Quick Tip - Stop Paying Too Much for a Family’s iCloud Drive Storage

Apple gives iCloud users 5 GB of free storage, but that fills up fast with iCloud Photo Library, iOS backups, iBooks, and more. Until iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 High Sierra, each person in a family had to buy extra iCloud space separately. Happily, Apple has now made it so everyone in a Family Sharing group can share a single 200 GB ($2.99 per month) or 2 TB ($9.99 per month) plan. 

The family organizer can start sharing storage in High Sierra or iOS 11 as follows: on the Mac, go to System Preferences > iCloud > Manage Family > My Apps & Services > iCloud Storage; in iOS, go to Settings > Your Name > Family Sharing > iCloud Storage. Any other family member can then cancel their paid plan and join the Family Sharing plan using their iCloud Storage screen. Its a great money saving tip!

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Who Should Buy the New iMac Pro?

Apple’s new iMac Pro has started shipping, and it’s an astonishing machine. Put simply, it’s the most powerful Mac ever, a title it will likely retain until Apple releases a new version of the Mac Pro, promised for sometime in 2018. But for now, what’s special about the iMac Pro, and should you buy one?

The main thing to know about the space gray iMac Pro is that it’s aimed at high-end professionals, and as a result, it gets pricey fast. The base configuration starts at $4999, and if you max out all its options, you’ll spend over $13,000. That’s a lot of money, but you get a lot of bang for your buck.

The power starts with the processor, an 8-core Intel Xeon W. If that’s not enough performance for you, there are also 10-core, 14-core, and 18-core options. Apple didn’t skimp on RAM either—32 GB comes standard, and you can bump it to either 64 GB or 128 GB. The default storage is a 1 TB solid-state drive, but you can increase that to 2 TB or 4 TB. You can’t upgrade the iMac Pro in any way yourself, but you can take it to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider (Or contact me) to have more RAM installed after the fact.

The screen is a stunning 27-inch Retina 5K 5120-by-2880 P3 display, and the iMac Pro drives all those pixels with a Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics card with 8 GB of memory, though you can get even more graphics processing power from an optional Radeon Pro Vega 64 card with 16 GB.

Most of the iMac Pro’s other specs are similar to the existing 27-inch iMac with Retina display—a 1080p FaceTime camera, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, an SDXC card slot, four USB 3 ports, and a headphone jack—but it also boasts four Thunderbolt 3 ports for driving external displays and large storage arrays, along with 10 Gb Ethernet for lightning-fast network access.

It comes with a space gray Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad and a space gray Magic Mouse 2. You can switch to a space gray Magic Trackpad for $50 or buy both input devices for $149, which you might want to do because the space gray peripherals aren’t sold separately.

Many of the iMac Pro’s options come with eye-watering price tags—$2400 for the 18-core processor and another $2400 for 128 GB of RAM—but those stratospheric costs make the purchasing decision fairly easy. If you’re in a line of work where increased performance translates directly to increased productivity, you’ll want an iMac Pro as soon as you can get one. It’s ideal for video editors who need to work with 8K video, engineers using complex modeling software, and developers suffering through long compile times. Put simply, if time is money for you, you’ll want an iMac Pro.

And if you’re a professional whose needs aren’t nearly so rarefied, you can rest easy knowing that the regular 27-inch iMac can give you more than enough performance for a lot less money.

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4 New Apple OS Features You Can Use Today

Apple just released new versions of all its operating systems—iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS—fixing bugs, plugging security holes, and, best of all, adding a few new features. Here are four things you can do once you’ve updated. (If you’re concerned that installing the updates may cause other problems, check with me first.)

1: Sleep better after using your Mac late at night.

macOS 10.12.4 Sierra has gained Night Shift, a feature from iOS that automatically shifts the colors of the screen to the warmer end of the spectrum after dark. Night Shift may help you sleep better by reducing the amount of blue light that tricks your body into thinking it’s earlier than it is.
To set up Night Shift, open System Preferences > Displays > Night Shift and choose Sunset to Sunrise from the Schedule pop-up menu. Night Shift knows when the sun rises and sets wherever you are, but if you prefer, you can also set custom on and off times. (If you don’t see the Night Shift button in the Displays preference pane after upgrading to 10.12.4, your Mac is unfortunately too old to support Night Shift.)





If you’re working with graphics at night, or if video looks odd, you can turn off Night Shift manually. Do that either in the Displays preference pane or by scrolling down in Notification Center (click it in the upper-right corner of the screen) to see the Night Shift switch.

