Editor's note: This article originally ran in May 2016, but was updated in July 2017 to include info on Android Wear 2.0 and the latest Android Wear watches. 

Apple built the Apple Watch to coexist with your iPhone, and they’re a near-perfect pair if you want a connected device on your wrist. However, it’s not the only smartwatch out there for iPhone owners. The dearly departed Pebble watches are compatible, as is the Samsung Gear S3 and S2—and yes, even Google’s Android Wear watches work with your iPhone.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Jeff K. has a bone to pick with Apple:

I have a great set of speakers that I connected to my old iMac with a optical audio/mini-plug cable through the headphone jack. They had terrific sound. Imagine my surprise then when I connected the cable to the headphone jack on my new iMac and it wasn’t recognized. I called Apple, and it turns out someone decided to change that part of the audio electronics. No more digital optical. My speakers already have a DAC [digital-to-analog converter] built in, so it’s not a matter of adding one.

Starting in 2006, Apple incorporated support for S/PDIF, an optical digital connection standard that uses a fiber-optic cable with a Toslink connector or through Mini Toslink, which is compatible with standard 3.5mm audio jacks. This allowed higher-quality digital audio output, and this standard allows for 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound encoding, depending on the source device.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you’re like most iOS users, you have lots of apps. It’s all too tempting and all too easy to buy new ones (or download free ones) from the App Store. As a result, you probably have a number of games, productivity apps, and utilities on your iPhone or iPad that you’ve hardly ever used and aren’t likely to use in the future.

But if you keep doing that, those apps will start to crowd your iOS device (and your iTunes library), taking up space and requiring frequent updates. That’s why it’s a good idea to periodically get rid of the apps you don’t use anymore. (You can always download them again from the App Store if you change your mind.) Culling your apps library can make managing your app collection easier and free up precious storage space. Here are four ways to do it.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Melissa Mead has a bad case of the overloaded iPhone. She writes:

My iPhone is running out of storage space and I think it’s because I have a lot of photos on it. I’d like to remove them all in one go, after backing them up. Is there a simple way to do that?

Try this: Jack your iPhone into your Mac using the included syncing cable and launch Image Capture. This is an oh-so-handy utility (that hardly anyone uses) for grabbing images from connected devices (including scanners, cameras, and iOS devices).

Select your iPhone in Image Capture’s Devices column. Below, choose a destination for your imported images from the Import To pop-up menu—your choices are the Pictures, Movies, Desktop, and Documents folders as well as iPhoto, Aperture, Preview, and Mail. Select Other and you can choose any folder you like. To import your photos click the Import All button at the bottom right of the window. This will import all the images in your iPhone’s Camera Roll.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Adele Higgins asks:

I somehow removed the Documents category from the Finder’s menu list on the far left of the screen on my MacBook Air. How do I get that category to display again?

You have two methods for certain special folders and items. I’ll explain the specific first, and then the generic way to add any folder.

1. In the Finder, select Finder > Preferences.
2. Click the Sidebar tab.
3. Check any folder or special item you want in the sidebar, like Documents or All My Files.
4. Drag in the Sidebar to rearrange the order in which items appear.

IDG

Apple has built a lot of proximity tools into iOS and macOS, and they’re great when they work. But when they don’t work, it’s leaves you scrambling to find an alternative. If you’ve ever used Handoff, Apple Pay, or AirDrop, you’re using a proximity tool.

Because these features require a combination of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to work, you’re likely experiencing a problem in how each OS or both of them determine whether they’re close enough to each other. (Some Continuity features work with just Wi-Fi or even devices just signed into the same Apple ID/iCloud account.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iTunes is great at storing all your music and other media, but only if you let it. If, like one correspondent, you have a number of hard drives with old iTunes Media folders, you need to do some work to consolidate them. In other news, iTunes has changed the way you delete files from your library, but not from the cloud. And if iTunes displays a “session expired” dialog, here’s how to fix it.

