Category: News

iMessage is Apple’s own proprietary messaging service that ties directly into the Messages app of both iPhone and iPad. By doing this you can seamlessly send regular SMS and MMS messages alongside iMessage. If your friends and family have iPhones or iPads too, iMessage just works. Well, most of the time. Just like any other service, iMessage isn’t error prone. From activation issues to errors sending, iMessage has its fair share of problems and most of us have experienced them at one time or another. Here are some steps you can take next time iMessage is giving you problems:

1. Make sure iMessage is actually the issue

A lot of us spend more time inside the Messages app than any other app on our iPhones or iPads. If your messages are hanging up and not sending, be sure that you have an active data connection. Do this by loading a webpage or another app that requires a cellular or Wi-Fi connection.

If no data is loading period, the problem is with your data connection, not iMessage. If everything else loads fine, the issue is iMessage related and you should move on to the next section.

2. Check iMessage system status

From time to time Apple may perform maintenance or run upgrades that could temporarily interfere with services such as iMessage. You can quickly check iMessage’s status by clicking the link below.

• Apple Services, Stores, and iCloud system status – United States only

If you live outside the US, a quick Google search for something like “iCloud system status UK” — replacing UK with your country name, should bring up the system status page for your country.

If the status light next to iMessage is not green, that means there are known issues so you’ll need to just wait it out. If the status light is green, continue on to the next step.

3. Reboot your iPhone or iPad

Restarting your iPhone or iPad can fix a lot of problems, and iMessage connection problems isn’t excluded. In order to reboot your iPhone or iPad, just hold down the Home button and Power button simultaneously and don’t let go until you see the Apple logo.

Try and send an iMessage once your iPhone or iPad finishes rebooting. If it sends and all is well, you can stop right here. If it doesn’t, continue on to step 3.

4. Toggle iMessage off and back on, on every device

Sometimes iMessage hiccups can be caused by an error connecting to Apple’s servers, or due to syncing issues between devices. This is most likely the issue if you find that some of your devices receive messages just fine while others don’t. It’s important that you turn iMessage off on all devices that are tied to your Apple ID before enabling it again on any of them. Be sure you don’t forget any Macs that may be linked to your iMessage account, as those are easier to overlook.

Once you’ve disabled iMessage on all your devices, give it a few minutes before you flip the switches back on. If you aren’t sure on how to turn iMessage off an on, you can follow our guide.

• How to enable (or disable) iMessage on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

5. Make sure your date and time settings are correct

If your date and time settings are incorrect, iMessage will experience all kinds of weird issues from not sending messages to not being able to activate at all. If you’ve recently traveled between time zones or you were messing with your date and time settings for another reason, such as to speed up time in a game, be sure you set them back once you’re done.

1. Launch the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap on General.
3. Tap on Date & Time.
4. Verify the time is correct. If it isn’t, change it.

6. Reset network settings on your iPhone or iPad

If nothing else seems to be working, resetting your network settings is always worth a try. Keep in mind this will clear any Wi-Fi networks you have joined as well as any VPN settings. You’ll have to re-enter them all again. However, if you’ve tried everything else and still can’t seem to get iMessage to work, you may need to. This is especially the case if you’re only experiencing issues on a single device but all others are functioning properly.

7. Contact Apple

It’s possible that the issue you’re experiencing hasn’t been reported yet. Whether it’s a system outage or something else, Apple should be able to further troubleshoot the issue for you. On the same system status page we linked in step 2, you can click the link labeled Contact Support in order to submit a support ticket.

Your tips for fixing iMessage issues?

If you’ve had issues with iMessage in the past, have you figured out any other tricks that aren’t listed here? Be sure to leave them in the comments!

See also:

• How to disable iMessage if you want to switch to Android
• The ultimate guide to using iMessage

With apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of Intel’s death on the Mac are greatly exaggerated

Former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée recently offered his opinion on the future of the Mac. In his blog post Macintel: The End Is Nigh, Gassée predicts the imminent demise of Intel-based Macs. Is he right?

