Mac

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.

How to send video wirelessly from your Mac to TV

Since OS X 10.9 Mavericks owners of the Apple TV have been able to wirelessly mirror their Mac screen to the big screen TV with an AirPlay feature called AirDisplay. There was just one slight problem: you couldn't stream individual videos without mirroring the whole screen.

Apple has solved this annoyance with OS X 10.11 El Capitan, which introduced richer AirPlay support permitting you to send video from Safari and other apps to the Apple TV.

How to start up your Mac from a bootable CD/DVD, USB thumb drive or external storage device

macOS can start up your Mac in a myriad of ways. We've already covered some of them in detail, such as using built-in Startup Manager to pick a disk to startup your Mac from and booting into Safe, Verbose and Target Disk modes.

In this article, we get to talk about starting your Mac up from external storage like optical media or an external USB-based hard drive or flash storage. Booting from an external storage allows you to start up your Mac in another version or copy of macOS, Additionally, it can help you troubleshoot certain issues, and more.

How to repair disk permissions on Mac

Some Mac hiccups and startup issues can be resolved by repairing disk permissions in macOS. Disk permissions allow your Mac to control what users have access to files and folders on your Mac.

Unfortunately, it's quite easy to unintentionally mess up disk permissions. In fact, the very act of installing and uninstalling apps on your Mac can over time result in broken permissions.

And when file permissions break, your apps might be allowed to alter each other's files or even modify read-only system files, which in turn can lead to various permission errors and erroneous behavior in macOS. It is therefore essential that disk permission in macOS are as they are supposed to be.

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to verify and fix disk permissions in macOS, which is typically a basic troubleshooting step to fix any software issues your Mac might be plagued with.

How to boot your Mac in Target Disk Mode

Our tutorial series dealing with the many ways you can start up your Mac continues with Target Disk Mode, a feature Apple conceived to allow your Mac to act as an external disk for another Mac.

It's not surprising that the vast majority of average Mac owners are totally oblivious to the existence of Target Disk Mode, and who could blame them? After all, Target Disk Mode isn't exactly front and center on macOS.

In this tutorial, you're going to be taught how to activate Target Disk Mode through the System Preferences application, or enter it directly at boot time with a simple keystroke. I'm also going to explain in layman's terms why, when and how Target Disk Mode should be used.

How to use Time Machine on your Mac – the full roundup

Over the last several months, we've revisited Time Machine, the backup utility present in OS X. We've showed you everything from performing an initial Time Machine setup, to encrypting Time Machine backups, to restoring specific files from those backups.

Time Machine is a great tool that every OS X user should become intimately familiar with, and in this roundup, we'll revisit each of the topics covered over the last couple of months.

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.

How to set up a new Mac from a Time Machine backup

One of the primary benefits of using Time Machine is that it allows you to restore your backup on a new Mac or a new macOS installation. This makes it so that you can essentially pick up where you left off from your old machine or old installation.

Fortunately, restoring Time Machine backups to a new Mac is extremely easy and straightforward. In this fifth tutorial in our Time Machine how-to series, we'll show you how easy it is.