HCS Blog

The ease of sending and receiving email makes it an attractive way to run scams like phishing attacks. One telltale mark of a phishing attack is the sender’s address not matching their purported domain; attacks that appear to come from legitimate email addresses are much more likely to fool the victim.

You can protect your organization’s email accounts from being compromised and used in phishing attacks by training your users to identify forged emails and use password managers, which won’t autofill a password on a malicious site. But how do you prevent bad guys from forging email that looks like it comes from inside your organization? You can’t, but you can reduce the chances that other email servers will accept it. In the process, you’ll enhance the deliverability of legitimate email from your domain.

In November 2023, Apple unveiled the M3 chip in new versions of the 24-inch iMac and MacBook Pro, causing speculation about when other Mac models would be updated to match. If you’ve been longing for a MacBook Air with an M3 chip, your wait is over. (And we expect Apple to update the Mac mini soon.)

Apple has now announced M3 versions of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air. For most Mac laptop users who don’t need the additional speed of the M3 Pro or M3 Max chips in the MacBook Pro lineup, these new MacBook Air models combine excellent performance with low prices. The 13-inch MacBook Air starts at $1,099, and the 15-inch model starts at $1,299.

Is your Mac’s menu bar overwhelmed with icons? They’re helpful little critters, but finding one can be difficult when you have too many and they’re in no particular order. The hidden trick to cleaning up your menu bar relies on the Command key.

Rearrange the menu bar icons in an order that makes sense to you by Command-dragging them around. You can’t move the Control Center icon or put anything to its right, but every other icon is movable. Delete unnecessary Apple-provided status icons by holding down Command and dragging them off the menu bar. (To put one back, select the “Show icon-name status in menu bar” checkbox in its System Settings screen.) You can’t remove the clock, Control Center, or the Siri icon this way, though you can turn off Siri in System Settings > Siri & Spotlight. Command-dragging to delete doesn’t work for non-Apple apps; instead, look for a preference in the app itself.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Valentyna Yeltsova)

On the iPhone and iPad, to send a photo to a Messages chat, tap the ⊕ button and then tap Photos in the list that appears to reveal the photo picker. That’s not difficult, but it requires an extra step you can avoid with this tip. If you’re running iOS 17 or iPadOS 17, instead of tapping the ⊕ button, touch and hold it for a second to bring up the photo picker immediately.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/oatawa)

Does it feel like your Apple devices are always asking you to install operating system updates? You’re not wrong—from September 2022 to January 2024, we saw the following releases in Apple’s previous set of operating systems:

macOS 13 Ventura: 20 releases iOS 16: 25 releases iPadOS 16: 20 releases watchOS 9: 15 releases tvOS 16: 12 releases

Apple issued many of those at the same time, but since you might not use all your devices every day, it can seem as though you spend all your time installing updates. As annoying as updating can be, we encourage you to do so soon after you’re notified for three reasons.

The near-ubiquity of videoconferencing is a lasting effect of the pandemic. The ease of gathering a group virtually usually more than makes up for the downsides. Despite that, many people still appear in video calls with low-resolution, poorly lit video that makes the call less effective.

A better webcam is an easy way to improve your video, and the best readily available webcam may already be in your pocket. That’s because you can use your iPhone and its high-quality cameras as a wired or wireless Mac webcam, thanks to Apple’s Continuity Camera technology.