Back in September, Adam Engst moved from an Apple Watch Series 2 to an Apple Watch Series 5. After living with it for several months, he’s figured out which features make a difference and which are just marketing fluff.

In keeping with our tradition, we’re going to take off the last few weeks of the year to spend with family and friends, so look for the next email issue of TidBITS on 6 January 2020. Thanks for your attention in 2019, and we hope you’ve found our content useful, accurate, and enjoyable!

In a welcome change of heart for a company that has lobbied against Right to Repair legislation, Apple has announced the Independent Repair Program, which will provide genuine iPhone parts, tools, training, repair manuals, and diagnostics to independent repair businesses.

Planning a European vacation? If you don’t want to pay through the nose for cellular connectivity, look into the Orange Holiday Europe SIM, which provides 3 GB of data (or 8 GB if you activate soon) for just $22.

After being warned by both iCloud and Gmail that he was running low on storage space, Adam Engst embarked on a mission to free up cloud space rather than pay for more than he needs. If your clouds are filling up too, follow along to avoid missing email, failing file syncs, and more.

Many of us take far more photos while on vacation than at any other time, but that raises the question of how best to share them with different people and groups. Particularly if you’re not enamored of sharing on social media, read on for advice, suggestions, and solutions.

We’ve graphed and averaged and pondered the results of our recent reader survey, so read on to learn more about who reads TidBITS, what they think of our work, and much more, including the two topics we’ll be writing a lot less about in the future. And look, no featured image!

In iOS 12, Apple lets you manually invoke Do Not Disturb sessions that automatically turn themselves off at appropriate times. A new Bedtime mode is also welcome and can be used to create a second Do Not Disturb schedule.

If you’re running macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra, and you restart, it’s possible that you’ll see an Installation Log screen and an error telling you that the macOS installation couldn’t be completed. Here’s how to recover.

Disgusted by Facebook’s behavior but feel stuck using it because it’s the only way you communicate with some family members? Try the free tier of the group-messaging system Slack instead. It’s great for families, doesn’t incorporate ads, and guarantees your privacy. A little training may be required.

Planning a trip to the UK? After a family vacation there, Adam Engst has some advice for international travellers looking for an inexpensive way to get cellular data for their iPhones. He also suggests using Apple Pay for public transportation in London and recommends an inexpensive power adapter for charging devices.

If you’re bringing a child to start school at Cornell University this week, we’d love it if you could join us at a meetup for TidBITS readers.

We think of our iPhones, iPads, and Macs as extremely personal devices, but as you’ll read in these five stories from the Jamf Nation User Conference, large organizations are also putting Apple devices to interesting uses as focused tools in education, healthcare, hospitality, and retail.

Apple has published a letter to customers to apologize for silently reducing performance in older iPhones in an attempt to eliminate unexpected shutdowns. In it, the company explains the situation and announces a drop in the price of battery replacements.