How-To

You don’t need to buy an old Macintosh to experience classic Mac OS anymore. In fact, you don’t even need to fiddle around installing an emulator and downloading ROMs. Thanks to Infinite Mac, you can boot up every major release of Mac OS from the 1980s and ’90s right in your web browser.

With more than 25 Apple computers and devices in my collection, I’m something of a vintage Mac collector. It’s an expensive hobby that few can indulge in, but the Infinite Mac website lets you experience one of the joys of collecting vintage gear: Taking ancient software for a spin on a vintage Mac.

Apple Music Classical is a new app for iPhone specifically designed as a great experience for browsing and listening to instrumental music. Its catalog of 5 million tracks has been carefully curated and tagged by composer, work, movement, instrument, orchestra, artist and more.

Why does there need to be a separate app for classical music? Apple says it succinctly on its support page: classical music “has longer and more detailed titles, multiple artists for each work, and hundreds of recordings of well-known pieces.” This app “is designed to support the complex data structure of classical music.”

This is how to discover, find, add and listen to music in Apple Music Classical.

You can use the Apple logo as an emoji … if you know how. Expressing your love for all things Apple looks a lot better if know how to type the .

It’s easy to do on a Mac, and I can show you how to add  to texts on iPhone and iPad, too.

How can you report a spam text you get on your iPhone, and what happens when you report it? Where does the report go? Does anyone look at these things?

Apple has useful tools like Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple for managing email spam, but text spam can be far more annoying. You don’t have a spam filter for your texts, and texts can be easier to fake.

If you’re getting spam texts, there are a few different steps you can take to can it, and I’ll walk you through all of them.

You can visit the App Store to download Apple apps like Music, Podcasts, Weather, Maps and Find My missing from your iPhone or iPad. If you can’t find them. It’s possible you uninstalled them and your device needs to download them again. Or they might have simply disappeared from your Home Screen, and are now hiding in the App Library.

There are also a few iPhone apps that Apple hasn’t made available on iPad. This was the case with Calculator until very recently, so you may need to install an update to get it.

I’ll walk you through all the possibilities, showing you how to get Apple’s stock apps back on your iPhone or iPad.

If you want to keep your iCloud data completely private and secure, but you live in the United Kingdom — where Apple is rolling back Advanced Data Protection to comply with government demands — you’ll need an alternative to iCloud sync and backup features.

That’s because the only option is to not use iCloud. There’s no getting around it: without Advanced Data Protection, your iCloud backups can potentially be snooped on.

Turning off iCloud will have many negative ramifications. iCloud manages syncing services across all your devices. If you own an iPhone, Mac and/or iPad, iCloud makes sure all your messages, photos, app data, notes, passwords, bookmarks, etc., appear everywhere.

Without Advanced Data Protection, there are still a few of these backup services that are end-to-end encrypted. But a few critical services, like device backups, are not — and if you don’t disable them, you’ll have a big hole in your data security. Keep reading or watch our video.

When guests come over, it’s common courtesy to share your Wi-Fi password — and your iPhone offers plenty of tricks up its sleeve to make it easy.

You don’t need to go through your photo library to look up the picture you took of the bottom of your router, then read the long string of numbers and letters. Instead, you can show them a convenient QR code to connect them instantly. Or, if they’re in your contacts, you can share the password with a single button tap. For your Android and Windows friends, you can look up any saved Wi-Fi password from either Settings, or, well … Passwords. If you often work with colors, a Nix Mini Color Sensor can make identifying and matching colors quick and effortless.

Here’s how. Keep reading below or watch our quick video.

The new Music Haptics accessibility feature in iOS 18 adds another dimension to audio: vibration. Taking advantage of the incredible precision of the iPhone’s Taptic Engine, the feature brings to life a specially recorded track of rhythmic vibrations and buzzing patterns timed to certain Apple Music songs.

Switch it on, and you can hold your iPhone in your hands and feel your music in a whole new way. Keep reading to see how the feature works (or watch our video that explains it all).

You can use a feature called Guided Access to lock down your iPhone to a single app before you hand it to a kid or someone else. You might want to let your offspring play a game, or pass your phone around for controlling music, or hand it off to show someone a video … but you probably don’t want them going rogue and reading your texts or calling your mom.

In Accessibility settings, you can enable Guided Access to limit your iPhone to a single app before you hand it off. It’s a kind of quick and dirty “guest mode.”

This will help you keep your phone — and your privacy — safe. You can even disable features like the volume buttons and set up time limits.

It’s easy to zoom in on your Mac screen and get a closer look at your display. If the text is just too small to read, or perhaps you’re making some graphics and you need pixel-perfect alignment, a simple tweak to your Mac settings is all you need.

Using your Mac’s zoom feature, you can hit a keyboard shortcut or use a multitouch gesture on your trackpad to zoom in on your screen. I’ll show you how to use this handy feature. Plus, I’ll cover Hover Text and Display Scaling, two more features that help you embiggen the words on your Mac screen.

You can get Apple Intelligence right now on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. All you have to do is update to the latest developer beta release. You’ll get access to Visual Intelligence, Image Playground, Genmoji and more.

The developer beta of iOS 18.4 enables Apple Intelligence in the European Union for the first time. visionOS 2.4 brings the featureset to the Vision Pro.

Apple Intelligence is compatible with the iPhone 15 Pro and the new iPhone 16 lineup. Unfortunately, older devices (or even the iPhone 15) don’t have enough RAM to support Apple’s Foundation models. Luckily, you can also try it out if you have an iPad or Mac with an M-series or A17 Pro chip.

