Is your Macbook's battery healthy?

Recently my MacBook Pro’s battery hasn’t been the best. While doing some work my fans started running at high-speed and I was afraid my MacBook Pro was about to lift-off and head to space. Thankfully it didn’t, instead I had a little pop-up warning about the excessive energy being used. This prompted me to check my battery health. So how does one check the health of their battery?

Make sure that you’ve updated your OS X to the latest - Catalina 10.15.5. Navigate to your System Preferences, click on Energy Saver, then click on Battery Health.

For my Mac, I had an alert that my battery needed to be serviced. After a short call, a quick online diagnostic, I was able to book in a work appointment to my local Apple store and got my battery replaced under warranty! Happy days! I could get back to work.

Photo by iabzd on Unsplash

There is more that you can do to help preserve the life of your Macbook’s battery. You can find out more from the good folk here.

Everything new that's coming to Apple

So Apple just held their annual World Wide Developer Conference and made it available online via streaming. If you, like me, couldn’t be bothered staying awake to watch it (I am not that crazed an Apple follower, good sleep comes first!), here’s a comprehensive list of new things coming to Apple that was announced!

1. Apple will start running their Macs on Apple-made chips instead of Intel

2. iOS 14 is coming and it will give you more options to customise your phone

3. Apple is re-inventing the car key fob

4. iPadOS 14 is making your iPad more like a computer

5. MacOS along with Safari is going to get significant upgrade as Big Sur comes into development

6. Seamless device switching when it comes to using your AirPods

7. Sleep and handwashing features for WatchOS 7

PHOTOGRAPH: BROOKS KRAFT/APPLE

You can read more about these announcements thanks to the good folk at Wired - “Here’s everything Apple announced at WWDC.”

How To: Export your Pages document as a Word document.

Not everyone owns a Mac and when it comes to sharing documents it can become quite a hassle if you’re sharing it with someone who only has Microsoft Word. The good news is, Pages is Word friendly! Unlike Microsoft Word that can’t open Pages documents, Pages can both read and export .docx files! Here’s how you can export a Word friendly document for your Windows wielding friend thanks to the smart fellows at Cult of Mac.

Mac OS Tip: Hide That Menu!

Here’s a quick Mac OS tip for you today to keep your desktop looking tidy.

Automatically hide the top menu bar by following these instructions…

SYSTEM PREFERENCES > GENERAL > ENABLE: “Automatically hide and show the menu bar”

Now whenever you bring your cursor to the top of your screen your menu will appear, and then disappear when you move away from it.