After spending several days helping some elderly friends with their Macs, Adam Engst came away with a new appreciation for how difficult some aspects of Mac use are for older people. Some Apple efforts are a step in the right direction but may not be available to today’s users. And there’s plenty of room to improve.

If you’re still running macOS 11 Big Sur, it’s worth updating to the quietly released version 11.6.7, which fixes a problem that prevented email apps from opening attachments. It may also help clear Time Machine blockages, but it could also introduce problems by removing Rosetta from M1 Macs.

In its ongoing effort to protect users’ privacy, Apple has built a series of related technologies into macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, and iPadOS 15. Unfortunately, they can cause network connectivity issues, such that you might want to disable one or more. Here is how we think they work.

After discovering a bunch of failed TIdBITS membership renewals, Adam Engst spent the week working with Stripe support to figure out why Citibank was refusing to honor payments to TidBITS Publishing, claiming that they were for cryptocurrency.

Adam Engst recently took a trip from upstate New York to Vancouver, British Columbia. As always, technology made the trip significantly easier than in the past, though he found that some bits (CarPlay in rental cars and North American T-Mobile connectivity) were vastly more helpful than others (an App Clip for buying gas and Apple Maps encouraging illegal U-turns).

Although there’s much to look forward to in macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16, there are also some features that had us scratching our heads, wondering what had gotten into the Cupertino drinking water. 

At Apple’s WWDC keynote, the company threw back the curtain on its next-generation chip—the M2—and a pair of laptops that use it, including a completely redesigned MacBook Air and an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro.

We’ve been making some changes to the TidBITS website, and while you shouldn’t notice much difference, there are a few rough edges that you may hit while we’re finishing up.

We’re taking a brief break from building an email issue of TidBITS next week in honor of the Memorial Day holiday in the United States, so look for the next issue in your mailbox on 6 June 2022.

Want to use the extra space on your APFS-formatted Time Machine drive to store non-backup files? Howard Oakley explains how you can make that possible by creating an APFS volume or an APFS container.

Apple will be unveiling new technologies at WWDC 2022, and while some will undoubtedly be welcome, we have additional ideas that we hope will make their way into future versions of Apple’s operating systems.

What better day than Friday the 13th to check that your backups are actually working by restoring some critical files?

iCloud Drive folder sharing has been around since macOS 10.15 Catalina, which makes it all the less acceptable that someone with whom the folder is shared can delete a file permanently and with only one possible—and unmentioned by Apple—option for recovery.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have committed to expanding support for the FIDO Alliance’s passwordless login technology over the course of the coming year. With luck, we’ll see it in the next versions of Apple’s operating systems.

After receiving three separate scam solicitations from acquaintances whose email accounts had been taken over by scammers, Adam Engst explains how the scam works and what you can do to protect yourself and help others who have been hacked.