If you’ve owned your iPhone or iPad for a while, there’s a good chance there are apps, contacts and settings that you either don’t use anymore or aren’t serving you as well as they could. This guide will take you through how to reclaim your notifications and your device’s storage.

Delete your unused apps

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You don’t need me to tell you to delete apps you don’t use to free up space on your iPhone, but you might not know that iOS has a dedicated tool to help you do this. You can access it by opening the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, then tapping “General,” followed by “iPhone Storage” or “iPad Storage.” It may take a few moments for the interface to populate, but once it does, you’ll see a handy visual representation of how much of your device’s storage you’ve given over to apps, photos and other types of files. You will also see a list of every app installed on your device, as well as how much space it takes up and when you last used it – all helpful information you can use to decide what to delete.

Depending on the app, iOS will present you with at least two options when you tap on it. You can delete the app and all its related data or “offload” it. In the latter case, iOS will delete the app from your iPhone or iPad but leave your data untouched. As such, when you reinstall the app, you can pick up right where you left off. It will also remain in your App Library for easy access. From the iPhone Storage menu, you can also set your device to automatically offload unused apps when you’re running low on storage, which is useful for all, but especially those with older, low-storage devices.

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If you use Apple Music and Messages frequently, tap on them since they offer a few additional options for managing their footprint. The interface for Apple Music includes a list of every download on your iPhone or iPad sorted by artist and album, offering a much better way of culling your library than from within the app itself.

Messages, meanwhile, has a few handy options for serial texters. At the bottom of the interface, you will see a breakdown of all the different attachments you may have received in messaging with your friends and family. Seeing how much storage those old photos, videos and GIFs take up may be eye opening; in fact, iOS will prompt you to review large attachments. That’s a good place to start since the interface does a good job of highlighting the biggest space hogs right at the top. You can also set iOS to automatically delete messages and attachments that are more than a year old. Unless space is at an absolute premium on your device, I would recommend against turning on this option, if only because it might delete a photo or video that has sentimental value to you.

Trim your contacts list

If you’ve had an iPhone for a while, there’s a good chance your contacts list could use an edit. Unless you plan to one day call everyone on that list, why not delete contacts you don’t speak to anymore? Your iPhone will give you a head start by identifying suspected duplicate contacts. Outside of that, there’s not much to this process other than going through each contact and ensuring the information you have is up to date.

Review your notification settings

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Something everyone should do every so often is review their notification settings since alerts can be a drain on your device’s battery (not to mention frequently take your attention away from more important things, too). To get started, open your device’s Settings app and tap on “Notifications.” If you haven’t already, I would recommend taking advantage of iOS 15’s scheduled summary feature. Let’s be honest, most notifications don’t require your immediate attention, and you’re better off addressing them all at once instead piecemeal. The schedule feature will help you do that by allowing you to set a few times per day when your device displays some notifications all at once.

For most people, that should make their notifications more manageable, but if you want to take things a step further, you can adjust individual settings for each app. For some of the worst offenders (Instagram and Twitter come to mind), it’s worthwhile to jump into their in-app settings to limit or disable the notifications they send you.

Focus Modes

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Another tool you can use to get a handle on your notification is Apple’s Focus feature, which allows you to configure custom do not disturb settings for different activities. By default, your device will come with a few preconfigured ones, and it’s worth reviewing the settings for each to optimize them for your needs.

To create a new custom Focus Mode, open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and tap “Focus,” which is located in the same subcategory as notifications. You can also create a new Focus mode directly from your device’s Control Center by long pressing on the “Do Not Disturb” icon and tapping “New Focus.”

Once you create a new Focus, customizing it is straightforward. You can specify contacts you want iOS to either silence or allow notifications from. You can do the same for apps as well. After you customize those lists to your liking, tap the “Options” prompt below your contacts and apps lists to see a few additional settings. Specifically, there’s an option to allow silenced notifications to display on your lock screen that you might find helpful.

The last thing I want to draw your attention to are the options around customizing your Home Screen for different Focus modes. By limiting the apps I can easily access, I find I’m less likely to get distracted. For instance, I’ve set my Reading Focus to limit my Home Screen to apps like Libby, Pocket and Apple Music.

If you own a Mac, there’s a good chance you spent quite a bit of money to buy it. If for no other reason than that, you should take care of your computer. Not only will it serve you better over its life, but you could end up getting more for it on the used market if you ever decide to sell your Mac.

