Learn To Talk About Your Mac by Knowing the Right Technical Terms

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about how to use the right words when talking to somebody about your Mac. 

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Now when you're communicating about your Mac, whether you're talking to a tech support person or just making a comment online, you want to make sure you use the right terms. It's very common to use the wrong word when talking about technology. But when you're asking for a technical solution to a problem, this can be an issue.  

For instance, let's start off with the term Taskbar. This is something I hear a lot especially if you're coming from Windows to Mac people are asking questions about the taskbar. Where is the taskbar? How do it do this with the taskbar? But there is no such thing on the Mac! That is something you have on Windows. On a Mac though sometimes map that term in their mind to something else. It could be many different things. So it is important to use the right word. For instance, here on the Mac Desktop I've got the Menu Bar here at the top. Sometimes people think of that as the taskbar since it is not at the top of the window like it is in Windows. In terms of functionality a lot of the items in the taskbar are actually found in what is called the Apple Menu here. So if you want to refer to this specifically just call it the Apple Menu. But when people use the term taskbar sometimes they are really just talking about the Dock here at the bottom. That's this row of icons here. It mostly contains apps and it is an easy way to launch apps. But it can have other items to the right as well. 

I have even heard people use the term taskbar to refer to what is called the App Switcher. This is what you get when you use Command Tab and it brings up the App Switcher here. You can click on any of these apps or just continue to Command Tab around until you get to the app you want and then release to go to that app. 

While we're looking at these terms I should also mention Control Center which is this button here which brings up all these different controls. You can get to a lot of System Settings here without actually going to the System Settings app. If you click on the Date or Time at the right upper hand corner or use another gesture you can bring up Notification Center which brings up notifications at the top and widgets below that. 

Now sometimes it is not that important to get the term exactly right. For instance there are two terms people use interchangeably. Cursor and Pointer. So technically the arrow that you see me moving here, that is the Pointer. The Pointer is the thing that you can move with your mouse or trackpad. But people often just call this the cursor. The Cursor technically is this blinking line here that is in the text. The Cursor is always in some text and it is something you move by typing or using the arrow keys. But in this case even if you use the wrong term usually the person you're talking to understands what you're saying. 

Another pair of terms that people use interchangeably, especially when dealing with text, is Selection and Highlight. So, if I were to use the Pointer here and select some text this is the selection. However sometimes people will say that they highlight the text. Technically that's not right. Highlighting can refer to either an editing function, for instance here in Pages you can highlight and notice once I do that the text stays with a colored background like this and it is Highlighted. Like using a highlighter on text on a piece of paper. You could also say that when you take text and then assign a text background color to it that that is also a kind of highlight. But when you're just using the pointer to select text that's called a Selection. We also use the term Selection when you're selecting say a file or another kind of object in an app, like say a shape in Pages or Keynote. 

Now when identifying your Mac people often use the wrong terms. For instance an extreme example would be when somebody simply refers to their Air. But there is an iPad Air and also a MacBook Air. So it is important to be specific because obviously technical solutions are going to vary greatly depending upon which one of those you have. In addition it is important to specify not just MacBook but whether it is a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. Of course there is also a very much older model just called a MacBook. So when referring to your Mac it is important to specify exactly what type of machine you have and usually that includes the year. If I go to the Apple Menu here and About This Mac, for instance, it will show that I've got a MacStudio 2022. The year is very important. It identifies which model you have. A MacBook Pro 2017 and a MacBook Pro 2023 are very different pieces of hardware. 

Even when people specify the piece of hardware they have usually that is not the most important piece of information, especially when it comes to software problems and solutions. What is most important is the version of macOs they have. So in this case you can see it is macOS Sonoma. When asking questions about how to do things or where buttons are, what things are called, what the step-by-step is for accomplishing a task the version of macOS is usually more important than the actual Mac hardware that you have. So if you want to be complete about it you wouldn't say I've got a MacBook, how do I do this. But instead I've got a MacBook Pro 2023 and it is running macOS Sonoma. 

While we're talking about Operating Systems it is important to get those terms right as well. Mac's, of course, run macOS. But so often I hear people refer to iOS instead. Somebody will say my Mac has iOS Sonoma. That, of course isn't right. iOS is for the iPhone and also iPad OS, that's for the iPad. Going back to macOS for some years now it has been referred to as macOS. Only much older versions are referred to as OS 10 or as some people say OS X. But macOS has been the correct term for a while now. 

There are also some antiquated terms that some people seem to use a lot. For instance people will still refer to the Photos App as iPhoto. But iPhoto was discontinued way back 2013 and the app has been called Photos since. So when somebody asks for help using iPhoto it is just this extra step to have to ask are you really using the old iPhoto App or are you talking about the modern Photos App. The same thing is true for the terms iTunes and iWork. iTunes is a much older app that years ago was separated into Music, Books, TV, and Podcast Apps. Also, people still use the term iWork even though Apple really doesn't use that term anymore. That used to refer to the suite of apps, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. But those are all individual apps now that you can get from The App Store and the term iWork was really just a marketing term for the three of those when they used to be sold.

Let's look at the term iMessage too. So there are two different similar sounding things. One is Messages which refers to the Messages App here on the Mac or on the iPhone or iPad. But, the Messages App can communicate with other people using several systems. One of those systems, if you go to Settings here, is iMessage. iMessage is Apple's proprietary messaging system where you can send messages back and forth with other Apple users. But the Messages App, say on the iPhone, can use iMessage and also your mobile phone carrier SMS system as well. But if you are just referring to the App and how to use the app it is correct to say the Messages App, not iMessage. 

