Macworld It’s almost as if having your iPhone stolen is worse than having your house robbed. It’s not just losing an expensive device—your iPhone holds so much of your private life that criminals don’t even have to do the work of ransacking your place for cash, jewelry, credit cards, and electronics. Recent reports have detailed how criminals can use your iPhone to break into your iCloud and bank accounts to quickly drain your finances and steal your identity by permanently locking you out of your Apple account. That’s in addition to cutting off contacts, notes, emails, and photos. How? As long as a thief has your unlocked phone (either by snatching it out of your hand while you’re using it…

Macworld Sometimes, you need to turn a piece of paper into a digital file. Maybe you need to include a receipt, registration, or other form of proof in an online form. Or, you want to keep copies of your important documents in the cloud, so they’re always accessible and safe from being lost or destroyed. Such documents are often digitized as Portable Document Format files (or PDFs). It used to be that you needed to use either dedicated hardware or a third-party iPhone app to take a photo of a document and convert it to PDF. Apple has added a very handy document scanner into the Notes and Files apps, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing most documents…

Macworld Sometimes, you need to turn a piece of paper into a digital file. Maybe you need to include a receipt, registration, or other form of proof in an online form. Or, you want to keep copies of your important documents in the cloud, so they’re always accessible and safe from being lost or destroyed. Such documents are often digitized as Portable Document Format files (or PDFs). It used to be that you needed to use either dedicated hardware or a third-party iPhone app to take a photo of a document and convert it to PDF. Apple has added a very handy document scanner into the Notes and Files apps, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing most documents…

Macworld Your Mac Photos app is friendly and versatile, but when it comes to facial recognition, it doesn’t always acknowledge some of our best friends. Photos already recognizes human faces and it encourages you to ID them with names so that you can see many images that feature your mug (or those of family and friends) with a double click. Clicking in any one of the listed faces under the app’s People section reveals that Photos automatically recognizes designated faces and offers up many more for immediate viewing. Sadly, it won’t do the same for my cat Ruby. But there is a way to get Photos to list the faces of your beloved pets right alongside your human associates so…

Macworld If you’re choosing between two different types of Mac, or two generations of the same Mac, you may be wondering just how much of a difference the processor will make. Since November 2020 all new Mac have featured one of Apple’s own system-on-chip based on the ARM architecture and sometimes referred to as Apple Silicon. A number of Apple chips have joined the line up including the M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2, M2 Pro and M2 Max so far. The only Mac yet to move from Intel to Apple Silicon is the Mac Pro. Mac Pro aside, it has been a while since Apple sold any new Macs powered by an Intel chip, but since some…

Macworld Want to know every device that’s logged into your iCloud account? It’s a breeze to find out—and may assuage any fears you have that someone has tapped into your accounts. In these uncertain times, the Mac 911 mailbox routinely hears from readers who worry that something is up. You can put at least one fear to rest by checking that iCloud device list. (Most recently, someone wondered if an unknown party was inserting entries into the Reading List.) Nobody can gain access to any of your iCloud information without physical access to your devices, the ability to log in with your account information at iCloud.com (for limited kinds of data) or iCloud for Windows (even more limited), or by…