In this how-to, we’ll share some tips on how to take care of your Mac. It’s impossible to cover the topic of computer maintenance from every angle, so think of this guide as more of an introduction to some organizational features and apps you may not have known about.

How to clean your Mac’s screen and body

While there are a lot of products you can buy that are specially made to help you with cleaning your computer, I’ve found the simplest approach works best — and it’s the one Apple recommends. To start, all you’ll need is some water in a spray bottle and a clean microfiber cloth. You can use either regular or distilled water. The advantage of the latter is that it’s far less likely to leave any residue on your Mac, particularly on the display. You can buy distilled water at a grocery store or make it yourself with some simple cookware. Either way, it’s more affordable than dedicated cleaning solutions and more versatile. If you don’t already own any microfiber cloths, Amazon sells affordable 24-packs you can get for about $14.

Two other products I’ve found that can make the job easier are Whoosh screen cleaner and a Giottos Rocket Blower. I can’t say enough good things about the latter. It will save you from buying expensive and wasteful cans of compressed air.

As for the process of cleaning your Mac, the most important tip to remember is to start with a clean cloth (that’s part of the reason we recommend buying them in bulk). You’ll save yourself time and frustration this way. Begin by turning off your computer and unplugging it. If you went out and bought a Rocket Blower, use it now to remove any dust. If not, take a dry microfiber cloth and go over your computer. Take special care around the keys, particularly if you own a Mac with a butterfly keyboard.

Next, dampen one side of your cleaning cloth with either water or Whoosh. Never spray any liquid directly on your computer. You’ll have more control this way and you’ll avoid getting any moisture into your Mac’s internals. I always clean the display first since the last thing I want to do is create more work for myself by transferring dirt from some other part of my computer to the screen. The last step is to buff and polish your computer with the dry side of the cloth. Be gentle here as you don’t want to scratch the screen or any other part of That’s it. Your Mac should be looking clean again.

How to organize your hard drive

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One of the hardest parts of cleaning your Mac’s hard drive is knowing where to start. After all, most of us have apps on our computers we don’t even remember installing in the first place. Thankfully, macOS comes with a tool to help you with that exact issue.

Navigate to the “Storage” section of the “About This Mac” menu and click the “Manage…” option. Here you’ll find a tool that sorts your files into broad categories and offers recommendations on how to free up space on your hard drive. You can use those in combination with the handy “Show in finder” button at the bottom of the interface to quickly navigate your hard drive. No need to search for files manually.

The section dedicated to applications is particularly helpful since you can see the last time you used a program, as well as if it’s no longer supported by the operating system or if it’s outdated thanks to a more recent release.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

You don’t need me to tell you to uninstall programs you don’t use, but what you might not know is that there’s a better way to erase them than simply dragging them to the trash can. A free program called AppCleaner will help you track down any files and folders that would get left behind if you were just to delete an application.

After deleting any apps you don’t need, move to the documents section. The name is somewhat misleading here since you’ll find more than just text files and excel spreadsheets. Documents, in this case, turns out to be the tool’s catch-all term for a variety of files, including ones that take up a large amount of space and DMGs you may have forgotten to dismount. The other sections on the sidebar are self-explanatory. The only other thing I’ll mention is if you’ve been using an iPhone for a while, there’s a good chance you’ll have old iOS backups stored on your computer. You can safely delete those too.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

By this point, your hard drive should be in pretty good shape. If you want to take some additional steps to clean it, there are dedicated apps that can help. I like one called CleanMyMac X. At $51 per year, it’s on the expensive side, but will save you the time and trouble of doing everything I mentioned above (and then some) on your own. It also doubles as a malware removal tool.

Tips and tricks for keeping a neat Desktop and Finder

Igor Bonifacic

Let’s start with the menu bar. It may not technically be part of the desktop, but a tidy one can go a long way toward making everything else look less cluttered. My recommendation here is to download a $16 app called Bartender. At first glance, it’s a simple program allowing you to hide unwanted menu bar items behind a three dots icon. However, the strength of Bartender is that you get a lot of customization options. For example, you can set a trigger that will automatically move the battery status icon out from hiding when your computer isn’t connected to a power outlet.

While we’re on the subject of the menu bar, take a second to open your Mac’s System Preferences menu and go to the “Users & Groups” section. Now click on the “Login Items” tab at the bottom of the interface and take a look at all the apps that launch when you boot up your system. You can speed up your system by paring this list down to only the programs you use frequently.

