Apple may have discontinued the Time Capsule, but many Mac users still need a network-based Time Machine backup. This article reviews what options exist and weighs their pros and cons.

Annoyed by constantly picking up his wife’s MacBook Pro instead of his MacBook Air, Adam Engst decided to decorate the laptops with inexpensive full-color vinyl skins. It worked like a charm, and the skins also make the laptops more secure to carry and offer protection against scuffs and scratches.

We recently covered the dizzying confusion of USB standards, but HDMI standards for displays are even more confusing and even misleading. Read on to see what we mean.

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.

With the iOS Music app, it’s easy to accidentally delete a purchased song from your library when you merely intend to remove the downloaded audio. You can’t recover from this mistake within the Music app but must work through the iTunes Store using a Mac.

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 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.

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

In the ongoing saga of things rattling around in Adam Engst’s head that don’t merit their own articles, Adam shares the fact of Apple’s new temporary iCloud Backup storage, passes on a story about Screen Time settings inexplicably changing, talks about moving TidBITS to a new virtual private server, and notes an upgrade to the TidBITS News app.

While our general advice to hold off on upgrading to macOS 12 Monterey remains in place, Adam Engst shares some thoughts on why Monterey may merit an earlier upgrade than previous versions of macOS. But he also points to some upgrade problems that suggest that we’re not quite there yet.