Combining old music folders in one iTunes library

Q: I have multiple iTunes Music folders from different old hard drives that were dying, and they all now reside on an external HD. One of them is in my iTunes Media folder, others are named Music 2, 3, etc. I am struggling to find an efficient way to consolidate all the music into the iTunes Media folder. Currently I have to open two Finder windows highlighting two different Music folders to manually compare contents, select the correct content and then drag it into the correct folder; then delete the artist and album from Music 2, and then repeat this dozens of times. Is there a better way?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ever do something on the web, like shop for shoes, and then notice that every other website you visit has ads for shoes? That’s the result of website tracking. It’s a little creepy, the idea that you’re essentially being followed on the web, targeted with advertising. (And yes, Macworld.com is guilty as charged.)

Apple’s Safari uses WebKit as its engine to present websites through a browser window. WebKit has features to reduce the amount of tracking a site does, and the latest feature is called Intelligent Tracking Prevention. ITP cuts down on the ability of a site to do cross-site tracking, which leads to the experience I mentioned above.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Safari’s Reader mode is a way for users to peruse a webpage without distractions from ads, videos, sponsored content links, and other web elements you may not consider essential to the article you are reading.

In Safari 10 (the version that comes with macOS Sierra), Reader mode has to be enabled manually (View > Show Reader or press Shift-Command-R). With Safari 11 in macOS High Sierra, you can set the browser to open most pages in Reader mode. (Some pages, like the homepage of news sites, can’t be opened in Reader mode. But the individual articles can.)

Here’s how to set Reader mode in Safari 11 for macOS High Sierra. What this will do is open any pages that are Reader compatible in Reader mode when you visit a particular website. (This how-to uses the High Sierra public beta. It will be updated when beta updates and the final version are released.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Just hours into using my new 27-inch iMac with 32GB of memory, the system felt sluggish. I checked memory usage via the top -u command in Terminal, which showed all 32GB was full. Exclamation point, I said aloud, and launched Activity Monitor to dig in more easily than at the command line.

Sure enough, all memory was in use, and the culprit was something I’d never seen before: com.apple.MediaLibraryService. Turns out that this service relies on Apple plug-ins to make music and other audio, photos and video, and GarageBand files available throughout macOS, including via the options in the Media section of the Open dialog box’s sidebar.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Not that long ago, it was easy to rack up bills of hundreds or thousands of dollars in data roaming charges when traveling with your mobile phone. Now, it’s possible to contain your costs, thanks to new offers from carriers, SIMs you can buy int he country you are visiting, or even mobile hotspots.

For Americans, Mexico and Canada are the easiest countries to travel to and call home from without a fuss. Any further abroad, and you’ll have to work harder for deals. It all comes down to planning ahead, and we’ll show you how in this article.

Here are the best options for keeping your mobile data costs down while traveling.

Work with your carrier

Many U.S. carriers have plan levels that extend a domestic plan to Canada and Mexico. T-Mobile is the only one with a plan that works worldwide for data and text with an upgrade option. The other carriers offer day passes (and some have week or month ones, too) for roaming.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

John Smith wrote in with a very interest set of queries about whether his Macs slow down when they’re left to complete a task. “Do you know why and whether there is a way to prevent it?”

John noted a few different behaviors he’d observed:

• After enabling FileVault on an older Mac, the time noted for completion ballooned dramatically when he’d walk away and come back.
• An animation program estimated completion time after about 5 or 10 percent was done, but on his return long after the remaining part should have been completed, it was still working away.
• Also with that animation rendering, the fans blazed full power until he walked away. Coming back and moving the cursor seemed to put the app back into full-speed mode, as the fans fired back up too.

John adjusted the Energy Saver system preference pane to make sure his Macs aren’t going to sleep or engaging other modes. He thinks he found a sweet spot for his animation software, but FileVault remained a slug.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Autoplay video: The bane of the web. You either hate them, or are completely disgusted by them. Fortunately, with Safari 11 in macOS High Sierra, you can easily disable autoplay video and surf the web in relative peace.

