Apple One offers a subscription service to get many of the offerings Apple provides like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, iCloud storage, Apple News+, and the new Apple Fitness+. One of the key features of the Family and Premier plans is you can share the subscription with your family share members.

Where things had trouble for one of my clients was in the attempt to share the subscription to the rest of the family share members — the options that should have been there were not. One of the quirks was a family member had been sharing Apple News+ with the main owner of the Family Share. Without being able to share the Apple One plan with the rest of the family, each member had to subscribe to the services separately!

Working with Apple Support and trying various steps didn’t resolve the issue. Cancelling Apple News+ under the other family member also didn’t resolve the issue as the subscription would expire 2 weeks from today (the subscriptions renew every month).

Finally the thing that solved the issue was to stop Family Sharing altogether and start it fresh. We went to the owner’s Family Sharing pane on System Preferences–> Family Sharing. Then stopped Family Sharing. Then started family sharing again – it immediately offered to share all of the subscriptions offered by Apple One and we then invited each of the members individually.

After inviting everyone we went back into the sharing options and enabled iCloud Storage, and Purchase Sharing.

Problem solved! Unfortunately the solution wasn’t as elegant as I would have hoped, at least it works.

Several times in my experience I’ve felt dramatic improvements with computers I’ve purchased.

• The first time I got a 3D graphics card (VooDoo Banshee) on a 1990s Windows computer.
• The first time I installed a SSD (Solid State Drive) into a computer and experienced the before/after effects.
• The most recent time I built a PC from scratch with some of the top end components.
• Now with the new M1 processor on the Mac Mini.

After a few days with the new Mac Mini I’m thrilled to report that at $699 it’s a killer deal, very fast, and very quiet.

All the new M1 systems that Apple recently released have been getting rave reviews for their speed, battery life, and near silence. I can attest to that for the new Mac Mini.

Comparing the system to a new-ish MacBook Air from 2020 was eye-opening. Running Big Sur (Mac OS 11) the MacBook Air had a hard time keeping various apps open without blazing its’ fan. Driving a large 5k display as shown in the photo seemed to tax the system a fair amount when running Zoom or FaceTime. Good luck using resource-intense websites like Facebook or Nextdoor without the system slowing down.

Gone are the days of fans buzzing, slow app response, laggy video playback in Zoom, and being forced to quit things when they’re not in use.

Some of my pain came from Mac OS Catalina and Big Sur as both upgrades slowed the system down. Every few revisions of the new system software will slow devices down, and then one will come out that will speed things back up again — Catalina and Big Sur are the ones that slow things down a bit and add new features.

One very unique feature of the new M1 computers is that they allow you to run various iPhone and iPad applications! So for those of you who have a favorite game or application on your iPad that is not available on the Mac App Store — with the newest systems that’s no longer a problem.

One minor limitation is the new M1 computers will not allow Parallels/VMWare or Windows to run. Microsoft may choose to license and sell a ARM based version of Windows in the next few years and once that is offered we will have a official method of using Windows on the Mac.

One minor bug on the new Mac Mini that I’m using that may be resolved in the future is the bluetooth cuts out on rare occasion. My suggestion is if you plan to get the Mac Mini you may want to use a Wired keyboard and Mouse, or a Logitech mouse that works off of a USB wireless dongle until Apple resolves the bluetooth quirk.

Expect new iMacs, Mac Pros, and MacBook Pros in early 2021 or some time next year. For now if you are on the budget end of the spectrum, now is a fantastic time to upgrade.

Overall – color me impressed! $699 for a system that blew me away with its’ great performance and ultra quiet nature.

When you have a PDF file that is quite large and you want to try and make it smaller there are several options.

