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With Apple’s productivity apps like Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders, which look and work pretty much the same on the Mac and in iOS, what you see is largely what you get. Particularly in iOS, they tend not to have much in the way of hidden depths. With Reminders, however, Apple’s engineers snuck some surprising little features into the Mac version. We like using Siri on the iPhone, Apple Watch, and HomePod to add items to our iCloud-synced Reminders to-do lists and shopping lists whenever we think of them. And...

File this warning under “unless it’s absolutely necessary.” If you use iCloud Photo Library on your Mac, don’t sign out from iCloud. Also, don’t deselect the iCloud Photo Library checkbox in either the Photos options of the iCloud pane of System Preferences or in the iCloud preferences in Photos itself. Why not? Because, when you re-enable iCloud or iCloud Photo Library, Photos will re-upload all your photos, which could take days. (It’s not really re-uploading all of them, but even just resyncing will take a long time.) Worse, if you...

Apple and IBM are integrating IBM’s machine learning AI called Watson to iOS, Watson aims to make iOS enterprise apps smarter. Watson is referred to as ML or Machine Learning software so the software or app in this case learns from each time you use it. Currently to integrate Watson with an app you have to access it via IBM’s cloud services, what this integration with Apple’s iOS aims to do is to bring the core services of Watson onto apps for iOS even when offline. By Apple and IBM...

Apple has given a boost to its self-driving car program, Project Titan, with up to 45 vehicles on the road in California, behind only General Motor’s Cruise subsidiary. According to a report from the Financial Times last Tuesday, pulling data from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, Apple’s self-driving program has expanded from 3 vehicles in April 2017 to 45 as of 2018, just behind GM’s Cruise with 110 cars. Car companies behind Apple are Tesla with 39 vehicles and Uber with 29. Uber had shut down its testing after an...

After months of anticipation, Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker finally shipped in mid-February. Reviews of its audio quality have been positive, and for the most part, it works both as advertised and as you’d expect. However, there were some surprises, most good but some bad. Whether you have a HomePod on your credenza (which may be a bad spot for it!) or you’re still deciding if you want to buy one, here are ten things you should know: Furniture rings. Let’s get this one out of the way. The HomePod...

Junk calls are one of the great annoyances of the modern world. You’re minding your own business when your iPhone vibrates in your pocket. You pull it out, curious as to who’s calling, but don’t recognize the number. You may notice that it’s in the same exchange as your phone number, suggesting that it’s a neighbor. But no. When you answer, it’s “Heather,” a pre-recorded voice wanting to sign you up for a resort vacation, give your business a loan, or help with your credit card debt. Angered by the...