Where Is Your Apple Tourist Guide?
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
My son recently flew off to London for a holiday. Color me envious.
So I asked the logical question, me being a Boomer and all; had he bought a London Tourist Guide?
He smiled indulgently and shook his head.
Millennials. Jeez.
Okay. I get it. On some level it’s just a knee jerk reaction spawned in an era of gas station road maps, spiral-bound atlases, and pocket-sized travel guides. Heck, to get from Seattle to Los Angeles, AAA gave you 3 of them. All.
Today, it’s all on your iPhone.
Sort of.
What a decent guide quickly gives you is context. What’s the big picture? Where is everything? What should I care about and what do I want to see?
Google searches and mobile apps are efficient at finding what we want, but what if we don’t know what we want? That’s where browsing a good guide or manual is so much better. It’s the difference between a tasting menu and choosing from the whole darn thing.
For many people, Apple devices are like a trip to London without a guide book. They follow the signs and recognize names, but how much better to really understand how everything relates and to check out all the spots you might otherwise miss. Yes, random chance is fun, but I love a bit of planning too. Especially when it comes to technology.
Fortunately, Apple thought of that and made some great guide books that come on every device. On your iPhone and iPad you just look for the “Tips” app or find it by searching. Tips gives you quick how-to’s for all the common tasks on your iOS devices. The opening screen shows you how to get around on your iPhone, settings and features of the main apps, Accessibility options, and a link to the full device appropriate User Guide where you get instructions on everything.
On the Mac, in Monterey or earlier, you go to the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and choose “About This Mac” to bring up a dialogue. Then select “Resources.” If you have upgraded to Ventura, just go to Help in the Finder menu.
You can access guidance on popular device tasks or skim through full-featured guides about every detail of using your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Then you’ll know what you don’t know. And where to look when you get stuck. I bet you’ll even stumble on some interesting tid-bit that you hadn’t thought to look for.
Like that great little hole-in-the-wall fish and chips place in Soho.