You wake up in the middle of the night and pick up your phone to quickly glance at the time...and you spend the next 30 minutes glued to it. We’ve all been there. Sure, you enabled Do Not Disturb so that your notifications come in silently, but now the display's bright light and the lock screen’s string of notifications are practically begging you to take action.

That’s where the new Bedtime Mode comes in. No to be confused with the Bedtime function of the Clock app (introduced in iOS 10), Bedtime Mode is iOS 12’s new optional enhancement to Do Not Disturb. Here’s how it works and how to enable it.

What Bedtime Mode does

If you set a scheduled Do Not Disturb time (as many of us do during our normal sleeping hours), you’ll have the option to toggle Bedtime Mode for those hours. 

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Since it’s been several days without an iPhone rumor, DigiTimes has piped up with what purports to be a salacious scoop about next year’s iPhone. According to the site, Apple “will likely have its 2019 series of iPhones come with USB Type-C support,” replacing the nearly six-year-old Lightning port.

In that time between Lightning’s arrival in 2012 and the upcoming 2018 iPhones, USB-C has risen to a position of prominence on many of Apple's products. It’s a mainstay on Apple’s MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac computers, and nearly every Android phone maker has adopted the symmetrical port as the charging solution on its handsets. USB-C is vastly superior to all other forms of USB, and it comes as no surprise that it’s taken over the finicky microUSB and less-versatile USB 3.1 ports on phones and PCs.

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As we approach the end of the second quarter of 2018, it’s nice to look back at all that nonsense about iPhone order cuts from the first quarter and be glad that’s all in the rear-view mirror.

Yes, looks like it’s time for The Macalope to lean back and take a looong drink of water as he opens up his browser to read the headlines of the day…

“Apple, Suppliers Drop After Report of Cut in iPhone Orders.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Philip and Alex.)

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Apple recently released the long-awaited Messages in the Cloud feature through updates to iOS and macOS, and Macworld provided a how-to guide to enable it on your devices, and some warnings about the time it takes for your devices to upload all the cached messages they maintain.

Macworld reader Lowell had a few questions that aren’t on the how-to front and which Apple doesn’t fully address in its FAQ on the subject.

Lowell wonders about regular text and multimedia messages (SMS/MMS) being encrypted, and how much storage is freed up in iCloud (not just on devices) by pushing everything to the cloud.

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The release of the iPhone X was accompanied by a fun feature for the TrueDepth camera: Animoji. The adorable cartoonish animated emoji were an instant hit, with early adopters creating "Animoji karaoke" music videos, skits, movie scenes, and more.

iOS 12 expands on Animoji in some important ways, like tripling the recording length to 30 seconds and adding new faces and improving facial recognition. But the most important change is a new feature called "Memoji" that lets you create an Animoji of yourself. In the Animoji menu, you can customize a cartoon avatar that will appear in your Animoji list and work just like the Animoji characters, following your facial movement. Here's how you make your own Memoji.

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Costco regularly discounts App Store and iTunes gift cards for a substantial amount, and, well, it’s that time again. If you log on to your Costco account today, you can get a $100 iTunes gift card for just $84.49 or a $25 card for just $21.49, good or $10 and $2.50 less than the wholesale giant's usual prices, respectively.

These deals are usually popular, and it’s not hard to see why. Discounted gift cards essentially allow you to give someone a gift that’s worth more than you paid for it—and remember, Father’s Day is less than a week away. And you just want to keep it for yourself, well, that's cool too.

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While Apple and Google are battling smartphone addiction by limiting the time kids spend using their gadgets, Fitbit hopes to get little ones hooked on theirs—in a good way. Today parents can purchase Fitbit’s first fitness tracker specifically designed to help kids put down their phones and stay active.

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Updated 06/11/18: The latest rumor says the next Apple Watch (or maybe the one after that) won't have buttons that move. For everything on watchOS 5, check out our FAQ.

Apple has released a new version of the Apple Watch every year since its debut in 2015, and the company seems to show no signs of slowing down. Here we have compiled all the latest rumors, leaks, and reasonably well-informed speculation about Apple Watch Series 4.

No more mechanical buttons

A “source with direct knowledge of Apple’s plans” has told FastCompany that Apple plans to outfit the Apple Watch with buttons that do not move, but rather simply sense the touch of a finger. The Haptic Engine would then be used to give the button the feel of a click.

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1Password 7 for Mac has a variety of small improvements and a fresher design that add up to a nice bump justifying the version number. But because its maker, AgileBits, switched to a subscription model as its dominant method of offering software, the company is clearly less obsessed with including the kitchen sink, as it tries to offer ongoing updates and new features between major releases to justify the cost to current subscribers. And that’s fine: a rush to cram features—some half-baked—into new versions of software where developers rely heavily on upgrade fees as part of their revenue cycle doesn’t benefit users.

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I’m stepping through a portal on the heels of a young elf woman who looks roughly my own age, or at least as close as you get when you’re dealing with a race that thinks of our pitiful lifespan like we think of dog years. And it’s your normal, everyday magical portal—no big deal, right? But on the other side of the portal I face a woman racked with the lines and worries of a wasted life. I hear her despair at seeing my relatively young face. And yes, it’s her: The trip through the portal felt like seconds for me, but she’s been over here on the other side, trapped and wandering in the lovely ruin we’d come to study for more decades than I’ve even been alive.

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What would Apple do without a host of pundits coming out in the days after its announcements to let the company know what it did wrong? The Macalope suspects the company would like to one day find out, but today is not that day.

Writing for the Forbes contributor network and summer school for beginner and intermediate air guitar, Ewan Spence declares that “No New iPhone At WWDC Is Apple's Big Mistake.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Alex, Dan and Philip.)

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At the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple took the wraps off the latest version of its Apple Watch operating system: watchOS 5. Apple has made big improvements to its wearables platform with each major new release, and it looks like watchOS 5 will be no exception. It doesn’t give us everything we hoped for, but with neat new features like Walkie-Talkie, workout improvements, better notifications, and smart Siri changes, it should further Apple’s already substantial lead in the smartwatch category.

Here are all the features of watchOS 5, and instructions on how to get it on your Apple Watch.

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Normally I fill this space with tips about the hottest deals on Apple’s own products, but for this Friday, let’s have some fun, shall we?

Today Best Buy is selling the R2-Q5 app-controlled droid from Sphero for just $50, down from the original price of $200. For a bit of comparison, it’s currently selling for $84.99 on Amazon (and there are a few left in stock). If your dad’s anything like me, it’ll make a great Father’s Day gift.

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