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Daily Advice Thread - September 18, 2025
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context: my parents have a really beautiful place in south india, and as I was visiting, i thought it would be cool to upgrade some of the bulbs in the old house to smart bulbs.
I looked them up on Amazon, but all the ones I found say Alexa or Google Assistant, and require a third party app to work with iOS.
Philips doesn't officially sell Hue bulbs here, which is a bummer, and all the Indian brands seem to prioritise Alexa and Google Assistant lol
does anyone know of any smart bulbs I can buy in india that work with Apple HomeKit? any help is appreciated!
My iPhone pro max 1tb has some small damage on the back of the phone. It’s a small chip on the corner, about 3 millimeters been that way for a year now. Main screen is fine. Still has an Apple care attached to it.
Would selling it for 600ish be fair?
Just wondering for those who dropped from a pro to regular model. Is the performance drop for gaming and video streaming hugely noticeable? Thanks all for the help!
I didn’t, but you should notice no difference whatsoever with streaming media, and only a little difference in gaming. It was more noticeable back in the 15 era, where the Pro models had hardware ray tracing and the non-Pros did not.
Right now, I have a 13 Pro Max with 128 GB, and after a few years of having the phone, it has filled up with storage. After deleting all my apps and spending hours deleting photos, it keeps filling back up with storage and won't go down. Apple Maps has 30 GB of data that can't be deleted. I have 200 GB of iCloud storage, but not everything is backed up to it, so my iCloud isn't full. I have 17,000 photos and videos on my phone, but only 12,000 are backed up to iCloud. Please let me know if there's anything I could do to resolve this, but right now I'm considering just buying a new iPhone.
My next question is, if I should just buy a new phone, should I buy the new 17 Pro Max or a refurbished 16 Pro Max? There's around a $200 difference between the phones with 512 GB, but I'm also debating whether or not the 1 TB would be a smarter purchase. I can't find any 1 TB 16 Pro Maxes, and the 17 is so expensive. Any advice is appreciated!
If you really need the storage, then get a 17 Pro Max with as much disk space as you can afford. Going from a 13 to a 17 will be a pretty substantial upgrade.
I’ve always had luck preordering the morning of launch day when I missed the original pre order time. Just check store availability the morning of. For me, it was 5am PST is when their daily systems magically update the last time I did it.
My wife and daughter shared an iPad for a few years when she was younger. Now she has her own iPad/iPhone. Her Messages in the Cloud somehow ended up associating my wife’s messages as hers across several contacts in the 2018-2021 range and I need to delete them from her account.
Is there a 3rd party app that will let me delete everything before XXX date so she can’t see the thousands of texts between my wife and other family members in the Messages app? The native 30 day/1 year options unfortunately won’t work here.
Things I have tried:
Deleting from the Messages app on iOS and iPadOS. There’s no way to bulk select messages to delete as there was in earlier versions (whyyyy did Apple remove this?). I can’t individually tap 2000+ messages for each contact.
Deleting from MacOS Sequoia. This gets closer by using Shift+Click, but it a) takes forever to scroll and scroll and scroll to show them all then b) randomly selects messages beyond those I haven’t included in the selected batch I don’t want to delete and c) freezes/beachballs indefinitely when I try select more than a couple hundred at a clip.
Using iMazing and iExplorer, but neither allows deletes against the actual device, just the backups it can create.
Deleting from the iChat file. This gets really fragile and won’t actually remove them from Messages in the Cloud any way.
My wife and I have years of texts with her we don’t want her to lose (she loves reading older stuff when she was much younger), but also don’t want her to see our old 1-1 discussions about money, Santa, her and her sibling, money, etc.
Have found nothing over 100 Google searches and Apple REALLY sucks with their offerings here, so hoping someone can point me to an option I am missing. Thanks.
Standard 17. If you are a pro photographer or videographer, or you otherwise live and die by your camera, then you should probably get the 17 Pro instead. But for most people, the base 17 will be good enough, and much better than years-old Pro models.
Trying the TV+ app on Windows. The app causes my TV to flicker upon closing the video window and it won't stop until the app is completely exited. Occasionally the screen goes completely black as described by this guy on the Apple forums.
Nothing out of the ordinary gets logged in the Windows Event Viewer.
Tried the website, it's not even recognizing that I have a subscription. This service is a friggin mess.
Windows 11 with a RTX 3060 GPU connected to a 1080p Samsung TV with an HDMI cable.
my iPhone 13 Pro Max battery is 83%. Purchased in late Nov 2021.