Intel’s dominance of the Macintosh platform, in place since Apple migrated away from PowerPC in 2006, will end with a future generation of Apple-made silicon, Gassée surmises. Is it possible? Yeah. Is it going to happen tomorrow? No.

The chips Apple uses in iPhones and iPads today certainly aren’t suitable to replace the silicon inside the Macintosh. iOS devices are radically different in their design and execution from the Mac, and there’s a whole host of technology inside a Mac that don’t concern an iPhone or iPad. Instruction sets are very different between the two chip architectures, too, and that raises a whole host of other issues.

Having said that, if there’s anyone that can manage a major architecture transition, it’s Apple. They’ve done this repeatedly. They moved the Macintosh from Motorola’s 68K architecture to PowerPC, then later from PowerPC to Intel. And while there were some growing pains along the way, each move has, on balance, yielded positive results for Apple, for developers and for customers.

Why does Apple switching the silicon inside the Mac keep coming up, from Gassée and others? A lot of the speculation is driven by a drought that Apple has seen this year from Intel, which has had trouble getting a new 14 nanometer manufacturing process to produce acceptable chip yields — something it needs to do to get its Broadwell microprocessors into production.

Broadwell’s behind schedule, but it is coming. And it’s coming fairly soon.

“I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” Intel CEO Brian Kraznich said to Reuters in May.

So later this year we’ll begin to see new computers featuring Broadwell microprocessors, and I have very little doubt that Apple will be one of the first, if not the very first, PC manufacturer to offer a new computer with one of the chips inside.

Broadwell promises to be more power efficient and to have some distinct performance improvements in areas like integrated graphics — something of key importance to Apple, of course, since graphics hardware, whether integrated or discrete, is used so thoroughly throughout the entire operating system.

In that same interview Kraznich also said that Intel wasn’t going to get Broadwell into production in time to meet the back-to-school schedule, so it’s no surprise Apple’s refreshed its most popular student machines (and realigned prices on some of them) already, rather than waiting.

One of the reasons Apple’s transition from PowerPC to Intel went as smoothly as it did in 2006 is because the operating system itself had been running on Intel processors for years. NeXTStep, the OS upon which OS X was based, ran fine on Intel processors, and Apple kept the technology working on Intel hardware even as it sold PowerPC-based Macs, and published PowerPC-based development tools, operating system and application software.

And that transition has yielded big benefits for Apple. One of them, for example, is the Macintosh’s innate ability to run Windows at native speeds using Boot Camp. Running Windows on the Mac wasn’t unique to Intel-based systems: You could run emulators like Virtual PC in the PowerPC days. They just didn’t scale to native hardware speeds at all. Even now, virtual machine software like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion run leagues better than Virtual PC ever could have dreamed of, thanks to the Mac’s Intel underpinnings.

Windows compatibility — and the Mac’s ability to operate as a host to many other x86-friendly operating systems — is a selling point both with consumers and with enterprise that shouldn’t be underestimated, and something that likely would be sacrificed if Apple transitioned away from Intel.

I have very little doubt that somewhere in the bowels of Apple’s Cupertino skunworks, sit Mac devices that already use some generation of A-series ARM processors. Apple would be crazy not to leverage its skills at owning the entire process not to have such a machine in operation. But there’s a huge difference between having a prototype showing a proof of concept and a machine that’s ready to unleash on the world.

In all likelihood, at some point in the future, Apple silicon will be able to make the transition to desktop use. But I don’t think Intel’s delays with Broadwell have been enough to put Apple off from using Intel hardware in the Mac.

Contrary to what some impatient Mac fans might want us to believe, Intel does have its act together, and they remain an incredibly important manufacturing partner for Apple. We’re yet to see the best of what’s to come from Intel and Apple, that’s for sure.