How-To Guides about Apple

Speech-to-text technology can be seen on your iPhone in various places, from the Dictation tool to Apple's new behind-the-scenes, auto-created transcripts for podcast episodes. Your iPhone also has some pretty impressive text-to-speech capabilities. With them, your iPhone can read webpages, documents, or whatever text is on the screen out loud to you — only some of these tools aren't easy to find.

Editing out unwanted objects, people, and distractions from your photos just got a lot easier on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Before, you would have to use apps like Google Photos or Snapseed to erase background distractions or perform spot healing, but it's now a native feature in Apple's Photos app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Your iPhone's Mail inbox may look a little different lately — with faces, initials, brand logos, and even icons like an airplane, shopping bags, storefronts, or a heart with an ECG waveform on it showing up beside emails. That's by design, and if it's not your thing, you can turn it off.

Safari is always evolving, but most of its improvements happen behind the scenes, making the web feel faster, more secure, and more polished without you even noticing. There aren't any flashy new browser UI changes in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, but it does upgrade what Safari is capable of in small but meaningful ways.

If you're in the US, your iPhone lets you set default apps for emailing, messaging, calling, web browsing, and even contactless payments and access. With iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, Apple also lets you pick a new default translation app.

In an era where cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, knowing whether a website is secure is more important than ever. Apple has finally addressed a long-standing limitation in Safari for iPhone and iPad, allowing us to view SSL/TLS certificate details in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 — something we could already do on macOS for over a decade.

Apple introduced a new Ambient Music feature for iPhone and iPad designed to enhance user well-being through curated soundscapes. This option offers four distinct categories — Chill, Productivity, Sleep, and Wellbeing — each providing a curated auditory experience to suit various moods and activities.

The last emoji refresh for iPhone was over a year ago, but thanks to the Unicode 16.0 update, a new wave of fun and expressive characters just hit your Apple devices, bringing fresh glyphs to your keyboard.

Apple has released and continues to test 2024's major software updates for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Apple Vision. But are your devices compatible? Will you need to upgrade a device or two to get all the latest features? Find out here.

Safari has a hidden feature for your iPhone that will change how you share, receive, and interact with links — and barely anyone knows about it. The feature works on the latest iOS software, as well as the latest iPadOS and macOS versions. Still, you won't find any information about it in Safari's app or settings, so it's pretty hidden if you haven't seen it by accident yet.

There are plenty of ways to personalize your iPhone or iPad, right down to how it responds when you open an app. With a quick setup, you can have it play a custom sound every time you launch your favorite apps, adding a unique touch to your daily routine.

With so many useful native and third-party apps available on iPhone, the Compass app often goes unnoticed. It may not be as essential as Messages, Photos, or Mail, but you can still get plenty of use out of it, especially if you're a hiker, camper, or someone who enjoys outdoor adventures.

One of the most significant changes to iPhone that came with iOS 18 lets you text Android users in the Messages app with iMessage-like features such as typing indicators, read receipts, large file sharing, high-quality photos and videos, and even emoji reactions.

You might not know this, but you can use Apple Wallet to store your driver's license right on your iPhone. It speeds up airport security, adds an extra layer of protection with Face ID or Touch ID, and lets you verify your age or identity quickly without handing over your physical card.

In today's digital world, personalization is everything — and stickers are a fun way to add a unique touch to your conversations. Whether you're creating stickers from still images, emoji, Live Photos, or Genmoji, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS make it easy to customize your collection. But when it's time to clean things up and remove stickers that no longer fit your style, knowing how to manage and delete them efficiently is just as important.

Staying connected with the people who matter most is easier when you can instantly distinguish their calls or messages — even without looking at your iPhone. That's where custom vibration patterns for alerts come in handy. They're perfect when you need a tactile way to identify who's calling or texting while your iPhone is on silent or in your pocket.

Apple's Freeform app levels up with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, offering you new features to enhance creativity, collaboration, and organization. While some updates, like the new Scenes feature, are prominent, others are more subtle but just as powerful. This incredible app's versatile features work equally well on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Apple Maps keeps getting better and better for all the hikers in the world. With iOS 18, iPadOS 18, or macOS Sequoia 15, you can access thousands of detailed trail maps within U.S. national parks and topographic views, but you can also create your own walking and hiking routes.

In today's digital world, where inboxes are often inundated with endless emails, the latest updates to Mail in iOS 18 are nothing short of game-changing.

