Intrepid PCMag testers roamed the United States to figure out which of the three big cellular networks reigns supreme. Also, a surprising fact about contemporary Internet usage.
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.
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).
After initially demanding that legacy G Suite users upgrade to the paid Google Workspace keep their custom email addresses, Google has relented and is now offering individuals and families a free option, but you only have until 27 June 2022 to claim it.
Inflation is making everything more expensive, and wireless plans are no exception. AT&T and Verizon are both hiking prices slightly in response to current economic conditions. Will T-Mobile follow or lure in disgruntled switchers?
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.
In an effort to create a centralized but local place to store all his data, Josh Centers bought a Synology DS 920+. So far, the investment has been worth it for him, but it may be more expense and trouble than it’s worth for you.
Apple’s networkQuality command-line tool in Monterey provides a new metric—“responsiveness”—that measures latency in a more realistic manner to better reflect your real-world experience with interactive Internet services like videoconference and gaming.
It’s a good news/bad news week. On the plus side, Apple finally fixed the bug that prevented Mail from following links to named anchors, making our table of contents links clickable again. Sadly, however, we mourn a steadfast friend of TidBITS who was responsible for ensuring that all TidBITS staffers could cover the just-released iPad.
T-Mobile and Verizon provide home Internet service via devices that use the wireless carriers’ 5G data signal as backhaul for local Wi-Fi. Julio Ojeda-Zapata has been testing both services and found them to be affordable, fast, and dependable.
Triggered by a conflation of recent cloud storage issues, Adam Engst examines the real-world experience surrounding cloud storage and explores a variety of quirks, irritations, and gotchas with Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive.
After much sleuthing, Adam Engst uncovers why some TidBITS readers experience a situation where an article in a TidBITS issue would be formatted as a column of text a single character wide. The culprit? An ancient email retrieval protocol as implemented by Yahoo Mail.
AT&T and Verizon have started using C-band wireless spectrum that will speed up their 5G cellular service and make it available to more customers. This important step in 5G’s overall evolution brings AT&T and Verizon more in line with T-Mobile, which has had an edge in available spectrum until now.
Feeling overwhelmed by negativity? Adam Engst shares some 2021 wrap-up posts showing that even in a pandemic-ridden year, a lot of good stuff happened that didn’t make the headlines. He also looks at the solution to a macOS upgrade problem and explains how to bring back the menu command for creating an ad hoc Wi-Fi network.
Did you know that pressing Control-H in Mail deletes the current message? You do now. Adam also shares a story about a Pakistani security researcher reporting a vulnerability on the TidBITS site and a reader tip about avoiding USB hubs when updating an iPhone from a Mac.