In macOS, a Text Clipping is a selection of text that you've dragged from an application to another location on your Mac, where it becomes a unique kind of standalone file. The relatively little-known feature has been around since at least Mac OS 9, and it offers a convenient way to save out pieces of text from pretty much anywhere for later use in another app or document.
To create a Text Clipping, simply highlight any piece of text, then hold left-click and drag it with your mouse to your Desktop or an open Finder window. This saves the highlighted text – including any rich text formatting – as a .textclipping file named after the first few words of text that you selected, but you can easily rename it to make it more identifiable.
To use the selected text in another file like a Pages document, drag the Text Clipping into the open document and the text will be automatically pasted wherever the cursor is located. You can paste the clipping in the same way into all sorts of open files and apps, including browser search engines, Mail compose windows, and more.
To quickly view the contents of a Text Clipping, simply double-click it to view the text in a dedicated window, and even highlight and copy (Command-C) just a snippet of the text from this window for pasting elsewhere.
Text clippings can speed up many repetitive tasks, making things like reusing email/letter templates and code snippets a cinch. Bear in mind that Text Clippings store content in a unique format that may not be compatible across all platforms or devices. So if you're sharing clippings, it's best to convert them into standard text formats to ensure they can be opened elsewhere.
To improve privacy, your Mac (or any other of the Apple devices) can identify itself to each network using a different Wi-Fi address, and might rotate (change) the address periodically.
To communicate with a Wi-Fi network, a device must identify itself to the network using a unique network address called a Media Access Control (MAC) address. If the device always uses the same Wi-Fi MAC address across all networks, network operators and other network observers can more easily relate that address to the device's network activity and location over time. This allows a kind of user tracking or profiling, and it affects all devices on all Wi-Fi networks. The Private Wi-Fi Address feature is designed to address this concern.
Using a private Wi-Fi address helps reduce tracking of your Mac by Wi-Fi network operators. Tracking can occur when your address always appears the same to other devices and networks.
Turn this feature off or on for a network:
• On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings..., then click Wi-Fi in the sidebar
• Click the "Details..." button
• Click the “Private Wi-Fi address” pop-up menu, then choose an option:
Off: Private Wi-Fi address is turned off. This Mac can be identified and tracked on this network, and across other networks.
Fixed: A fixed private address allows this network to track this Mac, but helps reduce tracking across other networks.
Rotating: A rotating private address reduces tracking on this network, and across other networks.
• Click OK
A private Wi-Fi address doesn't affect how you join or use most Wi-Fi networks. For improved privacy, allow your device to continue using a private addresses with all networks and software that support it.
If your Mac is a managed computer, you may not be able to change this setting. Contact a system administrator in the school or organization that provided you with the computer for more information.
In macOS Sequoia 15.2, Apple has introduced a new option that adds a weather report to your Mac's menu bar.
Mac users who update to macOS 15.2 (or later) can now add a handy weather icon to the menu bar, showing the current temperature alongside a visual indicator of the conditions — such as a sun for sunny skies or a cloud for overcast weather.
Clicking the icon provides a detailed hourly forecast, upcoming temperatures, and weather updates for saved locations. It also offers quick access to the full Weather app with just a click.
You can enable this feature on your Mac by following these steps:
• Click the Apple () symbol in the menu bar and select System Settings...
• Navigate to Control Center using the sidebar
• Locate the "Menu Bar Only" section near the bottom
• Alongside Weather, click the chevrons and select Show in Menu Bar
One of the useful Apple Intelligence features that is available in Safari is the webpage summarization feature. With Apple Intelligence Summarize in Safari, you can have an AI summary of an entire webpage, whether it’s a long article, a general website, or anything else on the web, giving you a nice summary of the page contents. This can help you quickly determine information and save time, and it’s really easy to use in Safari on the Mac.
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac with MacOS Sequoia, you can use the great Summarize feature on any webpage, here’s how it works:
• Open Safari on the Mac and navigate to whatever webpage you wish to summarize
• After the page has loaded, look at the address bar and then click on the Reader button to the left of the URL, it looks like a box with a few lines under it
• Click on “Show Reader”
• Once in Reader mode, wait a moment and you will see a “Summarize” option appear at the top of the screen
• You will soon see a summary of the webpage you are reading
Summarize works great on long articles, short articles, complex webpages, simple ones, and just about anything else on the web, and it can really save you time, or help you determine if a particular webpage or article is what you are interested in.
If you want to use Disk Utility to format a drive in macOS, you may sometimes want to first choose the scheme for backwards or multi-platform compatibility. The scheme defines the overall organization of the drive, which can feel pretty obscure, because you rarely need to change it.
You can select among GUID Partition Map, Master Boot Partition, and Apple Partition Map. For all modern Macs, GUID Partition Map is the only choice and it nearly never needs to be changed; Master Boot Partition is useful for cross-platform drives that can be mounted in Windows and in macOS, Apple Partition Map dates back to PowerPC Macs.
The format describes the way divisions in the disk are organized to read as files and directories by an operating system. For drives only mounted on Macs, APFS is the current best choice, but is only backwards compatible a few versions of macOS; for maximum compatibility, pick HFS+, which is labelled "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" in Disk Utility.
Format always appears when you select an item and click Erase, but Scheme never for you. Why is that? Because you’re displaying only volumes, not drives; nor are they containers (for APFS formatted drives and partitions).
From the View menu in the upper-left corner, select Show All Devices, and you will see the hierarchy of drive > volume (most formats) or drive > container > volume (APFS). Now, you can select a drive, click Erase, and view the Scheme options for the drive as well as the default format type applied when the drive has completed applying the new scheme.