Here’s how to get it all.

You can radically customize the Lock Screen of your iPhone with a bunch of widgets, aesthetics and styles. If you liked the themed custom Home Screens people were putting together using Shortcuts and Widgetsmith, you’ll love the level of creativity you can express with customized Lock Screens.

Read on to see all the features or watch our video.

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You can use the iCloud website to access all of your online Apple services from any computer, tablet or phone. This includes Find My, Mail, Photos, Invites, Files, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Notes, Calendar and Reminders. It’s really convenient if you need to find a lost device, print a file or download a picture from a different computer you’re not signed into.

The iCloud website provides easy access to all of Apple’s cloud services — and it’s even customizable for those who use it often. Let me show you how it works.

The Dvorak keyboard layout offers a different way of arranging the 26 letters of the alphabet. Dvorak puts all the most common letters right on the center row for increased typing speed. It also balances the most common letters across all 10 fingers to reduce strain. Physical Dvorak keyboards have been available for computers forever, but finally, you can get it on your iPhone and iPad.

iMessage effects can add much more meaning, emotion and fun to your texting. You can add bold, italics, underline and strikethrough text, just like a formatted document, and even choose from a bunch of cool, animated effects.

You can make congratulations more bombastic, to rejoice in someone’s finest moments. Or, you can use formatting and effects to convey sarcasm, stress and sorrow more clearly.

Keep reading below or watch our video.

While your iPhone doesn’t have a built-in microSD card reader, adding a plug-in memory card reader is easy. And it requires no additional software. The same goes for iPads.

Here’s what you need to do.

Eye Tracking is a pretty remarkable and ambitious accessibility feature that lets you control your iPhone entirely with your eyes. You can use this feature in a pinch if you need to use your phone with soapy hands while doing the dishes or with grimy hands while working on a car or doing other dirty work. Alternatively, if you’re losing your fine motor skills, this feature could be an essential one to learn.

Likely borrowing some of the software from the advanced Vision Pro headset, this feature lets you control your iPhone hands-free. And once you set up Eye Tracking, you can use the iPhone’s Sound Actions feature. It lets you perform certain functions, like toggling your flashlight or taking a screenshot, just by making various mouth noises.

Keep reading or watch our video.

If autocorrect repeatedly serves up ridiculous options, you can reset your iPhone keyboard to eliminate weird additions to its dictionary. This comes in handy when you find that autocorrect suddenly starts changing words it doesn’t need to change, or offering up other strange glitches.

It just takes a second to reset the keyboard dictionary on iPhone or iPad. We’ll show you how.

Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues feature will help you use your iPhone in the car by reducing feelings of motion sickness. With the feature turned on, dots along the edge of your iPhone screen will animate in sync with the motion of the plane, train or automobile you’re riding in.

According to Apple, “Motion sickness is commonly caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel.” Apple says these animations “reduce sensory conflict.”

It may sound weird, but the feature evidently works really well. Here’s how you can enable it.

To tackle your party planning, the new Apple Invites app can help you get organized with RSVPs and keep everybody up to date. It can even handle a shared music playlist and photo album that anyone can contribute to.

And yes, you can invite people who don’t have the app installed yet, don’t have an Apple Account or don’t have an Apple device at all. You can invite people via email; they can RSVP on the web and get follow-up notifications in their inbox.

Keep reading or watch our video guide — and download the app here.

Apple offers end-to-end encryption for many more types of iCloud data than it once did. Advanced Data Protection encrypts iCloud Photos, Notes, iCloud Backup and more. But you have to activate the feature to take advantage of the data protection. It is easy … once you find the switch buried in Settings.

We can save you some time. Here’s how and why you should activate it.

Even folks who don’t pay for access to TV channels can stream the Super Bowl live — and for free — on any Apple device or on the web. For Super Bowl LIX this Sunday, Fox Sports plans to stage a “takeover” of the Tubi streaming app. The free live Super Bowl stream will include a pregame run-up and the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show featuring rapper Kendrick Lamar. And it requires no viewer sign-in.

So now what’s your excuse to blow off the year’s biggest sporting event? Oh, you probably hate football, not to mention all the commercialist hoopla that comes with America’s modern-day gladiatorial bloodsport. Oh well. For tens of millions of others, Super Bowl Sunday is like a national holiday.

In the updated Notes app in iOS 18, you can transcribe audio to text for free: Your iPhone will automatically transcribe voice notes for later.

This is a great feature to use in a college class, if you want to record audio of a lecture alongside your notes. You can use it in meetings — the irritating in-person kind — for recording what people actually said alongside your notes. It’s also great for generating podcast transcripts or any kind of writing. It’s a quick and easy way to get a first draft.

Read more or watch our video guide.

Safari’s Hide Distracting Items feature lets you remove ads from your iPhone, along with other elements on the page that irritate you. It doesn’t require an ad blocker or a paid extension — Apple built it right into the browser in iOS 18.

Hide Distracting Items is not an ad blocker per se, but if you are pestered by pop-ups and other items with no obvious close button, Hide Distracting Items can come to the rescue. Here’s how to use it — keep reading or watch our video.

Find My iPhone, a feature available in Apple’s Find My app, will help you locate your lost phone. You can find it using any other Apple device you own or by borrowing a friend’s device. You can even ping your iPhone from your Apple Watch.

From Find My, you can also remotely lock down your lost iPhone, put the device into a special Lost Mode, or even wipe its contents. You should take a peek at this incredibly useful app before you have to.

Keep reading or watch our video.