Hi Nadine! I feel your pain. I have a MacBook Air from 2012, and without its power cable plugged in, my Air only seems to run for about an hour before its battery dies.

So, what’s the deal? Does your four-year-old MacBook Air need to be replaced—and if so, how much money are we talking here? Or is it still possible to wring a little life out of your MacBook’s dwindling battery?

Why your MacBook battery gets weaker and weaker

The lithium-ion batteries in laptops like your MacBook lose their capacity over time, with Apple estimating that MacBooks should keep about 80 percent of their battery capacity after 1,000 charges. Assuming you give your MacBook Air a full charge each day, 1,000 chargers comes out to about two years and nine months. After that, you can expect your MacBook’s battery to get weaker and weaker.

Related: 8 battery-saving iPhone tips

The MacBook Air’s sleek, sealed case sure looks great, but it also means you can’t replace the battery yourself.

Beyond the time factor, there’s also the demands that MacOS software updates put on older MacBook batteries. With each major update comes new and potentially power-hungry features, and a few updates down the road, a MacBook battery that once gave you three hours of battery life might eventually give you fewer than two.

If the battery in your aging MacBook Air barely makes it past breakfast, you’ve got a couple of options.

Option #1: Replace the battery

Because most modern MacBook models, including the Air, feature cases that are sealed completely shut, you can’t replace your MacBook battery by yourself.

However, you can always take your MacBook to an Apple store or an authorized service dealer. The Apple store will replace the battery of an out-of-warranty MacBook Air for $129. Battery replacement for a 17-inch MacBook Pro will run you $179, while swapping a new battery into a 12-inch MacBook or a MacBook with a “Retina” display will cost $199. (Click here for more details and prices.)

Option #2: Try some battery-saving MacBook tips

Don’t want to cough up the cash to replace your MacBook battery? Read on for a few tips that’ll help squeeze more life out of the MacBook battery you’ve got.

Dim your screen brightness

Probably the number-one battery hog on your MacBook Air is the backlighting on the display. When you’re on battery power, turn the screen brightness down as low as your eyes can stand; doing so will make a huge difference in your MacBook’s battery life.

Click your MacBook’s battery meter for a list of apps using a “significant” amount of battery power.

Also, you can set your MacBook’s screen to dim itself automatically when you’re on battery power; just open System Preferences from the Apple menu, click Energy Saver, click the Battery tab, then enable the “Slightly dim the display while on battery power” option.

Check for battery hogs

Your MacBook can tell you if any of your running programs are gobbling up more power than they should be. Click the battery life indicator in the top-right corner of the screen to find out which apps (if any) are using “significant” power, and quit them if you can.

Unplug any iPhones, portable hard drives, or other peripherals

Your MacBook’s USB port can power and/or charge devices like an iPhone or an external hard drive, but doing to puts tremendous strain on your MacBook’s battery. Unless your MacBook is connected to a power source, don’t plug in your iPhone or any other peripherals if you can avoid it.

Hope that helps, Nadine. Still have questions? Let me know!

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Getting started

You can create a bookmark folder for all your open Safari tabs in just a couple of clicks.

Click the Bookmarks menu at the top of the screen (if you don’t see it, make sure Safari is the active application on your desktop), then select the “Add Bookmarks for These (x) Tabs” option.

When you do, Safari will start the process of creating a new bookmark folder complete with bookmarks for all the open tabs in your current Safari window.

Just create a name for the folder (“Saved Tabs” is the default), pick a location in the Bookmarks menu (such as “Favorites”), then click Add.

Now, just click your new bookmark folder, and all the tabs you saved will spring into your active Safari window.

Bonus tip

You can set your new bookmark folder to open your saved tabs without closing any existing ones.

If you put your bookmark folder of saved tabs in your Favorites bar, clicking the folder will instantly replace all the open tabs in your current Safari browser with your saved tabs.

To open your saved tabs without closing other open tabs in your Safari window, right-click the bookmarks folder of saved tabs in the Favorites bar, then uncheck the “Automatically Replace Tabs” option.

