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Check Your Input Source If Your Mac Types Unexpected Characters

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If your Mac starts typing unexpected characters—or rejects a password you know is correct—check to see if the Input Source menu appears in the upper-right corner of the screen, indicating that your Mac has more than one keyboard layout available for writing in other languages. Accidentally switching from the standard U.S. keyboard (or whatever you regularly use) to another layout—like the French ABC – AZERTY, which swaps the A and Q keys, among others—can cause keystrokes to produce different characters than expected. This key swapping is particularly confusing in password fields, where you can’t see what’s being typed. To fix it, click the Input Source menu and choose your default. To prevent this problem from recurring, go to System Settings > Keyboard, click Edit next to Input Sources, and delete any keyboard layouts you don’t use. You can also change what the Globe key does in System Settings > Keyboard—you can prevent accidental layout changes by switching it from Change Input Source to Show Emoji & Symbols, Start Dictation, or Do Nothing.

Estonia, Tallinn, July 11, 2020. Apple Macbook pro 15 Retina on table

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Armastas)

Social Media: Is your Mac typing the wrong characters or rejecting your password? You may have accidentally switched keyboard layouts. Here’s how to check your input source and prevent it from happening again.

Not All Your Mac’s USB-C Ports Are the Same

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We recently helped a client set up an external boot drive on a Mac mini for testing, but the installation kept failing near the end with vague errors. We tried different cables, swapped drives, and more, to no avail. On a hunch, we moved the SSD to a different USB-C port, and the installation completed on the next attempt. But the port wasn’t bad—it was just the wrong port. Here’s what we mean.

All the USB-C ports on a Mac look identical, but they don’t all behave the same way. On Macs with Apple silicon and Intel-based Macs with the T2 chip, Apple designates one port as the DFU (device firmware update) port. Most of the time, this distinction doesn’t matter—you can plug a device into any port, and it’ll work normally. But for certain tasks, using the wrong port can cause mysterious failures that waste hours of troubleshooting time.

Note that we say “USB-C” here, even though in most cases, these are Thunderbolt ports. However, Thunderbolt uses the USB-C connector, and Apple refers to the ports as USB-C ports, so we’re following Apple’s lead.

When It Matters Which Port You Use

The DFU port exists for one specific purpose: reviving or restoring your Mac’s firmware using another Mac and the Apple Configurator app. This recovery procedure requires connecting a USB-C cable (not a Thunderbolt cable!) to the DFU port. It’s extremely uncommon to need to revive a Mac in this way, but it might be necessary if the Mac starts up to an exclamation point in a circle, starts up to a blank screen, shows the status indicator light pattern for firmware recovery mode, or has problems installing macOS.

For most everyday tasks, the DFU port should work like any other USB-C port. However, Apple has documented one notable exception on Macs with Apple silicon: when installing or updating macOS on an external drive, avoid using the DFU port. If your external drive is connected to it during installation, the process may fail partway through, often without a useful error message and certainly without a clear “Connect your drive to a different port” message. You might see vague notifications like “Some updates could not be installed” or cryptic errors like “com.apple.OSInstallerSetup.error 702.” After installation or updating completes, you can connect your external drive to any port, including the DFU port.

We’ve also heard of situations where seemingly inexplicable problems, such as errors from an Apple SuperDrive attached to a Thunderbolt dock, were resolved by switching to a different port. It wasn’t always clear which port was responsible, but it’s always worth trying a different one if you have trouble.

Finding Your Mac’s DFU Port

How do you figure out which USB-C port is the DFU port? Apple maintains a support document describing the DFU port locations for each Mac model. The location varies by model and, within the same model, sometimes by generation. Apple does not explain why a particular port is designated as the DFU port or provide another way to identify it. All you can do is refer to Apple’s documentation.

Unfortunately, users have found errors on that page in the past, so if you’re experiencing unexplained installation failures or other errors, try a different port even if you believe you’re using the correct one.

DFU Port Takeaways

For everyday use—connecting displays, drives, docks, and other peripherals—you shouldn’t need to think about which port you’re using. The only time you must use the DFU port is when reviving or restoring a very unhappy Mac.