2: Find the AirPod that fell between the couch cushions.

Apple’s wireless AirPods earbuds are cute, but they’re also easy to misplace. If you can’t find yours, iOS 10.3’s Find My iPhone app can help. Bring it up, tap the AirPods icon in the display, and then tap the Play Sound button to make them play a locator sound. If you’ve lost only one AirPod, you can mute the other so it’s easier to hear where the sound is coming from.



Note that Find My AirPods works only when in range of a paired iOS device, so it may not help if you lose an AirPod while running.

3: Don’t be “that person with the Apple Watch” at the theater.

You’re in a darkened theater, at a movie or a play, and when you move in your seat or cover your mouth to cough, your Apple Watch’s screen turns on, annoying the people around you. Even worse is when a notification rolls in, causing the watch to make a sound. Embarrassing, we know. Happily, watchOS 3.2 adds Theater Mode, which turns on Silent mode and keeps the screen dark by disabling its standard “raise to wake” behavior.
To enable Theater mode, open Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. Then tap the Theater Mode button, which is emblazoned with theater masks. After the performance, you’ll need to disable Theater mode manually by tapping its button again.



If you do need to check the time surreptitiously (who knew this performance would go so long!), tap your Apple Watch’s screen, or press the Digital Crown or side button.

4: Ask Siri to find your car in a humongous parking lot

We’ve all been there. You parked at the mall, but got turned around while you were inside, and now you can’t find your car in the sea of automobiles. In iOS 10.3, you can now search for “parked car” in Maps, or just ask Siri, “Where did I park?”



And if you ever lose your car at a place like Disney World, this feature alone will be worth the price of the iPhone!

Note of caution - I typically tell my clients to wait a minimum of two weeks before installing any new updates such as these. Keep in mind the new releases are DAYS old (as of this post). May want to hold off on installing and see if there are any bugs that need worked out. But at least you know about some new features you can look forward to. Feel free to drop me a line if you are interested if its safe yet. ;-)

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Restore Files from Time Machine for Peace of Mind

You are backing up your Mac’s data, right? (No? Really? Open System Preferences > Time Machine and set up backups to an external hard drive. I'll wait. Otherwise, the question is not if you’ll lose data, but when.)

Backups are essential, but many people don’t realize that there’s something even more important: the capability to restore your data in case of a catastrophe. All too often, people believe they’re backing up, but because disasters are rare, they don’t realize the backups aren’t being made properly until it’s too late. And even if your backups are good, you don’t want to learn how to restore while you are stressed out about possibly lost data.
Follow along, then, and let’s restore some data from your Time Machine backup together, so you both know that your backups are working and that you’ll be ready should you need to resort to your backup.

1. In the Finder, select the file or folder you want to recover, or if it was deleted, the folder that previously contained it. (For this example, we’ll practice with the iTunes Library.itl file that stores data for iTunes; it’s in the iTunes folder inside your account’s Music folder.)
2. Choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine  menu in the menu bar. (If you don’t see this menu, open System Preferences > Time Machine and select the checkbox for “Show Time Machine in menu bar.”)
   Your selected window moves to the center of the screen, whose background blurs, and copies of the window stack up behind it, each indicating a previous backup.
3. Find the version of the file or folder that you want, perhaps a backup from a few days ago. You can do this in one of two ways:
   • Click the arrows to the right the windows to move back (the top arrow) or forward (the bottom arrow) in time. For each click, Time Machine jumps to the most recent backup in which the files shown in the window were different.
   • Use the bars on the right side of the screen to navigate to a particular backup. As you hover over the bars, they expand to display the date of each backup; click a bar to jump to the state of the window at that point in time.
4. Because we’re just practicing here, we’ll restore to the Desktop instead of the original location. Right-click or Control-click the item you want to restore and choose Restore “filename” To from the contextual menu.
   
   
   

   
   
   
5. Time Machine switches you to the Finder and opens a Save dialog. Navigate to the Desktop by pressing Command-D, and then click Choose, after which Time Machine restores the file to the Desktop.

If you were really restoring a corrupted or deleted file, you could instead just click Time Machine’s Restore button, which is even easier, since then Time Machine restores the file to its original location. If a file with the same name exists, the Finder prompts you to replace the existing file, keep both copies (which renames the existing file with “(original)” at the end), or keep the original (which cancels the restoration).



That’s it! Try restoring a few more files and folders to the Desktop until you’re comfortable with Time Machine’s interface, and when you’re done, trash everything you’ve restored to the Desktop. To check that your backups continue working properly, restore some files once a month or so.

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