Productivity & Shortcuts

Imagine your iPhone adapting to each app you open — text that's always the right size, buttons you can spot at a glance, and a steady cursor that never blinks — all without touching your system-wide settings. It sounds like magic, but it's all thanks to a tucked-away feature.

Thousands of emoji are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and you can use these in many of the apps you have installed on your Apple devices. But there's one emoji you'll likely never see on any of Apple's official emoji keyboards, and its absence may surprise you at first, considering it's embedded in virtually every Apple product. That emoji is, of course, the Apple logo icon.

You can lock practically any app on your iPhone or iPad behind biometric or passcode protection. And we're not talking about using any funky workarounds. There's now an official Apple way to protect sensitive apps and their data. It even safeguards your personal information, keeping it out of sight across the system. You can even hide apps, making it harder for others to know they're there.

Apple Notes may not have all the bells and whistles that a more powerful word processor like Apple Pages has, but this simple text editor has plenty of helpful features that make it more than just a basic note-taking app. One of these features gives you the ability to highlight text and change font colors, giving you another way to make important details stand out.

A good e‑reader lets you disappear into a story without the headaches of blue‑light glare, notification pings, or dead‑weight battery anxiety. The latest crop goes further, adding color E Ink for comics, warm front‑lights for night reading, and waterproofing so you can finish that chapter poolside. We put the year's most compelling models to the page‑turn test and narrowed the field to five standouts for every kind of book lover.

It can feel pretty chaotic when you have a lot of open windows on your Mac that are different sizes, but there's an easy way to organize the mess in just a few seconds.

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.

Your iPhone can already send messages with your voice, reply with a tap, and suggest words while you type. Now, with iOS 18.4, it can instantly launch a specific conversation from virtually anywhere on your device. Thanks to a new action in the Shortcuts app, you're just one tap (or Back Tap) away from texting your favorite contact.

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.

Turn your Mac into a powerful transcription machine using the same AI that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT. With just a few Terminal commands, you can convert audio and video files into accurate text in minutes.

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.

Safari on iOS just got a little nosier — and it could unintentionally expose more than you'd like. With Apple's latest update, your recent searches appear front and center whenever you open a new tab or tap into the address bar.

Safari on iOS is more powerful than it looks, especially when you know the hidden gestures that can make your browsing faster and more productive. These shortcuts quietly transform how you navigate the web, manage tabs, and share content across devices. Once you know them all, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them.

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.

Chromebooks offer multiple ways to share files with other devices, whether you're transferring to another Chromebook, an Android phone, or even a Windows PC. Each method has its own advantages, depending on whether you want something quick and built-in or a more feature-rich third-party option.

Your days as an ordinary Muggle are over — as long as you have an iPhone. With just a word or two, you can use your iPhone and newfound Muggle-born powers to cast spells or utilize charms just like Harry Potter and team. Only your "wand" is from Apple, not Ollivanders in Diagon Alley.

Apple Intelligence has followed a predictable path so far, bringing plenty of AI features designed for everyday users. But even with new AI updates in every iOS release since iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, there's still plenty of room for growth — especially in generative AI (gen AI). And Apple seems to be leaning into that, as shown by its recent updates enabling Apple Intelligence by default and expanding language support.

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.

One of the coolest aesthetic features of iMessage is its animated message effects. If you're like many users, you might even have discovered them by accident, where wishing your friend a "Happy Birthday!" or congratulating them on a promotion unexpectedly flooded your screen with balloons or confetti.

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.

Night Shift, Dark Mode, Reduce White Point, and Zoom's Low Light Filter all help reduce the harmful effects on your body's clock that bright iPhone and iPad screens have at night. But there's another option on iOS and iPadOS that turns your entire display red, and it's useful for so much more than just late-night browsing in bed.

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.

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 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.

Previously, losing an AirTag or Find My network accessory meant relying on tech-savvy strangers to contact you via phone or email if they found it. With a new Find My update, you can ditch the passive approach and be more proactive about recovering your tracker by sharing its information with trusted contacts and even airlines, allowing them to track your tracker for you.

Your iPhone only has a few physical buttons, buttons with a set number of default actions assigned to them, like sleeping your display, controlling volume levels, and even taking pictures. But as much as these buttons can do for you, they can do more. You're not stuck with the out-of-the-box defaults. Every push button on your iPhone can be customized in one way or another.

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.

Election Day is today, and Apple News is making it easy for you to stay informed with real-time results for the 2024 presidential election through a new Live Activity feature on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.

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.

There are more actions available for the Action button, but only a handful of iPhone models have that button. However, there is another button with new features you can use, and you can access all the fresh features on any iPhone model that can run iOS 18.

Apple has revolutionized how we write with the introduction of its new Writing Tools, powered by Apple Intelligence. In beta on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, these tools allow you to select text and use intelligent features to summarize, proofread, or rewrite it until the tone and wording are just right. In a future beta, Writing Tools can even write original content for you.

From time to time, you may need to locate the version and build number for a particular app on your iPhone or iPad, but it's not at all obvious where you can find the information. Well, there's more than one place to look on iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, but none are perfect solutions. Knowing each method will ensure you can always find any app's real version number.

With iOS 18, you get better note-taking capabilities in the revamped Notes app, advanced features like conversions and results history in the more powerful Calculator, and interactive Math Notes, a feature in both apps that's a game changer for students and professionals dealing with complex equations. But Apple didn't forget about Reminders, which has become more than a simple to-do-list app.