When it comes to the desktop itself, the best advice is less is more. Nothing will make your computer look like a cluttered mess more than a busy desktop. Folders and stacks can help, but, for most people, I suspect part of the problem is they use their desktop as a way to quickly and easily find files that are important to them.

If you’ve ever struggled to find a specific file or folder on your computer, try using your Mac’s tagging capabilities instead. Start by opening the Finder preferences menu (“command” + “,”) and click the “Tags” tab. You can use the default ones provided by macOS or make your own. Either way, drag the ones you think you’ll use most often to the favorites areas at the bottom of the preferences window. This will make it so that they’re easily accessible when you want to use them. To append a tag to a file or folder, click on it while holding the ctrl key and select the one you want from the dropdown menu. You can also tag a file while working on it within an app. Keep in mind you can apply multiple tags to a single file or folder. You can even apply them to applications.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

What makes tags so useful in macOS is that they can appear in the sidebar of the Finder and are easily searchable either directly through the Finder or using Siri. As long as you have a system for organizing your files, even a simple one, you’ll find it easier to keep track of them. As one example, I like to apply an Engadget tag to any files related to my work. I’ll add an “Important” tag if it’s something that’s critical and I want to find quickly.

One tool that can help supercharge your Finder experience is Alfred. It’s effectively a more powerful version of Apple’s Spotlight feature. Among other things, you can use Alfred to find and launch apps quickly. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once you get a hang of it, Alfred will change how you use your Mac for the better.

How to organize your windows and tabs

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If you’ve used both macOS and Windows 10, you’ll know that Apple’s operating system doesn’t come with the best window management tools. You can click and hold on the full-screen icon to tile a window to either the left or right side of your screen, but that’s about it and the feature has always felt less precise than its Windows counterpart.

My suggestion is to download an app that replicates Windows 10’s snapping feature. You have several competing options that more or less offer the same functionality. My go-to is an $8 program called Magnet. If you want a free alternative, check out Rectangle. Another option is BetterSnapTool, which offers more functionality than Magnet but doesn’t have as clean of an interface. All three apps give you far more ways to configure your windows than what you get through the built-in tool in macOS. They also come with shortcut support, which means you can quickly set up your windows and get to work.

You can add Duolingo to the growing list of companies jumping on the generative AI craze. On Wednesday, the company announced Duolingo Max, a new, more expensive subscription tier that comes with access to a pair of GPT-4 features. The first of those, “Explain My Answer,” allows you to ask Duo, a chatbot named after the company’s owl mascot, to spell out why your answer to a question was right or wrong, with the option to ask for additional clarification if you need more help.

The second feature, Roleplay, allows you to practice the skills you’ve learned through Duolingo in a handful of scenarios. For example, one session tasks you with ordering food and drinks at a Parisian cafe. Duolingo says no two conversations will be exactly the same, even when you rehearse a situation more than once, and users can earn experience points by completing the practice sessions.

“Most people don’t have access to a one-on-one human tutor, but I believe AI will allow us to eventually recreate the experience of a human tutor and scale it to everyone in the world,” said Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn. “I’m so excited to share these incredible new features with millions of Duolingo learners.”

Duolingo has been working on Duolingo Max since 2022, as part of a partnership that saw OpenAI grant the company access to its new GPT-4 model before this week’s announcement. Thankfully, Duolingo is aware enough to admit GPT-4’s language skills are far from perfect. “We’ve spent months collaborating closely with OpenAI to test and train this technology, and will continue doing so until the mistakes are nearly nonexistent,” the company notes, adding users can report an incorrect AI response by long pressing on a message. Users can also evaluate a Explain My Answer session by offering a thumbs up or down emoji after they’re done with one.

Starting today, Duolingo Max is available to English-speaking iOS users learning Spanish and French. In the US, the service will cost $30 per month or $168 annually. It comes with all the features that are part of Duolingo's existing Super subscription, including unlimited hearts and no ads.  

In 2013, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted Prime Air, the company’s then newly announced drone delivery unit, would be flying within four to five years. A decade later, the service appears to be no closer to reality than it was in 2018. However, some drone startups have had more success. Among those is Zipline, which says it’s on track to complete about 1 million deliveries by the end of the year. By 2025, the company says it expects to operate more flights than most airlines, a feat it intends to accomplish thanks to its next-generation drone, the Platform 2 or P2 Zip.

