LastPass has come under fire in recent years following a 2022 data breach that compromised user vaults. Despite the controversy, it remains a popular and user-friendly option for saving credentials. But you don’t have to stick to LastPass’ default setup: If LastPass is your password manager of choice, these are the best hacks to optimize your experience.

Use vault identities to keep work and personal credentials separate

If you have one LastPass account for both work and personal use, you can separate relevant items into sub-vaults. When you toggle between them, you’ll see only the credentials relevant to that identity, and LastPass will suggest only those items for autofill. This reduces confusion and clutter, especially if you have both personal and professional accounts for the same services. You can also create mini-vaults based on category themes (such as travel or shopping) to organize your data. Go to Advanced options > Add identities on the left-hand navigation and click the Add icon. Name the new identity and drag and drop items into it. Then click Save. You can switch identities from the drop-down under your user account.

Set up custom fields to save PINs and security questions

In addition to your username and password, LastPass has custom fields you can use if a website or app requires other inputs—such as a PIN or security question—for logging in. Instead of saving these as text in a notes box, you can specify the name and value in a custom field. Open your password, tap the Edit icon, and select Custom fields > Add custom field. Add the name in the Field label column, then enter the value in the Field content column and tap Save.

Use “Favorites” to quickly launch frequently visited sites

If you open the same sites over and over—such as your work email, calendar, or project management platform—you can add these to your LastPass favorites and launch them all with one click. This streamlines your morning workflow, so you no longer need to type URLs or open separate bookmarks. Find the item you want to favorite in your vault, hover and tap the Edit icon, and select Star > Save. When you’re ready to launch, go to Advanced Options in the sidebar of your web vault and hit Open your favorite sites. Each will open in a new tab, and LastPass can autofill credentials if needed.

Use item history to restore old passwords or reverse a lockout

If you update credentials on a website or app, password managers will prompt you to automatically save the new version to your vault. Sometimes, though, the site itself glitches or fails to update the password, locking you out of your account. Instead of going through a tedious reset process, you can view the version history in LastPass to grab the most recent password. Open the item and select Edit, tap the History icon, and select View to see the last five changes.

Add important documents to Notes for easy access when you travel

If you need access to important documents like your passport, birth certificate, or medical records when you’re away from home, but don’t want to store them in the cloud unsecured, you can add them to LastPass. The app encrypts each document, so they’re accessible only when your vault is unlocked on your device. Attachments can be up to 10 MB each. (Free users have a total storage limit of 50 MB, while LastPass Premium subscribers get 1 GB.) Select Notes in the navigation bar and tap the Add Item icon. Select Attachments and follow the prompts. LastPass supports a variety of file types, including .pdf, .docx, .jpeg, and .txt.

Whitelist other countries so you can access your vault abroad (or when using a VPN)

By default, LastPass limits logins to your vault to the country where your account was created—a security feature that protects your account from unauthorized access attempts. However, there may be times when you need to access from a different country, such as when you’re traveling or using a VPN connection elsewhere in the world. You can whitelist additional countries under Account settings > General > Show Advanced Settings. Under Security > Country Restriction, check Only allow login from selected countries and select the countries you want to add. Then hit Update, enter your master password, and select Continue.

Restrict views on shared logins to keep passwords hidden

Credential sharing is a useful feature in most password managers, as it allows you to securely send logins for shared accounts. However, there may be times when you want to grant someone access to an account to complete a task but not allow them to view the password itself—for example, if you have an assistant who uses your social media or billing platforms, or a family member who wants temporary access to a streaming service. When you hide passwords, those you share with can use autofill but not view or copy the plain-text credential. When you share individual items, you can leave Allow Recipient to View Password unchecked; in Shared Folders, you can check Hide Passwords next to the recipient’s name.

