Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

While Apple’s brand is successful in most countries, there is one place where Apple hasn’t fared so well: India. At first Apple had trouble even selling iPhones in India, as the law there requires them to manufacture some percentage of devices inside the country. Even though they are available now, the vast majority opt for cheaper Android phones. (more...)

There’s only one Apple museum in the world as far as I can tell, and it is in Prague, right by where I am staying. I visited there today and it is very nice. Here is some raw footage that I hope to edit into a video for the site later on. I've got some more bits too. The audio from me walking around is a bit washed out by the background sound of Stwve Jobs speeches playing throughout the museum. Unlike the many tourist trap museums in Prague, this one is all for charity, apparently. Anyone else been there? I'm glad I didn't notice the no photography sign until I left at the end! Oops.

Many people share Numbers spreadsheets with others by exporting to Excel. This creates a cumbersome process where the spreadsheet is exported and imported multiple times and rules out using some of the best features of Numbers. But you can use the Collaborate feature to share a document with another users regardless of whether they are on Mac or Windows and what software they have installed or whether they have an iCloud account. You can password-protect the document and even collaborate in real time.

For years now, financial analysts have been predicting that Apple would become the first company with a market valuation worth more than $1 trillion. That happened this week when the stock price topped $206/share.
Of course, this is just a number. By itself, it doesn’t mean anything. However, the fact that Apple is the first to cross this milestone does mean something. And that no other company has a market valuation that high also means something.
Tim Cook put the focus back on the reasons for growth, not the number itself: “Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values.” (more...)

Hashtags are a way of tagging posts and images on social media. They are used heavily on Twitter, Instagram and other services. You can search for posts by hashtag, and use them in your own posts. You don't need to do anything special to create a hashtag, just start using it. Sometimes hashtags are used to express an emotion or something more complex to put an ambiguous post into context, or just for humorous effect.

While Charts are available in Pages, Numbers and Keynote, only Keynote can animate the charts with build-in animations for each element of the chart. You can set the type of animation to fit the style of chart, such as a horizontal wipe for horizontal charts or an iris out for a pie chart. You can group together sets or series and skip the animation of the initial chart background and first set.

A new update to the Gboard keyboard app from Google allows you to type using the dots and dashes of Morse code instead of a traditional keyboard. While this may be nothing more than a novelty for some people, others may actually be able to learn to type faster than using a regular touch screen keyboard. Google also has a nice little mobile website to teach you how to use Morse code.

Apple reported its best third-quarter results yet with a net profit of $11.5 billion. MacRumors has a good run-down of the numbers. As expected, services made up a good chunk of the revenue growth, with iPhone still being the majority from strong iPhone X sales. iPad and Mac still had respectable numbers, especially considering there were no new models.

What continues to surprise is the number of new Mac purchases that are for first-time Mac buyers. 60 percent means a lot of people are still switching to Mac from Windows. Apple Pay also continues to expand, hitting 7/11 in the U.S. soon and being available in Germany later this year too.

A Japanese blog is reporting that the new iPads coming out later this year will feature smaller bodies and no headphone jack. Others have also reported that maybe new iPads will have a “notch” and no Home button like the iPhone X to allow the display to go to the edges. (more...)

Since you talk instead of type to communicate with Siri, it is an ideal way to find out the spelling of a word. Just ask Siri on your Mac or iOS device: “How do you spell daiquiri?” Not only will you see the result, but Siri will spell it out for you.

In System Preferences there are several keyboard-related accessibility features that can be useful for anyone. You can set modifier keys to remain active so you can use keyboard shortcuts without needing to hold down multiple keys at the same time. You can enable typing sounds and a slight delay to prevent keyboard errors. You can also bring up an on-screen keyboard to use if you are having hardware issues.

When you look in List View in the Finder, you'll see a file size for every file, but no size listed for any folders. You can still view the total size of a folder using one of several methods. You can Get Info on a folder to see the size and number of files. You can also use the File Inspector. Quick Look also displays the folder size. If you want to see the sizes of all folders in List View, you can enable that by changing a setting.

Digital Trends has an interesting look at an Apple patent that shows MacBooks and iPads acting as inductive (wireless) chargers for iPhones and Apple Watches. You just stick one device on top of the other and it charges. But the headline they pull out of this patent is about a minor point where the MacBook appears to maybe have a touch screen. (more...)

Most fonts can either be called Serif or Sans-Serif fonts. The difference is that Serif fonts have extended strokes at the ends and corners whereas Sans-Serif fonts do not. The use of this term predates computers, and the existence of serifs even predates modern printing. Today it is useful to know the difference when choosing a font for a document or graphic element.

Apple Insider has an interesting story about an Apple patent that would make iPhone external lens attachments work better. The patent itself goes into all sorts of detail about how lenses fit and how the camera would adjust to them. But patents themselves aren’t worth much as rumor sources since Apple has a huge research and development department and they create all sorts of things that may or may not ever be used. (more...)

You can set your Mac to not require a password when you start up, wake up or log in. However, you should never use this function. Doing so leaves all of your information vulnerable to anyone who gets physical access to your Mac. Even if you are using a Mac that is stationary and locked up, it doesn't make sense to take the risk. Entering a password every time you use your Mac is a small price to pay for good security. You can mitigate the number of times you enter your password by setting the Require Password time to something reasonable, such as 5 minutes.

You can't always take a picture from the vantage point you would like. But with image editing tools like Acorn or Photoshop, you can adjust the perspective of your photo afterward to make it look like you shot the photo straight-on.

When you triple-click the iPhone's Home button, a variety of things can happen. This can trigger the magnifier, screen zoom, a type of dark mode, other screen filters and a few of types of touch assistance. You can have a single function activate instantly, or choose from a menu of more than one function.

Last week there was a bit of a controversy as a MacBook Pro i9 user reported slowness when rendering video with his new top-end MacBook Pro. Turns out the problem is a software bug, not any performance issue or attempt by Apple to keep the processor from reaching its full potential. (more...)

You can drag and drop a document to an app in the Dock to open it with that app. But it doesn’t appear that you can drag and drop to LaunchPad in the Dock, and then continue dragging inside LaunchPad to select an app. But you can. The trick is to wait for a second or two while the document is hovering over the LaunchPad icon. Then LaunchPad launches and you can drag to the app. You can even then drag to the edges of the screen to go to another page inside LaunchPad.