Here’s how to stop autoplay videos in macOS High Sierra Safari 11. (This tutorial is done using the public beta. If there are any changes in beta updates or the final release, these instructions will be updated.)

Stop autoplay videos: The quick way

1. When you’re on a website with autoplay videos, you can change how those video behave. Click on Safari > Settings for This Website or right-click the URL box and select Settings for This Website.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Editor’s note: This how-to uses the High Sierra Public Beta software. It will be updated when the final version is released.

When macOS High Sierra gets released later this fall, Apple will distribute it through the App Store. You need an internet connection, and the download will be about 6GB, so it’ll take a few minutes.

For a single Mac, this process works well, but if you have several Macs, it’s not efficient. That’s why I like to create a bootable installation drive. I can use the drive on each Mac I need to upgrade, saving me from the process of entering an Apple ID and password and then waiting for the download.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Jeffrey Dore went through the looking glass with Safari:

When using Safari [in Sierra], it suddenly enlarges the document, similar to what can be done with Control and mouse movement back and forth. If I revert to the previous screen, it returns to correct size, and I can click on the forward button, and it’s fine.

My suspicion is that Jeffrey has accidentally triggered a zoom option I just learned existed. With a trackpad or Magic Mouse, macOS offers an option to zoom on selected areas, just as you can in iOS.

IDG

Steve Dvorak writes in with a question about the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display and the new MacBook Pro.

While I can do the Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter for video and Thunderbolt accessories, I can’t use the power that comes from the display. There appears to be no adapter created that provides power from MagSafe 1/2 connectors to USB-C. Am I missing something?

Unfortunately not. The USB-C port(s) found in the 2015 and later MacBook and 2016 and later MacBook Pro models can pass power bidirectionally, an awesome feature for flexibility, and which allows using USB battery packs to charge your laptop. (Sadly, no battery pack has gone into production yet that can send enough power to charge your Mac while it’s awake.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple uses its App Store to distribute its software, like new Mac operating systems. It’s convenient, but sometimes it can take a while for a download to finish. And if you have multiple Macs, it’s inefficient to download the new OS to each and every Mac.

That’s why I like to make a bootable external drive for the sole purpose of installing the Mac operating system. When I need to tend to a bunch of Macs, it’s much faster to use a bootable drive instead of going to each Mac, launching the App Store, searching for the operating system, downloading it (after entering my Apple ID), and then running the installer.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s public beta program is designed to get a larger pool of people testing the new operating system—more users, more devices, more edge cases, and hopefully a lot more feedback.

Submitting bug reports and comments to Apple is your solemn duty as a beta tester, and Apple actually listens to and responds to those reports. In the macOS High Sierra and Sierra public betas, you report issues through the Feedback Assistant app, and iOS 11 and 10 public betas has a Feedback app too. When you install one of these betas, the app is automatically installed. If you’re unfamiliar with Feedback Assistant, we’ll walk you through the steps of using it.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sometimes you have to scratch your head at the way things work on a computer, and even more so with iTunes. It’s frustrating to have such quirky problems when all you want to do is listen to your music or watch your movies. This week, I address questions about movie metadata, repeated authentication requests, excess data usage, and I discuss vanishing disk space that can be caused by Apple Music.

The wrong genre

Q: I have all of my movies organized by Genre in my iTunes library. I changed all the movies’ genres to make them more appropriate; for example, for superhero movies, I changed the genre to Superhero, and for animated movies, I changed it to Animated. It’s awesome; exactly how I like it. But when I look at my movies on the Apple TV, these genres don’t display. What am I doing wrong?

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A few days ago, after my 12-inch MacBook running the latest Sierra became sluggish, I restarted. After entering my account password, my Mac showed a white progress spinner that uses “spokes”—the kind of spinner you usually see at shutdown—would appear for several seconds, then disappear, replaced with a cursor that couldn’t be moved with the trackpad. This would recur over and over for hours.