Set up emergency access to pass down your digital estate

Unlike some password managers, LastPass has an explicit legacy access feature that allows you to will your vault to a trusted contact if you are incapacitated. Once invited, a trusted contact can request access to your vault. If you don’t decline the request within a specified wait time, they will receive an Emergency Access folder in their vault containing all of the items in yours. Vault owners can revoke access later, but this is useful if your trusted contact needs to manage financial accounts or have access to other data, even temporarily. In your vault, go to Emergency access in the left navigation menu and open the People I Trust tab. Tap the plus sign and enter your trusted contact’s email. (Note that they must also have a LastPass account or create one.) Specify the wait time, then hit Send Invite.

Set up equivalent domains to merge multiple items into one entry

If you have a single account you use to log in across multiple domains or subdomains from a single provider, you can merge these items in your LastPass vault instead of maintaining separate entries. For example, you might have a single account used across Apple domains that you’d prefer not to store as individual items. This reduces clutter in your vault and streamlines your autofill options down to one. Go to Advanced options in your vault and select Autofill settings > Equivalent Domains > Add new. In the domain field, enter the domain you want to merge, then tap Add.

Add ‘Never URLs’ to prevent LastPass from autofilling credentials or forms on specific websites

Another useful advanced setting is “Never URLs,” which allows you to disable some (or all) LastPass interaction with certain sites. You can opt to prevent pop-ups prompting you to generate or save a password—which can happen if you’re simply entering a two-factor authentication code—or disable autofill if multiple people are using the same device. Go to Advanced options > Autofill settings > Never URLs and select Add new. Enter the URL and select the desired action, then hit Save.

Remember when Spotify was just for listening to music? It used to be the app for streaming tunes, but in 2026, the app has more of a do-it-all attitude. You can still use it to listen to just about any song you can think of, but you can also listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and DM with friends. (Really, there’s an in-app chat function.) Even after launching all of these features, Spotify’s quest to capture all of your attention isn’t over: The company has announced an effort to get you to listen to magazine articles as well.

Spotify’s new audio articles feature uses AI

Spotify announced its new “narrated articles” feature in a press release on Tuesday. According to the company, users now have access to over 650 “long-form” magazine articles to listen to through the app. Spotify says the company’s in-house team at Spotify Audiobooks is behind these audio productions, including articles from magazines like The Atlantic, Billboard, GQ, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and WIRED.

While real humans are performing some of these narrations, Spotify is, predictably, using AI to generate audio for the rest. The company told TechCrunch that any portion of an article narrated by AI will be labeled as such, so listeners know whether they’re hearing a human or a bot.

Articles are included in Premium—at the cost of your listening time

Spotify says all narrated articles are less than two hours long, which is important context, as they count towards Spotify Premium’s 15-hour monthly listening time limit. That means if you’re a Premium user and you tend to listen to audiobooks as part of your Spotify subscription, these articles will reduce the hours you have to listen to books. If an article takes an hour and a half to listen to, that counts the same as if you listened to 90 minutes of an audiobook. If you run out of time, you’ll have to purchase “top-ups” to keep listening.

Free users can still listen to articles on Spotify, but they’ll have to pay a fee per article: $1.99 for each piece, regardless of length.

Other ways to listen to articles without giving money to Spotify

If you already pay for Spotify and you don’t listen to many audiobooks through the service, this new feature might make sense for you—you can listen to quite a few articles within that 15-hour monthly time limit, and it’s likely Spotify will only continue to add to its library as time goes on. However, if you use Spotify for free, $1.99 per article will add up quickly. As someone working in digital media, I’m all for supporting journalism, but unless you’re using the feature to listen to an article only every now and then, you might end up paying as much as a full subscription to the site that published it would cost.

As such, it’s worth noting that a simple text-to-speech generator can accomplish the same thing that Spotify’s service does here, but for free—assuming you already have access to the article in question. There are a ton of generators to choose from, and chances are good your device has one built in. If you’re on a Mac or iPhone, for example, you can highlight any text, choose “Speech” (Mac) or “Speak” (iPhone), and your device will begin reading the text aloud. Depending on the program you’re using, the narration may even sound relatively natural, versus the robotic voices you might be used to from text-to-speech generators of old. (Yes, you have generative AI to thank for that.)