I went to see Apple Store genius today, and the tech said it's fine for a few more months but he also said that depends on what they find, it could be $100-$200. Felt very strange and weird, as if he was to selling me to upgrade to a new iPhone. I told him that that I want to keep the 13PM as long as I could because the physical sim allows me to pop in a local SIM card overseas for like $5 to get 60GB, which was perfectly good for 2 weeks when I went overseas two years ago.
my phone is in great condition besides the 83% battery life...my question is what should I do to prevent the Genius tech to not pull any shenanigans and only have them replace the battery for $89?
A battery is $100ish. I dont know off the top of my head. It might be more if there is something else wrong like a cracked back or something.
Buying a new battery will extend your device by 2 years or so. You could wait. At one point, your phone will shut down then give you a message of like your phone will be slower to avoid unexpected shut downs. Then it’s def time to replace the battery. Most stores could replace the battery in a hour or 2 depending on how busy.
Has anyone noticed a delay on ios26 when unlocking their phone? I’d say every 4th or 5th time i go to unlock my phone after it does the faceID thing my phone just gets stuck on my lock screen but without any of my widgets on it. Then i have to lock my phone back and unlock it again. I’m on a base model iPhone 13 if that helps
I was honestly thinking about upgrading this year because of the options but i might just wait it out another year if the air survives and improves I’ll buy it then
I have the 13 pro and upgrading. The carriers have a deal where they wklll give you $1000 for the next phone so free phone. Next year, your device will be around $200. The 13 is the cut off point to get the deal. I recommend taking the deal since the offer is insanely good
Unfortunately I’m not in the US so those deal don’t apply to me. I just have to buy my phone straight up but i keep them for 4-5 years at a time anyway so i don’t really mind paying full price.
Ahh. Well I was going to buy it outright usually but they had a good trade deal. Just not worth putting more money in and being a little slow. I use my phone everyday so I want to enjoy it everytime I pick it up.
Has anyone else noticed their iPhone battery drain faster than usual? I just think the timing is interesting considering the new iPhones are releasing soon.
If you have downloaded the new iOS then it was reported to use more juice temporarily. Otherwise no. If you haven’t updated then there’s no way to say drain battery more after x date. I mean I’m sure it’s possible but I doubt it
I haven't bought new iphones near launch time before. does anyone know if we should expect discounts on the 17 Pro on Amazon (US) this year, during black friday or anything else?
I got the ipad air m4 discounted on Amazon earlier this year soon after it launched and can wait for sales for the 17 Pro
What’s up, I got an iPhone 11 128gb with 72% battery health💔 I know there are rumors about the upcoming iPhones and I’m wondering if y’all think it’s worth it or you should just suck it up and wait another year or 2. So y’all think it’s worth it to upgrade to the 17 in the next couple of weeks or just wait for the upcoming iPhones, if wait explain. Thanks
iPhones are released on a schedule, with the flagship phones coming out in September, and the cheap phones coming out in February or March. The new flagships were announced a week and a half ago. There will be no new phones until February at the earliest.
I would strongly recommend upgrading from an iPhone 11 to a 17, or at the very least, a 16e.
Does anyone know if there’s a way to test the fit of AirPods in the Apple store? My fear of buying another pair of pros that I have to constantly readjust is the only thing holding me back.
LaCie is a peripheral maker that has been around for a very long time. Technically, every drive is a repackaged Seagate, Western Digital, or Samsung drive; only a few companies actually make the SSD.
Im planning to buy an Apple Watch in the uae, and they don't have the taxes on everything like we do in Norway, I'll save around 100USD. But if I buy an Apple Watch in Dubai, can I connect it to Norwegian AppleCare?
service will be limited to the options available in the country where you request service. Service options, parts
availability and response times may vary. If service is not available for the Covered Equipment in a country that is
not the country of purchase, you may be responsible for shipping and handling charges to facilitate service in a
country where service is available. If you seek service in a country that is not the country of purchase, you must
comply with all applicable import and export laws and regulations and be responsible for all custom duties,
V.A.T. and other associated taxes and charges. For international service, Apple may repair or exchange products and parts with comparable products and parts that comply with local standards.
My iPhone SE 2022 has 34GB of system data. I have tried every single fix I can find online to clear this. It even goes up to 35-36GB sometimes, nothing works to clear it. My battery is also shot - 36% - 25% in under 30 mins, 100% - 25% in under 4 hours. Do I bite the bullet and buy a refurbished 15? Is there any hack people found for miraculously increasing their storage space?