Apple just released its biggest update to iOS 17 yet, and there are 60 exciting new changes for your iPhone. With iOS 17.2, you get a brand new app, more Apple Music enhancements, upgrades in Messages, and a new security feature that was announced last year, as well as changes for Weather, notifications, Apple TV, Books, and more.

Voice Control has long been a cornerstone of hands-free convenience on iPhones, but for users with unique speech patterns or atypical speech, standard recognition systems often fall short. Apple's solution? Vocal Shortcuts. While this innovation is a game-changer for those with speech differences, it's also a versatile tool for anyone looking to streamline tasks.

If scrolling through your phone during a car ride makes you feel queasy, you're not alone. Motion sickness often occurs when your inner ear senses movement but your eyes focus on something stationary — like your iPhone's screen. Apple's Vehicle Motion Cues feature aims to alleviate this discomfort with subtle, dynamic on-screen visuals that sync with your vehicle's movements.

Apple's Messages app has long had visual effects you could apply manually after long-pressing the send button, and there are even hidden keywords you could use to trigger full-screen effects automatically. FaceTime can also give you some full-screen effects to play around with during video calls, but the triggers are an entirely different concept — hand gestures.

Apple has introduced a valuable new tool for Safari that lets you export or import browsing data such as bookmarks, history, extensions, credit card information, and usernames and passwords. This makes it easy to move your data between Safari and other browsers like Brave or Orion, create a backup archive, or even sync Safari passwords with third-party managers like Proton Pass.

Siri has long relied on basic sources like Google and Wikipedia for answers, but with iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, Apple is taking its virtual assistant to a new level by integrating ChatGPT. Now, you can use Siri to generate text and images with ChatGPT — and that's not all. ChatGPT is deeply integrated into Apple Intelligence and goes beyond just Siri.

There are thousands of emoji characters, but finding the right one can feel like a wild goose chase. Want a red panda? You can have a black-and-white one. Need a crying heart? You're out of luck. With Apple Intelligence, finding the right emoji for any occasion is now a reality.

In a new update, the iPhone 16 lineup is finally getting Visual Intelligence, a feature that lets you instantly gather information about anything around you just by snapping a picture.

Apple has yet another new game for Apple News+ subscribers on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. With the latest software updates, Sudoku officially joins Crossword, Crossword Mini, and Quartiles in the News app's Puzzles section.

A new iPhone and iPad setting gives you control over how loud your device's built-in speakers get, which can help you avoid being startled by loud auto-playing videos, waking up someone sleeping nearby, hurting your ears, or degrading your speakers' quality and performance.

Since 2020, you've been free to set your preferred web browser and email app as the default on your iPhone or iPad. Now, four years later, Apple is expanding this flexibility in the U.S., allowing even more apps to be set as defaults for specific actions. Plus, there's now a centralized menu to manage all these default app settings.

The devices in the new iPhone 16 series lineup have one feature no other iPhone models have: a physical Camera Control button. If you use your iPhone to take photos or record videos, the Camera Control speeds up the process and gives you immediate control over adjusting settings and values using intuitive gestures. But what exactly can you do with it?

An invaluable button on your iPhone can do hundreds, even thousands, of amazing things, but most iPhone users don't even know it exists. You can't push it. You can't click it. You can't press it. But it's the largest button on your iPhone, more powerful than the versatile Side button, and it's hiding in plain sight.

If you can't always see what you're typing very well on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you no longer have to adjust the font size for the app or entire system just to read your writing more easily. One of Apple's newer Accessibility features gives you a customizable, magnified view in a floating window so you can see every character with crystal-clear clarity in real time.

Safari is an excellent app for all your web browsing needs, but Apple gives you the freedom to choose a different default web browser on your iPhone to open links in. If you primarily use a third-party web browser like Chrome or Firefox on your computer or tablet, changing your default iOS web browser allows you to have a synced web browsing experience across all your devices.

Apple has finally given Control Center the love that it needs with an updated interface design and more customizations than ever before. Taking the more customizable overhaul one step further, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 have elevated controls beyond Control Center, so you can use controls from other places on your iPhone or iPad for even faster access to your most-used shortcuts.

Apple's official feature list for the Music app on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 may highlight only one update, but there's much more happening under the surface than that. Whether you subscribe to Apple Music, the latest version brings hidden gems that enhance your up-next queue, playlists, and overall experience.