Using this method would free up those dollars, perhaps to be put toward subscribing to publications directly. Of course, there are ways you can get around a paywall to read many articles for free, but if you can, I encourage you to support digital media you find useful.

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There are a lot of excellent earbuds out there, but if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, few options are better than AirPods. While Apple’s earbuds offer fantastic audio quality in their own right, their real selling point is how well they work with the company’s other products. If you have one device, like an iPhone, your AirPods will instantly pair with it when you pop them in your ears; if you have multiple devices, like a Mac or an iPad, your AirPods will automatically switch between them as you start different audio sources. If you have an Apple TV, you can quickly pair your AirPods with a button press on the remote and watch movies and shows without bothering anyone else in the house. For those of us in the ecosystem, AirPods are pretty great.

There is one major downside to AirPods, however, especially for Android users coming from a competitor’s earbuds: settings and management. See, AirPods are ideal when you don’t have to tinker with the defaults. Auto-pairing, auto-switching, Conversation Awareness: The automated settings make AirPods easy to use. But once you start thinking about changing the settings, things get a bit murky. Rather than a dedicated AirPods app to manage these defaults, Apple instead spreads out your AirPods’ options throughout your device’s OS. Take iOS, for instance: You can control a number of settings from the volume slider in Control Center, including noise cancellation, Conversation Awareness, and Spatial Audio. But you won’t find other settings, especially any that have to do with customizing your AirPods. For that, you’ll need to dive into the Settings app. When paired, your AirPods should appear towards the top of the page, but if not, you might need to jump into Bluetooth settings, then tap the (i) next to your AirPods. Here, you’ll find all of the settings and features you can adjust on your AirPods, minus EQ. If you want to change that (at least for Apple Music), you’ll need to find the Music app’s settings page, then “EQ.” In short, the whole experience is a bit of a mess.

iOS 27 may improve AirPods management

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple may be improving things with its upcoming iOS 27 update. Gurman says that Apple “has heard the feedback” about the lackluster experience of managing AirPods settings, and while the company isn’t necessarily building a dedicated app, it is taking steps to update the AirPods settings menu.

The goal here is to make the menu “more functional, better organized, and more streamlined.” Details are thin, but Gurman says the overhaul should make AirPods easier to work with, and users should be able to clearly see all the features their AirPods are capable of from this new menu. Perhaps this means a more permanent placement in the Settings app, as well as a reorganized settings menu, with clearly labeled categories and explanations for all features.

Personally, I think Apple should consider adding graphics and animations in this space. Some features are too complicated for a quick text blurb: People may need to see how things work in order to learn how to use those features themselves. One of my favorite AirPods Pro perks is Adaptive Transparency, which can lower the loudness of sounds without blocking them. Teaching users how to use this feature, and even how to adjust it to make it more or less sensitive, would be an excellent use of this settings redesign.

AirPods really need a dedicated app

While this could be a step in the right direction, AirPods are in desperate need of a dedicated app. Apple can make the new settings menu as clear and easy to follow as possible, but how many people are going to go digging through their Settings app to find these options? I think new AirPods users are much more likely to try an app on their iPhones called “AirPods,” and learn about all the things their new earbuds can do for them—and how they can personalize the experience to their needs.

Plus, it’s beyond time for Apple to offer some sophisticated EQ and tuning options, which would fit perfectly in an AirPods app. While the overall sound experience is great for most users, plenty of other earbuds come with these adjustments, which let users customize the sound experience to their liking. Apple’s built-in EQ presets are far from adequate, since you can’t actually customize each. If “Bass Booster” doesn’t actually boost the bass enough for you, too bad. Apple doesn’t love customers breaking out from its core design, but when it comes to AirPods, especially AirPods Pro, I think the company should relent.

Based on Bloomberg’s reporting, it sounds like an AirPods app isn’t coming anytime soon, so I should consider myself lucky I’m getting improved AirPods settings at all with iOS 27. But if Apple wants to seriously update the AirPods management experience, I hope they consider a dedicated app for iOS 28—or even a future version of iOS 27.