However, if you’re setting up an external boot drive or updating macOS on an external drive, take a moment to identify your Mac’s DFU port and plug your drive into a different one. And if a peripheral, even if it’s connected through a dock, behaves inexplicably, treat the port itself as a variable. Before troubleshooting cables, drives, or software, move the connection to another USB-C port. This simple step can save you from frustrating troubleshooting sessions where everything appears to work but ultimately fails.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Milosz Deptula)

Social Media: Your Mac’s USB-C ports look identical, but one is special—and using it can cause macOS installations or updates on external drives to fail, or trigger other errors with Thunderbolt docks. Learn which USB-C port isn’t like the others.

How to Find and Silence the Browser Tab That’s Playing Audio

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When a Web browser has many tabs open, it can be hard to find the one playing audio if you need to silence it. Worse, when a browser relaunches, it can be tough to identify and silence all the tabs that have automatically started playing audio. Happily, all browsers can help. Tabs with active audio show a speaker icon next to their names; click it to mute the audio. These speaker icons are easier to spot in browsers that display tabs vertically rather than horizontally across the top, where space constraints may prevent the speaker icons from appearing. Safari provides an additional option: a speaker icon on the right side of the address bar (see the top screenshot). Click it to mute all audio, or Control-click it to see which tabs are playing audio. Chromium-based browsers—including Google Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft Edge—display a musical note icon in the upper-right corner of the toolbar (bottom screenshot). Click it to open playback controls and stop playback.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Khosrork)

Social Media: Drowning in open tabs and can’t find the one playing sound? Look for the speaker icon on the tab itself, or use Safari’s address bar icon or Chrome’s music note for quick control.

Losing Messages or Calls? Look in the Unknown Senders/Callers Filter

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In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26, Apple added an option in the Messages app to filter messages from unknown people and those marked as spam by the carrier. To enable filtering, open Messages, tap the Filter button in the upper-right corner, tap Manage Filtering, and turn on Screen Unknown Senders and Filter Spam. Once those are enabled, the Filter menu gains two new options: Unknown Senders and Spam. If a text from an unknown person comes in, the main app icon will get a red badge, but you won’t see the new message in the usual list. Instead, use the Filter menu—which also gets a blue badge—to switch to Unknown Senders or Spam and look in those lists. The Phone app works similarly—enable call filtering in Settings > Apps > Phone under Call Filtering, and unknown callers will appear in separate lists accessible via the Filter button in the Phone app’s Recents or Calls views. To move a conversation out of Unknown Senders, tap Mark as Known.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Liubomyr Vorona)

Social Media: Missing texts from unknown numbers? iOS 26 filters them into hidden lists. Here’s where to find them in the Messages app—and how to mark senders as known so you don’t miss important messages. PS: The same applies to calls in the Phone app.

Apple’s Focus Is Powerful but Unpredictable

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Sometimes you just don’t want your phone to ring, chirp, or even vibrate. Maybe you’re asleep, in an important meeting, having dinner with family, meditating, playing a game, or simply enjoying some quiet time.

Apple’s Focus feature on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac can silence those interruptions, but Focus is considerably more complex than the straightforward Do Not Disturb feature it replaced in 2021. Misconfiguring Focus such that it activates unexpectedly can cause you to miss important calls, messages, and other notifications.

What Focus Does

Focus lets you create customized notification environments that block unwanted interruptions while allowing important ones through. You can have a Focus for different situations—when you’re at work, eating dinner, at the gym, and more—each with its own rules about when it activates and which people and apps can reach you.

When a Focus is active, it can:

  • Silence notifications from selected people and apps
  • Allow specific people and apps to break through
  • Change your Lock Screen appearance
  • Hide certain Home Screen pages
  • Automatically reply to messages explaining you’re unavailable
  • Filter content in apps like Mail, Calendar, and Messages
  • Make a certain profile or tab group active in Safari

Focus can share your settings across all your Apple devices, which saves you from having to configure it on each device but can also create confusing interactions.

The Built-In Focus Modes

Apple provides three essential Focus modes that cover most people’s needs:

  • Do Not Disturb: A general-purpose Focus for when you need to ensure your iPhone doesn’t interrupt you. It’s ideal for doctor appointments, workouts, movies, and similar situations. You can schedule it, but it’s often best to activate it manually from Control Center for a specific amount of time or until you leave the current location.
  • Sleep: This Focus activates according to the Sleep schedule you set on the iPhone (in either Settings > Focus > Sleep or in the Health app) to minimize nighttime interruptions. It lets you choose a specific Lock Screen, Home Screen, and Apple Watch face to limit distractions at night.
  • Driving: Automatically activates when your iPhone connects to a car’s Bluetooth system or detects driving motion. (The Bluetooth connection may be best if you’re frequently a passenger and want to use your iPhone while being driven.) It blocks nearly all notifications to keep your attention on the road and can send custom automatic replies to people who text you.

