If you’re experiencing a sporadic problem with your Mac, the sort of thing that happens often enough to be annoying but not so frequently as to be reproducible, allow us to suggest one little-known troubleshooting tip. Malfunctioning USB devices—keyboards, mice, hubs, printers, etc.—can sometimes cause truly inscrutable problems ranging from startup issues to kernel panics. USB-caused issues aren’t common, but when they do happen, they can be challenging to track down. If you’ve tried everything else, disconnect all unnecessary USB devices and, if possible, swap your wired keyboard and mouse for another set. Then see if the problem goes away.
(Featured image by Adam Engst)
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/11/USB-troubleshooting-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-11-01 11:08:002023-06-27 20:09:17Consider USB Peripherals When Troubleshooting Mac Problems
Apple likes to keep Mac names simple, but that’s not always helpful. For instance, if you want to add RAM to your Mac, it’s not good enough to know that it’s an iMac. You’ll need to know that it’s a 27-inch iMac with Retina display from late 2014. To find that out, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu. In some cases, you might even need to know the model identifier, which is a numeric code that’s accessible if you click the System Report button in the About This Mac window, and then click Hardware at the top left of the System Information window. It will be something like iMac15,1.
(Featured image modified from an original by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels)
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/10/Mac-model-iMac-photo.jpg8531280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-10-01 11:05:002023-06-27 20:30:47Which Precise Mac Model Do You Have? Here’s How to Find Out
It’s extremely uncommon for a Mac to freeze or crash these days, but it can happen. What should you do if your Mac locks up and becomes completely unresponsive to the mouse and keyboard? The trick is to press and hold the power button until the Mac turns off. Wait 5 or 10 seconds, and press it again to turn the Mac back on. You will lose any unsaved changes if you do this, so use it only as a last resort when you can’t restart normally. Look for the power button on the back of a desktop Mac, and at the top right of the keyboard on most laptop Macs. For a recent MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, press and hold the Touch ID button.
(Featured image by Adam Engst)
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/08/Power-button-iMac-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-08-01 11:05:002023-06-27 20:05:17Need to Restart a Mac That Has Frozen? Here’s How
When summer brings sunny days and rising temperatures, you may have ditched your business suit for shorts or skirts to stay comfortable, but your technological gear can’t do the same. And keeping your tech cool is about more than comfort—as temperatures rise, performance can suffer, charging may get slower or stop, various components might be disabled, and devices can become unreliable.
How Hot Is Too Hot?
You might be surprised by the recommended operating temperatures for Apple gear—whether you’re talking about an iPhone X or a MacBook Pro, the company recommends staying under 95° F (35° C).
Such temperatures happen regularly throughout the summer. Even in cooler climes, the temperature in a parked car in the sunshine can easily hit 130º F (54º C) in an hour and rise higher as time passes. And no, cracking the windows a couple of inches won’t make a significant difference. We hope you’re already thinking about that with regard to children and pets, but as you can see, tech gear should also be protected. Apple says its products shouldn’t even be stored—turned off—at temperatures over 113º F (45º C).
It’s not just cars you have to think about. Temperatures in homes and offices without air conditioning can also rise higher than electronics would prefer, and that’s especially true for computers that stay on most of the time and aren’t located in well-ventilated areas.
What’s the Danger?
First off, remember that all electronic devices produce their own heat on top of the ambient heat in the environment, so the temperature inside a device can be much, much hotter than outside. The CPU in an iMac can hit 212º F (100º C) under heavy loads.
Temperatures higher than what components are designed for can have the following effects:
Chips of all types can behave unpredictably as increased thermal noise (electrons vibrating more) causes a higher bit error rate. Because electrical resistance increases with heat, timing errors can also occur.
Lithium-ion batteries discharge well in high temperatures, but the increased rate of chemical reactions within the battery will result in a shorter overall lifespan.
As devices heat and cool, the uneven thermal expansion of different materials can cause microscopic cracks that can lead to a variety of failures over time.
Some heat-related problems are temporary, so when the device or component cools down, it will resume working correctly. But others, particularly drops in battery life—are irreversible and particularly worth avoiding.
When a Mac gets too hot, it will spin up its fans in an attempt to keep its internal components cool. If your Mac’s fans are ever running at full tilt, first quit apps you aren’t using, particularly those that might be CPU-intensive and thus creating a lot of heat. If that doesn’t make a difference, restart it to make sure the problem isn’t some rogue process. If the fans come back on at full speed quickly, shut it down and let it cool off for a bit. In the worst case, an overheated Mac will start acting unpredictably or crash.
iOS devices don’t have fans, so they employ other coping mechanisms. If your iPhone or iPad gets too hot, the device will alert you.
Apple says you might notice some of the following behaviors:
Charging, including wireless charging, slows or stops.