1. Go back to the original file, such as Microsoft Word/PowerPoint, and try to use the tools inside that application to shrink the document and then save it out as a PDF file. For example on newer versions of Word, you can click the File menu and choose “Reduce File Size”. From the popup window you can change the Picture Quality to suite your needs – On-Screen being a generally decent option, otherwise Print also works. After you’ve shrunk the original file you can save as a PDF file again. This version may be smaller than it used to be due to the smaller photo sizes. For details on how to do this, check out my guide on Shrinking Word and PowerPoint documents here: https://wizdomonwheels.com/shrink-word-or-powerpoint-file/
2. Use another tool to try and shrink the PDF document further.

I tested many different PDF readers and compressors in order to determine the one that seemed to work the best (smallest size with not too much quality lost). These included Adobe Acrobat Professional 9, PDF Expert, PDFpenPro, the built in Mac options, and finally an application called PDFCompress. Acrobat Professional was able to shrink the sample PDF file further than all the rest of the applications, however a close second was using a free application called PDFCompress by MetaObject.

Here are the steps you would use to get PDFCompress to work for you:

1. Visit the PDFCompress download link by clicking here: http://www.metaobject.com/downloads/Products/PdfCompress/PdfCompress-6.3.3.dmg

• 2. Open the downloaded DMG file and drag the PDFCompress application into your Applications folder so you can find it again in the future.

• 3. Open the Applications folder and launch PDFCompress by double clicking the icon and clicking OK on the various prompts that may come up.

• 4. Now it’s time to set the preferences for the software in order to find a balance between too big a file with excellent quality and too small a file with bad quality. Click the PDFCompress menu in the upper left of your screen and choose “Compression Options” from the menu.

• 5. Next drag the Size/Quality slider bar around 1/3 of the way from the left side. You can also put the slider bar in the center, which will make slightly bigger files. Check the box to “Downsample for Web and Screen”.

• 6. Close the Compression Options dialog box.

• 7. Take the PDF file you want to compress and drag it onto the PDFCompress icon on your dock or in the Applications folder.

• 8. If it was successful a new PDF file will appear nearby your old one with the file name ending in: _web.pdf

If a dialog box appears saying it cannot shrink the file further, then you’ve reached the maximum you can compress the file without going back to the original file and working from there, or using the expensive Adobe Acrobat Professional software.

Some files can be compressed quite well, and others cannot. For example one PDF file began as 84.6MB and through the steps above was able to compress down to 5.4MB! The results look similar when comparing the two side by side.

I recently ran across an issue where I had downloaded Microsoft Office 2019 fresh from the internet, installed the software, then attempted to open Microsoft Word. Upon opening it asked me to activate/sign in. I signed in with the client’s email and password successfully however the next page was supposed to show what licenses were available but instead simply showed a blank page similar to the image below.

I attempted many things to try and resolve the issue, however the simple fix was to Right Click inside the window, or hold the Control key down on the keyboard and click inside the window with your mouse cursor. Once clicking it offered a “Reload Page” option. If the page activates properly from there, you’re all set! Otherwise select the “Reload Page” option and it will refresh the blank page and should activate.

For anyone who knows or is a low-income family, I would recommend checking out the Comcast website I’ll include the link below for. Comcast is offering 2 months free service for the Covid-19 outbreak. The speed isn’t too bad at 25Mbps and free in-home WiFi.

https://www.internetessentials.com/?rid=4502991275&mid=20200331_Adhoc_CM_Crisis_DWWeekly_Email3

Drive Savers is my favorite partner for recovering info from all sorts of devices. They’re the only company I trust to send devices out to. Check out the video below for a look into their clean room and meet some of their reps.

If you do need recovery, use our Referral code for a bit of $ off. 
Call 800-440-1904 any day or time.
Use the Referral Code: DS20079

Drive Savers is our favorite partner for recovering info from all sorts of devices including iPhones/iPads. They’re the only company I trust to send devices out to. Check out the video below for a look into their clean room and meet some of their reps.

If you do need recovery, use our Referral code for a bit of $ off.
Call 800-440-1904 any day or time.
Use the Referral Code: DS20079