IDG

You probably already know how to search the web from Safari’s address bar on your iPhone, or which button enables the handy Reader mode. But for every Safari feature you think you’ve mastered, another is hiding in plain sight.

For example, there’s an easy way to search the current page in Safari, as well as customize how Reader mode looks and feels. You can also nix that listing of frequently visited sites, perform Spotlight searches without leaving Safari, save a page as a PDF, and even close an open Safari tab on another of your iOS devices. Read on for more of our favorite Safari tips. 

Hide frequently visited websites

As you’re browsing, Safari for iOS keeps track of the websites you visit the most and puts them in a Frequently Visited panel just beneath your web favorites, which you can access by tapping the address bar.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The days of being tied to a single carrier with a locked phone for months on end are all but over. Where we once were forced into 24-month contracts with devices that were useless on any other network, nowadays your wireless carrier must unlock your phone if you request it.

Seriously, they do. It’s actually a law. The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act makes it so any phone purchased after 2015 will work with any carrier, so your provider can’t keep your phone tied to their network because they feel like it. However, there are some terms and conditions that you’ll need to follow before you can pop another SIM into your phone, and of course they vary by carrier.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Rob Rosenbaum has a slightly terrifying question. He’s been syncing photos from a single iPhone to two different Macs via USB—just importing them on each Mac. He is about to turn on iCloud Photo Library, but he wonders.

Once I turn this on for the first time, will iCloud import everything from all three? Even if it’s the same photo? Will anything be erased?

Before you change any settings, I recommend making a full local backup of all your libraries, just in case. Photos and iCloud Photo Library is much better and more stable than in its earlier releases, but you never know what might happen.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you’re curious about how to build your own Hackintosh, Kirk McElhearn and I recently built Hackintoshes and wrote about our experiences. These articles are great starting points for researching your own Hackintosh.

• How to build a do-it-yourself Mac for high-performance games
• How to build a do-it-yourself Mac mini

But there’s a lot of detail in those two articles, and if all you’re trying to figure out is if you should build your own, there may actually be too much detail.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fellow Macworld contributor Kirk McElhearn recently built a mini Hackintosh; that is, a generic PC styled like a Mac mini, on which he installed and ran macOS. This is a road I’ve gone down myself, way back in 2008, when I built my Frankenmac. As Kirk was building a relatively low-end Mac clone, and as Apple has ignored the high-end Mac Pro for so many years, I thought it’d be interesting to build a new high-end Frankenmac.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

All the cool kids are doing it these days: they’re building Hackintoshes. Since Apple isn’t updating their desktop Macs as often as people want, some Mac users have gone the home-build route, making their own Macs using off-the-shelf parts and hobbyist software.

I have an old Mac mini that could do with a refresh, so I decided to try this out and build a Hackintosh mini. Here’s how it went.

Why build a Hackintosh?

I own a late 2011 Mac mini that I use as a media server to host and stream my Plex video library, and for Time Machine backups. It runs macOS Server, and uses its caching server feature to cache app updates. It’s not connected to a display, and I control it using Screen Sharing. It’s not a workhorse by any means, just an appliance that I use to manage files.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you’re like me (and many of you are), you have two Apple IDs for historical reasons that you continue to use. Until the mythical future date at which Apple updates its back-end systems to achieve the glory obtained only decades ago by most businesses that manage accounts to allow merging purchases and other data from multiple IDs into a single one, we’re stuck with it.

(Sidebar: Many, many, many people write in regularly asking how to solve this problem, because they assume they simply haven’t found Apple’s merge-accounts options. It’s not you, folks.)

Years ago, iOS could interact poorly with two ID setup, but then Apple switched to embrace it fully. Now, in iOS 10, the Settings section for accounts even lists iCloud and Store as separate items if you’re using two accounts along with the email addresses for them. That’s a nice move.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here