Joe Hutsko

When you first turn on your Mac (or install an upgrade to the operating system), a series of questions and prompts appear, including a prompt to sign in to your Apple ID account or create a new Apple ID.An Apple ID identifies you and your devices in all things Apple that you do: registering new products, purchasing media and apps from the iTunes Store, the Book Store, and the App Store, as well as signing in to your iCloud account.

iCloud remotely stores and syncs data that you access from various devices — your Mac and other Apple devices, such as iPhones, iPads, and iPods, and PCs running Windows. Sign in to the same iCloud account on different devices, and the data for activated apps syncs; that is, you find the same data on all your devices, and when you make a change on one device, it shows up on the others.

Safari and iCloud have terrific built-in features that help you remember user names and passwords and credit card information. And Safari has security and privacy features to keep that personal information to yourself — or to your Mac. Here, we tell you how to use AutoFill so Safari remembers passwords for you, and then we explain how to keep your information safe.

Many people consider passwords to be less than ideal for security. To begin with, you have to remember them. The only sure way to make sure you don’t forget or lose your password is to write it down and keep that piece of paper (or whatever you wrote on) safe.There’s a better way if you have a current MacBook Pro or MacBook Air that supports Touch ID.

The iPhone's Contacts allows you to include all sorts of details about any person in your phone book, from their relationship to you, job title, or social media addresses. Here are some details of the fields you can use in Contacts. Add Related Name This is one of our favorite features of Contacts. For example, before this feature was added, Barbara would create a custom field for the phone number of a colleague's secretary and add him to the contact info of the colleague.

Your iPhone, especially if you have a version with 32 or 64 gigabytes of memory, is a portable video warehouse, and iPhone 5 and later versions have a larger screen and Retina display that make watching a pleasure. Nonetheless, watching a documentary about the Himalayas on your iPhone really can't match the thrill of sweeping views that a large-screen monitor or television offers.

When you make presentations at client meetings or conferences, you may use an electronic slideshow to support your spoken words, and that slideshow is more than likely projected on a large monitor or projector screen connected to your computer. Download the appropriate app, and you can use your iPhone as the remote control.

You configure your e-mail account directly on your iPhone with a series of taps. Apple has been kind enough to insert the technical stuff needed to access some of the most used e-mail services. For the following e-mail services, you need to have your e-mail address and password handy: iCloud MS-Exchange Google Mail Yahoo!