Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Welcome to Messages

Messages does eight things very well:

• Instant messaging. Instant messaging combines the privacy of email and the immediacy of the phone. You type messages in a chat window, and your friends type back to you in real time.

• Unified chat/text messages with phones (iMessages). This is huge. If you and your conversation partner both have iCloud accounts, then you both can move freely from phone to tablet to Mac. Your conversation appears in real time on all your gadgets simultaneously. If you started texting someone on the train home, you can sit down at your Mac and open Messages—and pick up right from where you left off.

  The messages, which Apple calls iMessages, are a lot more flexible than regular text messages. They can be much longer than 160 characters. They can include photos, movies, or other kinds of files. They give you feedback that lets you know when a message has arrived on the recipient’s gadget.

  And they don’t count as text messages. They’re routed through the Internet rather than the cellphone voice network. As far as your cellphone company is concerned, you’re not texting at all, and therefore you don’t have to pay for a texting plan.

• Send text messages. If you have an iPhone, you can also exchange text messages with any cellphone—from Messages, while seated at your Mac. That’s a mind-bending violation of the usual rules that confine text messages to cellphones only.

• Send audio clips. Instead of just typing a line or two to somebody, you can speak it. That ...