The display dims or goes black.
Cellular radios enter a low-power state. The signal might weaken during this time.
The camera flash is temporarily disabled.
Performance slows with graphics-intensive apps or features.
If you’re using Maps on an overheating iPhone for GPS navigation in the car, it may show a “Temperature: iPhone needs to cool down.” screen instead of the map. You’ll still get audible turn-by-turn directions, and the screen will wake up to guide you through turns,
How to Keep Your Tech Cool
For the most part, keeping Apple devices cool just requires common sense, since you’d do the same things for yourself.
As Apple’s specifications recommend, avoid using devices when the temperature is over 95º F (35º C). If you can’t avoid it entirely, keep usage to a minimum.
Don’t leave devices in cars parked in the sun for long periods of time. If it happens accidentally, let the device cool before using it.
Provide good ventilation so air can cool the device. Don’t block ventilation ports in the back of desktop Macs, and don’t use Mac laptops in bed, propped on a pillow, or under the covers. It can be worth vacuuming dust out of ventilation ports every so often.
Never put anything on the keyboard of an open Mac laptop.
Avoid stacking things on top of a Mac mini.
Monitor the temperature of server closets. If they get too hot, keep the door open, add a fan, or run the air conditioning.
Luckily, the temperatures that cause problems for Apple hardware aren’t terribly comfortable for people either, so if you’re way too hot, that’s a good sign your gear is as well.
(Featured image by Alfonso Escalante from Pexels)
Social Media: How hot is too hot for your Apple devices? You may be surprised by the answer.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/07/Keep-tech-cool-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-07-01 10:04:002023-06-27 20:30:24Some May Like It Hot… But Your Technology Prefers to Stay Cool
If you’re like many of our clients who use Dropbox intensively, you have a desktop Mac with a large drive and a MacBook with much less drive space. How do you prevent your large Dropbox account from overwhelming the laptop Mac’s available storage? The answer is Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature. On the MacBook, click the Dropbox icon in the menu bar, click your avatar in the upper-right corner, and choose Preferences. In the Preferences window, click Sync and then click the Choose Folders to Sync button. Deselect the folders you want to prevent from syncing to the MacBook and click Update. If you need to access any files in those folders from the MacBook, go to dropbox.com in your Web browser instead, or adjust your Sync preferences to bring in the needed folder.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/06/Dropbox-Selective-Sync-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-06-03 07:07:002024-12-10 11:07:21Use Dropbox’s Selective Sync to Save Space on Small Drives
With luck, you should never need to check your iPhone’s or iPad’s warranty status. But bad things do happen to good devices. In iOS 12.2, Apple has just made it easier to figure out if your device is still under warranty or covered by AppleCare+. Go to Settings > General > About, where you’ll find a new entry that’s either called Limited Warranty (the basic Apple warranty) or AppleCare+ (the extended warranty you can buy). The entry shows the expiration date, and tapping it provides more details on the Coverage screen. If your iPhone or iPad doesn’t have AppleCare+ but is eligible for it, you can even buy it from this screen. You won’t see anything if your device is out of warranty and no longer eligible for AppleCare+.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/05/Warranty-info-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-05-01 14:08:002019-06-02 19:04:00Can’t Remember When Your Warranty Expires? iOS 12.2 Lays It Out
Is your Apple Watch failing to turn on its screen when you raise it, display notifications from your iPhone, or even update the time zone? watchOS has four modes accessible from Control Center (swipe up from the bottom of the screen) that are useful but can cause confusion if you forget to turn them off:
Silent Mode: In Silent mode, your Apple Watch won’t make any sounds, but will provide haptic feedback you can feel on your wrist.
Theater Mode: When in Theater mode, your Apple Watch not only turns on Silent mode, it also keeps the screen dark unless you tap the screen or press a button.
Do Not Disturb: As with Theater mode, enabling Do Not Disturb turns on Silent mode and prevents notifications from lighting up the screen.
Airplane Mode: Invoking Airplane mode turns off the Apple Watch’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and the cellular radio if your watch supports that. Without Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the watch can’t communicate with your iPhone and will thus miss notifications and time zone changes.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/05/Apple-Watch-too-quiet.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-05-01 14:05:002019-06-02 19:04:00Is Your Apple Watch Out to Lunch? Check These Settings
iCloud Photos (which Apple previously called iCloud Photo Library) is wonderful when it’s working. Take some photos on your iPhone, and they appear on your Mac and iPad a minute later. Delete unnecessary shots and edit the others on your Mac, and your iPhone and iPad reflect those changes almost immediately. But what if changes aren’t syncing? Photos in iOS and macOS can pause syncing for a variety of reasons, and sometimes it doesn’t restart when it should. To see if this is happening, go to the very bottom of the Photos view in Photos, where it lists the number of photos and videos you have stored. Below that number is the sync status. If it has a reason and a Resume link, click or tap Resume to start it again.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/04/Photos-Resume-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-04-01 12:08:002019-05-01 13:51:04Photos Not Syncing between Devices Properly via iCloud Photos?