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The trick: turning on a Mac feature called Mouse Keys, which lets you move the Mac mouse pointer by tapping the keys on your numeric keypad—or, if you don’t have a separate numeric keypad, by pressing a set of keys within the keyboard itself.

How to turn on Mouse Keys

To get started, open the Mac’s System Preferences panel by clicking the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, then select System Preferences.

Next, click Accessibility, select Mouse & Trackpad in the left column, then check the Enable Mouse Keys checkbox.

How to move the Mac mouse pointer with a numeric keypad

The Mac’s Mouse Keys feature will let you move your mouse pointer using a numeric trackpad—or, if you don’t have a trackpad, you can tap keys on the keyboard itself.

Now, let’s give it a try. If you have a numeric keypad, press the “8” key to nudge the Mac mouse up a tad. The “2” key will move the mouse down, while the “4” and “6” keys will move the mouse left and right, respectively. The “7,” “9,” “1,” and “3” keys will move the Mac mouse up and to the left, up and to the right, down and to the left, and down and to the right.

Press the “5” key to click the mouse, click “0” to click and hold the mouse button, and press “.” to release the mouse button.

How to move the Mac mouse pointer with a trackpad

What if you don’t have a numeric keypad for your Mac? No problem; instead, use the box of nine keys bordered by the “7,” “9,” “J” and “L” keys. You can also press the mouse button by tapping the “I” key, tap “M” to press and hold the mouse key, and press “.” to release the mouse button.

Sounds easy, right? Well, here’s the catch: when Mouse Keys are enabled, you can’t use the assigned Mouse Keys for anything besides moving the mouse—in other words, no typing, which is particularly vexing if your Mouse Keys are smack-dab within the keyboard. Luckily, there are a couple of shortcuts for turning Mouse Keys on and off.

How to toggle Mouse Keys on and off

First, you can press a specific keyboard combo—COMMAND + OPTION + F5—to open the Accessibility Shortcuts menu. From there, you can quickly turn the Mouse Keys feature on or off.

Related: How the Mac’s “Sticky Keys” feature makes it easier to press keyboard combos

With the right setting enabled, you can toggle Mouse Keys on and off by tapping the OPTION key five times in a row.

Even better, though, you can toggle Mouse Keys on and off by pressing the OPTION key five times in a row. To do so, head back to the Mouse & Trackpad settings within the Accessibility preferences pane, click the Options button, then check the box next to the “Press the Option key five times to toggle Mouse Keys” setting.

A few more Mouse Keys tricks

The Options panel also has a couple of sliders: one labeled Initial Delay, and the second marked Maximum Speed. These sliders control what happens when you press and hold a mouse key to repeat a mouse movement. Move the Initial Delay slider from Short to Long to change how long it takes for the mouse pointer to start moving after you press and hold a mouse key, or fiddle with the Maximum Speed slider to control how quickly the mouse can move while you’re holding a key.

Finally, trackpad users can disable the trackpad while Mouse Keys are enabled by checking the box next to the “Ignore built-in trackpad when Mouse Keys is on” setting.

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1. Yank seldom-used icons out of the desktop dock

So there I was, idly poking around the app dock at the bottom of my Mac’s screen when I noticed just how many dock icons I never, ever click on. The Apple Maps icon? Never use it. iBooks? Ditto. GarageBand? Hardly ever.

Don’t need the Contact app icon in your Mac dock? Just drag it out.

If you see any app icons in the dock that you haven’t clicked on in the past six months, do yourself a favor and drag them out with your mouse. Doing so won’t delete the app, only its dock icon, and by paring down the number of icons in the dock, you’ll be making the dock itself that much more useful.

2. Check how many programs are launching themselves at startup

If it takes forever for your Mac to fire itself up in the morning, it could be because there are too many programs trying to open themselves at startup. Want to speed up the process? If so, consider crossing some apps off the startup list.

Just select an app and click the “-” button to remove it from your list of Login Items.

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, click System Preferences, click Users & Groups, make sure your username is highlighted in the left column of the window, then click the Login Items tab.

