Quick Tip - Don’t Use These Products to Clean Your iPhone (Or You’ll Wish You Hadn’t)

All iPhones pick up fingerprints, and it’s all too easy to get your iPhone dirty with ink, lotion, makeup, dirt, food, and oil. If you’re faced with an iPhone that needs cleaning, resist the urge to spray it with window cleaner, rubbing alcohol, or ammonia, or, even worse, to scrub it with baking soda or Borax. 

That’s because all iPhones have oleophobic—oil repellent—coatings on their glass surfaces that make it easy to wipe off fingerprints. You don’t want to remove that coating any faster than it will wear off normally, and cleaning products will strip it quickly. Instead, Apple recommends a soft, lint-free cloth such as you would use for glasses or camera lenses. You can even save over $18 and get a 6 pack from Amazon for less than $6 here.

By the way, even though the iPhone 7 and later have some level of dust and water resistance, it’s important to avoid getting moisture in the openings—most of the time, a lens cloth should be all you need. 

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Breathe new life into an old Mac

Improve an Old Mac’s Performance with an SSD

I understand. That MacBook Pro you bought a few years back doesn’t seem like it should need replacing, but performance has started to lag, and you don’t have the money for a shiny new Touch Bar model. Adding RAM up to 8 or 16 GB can help, but the best bang for your buck in terms of performance comes from swapping your Mac’s hard drive for a solid-state drive, or SSD.

What’s an SSD? As the name implies, it’s a storage device that has no moving parts—no spinning disks and no read/write heads skimming along just a few nanometers above the disk surfaces. Instead, SSDs use flash memory, a type of non-volatile memory whose chips retain data even without power.

SSDs have two huge advantages over traditional hard drives. The first is reliability, particularly in laptops that are picked up and set down many times a day. Drop your MacBook Pro on the desk a little too hard, particularly while it’s on and the drive is spinning, and that read/write head could hit the surface of the disk—the very definition of a hard disk crash. With no moving parts, SSDs aren’t nearly as vulnerable to physical damage.
But the second advantage is why SSDs have become so popular—they’re fast, really fast. One SSD vendor advertises them as up to 92 times faster than hard drives. Obviously, the specifics can vary quite a bit, but in system benchmarks, swapping an SSD in for a hard drive can improve overall performance by 50 percent or more. Drive-intensive activities like booting see the most benefit—you’ll be shocked at how much faster your Mac boots with an SSD! Boot times can go from 45 seconds or more, down to 10 seconds or less.

So if you’re trying to goose the performance of your older Mac, look into an SSD. Your mac will feel brand new again! If your interested in getting an SSD installed in your iMac or MacBookPro, let me know, and we can get it set up. The clients that have done so, are more than pleased!

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