If you’re running macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra or macOS 10.14 Mojave, you may have seen a dialog that says an app isn’t optimized for your Mac. The message differs slightly between High Sierra and Mojave, with the High Sierra version telling you the developer needs to update the app to improve compatibility whereas Mojave saying bluntly that the app won’t work with future versions of macOS.
What’s going on here, what should you do, and when should you do it?
What’s Going On: 32-bit and 64-bit Apps
Over a decade ago, Apple started to transition all the chips used in Macs, along with macOS itself, from a 32-bit architecture to a 64-bit architecture. Without getting into technical details, 64-bit systems and apps can access dramatically more memory and enjoy significantly faster performance.
Apple knew it would take years before most people were running 64-bit hardware and 64-bit-savvy versions of macOS, so it allowed macOS to continue running older 32-bit apps. However, maintaining that backward compatibility has a cost, in terms of both performance and testing, so at its Worldwide Developer Conference in 2017, Apple warned developers that High Sierra would be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps “without compromise.” At the next WWDC in June 2018, Apple announced that macOS 10.14 Mojave would be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps.
Happily, the only “compromise” for 32-bit apps in Mojave is the warning dialog, which appears every 30 days when you launch an older app. But the writing is on the wall: 32-bits apps will cease working in macOS 10.15.
How Do You Identify 32-bit Apps?
Apple provides a tool to help you find 32-bit apps. Follow these steps:
From the Apple menu, choose About This Mac and then click the System Report button.
In the System Information utility that opens, scroll down to Software in the sidebar and select Applications. It may take a few minutes to build the list of every app on all mounted drives.
When it finishes, click the 64-bit column header (No means 32-bit; Yes means 64-bit) to sort the list, and select an app to see its details in the bottom pane.
This technique works in both High Sierra and Mojave, but in Mojave, System Information includes a better-formatted section, called Legacy Software, that also provides a list of 32-bit apps. However, this list may be smaller because it includes only those apps that you’ve launched. Since it’s likely that you open old 32-bit apps only occasionally, you can’t trust the Legacy Software list to be complete.
If you find System Information’s Applications list overwhelming, check out the free 32-bitCheck utility from Howard Oakley. It performs exactly the same task but lets you focus on a particular folder and save the results to a text file for later reference.
What’s Your Next Step?
Once you know which apps won’t work in macOS 10.15, you can ponder your options. Luckily, you have some time. We expect Apple to release macOS 10.15 in September 2019, but you don’t need to upgrade right away—in fact, we recommend that you wait a few months after that to allow Apple time to fix bugs.
That said, we do encourage upgrading eventually, and if you buy a new Mac after September 2019, it will come with macOS 10.15. So you need to establish a plan—it’s better to know what you’re going to do than to be forced into action if you have to replace your Mac on short notice. For each 32-bit app on your Mac, you have three options:
Delete it: It’s not uncommon to have old apps that you haven’t used in years and won’t miss. There’s no need to waste drive space on them in macOS 10.15.
Upgrade it: Apps in active development will likely have a new version available. The main questions are how much the upgrade will cost and if there are compatibility issues associated with upgrading. You can upgrade at any time, although it’s likely worth waiting until you’re ready to move to macOS 10.15 to minimize costs. The apps that cause the most irritation here are things like the Adobe Creative Suite—Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—that require switching to a monthly subscription.
Replace it: If no upgrade is available, the cost of upgrading is too high, or upgrading comes with other negatives, it’s time to look for an alternative. This can take some time, so it’s worth starting soon to ensure that the replacement will provide the features you need before macOS 10.15 forces the decision.
Needless to say, if you’d like recommendations about how to proceed with any particular app or workflow, get in touch with us!
Social Media: Have you seen dialogs warning that an app isn’t optimized for your Mac? Here’s what’s going on, what you should do, and when you should do it:
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Many Apple users rely on mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com email addresses, along with plenty of other iCloud-related services. So if you can’t send or receive email, if photos aren’t transferring via iCloud Photo Library, or if some other iCloud-related service isn’t responding, the first thing to do is check Apple’s System Status page. It’s updated every minute, and if it shows that the associated Apple service is having problems, you know to sit tight until things come back up. If everything is green, you’ll have to look elsewhere for a solution—or get in touch with us.
https://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2019/02/Apple-System-Status-photo.jpg8001280F-11 Photohttps://f11photo.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2023/06/PR-F11Photo-logo.jpgF-11 Photo2019-02-01 11:05:002019-03-01 02:51:44iCloud Services Being Wonky? Check Apple’s System Status Page