Now, check the list of programs that launch when your Mac starts up. Some of them—like, say Dropbox or Google Drive—you may want to keep. Others—like Mail or iTunes—might be overkill. To take an app off the list, click its name, then click the “-” button near the bottom of the window. If you change your mind, you can always click the “+” button to put an app back on the Login Items list.

3. Spruce up your cluttered desktop

If you’ve got a jumble of icons cluttering your Mac desktop, there’s an easy way to straighten things up. Just right-click your Mac’s desktop, then select “Clean up” from the pop-up menu. Doing so will arrange all your desktop icons in a nice, neat grid.

The “Clean Up By” option makes it easy to quickly organize your desktop items.

You can also select “Clean up by” to organize your desktop icons alphabetically or by size; once that’s done, you can rearrange your icons any way you see fit. Want to keep your desktop icons sorted at all times? Right-click your desktop, then select the “Sort by” option

Related: 6 easy ways to tidy up your desktop

4. Change your desktop wallpaper

How long have you been staring at the same wallpaper on your Mac? In my case, way too long. Make a change by right-clicking the desktop, then select Change Desktop Background.

You can set your Mac desktop wallpaper to automatically change itself every day, hour or even every five minutes.

You can choose from dozens of images in the Desktop Pictures folder, or pick one of your own snapshots from the Photos section.

If you like, you can also set your desktop wallpaper to change itself every day, once an hour, or even every five minutes.

5. Empty the trash can

This might seem like an obvious spring-cleaning chore, but regularly emptying the Mac’s trash is one of the easiest ways to clean up your Mac—and it’s easy to forget, too.

Don’t forget to empty your Mac’s Trash regularly—or, even better, set it to empty itself each month.

Just the other day, I peeked into the trash and found several gigs of junk sitting there—and given that my MacBook Air only has 128GB of storage, freeing up five gigabytes of space is a big deal.

Go ahead and right-click the Trash icon in your desktop dock, then select Empty Trash.

Even better, you can set the Trash to empty itself once a month. Click the desktop, click the Finder menu at the top of the screen, select Preferences, click the Advanced tab, then click the “Remove items from the Trash after 30 days” checkbox.

6. Trash your least-used applications

Speaking of taking out the trash, a great way to clean up your Mac is by sifting through the Applications folder and looking for apps—particularly the big ones—that you hardly ever use.

You can use the Sort button to quickly pinpoint the Mac apps you use the least.

To get to the Applications folder, just open any Finder window, then click Applications in the left-hand sidebar.

Now, let’s do a little sorting. Click the Sort button (the one with six little boxes and a down-arrow on the right), then pick an option. Sorting by Size can help the biggest space hogs, while the Date Last Opened will pinpoint apps that you haven’t touched in ages.

See anything you don’t need anymore? If so, you can just drag the app into the Trash.

Bonus tip: Some of the biggest apps on your Mac are likely Apple programs like iMovie and GarageBand, which you can always redownload from the Mac App Store after deleting them.

7. Clean out the Finder sidebar

While you were looking for the Applications folder in the Finder sidebar, you may have noticed that the sidebar itself was cluttered with items that you don’t need or never use, like the Movies directory or AirDrop.

You can organize your Mac’s Finder sidebar just about any way you like.

If you want to make a change, feel free to drag sidebar items up, down, or even out. You can also drag any of your folders into the sidebar, perfect for creating a handy shortcut.

To restore a default item to the sidebar, click on the desktop, click the Finder menu at the top of the screen, select Preferences, then click the Sidebar tab. You can then check or uncheck any of the default sidebar items to hide or restore them.

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Just like the Safari web browser, each Mac folder window is capable of using a tabbed interface, perfect for juggling multiple open folders within the same window.

Here’s the thing, though: because folder tabs generally don’t appear in a folder window unless you specifically add them, it’s easy to forget that Mac folders have tabs at all. Once you get used to them, though, you’ll love ’em.

You can create a new folder tab by right-clicking either a subfolder or an item in the sidebar.