Another term that is incorrectly used is iCloud. If you go into System Settings here and you go to your Apple ID and then look at iCloud you can see here that iCloud refers to a variety of different services. At lot of times people use iCloud interchangeably with iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive is just one part of iCloud. It's the part that allows you to see all of your files across all your different devices. But it is separate from, say, iCloud Photos and an iCloud email address and many more different services offered as part of the iCloud Service. So iCloud basically refers to a wide variety of Apple's Data Services. iCloud Drive is specifically about files. 

Now let's talk about your Mac's keyboard. This also applies to iPad keyboards as well. Your keyboard has several modifier keys. These are Shift, Control, Option, and Command. These are the modifier keys although you can also include the fn or as Apple calls it more recently the Globe Key. These keys modify what you're doing when you press something else. So pressing C, for instance, by itself types the letter C. But Command C is the Copy command in most apps.

But notice I didn't mention anything about an Alt key because Mac keyboards don't have an Alt key. When people use the term Alt they're probably referring to the Option Key. This goes back to two separate things. One is on Windows there is no Option key, there's an Alt key and it serves a similar function. Also it is a much older Mac keyboards, years ago, would have the term Alt on the key as well as Option, probably to help Windows users transition easier. But it is important to refer to the key as you see it on the keyboard. So it's the Option Key.

People also often confuse the Control and Command key. This also goes back to Windows because on Windows Control is the primary modifier key. But on the Mac, Command is the primary modifier key. So on Windows, for instance, Control C is copy, whereas on Mac Command C is Copy. But people sometimes will just say Control C when they mean Command C. But if you're trying to get technical help from somebody or when you're trying to talk about something at a technical level it is important to get it right. So say Command when you mean the Command key. 

Let's talk about the different ports on your Mac. If you look at most modern Macs today you'll see a command port that is shaped like an oval and the correct term for this is Thunderbolt. However sometimes people refer to this as lightning. You can see why, because it's got a little  lightning symbol next to it. After all that symbol is technically lightning. It's not thunder which is a sound. But lightning is actually the type of connector that is used on older iPhones and it is still used on lots of devices including the modern Mac Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse. They all use a lightning connector to charge. So you still have lots of use of a lightning connector and it is a very specific shape and is proprietary to Apple. A Thunderbolt connection is different. It doesn't actually talk about the shape. The shape itself is USBC. But the actual type of connection is Thunderbolt which includes several different things. A Thunderbolt connection can typically carry lots of different types of data, including USB data, display port data to connect a screen, and the Thunderbolt Data Protocol as well as other things like actually getting and sending power. So it gets very confusing when thinking of USBC versus Thunderbolt. USBC is the physical shape whereas Thunderbolt describes a set of different types of connections that can go over the cable. But you can also have a USBC port that just carries USB. Think of these as different languages. There's the language called USB. There's a language called Thunderbolt. A language called Display Port. A language called Power or electricity. A USBC connection can sometimes only speak one of those languages, like just USB, and sometimes it is multilingual and it can speak USB and Thunderbolt, and Display Port, and Power. When a USBC port is multilingual, like that, it's called Thunderbolt. When it can only speak one language, USB, it is just called a USB port. 

Let's talk about the term that people may misuse the most. That is Memory. I hear people use the term Memory and they don't mean the memory of the device they are using. They mean the Storage on that device. If you look here at the MacBook Air buy page, for instance, you can see each one of these models has an amount of memory and an amount of storage. The Storage refers to the either hard drive or solid state drive on your Mac. It's all your Files. All the stuff that you've got there. If you shut your Mac down all that stuff is still there on storage. Memory is what is active when the Mac is On and you're using it. So, for instance, in Storage you may have thousands of different files and when you open one of those files in an App it brings that file into Memory and then you just have one file in memory at that moment and you're working with it. When you Save it saves a new copy back to storage. That's a little bit of an oversimplification. There's a lot of overlap because storage is sometimes used for memory overflow. But in general it's important to realize these are separate things. You don't have a Mac that has 512 gigs of memory. That's not a thing! You have a Mac that has 512 gigs of Storage. It may have a 16 or 32 gigs of memory. You would want to get more Storage if you want to have more files and larger files stored on your Mac for you to access. But you want to get a Mac with more Memory if you want to be able to have more apps open at the same time and a faster response time when using those apps. 

Another term that people use to describe two different things is Battery Life. Some people may use the term battery life to describe how long their Mac will last after they unplug it. Will they have 6 hours of battery life. 8 hours of battery life and so on. Other people will use the same term, Battery Life, to describe how long the battery will last until they need to replace it. Will it last for 3 years? 4 years? 5 years? If you want to make it clear that you're talking about how long the Mac should last while unplugged then you may want to talk about Battery Performance or Capacity. If you want to talk about how many years the battery will last before it needs to be replaced you may want to talk about lifespan or longevity. 

These are just the most common terms that I hear people misuse when asking questions online. Beyond these you always want to think very carefully when asking a technical question. Make sure you're providing the correct details and make sure that the word you're using can't be confused for something else. Not using the right term can make it harder to get the right answer and may even produce the wrong answer if the person you're talking to misunderstands you. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.