Apple has updated the iPad mini with an A17 Pro chip for Apple Intelligence, along with more storage, faster connectivity, and support for the Apple Pencil Pro. It’s still $499 and remains an excellent option for anyone wanting a smaller iPad.

Beware of PayPal invoice scams that might even appear to come from Apple. Should you receive one, report it to PayPal to help protect other people, but don’t mark the message as spam.

If you’d like to allow a child, friend, or colleague to enjoy a specific app on your iPhone or iPad while keeping them focused and preventing access to everything else on the device, check out Apple’s Guided Access feature.

Scams are starting to incorporate personal information stolen in data breaches, so you may get “sextortion” threats that purport to know your phone number, address, and more.

Keep prying eyes—or mischievous children—out of sensitive or important apps by requiring Face ID or Touch ID access before the app opens. You can also hide such apps so they appear only after you authenticate.

People who like using the Mac’s window proxy icons (and if you don’t know about them, you should!) can make them visible at all times with an option deep within System Settings. Here’s how to find it and what you can do with proxy icons.

Apple has renamed Apple ID to Apple Account everywhere as of macOS 15 Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and watchOS 11. Nothing has changed functionally, but keep it in mind when reading tech articles or support documentation.

Don’t forget about local security on your Mac. Make sure to require a password shortly after the screen saver starts or the display sleeps to prevent people from riffling through your email, photos, messages, and more.

Ransomware primarily affects Windows and Linux computers, but if you, or anyone you know, falls prey to it, visit the No More Ransom website for advice and decryption tools.

If you connect your Mac to your UPS with a USB cable, you can use Energy Saver to shut your Mac down automatically in the event of a power failure… before the UPS battery runs out.

If you have parked domains that never send email, it’s important to set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC so scammers can’t forge legitimate-looking email from those domains.

If a temporary banner disappears from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac before you have a chance to read it, you can find it in Notification Center.

When you connect to a public Wi-Fi network, you often must authenticate or agree to terms on a captive portal login page. Here’s the solution if that page doesn’t appear.

QR codes—those blocky squares you scan with your iPhone camera—are an easy way to open a Web page. Unfortunately, scammers also use them to trick people into visiting malicious websites, so read our tip about scanning these codes safely.

The built-in Magnifier app on the iPhone and iPad is a godsend when trying to make out a tiny serial number or anything else that’s too small to read easily.

Finding and entering a desired emoji can be tedious. For those you like to use regularly, creating a text replacement lets you type a few characters to get a particular emoji quickly and easily.

Have you ever wanted to use a Mac app’s icon in documentation or a Web page? It’s easy to copy a high-resolution version straight from the Finder!

Apple has published a white paper that offers an illuminating look at how the company works to increase device longevity while balancing environmental impact, protecting customer privacy and safety, and enabling transparency in repair.

For better results when a team or family group needs to share 2FA codes to log in to a website, try to use an authentication app instead of SMS, or better yet, use a password manager that can both generate 2FA codes and share logins with a group.

Rather than frequently skimming your entire spam mailbox for incorrectly captured messages, try searching for specific keywords that are likely to appear in legitimate email.

If you regularly work at your Mac late at night and have trouble falling asleep, consider turning on Night Shift to reduce your blue light exposure. By default, it makes the colors of your Mac warmer from sunset to sunrise.

You can take advantage of Apple’s Live Text feature in Photos to catalog books, boxes, or any other items with text names. Think of it as a lazy person’s ad hoc database.

A new feature in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers lets you select bits of text that aren’t next to each other so that you can, for example, format them or copy them all at once.

If you like how the Lock Screen’s Photo Shuffle wallpaper rotates through photos but would prefer that it worked from an album you specified, you’re in luck! That’s now possible in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17.

Smart quotes and dashes usually make your text look more professional. But if they’re problematic, you can turn off the feature that inserts them automatically or revert them on a one-off basis.

If you’re tired of trying to interpret how full your MacBook’s battery is from its menu bar icon, here’s how to get it to display a percentage as well.

You can adjust your Mac’s screen resolution to make text and graphics larger so they’re easier to see, or if you have good vision, you can make them smaller so more content fits on the screen. Our tips will help.

Did you know Apple’s Podcasts app now includes written transcripts? Our tip helps you view the text while you listen, use it to navigate within the audio, search for specific bits, and more.

Want to see all your upcoming events in a list in Apple’s Calendar app on the Mac? It doesn’t have a built-in list view, but there’s a workaround.

Do you want to read the actual manuals or specs for Apple products? You can now easily find them on Apple’s new Documentation website.