Read on for four ways that folder tabs can make life on your Mac much easier, starting with…

1. Open a folder or sidebar item as a new folder tab

Got a folder window open on your desktop? Does the folder contain any subfolders? If so, right click on one of those subfolders—or, if you like,try right-clicking on an item in the sidebar on the left—then select Open in New Tab.

When you do, a new folder tab will appear in your original folder window, just like a new browser tab would in Safari.

You can switch folder “views” (icon, list, columns, etc.) in one tab while keeping the folder views different in other tabs, and you can also navigate to a completely different folder within a tab.

Just drag a folder tab onto the desktop to turn it into its own window.

Want to re-arrange your folder tabs within a folder window? Just click and drag a tab, just as you would in a browser window.

2. Drag a tab out to create a new folder window

So, you’ve got a bunch of folder tabs sitting in a single folder window. What if you want to turn a tab into a separate window?

Again, just as you might with a browser tab, just click a folder tab and drag it out onto the desktop; when you do, it’ll snap into its very own window.

3. Take all your open windows and merge them into one tabbed window

Got a bunch of open folder windows that you’d like to merge into one? Not a problem.

Want to take all the open folder windows on your desktop and merge them into one? Easily done.

Click the desktop to open the Finder menu at the top of the screen, click the Window menu, then select Merge All Windows. In a flash, all your open folder windows will fly into a single tabbed window.

4. Drag files from one folder tab to another

One of the plusses of folder tabs in MacOS is that they make it easy to shuffle files from one folder to another.

What’s the trick? Easy: just click and hold a file in one folder tab and drag it onto the tab of another folder. When you do, the top of the second folder tab will flash briefly, and then the tab itself will open; once it does, just drop the file wherever you’d like it to go in the tab.

Click the little green button in the top-left corner of a folder window to make the folder fill the screen.

Bonus tip

Here’s a folder trick that has nothing to do with tabs, but it’s still worth mentioning: if you wish, you can switch on “full-screen” mode for folders, just as you can for browsers, the Mail app, iPhoto, and other Mac apps.

Just click the little green button in the top-left corner of any folder, and whoosh—it’ll expand to fill the entire screen.

Want to shrink a folder back to normal size? Move your mouse to the very top of the screen until the menu bar appears, then click the arrows in the corner again.

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Instead, you can take a quick look at just about any file on your Mac by tapping a single key—and, more importantly, without having to wait several seconds (or longer) for an application to finishing bouncing in your Mac’s desktop dock.

The secret: using the Mac’s aptly named “Quick Look” feature, which lets you preview images, word documents, spreadsheets, and other files in a flash.

The full-screen Quick View mode features a floating panel of buttons that lets you cycle through a series of files, or you can launch an instant slideshow by pressing the Play button.

Now, there’s not a whole lot you can do while viewing a file with Quick Look besides, well … look at it. In other words, there’s no editing, composing, or tweaking allowed.

But Quick Look makes for an easy way to, say, peruse a contract that’s sitting on your desktop, or to arrange a big folder of photos into an easy-to-scan contact sheet.

So, that’s what Quick Look does. But how do you turn it on?

Well, there are actually five ways:

1. With the space bar

Select the files or folders you want to sneak a peek at, then press the space bar (or COMMAND + Y, if you wish).

2. With a right-click

Right-click the file (and yes, you can select multiple documents), then select “Quick Look” from the pop-up menu.

3. With a three-finger tap

Select the files you want to preview, then tap (but don’t click) your trackpad with three fingertips.

You can click the Quick Look button to preview any selected item inside a folder.

4. Using the Quick Look button

To take a “quick look” at a file that’s in an open folder, just select it, then click the Quick Look button (the one marked with an eye) at the top of the folder.

Or, here’s another option: click the Action button (the button with the gear) and select “Quick Look.”

5. In the “Mail” program

In your Mac’s Mail application, you can take Quick Look an attachment by clicking the Quick Look button in the top-right corner of the message.

