Learn how to change the startup disk on your Mac on the fly or permanently if you'd like to boot from other storage devices like an external drive.
How to pick a startup disk for your Mac at boot time
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Stay up-to-date on the latest Mac news, and tutorials. Get expert tips and tricks to optimize your Mac’s performance and learn about the latest Apple products and software updates. Discover the best Mac apps and accessories to enhance your user experience.
OS X El Capitan Recovery Update now available
Apple on Friday seeded a small update to OS X's Recovery feature to users running a pre-release version of OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The OS X El Capitan Recovery Update includes improvements to the operating system's Recovery partition. Like in prior OS X editions, this feature can be invoked at boot time by pressing the Command - R combo.
Parallels Desktop 11 with support for El Capitan and Windows 10 now available
In addition to running newly-released Windows 10 natively on your Mac in dual-boot mode through Boot Camp 6, you can now enjoy Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system alongside OS X using the popular virtualization solution, Parallels Desktop.
In its latest incarnation that was released earlier today, Parallels Desktop 11 brings full support for Windows 10 features like Cortana and experimental support for Macs running OS X El Capitan.
Stay away from new Mailbox for Mac update: it’s full of bugs and breaks support for Mavericks
It's been more than two years since cloud-storage startup Dropbox acquired the popular iOS email client Mailbox, and a full twelve months have passed since a public beta of Dropbox for Mac launched, and the software still hasn't dropped the beta flag.
As a matter of fact, those among you who use Mailbox as your daily driver should hold on upgrading to the most recent release as it breaks compatibility with Macs running OS X Mavericks while introducing a host of new problems, as first reported by The Next Web.
Review: BatteryBox – a good charging solution for your MacBook?
I’ve been using Gbatteries’ BatteryBox ($219 on Amazon) portable MacBook-enabled battery charger for several months, and now I’d like to share my thoughts on the device.
The BatteryBox is a dense, yet small compact box that’s almost exactly as wide as of pack of playing cards, and about as tall as two and a half packs of playing cards.
Needless to say it’s a very small device, but it’s also extremely dense and a little awkward to travel with. It’s essentially like carrying around a power brick from your favorite game console in the mid-90’s.
The BatteryBox is dense because it packs in a whopping 60 Wh rechargeable li-ion battery. That’s a lot of juice, and as such, it can power a MacBook Air for 13 hours straight. As a user of a MacBook Pro, the amount of time I get from the BatteryBox is obviously reduced, but I still came away fairly impressed with the results.
The BatteryBox can also charge other items, like iPhone and iPads, via a standard USB connection. In fact, it can fully recharge an iPhone up to 11 times, which makes it great for traveling where you power outlet access may be limited.
But what makes the BatteryBox stand out is the fact that it can connect directly to a MacBook’s charging port via a specially designed connector. Since Apple owns the patents to MagSafe connectors, Gbatteries had to come up with a different method for connecting to the MacBook. The BatteryBox is the result of its efforts, and it works well from my experience.
If you’re a MacBook user who’s often on the go, should you consider supplementing your MacBook’s battery with a BatteryBox? Find out inside…
How to boot your Mac in Verbose Mode
We previously discussed how booting your Mac into macOS' Safe Mode can help troubleshoot various issues with your computer. In more obscure situations and borderline cases, however, Safe Mode may not be enough to understand why your Mac freezes or crashes during the system boot process.
Enter macOS Verbose Mode.
Not only does Verbose Mode makes it easy to access detailed status messages as your Mac is starting up, but also lets you see what's really going on behind the scenes and watch as macOS loads kernel extensions and other startup items.
In this tutorial, we're going to cover booting your Mac in macOS' Verbose Mode, explain in which situations it might come in handy and give you some handy tips related to using Verbose Mode.
How to move Music or Photos to a new Mac using Time Machine
With Time Machine, it's easy to restore all of your data back to a new Mac or to a fresh install of macOS. As we outlined previously, users can choose to restore all data, or pick and choose the data that they wish to restore during the initial setup process of macOS, and that includes both music and photos.
Another option is to simply restore the entire Pictures or Music folder via the Time Machine interface. We show you how to do that via this post.
In the following tutorial, we'll show you another quick and easy way to recover photo or music data from a Time Machine backup—directly from the backup folder on your Time Machine external drive.
Apple releases iTunes 12.2 with Beats 1 and Apple Music fixes and enhancements
In addition to releasing the iOS 8.4.1 software update for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad with Apple Music fixes and enhancements, and the OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 software update with a crucial patch for the dangerous DYLD exploit and more, Apple today also posted a new version of iTunes with a bunch of fixes and improvements.
Among other things, iTunes 12.2 for Mac and Windows contains improvements for Beats 1, Apple Music and Connect features while fixing a few issues with the software.
Apple releases OS X 10.10.5 with patch for DYLD bug and other fixes
In addition to iOS 8.4.1, Apple on Thursday also seeded OS X Yosemite 10.10.5, a free update for Macs. The release comes after two developer betas and a month of testing, and you can find it in the Updates tab of the Mac App Store.
Most notably, the update features a patch for the DYLD privilege escalation bug that was discovered earlier this month. Apple says in the release notes that the software includes fixes for both Mail and Photos apps, as well as QuickTime.
Grab Civilization: Beyond Earth for Mac for $20 today, down from $50
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth has dropped to just $20 on the Mac App Store today, down from its regular asking priced of $50 a pop.
Developed by Firaxis and ported over to the Mac platform by Aspyr Media, Beyond Earth is a premium sci-fi strategy game set in the distant future in which a series of unfortunate global events have destabilized the world “leading to a collapse of modern society, a new world order and an uncertain future for humanity”.
Apple’s Beats Solo2 back to school promotion now available online
Back on July 23rd, Apple began its annual back to school promotion. The promotion went like this: buy a Mac, and get a pair of Beats Solo2 Headphones on the house.
Up until now, the only place to take advantage of this promotion was at US Apple retail stores and participating Apple Authorized Campus Stores. From now until the end of the promotion, however, customers can take advantage of the savings via Apple's just redesigned online store.
CARROT Weather makes its way to the Mac
CARROT Weather, the popular app featuring a robot assistant with a personality and attitude, is now available on the Mac. Like its iOS counterpart, sadistic robots in CARROT Weather's Mac app will taunt you when it’s going to rain while offering some hilariously twisted weather forecasts based on Forecast.io's accurate weather data.
In addition to the new Mac app, CARROT Weather for iOS has been updated with a bevy of new features such as notification forwarding from the Mac app to your iPhone or Apple Watch when you're away from your desk, new radar and satellite maps and a Time Machine feature which lets you check out the weather for any location up to 70 years in the past, or ten years in the future.