For further customization, you can create additional Focus modes—Apple suggests modes for Gaming, Mindfulness, Personal, Reading, and Work. For instance, if you take a spin class every Tuesday at noon and yoga on Thursdays at 7 AM, you could create a Focus for Working Out that would automatically activate during those times.

Configuring a Focus

To set up a Focus, go to Settings > Focus on your iPhone or iPad, or System Settings > Focus on your Mac. Select the Focus you want to configure or create a new one, then:

  1. Choose allowed people: Decide whether to allow or silence notifications from specific people. You can also specify whether phone calls from certain groups (Allowed People, Favorites, Contacts, or Contacts groups) can break through.
  2. Choose allowed apps: Similarly, allow or silence specific apps. You can also enable Time Sensitive Notifications, which lets urgent alerts (like delivery notifications or security alerts) come through even from disallowed apps.
  3. Set a schedule: Have the Focus turn on at certain times, locations (on when you arrive, off when you leave), or when using specific apps (but not when apps are in the background). App-based triggers are useful for presentations, live performances, and games. A Smart Activation option on the iPhone can automatically turn on a Focus based on your location, app usage, and time of day.
  4. Add Focus Filters: Customize how Calendar, Mail, Messages, Safari, and others behave when the Focus is active—for example, showing only certain Safari tab groups and your work email accounts during a Professional Focus.
  5. Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing: If you have Apple Intelligence enabled, this option “intelligently” allows priority notifications to interrupt you and silences others. It doesn’t override your explicit settings for allowing or silencing notifications.

The Complexity Problem

While Focus is powerful, its complexity can create unpredictable behavior. Here are common pitfalls to avoid:

  • Unexpected activation: With automatic schedules based on time, location, and apps, it’s hard to predict when a Focus might turn on. You may not realize notifications are being silenced until you’ve missed something important. This is especially important if your routine is interrupted. Perhaps you normally work out at noon, but today you are at a professional conference or dealing with a family emergency.
  • Cross-device confusion: By default, Focus syncs across all your Apple devices via the Share Across Devices option. Syncing means a Focus activated on your iPhone—such as Sleep—might also silence notifications on your Mac when you’re working late and need to communicate with colleagues. Consider turning off Share Across Devices unless you’re certain you want synchronized behavior.
  • Unpredictable AI: Focus includes two features that rely on machine learning—Smart Activation and Intelligent Breakthrough & Silencing—to make contextual decisions about when Focus should activate and which notifications are important enough to bypass it. We recommend against using them because they make an already unpredictable scenario even more unpredictable.
  • Silenced notifications indicator: When a Focus is active, people who text you in Messages see that your notifications are silenced. While this can be helpful, it can also confuse others when a Focus activates unexpectedly.
  • The forgotten Focus: A Focus that activates automatically when you go to a specific location or open a particular app might remain active longer than you expected. For instance, what if a Focus activates when Mail is your frontmost app, but you have to leave unexpectedly and your Mac doesn’t sleep automatically, so Mail remains the active app over the weekend? That might be particularly confusing when a Focus Filter hides certain accounts or data.

Practical Recommendations

To get the benefits of Focus without the confusion:

  • Keep it simple: Start with Do Not Disturb, Sleep, and Driving. These three cover the needs of most people and have the most predictable behavior. If you created Focus modes you’re not using, delete them.
  • Be conservative with triggers: If you add schedules or triggers based on location or apps, keep them to a minimum. The more triggers you add, the harder it becomes to predict when a Focus will be active.
  • Allow more calls: These days, unexpected calls from people you know well are fairly uncommon, and those that do happen are more likely to be important. So consider allowing calls from family and close friends (perhaps via Favorites or a Contacts group) and enabling Allow Repeated Calls, which lets someone through if they call twice within three minutes.
  • Check Focus status when troubleshooting: If you or someone you know is missing notifications, check whether a Focus is unexpectedly active. The easiest place to check is Control Center.
  • Review Share Across Devices: If you experience unexpected Focus behavior, turn off Share Across Devices and configure each device’s Focus settings independently.
  • Control notifications directly: Rather than rely on Focus, limit notifications to just those that are actually important to you. Many apps are unnecessarily chatty.

