Dan Kessler is the owner of MacMaven Consulting.
While Apple provides solid state drives on its laptop models, the stock iMacs use slow spinning hard drives. The more expensive models include a Fusion drive, which is a combination of a SSD and a spinning hard drive. With a Fusion drive, frequently accessed files are stored on the SSD, for faster retrieval. The…
After picking up the iPhone X for the first time, I said “wow” out loud. It’s really that impressive. The near-borderless OLED screen is gorgeous and the build materials are first-class. It’s the first time I’ve used an iPhone and was blown away at the speed. The A11 Bionic chip is a screamer. Although…
If you’ve been putting off enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) on your internet accounts, you shouldn’t. 2FA is one of the simplest and quickest ways to protect your online presence. You need 2FA because it’s just too easy for a hacker or other bad actor to obtain your username and password. The most common method to…
Tomorrow Apple is holding its big media event to debut the new iPhone, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Unfortunately, the details of these products were leaked. According to John Gruber, a disgruntled Apple employee obtained the URLs to the device “golden master” firmware and sent the URL list to 9to5Mac and MacRumors. This leak…
Setting up perfect Wi-Fi has historically been a challenge in many New York City apartments. In larger apartments, and especially pre-war apartments, the signal levels drop off precipitously in the rooms far from the router. For this reason, I always recommend in-the-wall ethernet for new construction or a gut renovation. In the cases where…
I ordered a cable modem from Amazon, using the free shipping option. I’m not a Prime member, as I only order a few items from Amazon per year. The free shipping option provided a whopping six-day delivery window. I took this risk, assuming that the large window allows for shipping delays by the carrier…
Apple discontinued the iPod nano and iPod shuffle today. This leaves the Apple Watch as the tiny music player in Apple’s product lineup. The Watch may be a suitable replacement, but there’s one aspect of the shuffle that made it the ideal exercise companion. It has big physical buttons. The buttons make it easy…
If you’re using the Mac’s native calendar application with certain CalDAV servers (such as the service that comes with MacOS Server), end users can share and delegate their calendars. Here are the differences between these options: Sharing a calendar allows you to give users either read or read/write access to your calendar. A calendar can…
I enjoy streaming my iTunes music library to my Apple TVs (and connected speaker systems.) On my 4th generation Apple TV, the home sharing feature frequently can’t find the music library on my Mac. The Apple TV insists that iTunes Home Sharing needs to be turned on. It’s on Apple, it’s on! Apple has many…
The recently announced iMac Pro is a beast of a machine. That said, it seems like a very niche model that won’t move Apple’s revenue needle in any appreciable way. While the machine is geared for professional graphics users, I don’t foresee most graphics/CGI shops buying these. For one, companies would expect to get many years of…