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What Your Roku Stick Can Actually Do (Beyond Basic Streaming)
Most people plug in a Roku stick, find Netflix, and stop there. But the device sitting behind your TV is capable of quite a bit more than queuing up the next episode of whatever everyone is watching. Understanding the full range of what a Roku stick offers can meaningfully change how you use your television every day.
TL;DR – Taking ten minutes to explore these settings ensures you are getting the sharpest picture, the best audio, and a more secure streaming environment from day one.
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Read more: Roku Stick: Apps, Hidden Features, and Getting the Most From It
The Hidden Storage Hog Living Inside Your Mac
If you have been using Xcode for any meaningful stretch of time, there is a good chance your Mac is quietly running out of room — and you may have no idea why. Xcode simulators are one of the most persistent and underappreciated causes of ballooning disk usage on a developer's machine, accumulating gigabytes of data in the background without ever surfacing a single warning or prompt.
The problem compounds itself in two distinct ways. First, simulator runtimes themselves take up significant space — each iOS, watchOS, or other platform simulator you have ever downloaded leaves behind a substantial footprint. Second, Device Support files pile on top of that. These are files Xcode writes to ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/iOS DeviceSupport and equivalent directories for every device and OS version combination you connect or target. Neither category cleans itself up reliably, and neither is especially visible in day-to-day use.
To put a real number on it: I freed up 150GB of disk space after running cleanup commands on a machine with. 1TB SSD. That is not years of neglect — that is less than a year of ordinary Xcode use silently consuming the equivalent of thousands of photos or hours of video.
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Read more: Xcode simulators can be very nearly impossible to delete
Why iOS Backups Are Silently Eating Your Mac's Storage
Every time you connect an iPhone or iPad to your Mac and sync it through iTunes (on older macOS versions) or Finder (on macOS Catalina and later), your Mac quietly creates a full local backup of that device. These backups are designed to be a safety net, but over the years, they have a habit of becoming a hidden storage crisis.
The problem compounds with each device upgrade. When you move from one iPhone to the next, a new backup is created for the new device, but the old backup is rarely deleted automatically. After two, three, or four device cycles, you can easily have a collection of backups sitting on your Mac that you have completely forgotten about. Each individual backup can run to tens of gigabytes depending on how much data, photos, and app content was on the device at the time it was created.
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Read more: Disk full on a Mac? Check for old iOS backups hogging space
What Apple's New Terminal Warning System Actually Does
With macOS Tahoe, Apple introduced a proactive security layer directly inside the Terminal application — one designed to intercept potentially dangerous commands before they ever execute. The system works by analyzing clipboard content at the moment a user attempts to paste it into a Terminal window, flagging anything that exhibits characteristics associated with malicious or destructive behavior.
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Read more: macOS Terminal Security: Apple's New Warning System Explained
What Is Assistive Access and How Does It Work?
Assistive Access is an Apple accessibility feature introduced in iOS 17, designed specifically to simplify the iPhone and iPad experience for people with cognitive disabilities, including those with intellectual disabilities, Down syndrome, or dementia. Rather than hiding or restricting features, Assistive Access rebuilds the entire interface from the ground up, presenting only the elements a user truly needs in a format that is far easier to understand and handle.
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Read more: Assistive Access: A Simpler iPhone Interface for Everyone
In a crowded streaming device market, the Roku Stick has carved out a distinct identity by prioritizing simplicity, neutrality, and broad compatibility. Whether you opt for the entry-level Roku Express 4K+ or the premium Roku Streaming Stick 4K, the lineup offers a device for virtually every budget and use case, making it one of the most accessible streaming solutions available today.
TL:DR – Roku's secret weapon? It searches every streaming service at once and never pushes you toward one over another. No bias, no bloat — just your content, found fast.
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Read more: Roku Stick: Apps, Hidden Features, and Getting More From Your Device
Apple's Price Rises: How Bad Is It Really?
Apple's latest round of price increases has landed hard across its Mac, iPad, and home device lineups, and the pain is not limited to new products. Even Apple's Certified Refurbished store, long considered a refuge for budget-conscious buyers, has seen prices climb by between 6% and 15% compared to listings from just weeks earlier.
The driving force behind the hikes is not a weakening pound or post-Brexit tariff pressure, as has historically been the case with UK Apple price surges. This time, outgoing CEO Tim Cook pointed to a more structural cause: scarcity of memory components being redirected to support the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure. In other words, Apple silicon that goes into a MacBook or iPad is now competing for allocation against data centres powering AI and similar services.
How Do the Numbers Stack Up?
To put the scale of the increases in context, consider some specific examples from Apple's own refurbished store:
- A refurbished 15-inch MacBook Air M4 (16GB/256GB) rose from $929 to $1,019 — a $90 jump in under two weeks.
- A refurbished 14-inch MacBook Pro M5 (16GB/512GB) increased from $1,359 to $1,439, up $80.
- A refurbished 24-inch iMac M4 saw one of the steeper rises, climbing $170 from $1,099 to $1,269.
- A refurbished 13-inch iPad Pro M4 (Wi-Fi, 256GB) increased by $150, moving from $1,019 to $1,169.
Unlike the exchange-rate-driven spikes that followed Brexit or the dollar surges of 2022, these increases apply to existing inventory — devices with components already installed. That makes them harder to justify on a pure cost basis, and harder for buyers to avoid by simply waiting for currency conditions to improve.
TL:DR – For UK buyers accustomed to Apple prices that already sit well above US equivalents after VAT and import costs, these additional increases compound an already unfavourable position — and, critically, they now extend right through to the refurbished market that many relied upon as a more affordable alternative, but bargans can be found!
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Read more: What do Apple's price increses mean for buyers and values
