watchOS 8 wished Adam Engst a happy birthday recently, which was both a nice touch and a small surprise. He also discusses some quirky problems related to printer drivers.

USB-C was supposed to make connectivity easier. Instead, it has acquired a profusion of footnotes, exceptions, and labeling that can leave average users frustrated—and with the wrong cable. USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 are our last best hope.

If you’ve wanted to enable HiDPI scaling for sharper text on a 1440p display connected to an M1-based Mac, you’ve been out of luck… until now. The open source BetterDummy helps you take full advantage of 1440p external screens.

Apple has sued the notorious NSO Group and will be funding two prominent research groups that specialize in discovering and describing cyber surveillance attacks. These moves appear to be the first step in a new strategy against companies that weaponize operating system flaws to profit off surveillance.

We’re taking the next email issue of TidBITS off to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, although we’ll continue to publish articles on our Web site. You can look forward to the next email issue on 6 December 2021.

New FaceTime features like links, grid view, and a Web client make FaceTime in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey more competitive with video conferencing apps like Zoom.

Apple has released watchOS 8.1.1 to address charging problems with the Apple Watch Series 7.

Apple has released iOS 15.1.1 exclusively for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 to address a bug causing dropped calls.

After lobbying against right-to-repair legislation for years, Apple has seemingly done an about-face by announcing the Self Service Repair program, which will provide genuine Apple parts, tools, and repair manuals to individuals who want to repair their Apple devices.

Thanks to Apple’s Weather app picking up features from Dark Sky, the company that Apple acquired in early 2020, you can now turn on next-hour precipitation notifications in iOS 15. But they aren’t reliable for some users—how about you?

Reports of massive memory leaks in macOS 12 Monterey have been traced back to custom pointer changes. Resetting custom pointers should reduce or eliminate the problems until Apple releases a fix.

This week, Adam asks for help tracking down an email formatting bug in TidBITS issues, points those worried about ransomware to RansomWhere and Retrospect 18, and looks at more utilities that perform OCR on text in images.

A week after the release of the third-generation AirPods, Apple subsidiary Beats By Dre unveiled Fit Pro earbuds that offer a compelling alternative thanks to a more secure fit, H1 chip, and active noise cancellation.

Josh Centers and Julio Ojeda-Zapata team up to give you their first impressions of Apple’s third-generation AirPods.

Howard Oakley of The Eclectic Light Company blog shows that Disk Utility in Monterey now lets you view and work with APFS snapshots.