Zipline’s latest drone consists of two autonomous vehicles that will work in unison with one another to deliver packages that weigh up to 8 pounds. The first is a UAV that can complete a 10-mile flight in about 10 minutes. When it arrives at its destination, P2 Zip will hover about 300 feet off the ground and deploy its sidekick, an adorable “fully autonomous delivery droid.” The latter descends from its counterpart using a tether – the company is called Zipline for a reason – and gently drops off your package. According to Zipline, P2 Zip is nearly silent in flight, producing a sound the company claims is similar to rustling leaves in the wind, and precise enough, thanks to its droid companion, to deliver packages to areas as small as patio tables and front steps. Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton told CNBC P2 Zip may even put an end to porch pirates since the drone is fast enough to enable on-demand delivery.

Zipline

For more distant deliveries, the P2 Zip can fly up to 24 miles one way from dock to dock, charging at each docking station before completing the next leg of its journey and picking up new cargo. The drone’s charging station looks like something from science fiction. It features a chute for the delivery droid to enter the building the station is attached to, and what looks like a net to catch one of the drones if they fall. The company told CNBC setting up a P2 Zip dock takes about as much time as installing an electric vehicle charger. It envisions restaurants and hospitals installing the dock to enable the fast delivery of food and prescriptions.

Zipline already has a few customers eager to test the P2 Zip, including restaurant chain Sweetgreen, Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City, Michigan Medicine and Multicare Healthcare in Washington State. Before those companies gain access to the drone sometime next year, the startup plans to conduct more than 10,000 test flights with about 100 aircraft.

After debuting on PlayStation 5 and PC last year, Ghostwire: Tokyo is heading to Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass. Developer Tango Gameworks announced Wednesday that the game will arrive on Microsoft’s current generation consoles on April 12th. That same day, the studio will release the free “Spider’s Thread” update for all platforms.

The DLC adds a new game mode that will challenge players to complete a 30-stage gauntlet. As you progress through the mode, you’ll earn in-game currency you can spend to purchase upgrades for your run. Separately, the update adds new locales and missions within the game’s supernatural take on Tokyo for players to explore and complete. Complementing the new content are extended cutscenes designed to provide more insights into the game’s story. Good thing too because Engadget’s Mat Smith thought the game was begging for DLC to flesh out some of its more ambiguous plot points.

With today’s announcement, Ghostwire: Tokyo becomes the last Bethesda Softworks PS5 exclusive to receive an Xbox release date. Alongside Deathloop, Bethesda, before its acquisition by Microsoft, agreed to make the game a timed PlayStation 5 exclusive.

NASA has shared an image from the James Webb Space Telescope that could help astronomers one day answer longstanding questions about our universe. The capture you see above shows WR 124, a star located in the constellation Sagittarius, approximately 15,000 light years away from Earth. When the JWST first sighted WR 124 in June 2022, it captured the star undergoing a Wolf-Rayet phase. According to NASA, only some massive stars go through such a transition before they eventually explode. Those that do are among the largest and most luminous celestial bodies in the night sky. In the case of WR 124, NASA estimates the star is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has so far shed about 10 Suns worth of material. Over time, the gas Wolf-Rayet stars expel will cool and form cosmic dust.

Cosmic dust is something astronomers are keen to study for a few reasons. The material is an essential building block of the universe. As NASA notes, it shelters coalescing stars and can even come together to form planets. At the moment, however, there’s no theory that explains the amount of cosmic dust there is in the universe. The JWST could help astronomers tackle that mystery. “Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget,” NASA said. “Now those questions can be investigated with real data.”

For the first time, the US government plans to regulate the presence of “forever chemicals” in drinking water. PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are ubiquitous in the modern world. They’re found in many household items, including non-stick Teflon pans and dental floss, and can stay in water and soil for generations. What’s more, PFAS exposure has been linked to a whole host of health problems, including cancer, liver damage, asthma and developmental issues among children.

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposed drinking standard that would require public utilities to monitor drinking water for PFAS contamination and notify the public if the levels of those chemicals exceed the new standard. The proposal calls for classifying Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) as individual contaminants that water utilities would be mandated to detect at a level of four parts per trillion. Under an Obama-era recommendation, the agency previously recommend that water contain no more than 70 parts per trillion of PFAS chemicals. The EPA estimates the new guidelines will prevent “thousands” of deaths and “tens of thousands” of illnesses that are attributable to PFAS poisoning.

“EPA’s proposal to establish a national standard for PFAS in drinking water is informed by the best available science, and would help provide states with the guidance they need to make decisions that best protect their communities,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “This action has the potential to prevent tens of thousands of PFAS-related illnesses and marks a major step toward safeguarding all our communities from these dangerous contaminants.”

