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Finder freezes. They shouldn’t happen at all, and they don’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of for your Mac’s Finder to freeze, freak out, or otherwise stop responding properly. To bring it back to life, hold down the Option key, click and hold the Finder icon in the Dock, and choose Relaunch. (If the “click and hold” action feels odd, you can instead hold down Control and Option, and then just click.) In theory, you should be able to keep working normally after the Finder relaunches, but we recommend restarting your Mac afterward just to be safe.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on June 4th, the company unveiled the first developer versions of all four of its operating systems: macOS 10.14 Mojave, iOS 12, watchOS 5, and tvOS 12. They won’t be available until this fall, likely in September or October, but here is a glimpse of what you can expect. macOS 10.14 Mojave Adds Dark Mode, Enhances the Finder, and Gains Four iOS Apps With the update to macOS, which Apple is calling “Mojave” after the southern California desert, the company is beefing up the Finder, adding visual enhancements, and bringing some familiar iOS apps...

Smartphone addiction is real. Do you check your iPhone before you get out of bed? During family dinners? Right before you go to sleep? Constantly during the day even when you’re on vacation? If you—or your family members—feel that you’re disappearing into your phone too often or at inappropriate times, it may be time to do something about it.To start, you might want to quantify the problem, and for that, you can turn to a free iPhone app called Moment. Written by developer Kevin Holesh, Moment is designed to track three key pieces of data: How often you pick up...

Attend any live theater presentation, and someone will ask the audience to silence their cell phones. But what about your Apple Watch? You don’t want it lighting up or making noise during the show either. To ensure that doesn’t happen, swipe up on the face to display Control Center, and then tap the theater masks icon to enable Theater mode (you may have to scroll down to see it). That automatically turns on Silent mode and prevents the screen from lighting up unless you tap it, press a button, or on the Apple Watch Series 2 or 3, turn the...

One of the great innovations of the Mac, way back when, was the concept of the Trash. Instead of deleting files immediately, you’d put them in the Trash, where they’d sit until you either took them out or removed them for good by emptying the Trash. You undoubtedly know the basics of working with the Trash: drag files in, drag mistakenly trashed files out, and choose Finder > Empty Trash to delete the files and recover the disk space.But instead of just dragging files to and from the Trash, you can take advantage of a few special techniques that make...