Focus is a powerful tool for managing the constant stream of notifications from our devices, but it requires careful configuration. When in doubt, keep it simple: Sleep to protect your sleeping hours, Driving to block distractions in the car, and Do Not Disturb for ad hoc appointments and performances may be all you need.

(Featured image by iStock.com/DragonImages)

Social Media: Apple’s Focus can silence distractions when you need quiet time, but its complexity can cause you to miss important notifications. Learn how to configure it safely—and avoid the pitfalls that lead to missed calls and messages.

How to Look Up a Saved Wi-Fi Network Password

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Apple offers several simple ways to share Wi-Fi network passwords. When someone nearby tries to connect to a Wi-Fi network with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and they are in your Contacts app, you will be automatically prompted to share the network password with them. Additionally, in the Passwords app, you can display a Wi-Fi network QR code that anyone can scan to join the network. However, sometimes you need to share a password via email or text. To look up a Wi-Fi password on an iPhone or iPad, open Passwords, tap Wi-Fi, select the desired network, and tap the obscured Password field. A Copy Password button makes it easy to copy. In the Mac version of Passwords, hover over the obscured password and click the revealed password to copy it.

(Featured image by iStock.com/jpkirakun)

Social Media: Apple makes it easy to share Wi-Fi passwords without requiring anyone to type them. We explain how you can do this nearly automatically, with a QR code, or by looking up the password and copying it so you can paste it into an email message or text.

Try macOS 26.2’s Edge Light for Low-Light Video Calls

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We can’t always guarantee optimal lighting for video calls, especially when using laptops on the go. A new feature in macOS 26.2 Tahoe called Edge Light might help. It’s a video effect that uses the outermost pixels of your Mac’s display to create a bright white rectangle that illuminates your face during video calls. It acts like an on-screen ring light in low-light conditions. You can activate it from the green video camera icon in the menu bar (shown when the camera is active), and on Macs from 2024 and later, you can set it to turn on automatically in low-light environments. Click the disclosure triangle next to Edge Light to adjust the light’s width and color temperature. Mouse awareness allows the light to recede automatically when you move your pointer toward it. While Edge Light won’t replace external lights, it can help make your face visible in otherwise dark rooms.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Dima Berlin)

Social Media: Dark room, important video call? macOS 26.2’s Edge Light transforms your Mac’s display into an on-screen ring light, illuminating your face so you’re visible on camera.

Charge Your MacBook with the Right Power Adapter

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If you lose or break the power adapter that came with your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, make sure to replace it with a charger that meets or exceeds the machine’s required wattage. A charger with too low a wattage may result in little or no charging (or even battery drain while working), and it certainly won’t enable fast charging. You can check the adapter’s wattage by reading the fine print on the charger itself, or by opening the System Information app (in the Applications/Utilities folder) and checking the AC Charger section in the Power screen. It’s safe to use an adapter with a higher wattage than required, but we don’t recommend going below the wattages of Apple’s included adapters:

  • 13-inch MacBook Air: 30 or 35 watts standard, 67 watts for fast charging
  • 15-inch MacBook Air: 35 watts standard, 70 watts for fast charging
  • 14-inch MacBook Pro: 67 or 70 watts standard, or 96 watts for the Pro and Max chips, 96 watts for fast charging
  • 16-inch MacBook Pro: 140 watts for both standard and fast charging

(Featured image by iStock.com/Isaac Lee)

Social Media: Lost your MacBook charger? Don’t grab just any USB power adapter—using one that’s too weak can result in no charging, glacial charging, or battery drain while you work. Here’s the minimum wattage you need for each MacBook model.

Backups: Trust but Verify

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It’s easy to assume your backup app—whether it’s Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner, Backblaze, Retrospect, or something else—is quietly doing its job. But it’s possible for a bug to corrupt backups or for a destination disk to fail silently, such that you can’t restore backed-up data. We’ve seen this happen! For peace of mind, set a quarterly reminder to verify your backups. Test by restoring a few files and opening them: for Time Machine, enter Time Machine and restore a few important files; for a clone, mount it and open files; for a cloud backup, perform a small restore. Backup failures aren’t common, but since backups are your lifeline after a catastrophe, it’s worth confirming they work.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Andreus)

Social Media: Don’t just trust your backups—verify them. Each quarter, restore a few files from Time Machine, your clone, or your cloud backup, and make sure they open correctly. Silent failures happen; test restores prevent nasty surprises.