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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