A few more Quick Look tips

• If you’re in Quick Look mode with a file and decide to go ahead and open a file with an application, just click the “Open with…” button in the top-right corner of the Quick Look window.
• If you selected multiple files for a Quick Look, you can cycle through them by clicking the arrows in the top-left corner of the Quick Look window. You can also tap the thumbnail button in the top-left corner of the window for a bird’s-eye view of all your selected documents, perfect for browsing photos in a contact sheet.
• Last but not least, you can launch an instant slideshow of your selected Quick Look files. Just click the full-screen button (the little one with the arrows in the top-left corner of the screen), then click the Play button in the floating toolbar.

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Indeed, you can expand, shrink, move, and otherwise tweak the Mac’s desktop dock in just a few steps, as well as rearrange your dock items, access programs shortcuts from the various dock icons, and more.

1. Move icons out of—or into—the mac dock

Nope, you don’t have to be stuck with the default array of icons that Apple puts in the dock of a brand-new Mac.

Don’t want an icon in the Mac desktop dock? Just drag it out.

If you don’t want, say, the Reminders icon wasting space in the dock, just click and hold its icon with your mouse, drag it out until a “Remove” bubble appears, release the mouse, and poof! The icon will disappear in a puff of digital smoke. (In case you’re wondering, this doesn’t delete the program itself, only its dock icon.)

Want to add an icon for a program, a file, or even a folder to the dock? Just drag it in.

To make a program’s icon stay in the dock even when it’s not running, right-click its dock icon, then select the Keep in Dock option.

Last but not least, you can rearrange your mac dock icons any way you want (well, except for the immovable Finder and Trash icons). Just click and hold the icon you want to move, then slide it left or right.

2. Make the mac dock bigger or smaller

Want to boost the size of the mac dock, or shrink it down to size? No problem. With your mouse, click and hold the razor-thin separator between the app and folder icons in the dock (it’s usually sitting near the right end), then drag it up to expand the dock or down to shrink it.

You can also adjust the size of the dock from your Mac’s System Preferences panel. Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, click the dock icon, then move the Size slider back and forth.

3. Move the entire mac dock to the left or right side of the screen

Who says the mac dock needs to sit at the bottom of the screen? Nobody, really—and indeed, moving the entire dock to the left or right side of your Mac’s display is a snap.

You can move the Mac dock to the left or right side of the screen.

Just go back to the dock control panel in System Preferences (click the Apple menu, select System Preferences, and click the dock icon), then select “Left,” “Right,” or “Bottom” under the “Position on screen” section.

4. Keep the mac dock icons from zooming up

When you move your mouse across the dock, the various icons will expand and then shrink as the cursor passes over them. It’s one of those nifty Mac visual effects—well, nifty or irritating, depending on your point of view.

Want the dock icons to stay still rather than zoom? Go to the dock preferences panel (Apple menu, System Preferences, Dock), then uncheck the box next to “Magnification.”

Another option is to leave the Magnification box checked but adjust the slider to reduce the dock’s “zoomage” level.

5. Hide the mac dock

You can play peek-a-boo with the dock by checking the “Automatically hide & show the Dock” setting in the dock control panel.

Just check the box, and the dock will disappear from the screen until you move your mouse to the bottom of your desktop.

6. Nix the “genie” effect

By default, any app window that you minimize into the dock will essentially “pour” itself into the dock thanks to a groovy animation, or fly back out of the dock like a genie from a bottle.

You can tweak all kinds of dock settings from the Dock preferences pane.

Yep, it’s yet another of the Mac’s little visual touches, but you can opt for a speedier, more basic animation by selecting “Scale” from the “Minimize window using” drop-down menu in the dock preferences panel (Apple menu, System Preferences, Dock).

7. Hide a program

You can keep a program running but hide all its windows from your desktop by right-clicking its dock icon and selecting Hide.

To reveal a hidden program’s windows again, just click its icon in the Dock, or right-click its icon and select Show.

