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When it’s cold out, you can always throw on a sweater to stay warm. But your electronics are more reptilian—they can get sluggish or even fail to work in freezing weather. (No, that’s not what iPod Socks were designed to fix.) Worse, charging batteries at low temperatures or moving tech gear between extreme temperature ranges can cause damage. There’s a difference between temperatures your devices can withstand when you’re actively using them and when they’re just being stored. Manufacturers usually publish the environmental requirements for devices, though it may take a little searching to find the details. Here are the...

No matter how fast your Mac was when it was new, the time will come when apps launch slowly, the spinning beachball appears more often, and everything responds sluggishly. Such problems won’t happen all the time, and you can often fix them by quitting a piggy app or restarting your Mac. But if these problems are happening more frequently, one possible fix is to install more RAM.  Also known as random-access memory, RAM is the temporary working space where macOS loads apps and documents while you’re using them. Let’s look at how memory is used, how you can determine if...

When Apple released iOS 12 in September 2018, the main change for iPad users was a revamped collection of gestures similar to those used by the iPhone X. As it turned out, these new gestures were in preparation for the release of the new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models that dropped the Home button and Touch ID in favor of Face ID. Just as with the iPhone X, the elimination of the Home button requires new gestures. Luckily, Apple did a great job on these, so once you learn them, you’ll probably find them even faster to use than...

Every now and then, we’ve seen iPhones stop being able to access the Internet, either via Wi-Fi or a cellular data connection. Assuming that the Internet connection is working for other devices, there are two easy ways to reset your iPhone’s connection and get it working again. First, enable Airplane mode to shut off the iPhone’s radios—bring up Control Center and tap the Airplane mode button. After a few seconds, tap the button again to turn it off. Second, if toggling Airplane mode doesn’t work, power down the iPhone by pressing and holding the top or side button (iPhone 8...

Browser tabs. They breed like bunnies, and if you’re like us, you have oodles of tabs open on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. But you may not know that Safari has a great tab-management feature that lets you access all the open tabs on all your devices. (Make sure to enable the Safari switch in System Preferences > iCloud on the Mac and in Settings > YourName > iCloud in iOS.) This tab overview is easiest to find on the iPad, where tapping the tab   button displays local tabs as thumbnails at the top of the screen and lists...