With today’s announcement, the EPA will accept public comment on the proposal for 60 days before it takes effect. A handful of states, including New Jersey, Vermont, Michigan and New York, already regulate the chemicals on their own. That said, PFAS water contamination is a national problem. One 2020 study estimated that as many as 200 million Americans have been exposed to the chemicals through their tap water. More recently, scientists have found polyfluoroalkyl substances in human breast milk.

Nearly a year after it was first announced, Hyper Light Breaker finally has a gameplay trailer. Developer Heart Machine shared the long-awaited first look through IGN. The studio promised Breaker would be a departure from its predecessor, 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter. The trailer reiterates that, showing how just how much will change with the series switching to 3D.

Where Hyper Light Drifter pulled most directly from early Legend of Zelda entries like A Link to the Past, its sequel shows obvious Breath of the Wild influences, with nods to Dark Souls and PlatinumGames titles like Bayonetta 3. Judging from the trailer, traversing Breaker’s open world, a domain known as the “Overgrowth,” will be a highlight, thanks to the hoverboard and glider your character will have at their disposal. The trailer also promises “endless loadouts” and “endless deaths.” In other words, expect tough enemies that will push you to learn the ins and outs of the weapons you find throughout the game. Oh, and you can see how the optional co-op play will allow players to band together to take on some of Breaker's more difficult challenges. 

With the gameplay reveal, Heart Machine also announced a new release date for the game. Hyper Light Breaker will now arrive on Steam early access this fall, instead of the spring as previously announced. 

Earlier this year, an amateur Go player decisively defeated one of the game’s top-ranked AI systems. They did so using a strategy developed with the help of a program researchers designed to probe systems like KataGo for weaknesses. It turns out that victory is just one part of a broader Go renaissance that is seeing human players become more creative since AlphaGO’s milestone victory in 2016

In a recent study published in the journal PNAS, researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and Yale found that human Go players have become less predictable in recent years. As the New Scientist explains, the researchers came to that conclusion by analyzing a dataset of more than 5.8 million Go moves made during professional play between 1950 and 2021. With the help of a “superhuman” Go AI, a program that can play the game and grade the quality of any single move, they created a statistic called a “decision quality index,” or DQI for short.

After assigning every move in their dataset a DQI score, the team found that before 2016, the quality of professional play improved relatively little from year to year. At most, the team saw a positive median annual DQI change of 0.2. In some years, the overall quality of play even dropped. However, since the rise of superhuman AIs in 2018, median DQI values have changed at a rate above 0.7. Over that same period, professional players have employed more novel strategies. In 2018, 88 percent of games, up from 63 percent in 2015, saw players set up a combination of plays that hadn't been observed before. 

"Our findings suggest that the development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies and induced them to explore novel moves, which in turn may have improved their decision-making," the team writes.

That’s an interesting change, but not exactly an unintuitive one if you think about it. As professor Stuart Russel at the University of California, Berkeley told the New Scientist, “it’s not surprising that players who train against machines will tend to make more moves that machines approve of.”

At the start of the year, someone on the Marvel Studios Spoilers subreddit, a community dedicated to upcoming Marvel productions, posted the mother of all MCU leaks. A month before the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a user named MSSmods shared a 63-page Google Doc transcript of the film’s dialogue. Now, Disney wants to know who was behind the leak and is trying to force Reddit and Google to identify the person or group of people responsible.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, Disney’s MVL Film Finance unit, a subsidiary the company established to support Marvel Studios productions, has filed two Digital Millennium Copyright Act subpoena applications designed to compel Reddit and Google to identify who was behind the leak. As MSSmods is an account shared among the moderators of r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers, Reddit complying with the application would entail the company identifying more than one person. What’s more, Disney has requested that Google and Reddit share any “identifying information” they have on MSSmods — including names, telephone numbers and IP addresses — along with details on any user who may have been involved in posting, editing or uploading the leak.

Reddit did not say if it intends to comply with the application. “Reddit is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We have rigorous processes in place to assess legal requests and object when appropriate,” a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget and pointed to the company’s legal request guidelines. Google did not immediately respond to a comment request.

It’s not clear what, if anything, Disney plans to do about the source of the leak, possibly a subtitle vendor or freelance translator. The document MSSmods shared was a translation of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s Portuguese subtitles, with some of the dialogue not presented in chronological order.