8. Right-click to compose an email, play music, and more

Right-clicking a program icon in the Dock will often reveal handy, time-saving shortcuts. For example…

• To spawn a new browser window in Safari, just right-click Safari’s Dock icon and select “New Window.”
• Want to compose a new message in Mail? Right-click the Mail icon in the Dock and select “Compose New Message”—or, if you like, select “Get New Mail” to check your email accounts or “New Viewer Window” to open a fresh Mail interface.
• Meanwhile, the Dock icon for iTunes gives you all kinds of options, from teeing up a recently played song to skipping and pausing your tunes.
• Right-click the Trash icon to empty the Mac’s trash bin.
• Finally, right-click the Finder icon (it’s the one on the left side of the Dock—and no, unfortunately, you can’t move it or hide it) to open a new Finder window or search your hard drive.

Want to find more right-click Dock shortcuts? Just keep clicking.

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Sounds good, but what if you need to focus on a pair of windows? If so, you can still make use of MacOS’s full-screen mode for windows and apps. All you need to do is click and drag.

Note: The desktop juggling I’m about to describe will make a lot more sense once you wrap your brain around Mission Control, a Mac feature that gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your windows and desktops. If you don’t quite have a grip on Mission Control, read all about it here, then come on back.

Click the green button to make a Mac window go to full-screen mode.

Getting Started

Open the two windows you’ll be using on the same desktop. You can open each window in different desktop “spaces” if you like, but let’s use the same desktop for simplicity’s sake.

Now, go to the first window you want to use and click the little green button in its top-left corner. Doing so will make the window expand to fill the screen, hiding the desktop in the process.

Next, return to the desktop containing your second window. You can do this by activating Mission Control (there are many ways to do it, but the easiest is to move your mouse to the very bottom of the screen until the dock slides into view, then click the Mission Control icon) and clicking the correct desktop space at the top of the screen.

Another option: press and hold the COMMAND key, then click the left or right arrow to cycle through your various desktops.

Drag your second window onto the full-screen window you created earlier to put both windows side-by-side.

Back to Your Second Window?

Once you are back to your second window, activate Mission Control again, then drag that second window on top of the first (and now full-screen) window.

When you so, you’ll see a “+” sign appear on the left or right side of the full-screen desktop, depending on which side of the desktop you’re dragging the window over. Pick a side, release the mouse to drop the window in place, then click your new dual-view, full-screen desktop to zoom in.

To revert one or both of your full-screen windows back into a regular window, just click the little green button in the corner of either window.

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Hi Mike! Yep, it’s pretty confusing that there’s an Emoji & Symbols option in the Edit menu that doesn’t seem to do anything in the photo app for Mac. As it turns out, the Emoji & Symbols window is just a standard Finder feature, and it’s not compatible with Photos at all.

Click the Extensions button, then click Markup to begin drawing arrows in your Photos images.

That said, there is a relatively easy way to add arrows, circles, squares, and even text to your images. One way is by using the Preview app, a method I’ve already covered. But you can also add arrows to pictures in the photos app for Mac, too. Here’s the trick.

Open the image, click the Edit Photo button in the top-right corner of the screen (it’s one marked with a trio of sliders), click the Extensions button that appears to the right of the photo, then click Markup.

You should now see seven new Markup buttons in the top-left corner of the screen. The first three buttons let you free sketch, draw shapes and arrows, and add text, respectively, while the following four buttons let you adjust the width of drawn lines, change the color of lines and shapes, and tweak text fonts and sizes.

You’ll find the arrow button under the Shapes menu in the Mac’s Photos app.

If you want to draw some arrows, click the Shapes button, then click the arrow in the drop-down menu. When you do, an arrow will appear right on top of the image; just click and drag to move the arrow, make it longer or shorter, or change the direction in which it’s pointing. You can also drag the handle in the middle of the arrow to bend it one way or another.

Once you’ve put the arrow where you want it to go, you can click the Shape Style, Border Color, and Fill Color buttons to change the width and color of the arrow, or click the Text button to add a caption.

All finished? Click the Done button—and yes, you can always go back to the image to edit the arrow again.

Hope that helps, Mike. Still have questions? Let me know!

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