Skip to main content

Connect Mac to the internet through iPhone

The iPhone comes with a feature that enables it to share its 3G or 4G mobile broadband connection with other devices (though this must be allowed by your network operator), making it perfect for getting your Mac online wherever you are. 

There are three ways to connect your Mac to your iPhone to share its signal: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB.

To begin, go to the Personal Hotspot option in the iPhone's Settings menu, and turn it on. If you want to connect over Wi-Fi, find the Wi-Fi network created by the iPhone in your Mac's Wi-Fi options, select it, and enter the password shown in the iPhone.

To connect using USB, plug your iPhone into your Mac and you should get a dialog that takes you to the Network section in System Preferences, from which you can select the iPhone. 

For Bluetooth, activate Bluetooth on both devices and pair them, and the connection option should again appear in System Preferences > Network.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record iPhone or iPad's screen

With Yosemite, you can now record whatever happens on the screen of your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, which isn't just useful for developers to show off the apps and games they build, but can also be great for things like creating little tutorials or even just recording a bug so you can help a developer or a company fix it. To use this feature, you just connect your iOS device up to your Mac using its cable, then launch QuickTime Player. The chose New Movie Recording from the File menu and then, if it's not already selected for you, choose your connected iOS device as the 'camera' source from the drop-down menu next to the record button.  Choose whether you want to record sound (either from a built-in or external mic, or the audio the iOS device itself is producing) from the same menu, then click the record icon. Once you're done, you can trim the clip (⌘T) and then easily share it to, for example, YouTube.

Talk and Listen to your Mac

Way back before macOS Sierra launched in 2016, the Mac’s ability to listen to you and talk back was already impressive through Dictation. However, that’s been completely topped by Siri’s arrival on Apple’s Mac lineup. You can either hold down Command and Space for a couple seconds, or simply click the Siri button on your Dock or Menu Bar, and summon the same Siri you’ve grown accustomed to on your iPhone.  And, if you have a newer Mac, like the 2018 MacBook Pro, you can just say ‘Hey Siri’. And, as a bonus, this version of Siri is much more useful. Beyond the questions you may usually ask, like the weather or who’s playing in the playoff game, Siri on macOS High Sierra can toggle system functions like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or even pull up individual files stored on the system, based on what you tell Siri about the file. Siri can even launch or close apps for you as well as store the results of your queries inside the Notifications area of the OS for later use. Just press Command+S...

Quick Searching within Sites on Mac

There's a really cool, badly understood feature in Safari since Yosemite: the ability quickly to search within specific sites right from Safari's search bar. How it works is this: let's say you go to amazon.com and search for 'MacBook'. What actually happens is that you're redirected to a new URL that looks something like this: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=macbook. Now, what Safari can do is look at that URL and work out that it's a search and, just like you could, realize that if you wanted to search Amazon for 'iMac' instead of 'MacBook', then rather than waiting for the amazon.com homepage to appear before typing "iMac" into the search field and waiting for the results to load, Safari could send us straight to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=imac. See that last word in the URL change? To make that happen, all you have to do is...