Mobile networks have a hard time handling emergencies that send us all rushing to our phones to get the latest information or reach friends and family. A new Weather Channel app, though, can get the message through even during earthquakes, tornadoes and terrorist attacks when mobile networks can be overwhelmed and may not work. The …

It took six weeks of tech support calls, power usage monitoring and Genius Bar diagnostics, but I’m finally convinced my new MacBook Pro isn’t an expensive mistake. And what I’ve learned along the way can help you, too — regardless of what laptop you’re using. I bought a 15-inch Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pro sight unseen late last year, confident that …

After buying a 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro in December with initially disappointing battery life, I became one of the skeptics. But I’ve been running tests and talking to Apple techs — read the details here — and I’ve extended my useful battery life dramatically. In one day’s test, mostly using a browser with a dim screen, I made it beyond …

How many people are disaffected with cable TV but still attached to HBO’s shows? Two million so far, according to Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes, who shared HBO Now subscriber numbers Tuesday, according to remarks spotted by Variety. HBO Now, which costs $15 per month, lets people watch “Game of Thrones” and “Westworld” online without needing a subscription through …

Burning batteries have caused more trouble for South Korean tech giant Samsung. For the last year, the problem has been Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy Note 7 phone, which suffered fire-prone batteries in its initial run as well as in a round of replacement phones. But on Wednesday, its sister company Samsung SDI was hit by a minor fire involving faulty batteries. …

Multitaskers who need to watch video while crunching numbers in a spreadsheet will be delighted to know Windows 10 soon will be able to accommodate miniature video players better. A test version of Windows 10 released Wednesday comes with a feature called “compact overlay window” that will always float atop your other windows. That could be handy for holding Skype …

Blind users of Facebook just got an upgrade in the social network’s ability to explain photos to them — and the same technology helps everyone else, too. In brief, Facebook’s artificial intelligence technology now uses verbs, not just nouns, in the photo captions that computers can read to blind people. “Until recently, these captions described only the objects in the …

To nobody’s surprise, Super Bowl 2017 is off limits to drones. But it’s not just the stadium where your quadcopter will be grounded. (Tough luck if you had hopes of an aerial video of crowds swarming through the parking lot.) The Federal Aviation Administration, which sets rules for aircraft, has barred drones for a 34.5-mile radius around NRG Stadium in …

Apple long has argued in favor of customer privacy, but the company wants to do more with your personal data so services like Siri voice recognition can get smarter. A new option in its iOS 10.3 software, released earlier this week for beta testing, asks iPhone and iPad users to share iCloud account data. iCloud services include file storage, email, …

Browser makers pay lots of attention to speeding up all the parts of loading a website — downloading a page’s programming instructions, running JavaScript code, pushing graphics and words to the screen — to spare us annoying waits. By contrast, refreshing a page you’ve already loaded seems pretty ho-hum. But programmers for Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browsers have been …