C cables for charging, Lightning cables remain common for older iPhones and iPads. Both are readily available in gas stations and drugstores, but you’ll do best if you stick with cables from brand-name companies. They cost more, but do you trust a cable sold next to tabloids and Twinkies? It will probably work in a pinch if you need to fill in for a lost or forgotten cable on a trip, but don’t rely on it afterward.

Even the best cables will fail if you mistreat them. Follow this advice to ensure a long life for heavily used cables:

• Don’t create sharp bends in the cable, especially near the connector. Sharp bends can eventually break the insulation and reveal the wires inside. Even before that, if the wires get too close, they can heat up and melt the insulation.
• When unplugging your device, pull from the plug instead of farther down on the cord to avoid stress on the connection point.
• When coiling your cables, avoid wrapping them tightly around something that’s not round. A tight wrap can cause kinks that degrade the wires inside.
• Don’t put heavy objects on cables or sandwich them between a desk and the wall. Anything that compresses the cable can cause damage.
• iPhones are fairly water resistant, but try to keep the charging port and cable plug clean and away from liquids. Pocket crud or a droplet in the wrong place could cause a short circuit. Because of their metal jackets, USB-C cables are less susceptible than Lightning to such problems, but it’s still worth being careful.
• If a cable’s insulation ever breaks so you can see the wires inside, discard it immediately. It’s always worth maintaining a collection of a few cables of every type you use so you can replace damaged cables right away.
  

In the end, the advice is simple. Spend a little more on quality products from reputable manufacturers so you don’t have to worry about a $3 non-compliant USB-C cable damaging your pricey iPhone or worse. What’s worse? Your house burning down.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

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For more information on all the great Apple products and features, give us a call today!  940-767-MACS (6227) MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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For more information on all the great Apple products and features, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227) MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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You’ve likely seen our tip on using the Dock on an iPhone or iPad as a temporary holding place that makes rearranging apps easier. We’ve learned two new tips that help even more! First, you can move multiple apps at once. Start by touching an app, waiting to feel a tap, and then moving it (or just touch and hold and tap Edit Home Screen to enter jiggle mode first). Once you’ve picked up an app, drag it down to the blank spot on the right side of the Home screen just above the Dock so you can see what you’re doing while keeping your finger down. Then, with a finger on your other hand, tap other apps to “stack” them on the first app. Now move the stack to the desired location and lift your finger. Second, instead of laboriously dragging the stack to another Home screen, before you lift your finger to drop the stack, use that other finger to swipe left or right to move between Home screens—in essence, you’re moving the Home screen under the stack you’re holding. For a visual demo of these tips, see the TidBITS video. MacTech Solutions has iPad’s in stock and can repair your iPhone, or any Apple device. Giver us a call, 940-767-6227 or visit us at 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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