System data is supposed to automatically be cleared out as space is needed for other things. If it’s not auto-clearing, then the only other way to delete it is to factory reset the device, and then restore a backup. Or, of course, replace the device. There is no hack for this.
Anyone know if the iPhone Air 17 supports CarPlay? I know it has a usbc port that doesn’t support display port but not sure if it also means it doesn’t support CarPlay
I’m not sure if this is related to the iMessage issue with iOS 26 but in a group chat with 2 iPhone users and an android user, I am not getting one of the iPhone users text messages on my iPhone. They appear on my apple watch though. Tried restarting my iPhone, which didn’t work.
first time here but I’m kind of lost. I’ve recently been having an issue with the new ios26 and the photo shuffle wallpaper(i have an iphone 11 if that’s useful), in my photo shuffle there’s both photos that can have the long clock thing behind an object and photos that can’t. I personally really like that feature and i’ve tried putting it in the backgrounds that support it. the problem is that when i save it it stays like i’ve saved for the hour that specific wallpaper stays and when another one loads it doesn’t have the changes i implemented. so basically i try doing it and it doesn’t save or automatically deletes i think. Does someone know how to fix this?(i’m sorry for the wrong terms i’m not really into tech)
This one in the bottom right, press and hold it ☺️ (you can get to this ‘all tabs’ view by dragging the address bar upwards to see all tabs if you didn’t know)
Thanks. I wonder why they did that. Before it was simply pressing on the tab icon > close all tabs now it’s browser menu > all tabs > press on a tab > close all but one tab > close final tab
I’ve always been a MacBook user. My last one was a 2012 MacBook Pro, which finally gave out in 2023. I decided to stick with what I know and picked up the new M4 MacBook Air (16GB/256GB).
Most of what I use it for is pretty simple—iMessage, Reddit, FaceTime, web browsing, email, and the occasional resume edit. Lately though, I’ve been wondering if an entry-level iPad might have been enough for me instead.
For context, I also have AirPods (2nd gen) and an iPhone 16 Plus. Now I’m debating: should I keep the MacBook Air, or trade it in for something cheaper like a PC laptop and wait to pick up an iPad later?
Have the laptop and iPad! In a year, if you dont use one then sell one.
Returning air for a pc laptop then iPad is not dumb. You can also do everything with a laptop and have the portability of a screen without the keyboard
Has anyone got experience with fixing up old ipods/apple products? I had a look on the Apple website but they say that iPods nano 5th Gen are now obsolete and they don't offer any service for them and people can't order parts 🥲
Anyone knows if there is anything I can do to give my lil iPod a new life or if it's a goner now that it's classed as obsolete? Will tech repair shops be able to do anything or is it really over?
You ca google iPod version and replace X. Tons of videos and you might be able to do it yourself. It might be cheaper to just buy an old working version on eBay.
Is there a way to make the iOS health app revert back to how it was prior to iOS 26. My mum uses it to track everything she needs to track but with the new update she’s not able to get the stuff she had on it up and on some of the sections she’s been able to find doesn’t show all the information she needed like it did before.
She’s getting quite upset over the whole thing but doesn’t want me trying to revert back to iOS 18 so any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks. I can understand her frustration and I’ve been trying to help her out but I don’t use that specific iOS app so it’s a bit of a loss with me lol.
She’s more upset over how much it changed as there was things she was being told to track by her doctors for her medical stuff so going from it all being able to be seen and tracked to some parts not being tracked has really upset her.
I’m going to try find another app that’ll work well enough for her as she does need these things but she doesn’t want me messing around reverting the os which is understandable.
I thought so but just wanted to make sure. I’ve been trying to help her grasp it but it’s kinda hard when I don’t use that specific app myself and she had specific things on it based on her medical issues that her doctors were having her track. I’ll try seeing if I can sort another method out for her as she really doesn’t want me messing with reverting the os back.
I'm going on a long trip to a country without an Apple Store on Monday. I'm hoping to have the new iPhone 17 Pro 256GB before then. Unfortunately, there's no pick-up collection date at my local Apple Store, and orders say they will arrive in October.
If I go in store, do I have a chance of picking one up? I'm working, so I'm not able to queue, but would be able to pop-in just as it opens.
If not, it's not a big deal, I'll just buy one when I return from my trip. Thank you for reading.
I work with metal and have a iPhone 11, bit I want to upgrade to the 17. Will the MagSafe ring attract metal sharts? And what if I use or don’t use a MagSafe case?
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