Macworld September 2018

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he didn’t like what he saw, so he set about changing the corporate culture. A decade later, one proof of his success was the fact that the company seemed to follow a rulebook, largely behaving with a consistency that allowed those of us who covered the company to react to wild rumors with phrases like “Apple wouldn’t do that” or “That’s not how Apple does things.” But in the years following Jobs’s death—and after the departure of some other Jobs-era executives—Apple has continued to evolve, and, in many cases, it’s torn up the old rulebook. A lot of the changes strike me as being for the better. I feel like after Steve laid down the law in the late 1990s, some…

Blackmagic in July released a new external graphics processing unit (eGPU) targeted at users looking for a simple-to-integrate device over Thunderbolt 3. The new $699 device was introduced to the media during Apple’s showcase of its new MacBook Pro laptops. The Blackmagic eGPU houses an AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics card with 8GB of GDDR memory. The integrated design means that, according to a Blackmagic representative, the card inside the device is not upgradeable. The eGPU can provide a 2.8x increase in performance over the stock graphics in the new 15-inch MacBook Pro and its discrete Radeon graphics. With the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, the jump is more dramatic: 8x over the integrated Intel Iris Pro. The eGPU unit itself measures 7 by 7 by 12 inches, similar to a Mac…

If you’re a fan of Apple’s photo printing service, you won’t like this news one bit. According to a new message popping up in the Photos app and confirmed with Apple by Macworld, Apple is discontinuing its Photo Print Products service. Launched in 2002, Photo Prints Products grew from just supporting simple prints to producing albums, calendars, and photo books. The message, first spotted by 9to5Mac, instructs users of macOS 10.13.6 to make their “final purchases” by September 30 of this year. MacOS Mojave’s Photo app has already scrapped any mention of the service. The message also encourages users to download the Photo Project Extension from the Mac App Store to get access to a range of third-party printing services. The message also encourages users to download the Photo Project…

Apple unveiled new MacBook Pros in July and they bring much of the enhancements we expected they would: Powerful new eighth-gen Intel processors, new DDR4 RAM with double the maximum capacity, and—hallelujah—a quieter keyboard. It also has a bigger battery, but before you get too excited, there aren’t any actual real-world gains from it. The new MacBook Pros are rated for the same “up to 10 hours wireless web and iTunes movie playback,” but good luck getting anywhere near that with actual work. Anyone who is using their Mac primarily for “wireless web” surfing probably shouldn’t be wasting their money on a $2,000 MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro updates are about speed. Apple claims a boost of up to 70 percent for the 15-inch MacBook Pro and a whopping 100 percent…

McAfee Total Protection is one of the best bargains among the options for antivirus and malware-protection software—but only for the first year. Its introductory rate of $45 includes a one-year subscription for up to 10 computers, plus a password vault system for desktop and mobile called True Key. But after those first twelve months, when the price rises to the regular annual rate of $100, Total Protection’s lack of features relative to other competitors makes it hard to recommend as a long-term option. Moreover, the software is the only package we’ve reviewed in early 2018 with no score from either AV-TEST or AV Comparables’s 2017 testing, so we can’t provide an apples-to-apples score on macOS and Windows malware and macOS unwanted/adware apps. PERFORMANCE That said, in our own hands-on spot-testing,…

The first thing you need to know about a Douchebag is that the word itself appears nowhere on the bag. The most you’ll find is a sleek Db logo peeking out from no less than six spots across the bag, along with a massive 2.5-inch monogram that hugs the small of your back when it’s worn. True, it looks a little like the Op logo that dominated T-shirts in the early ’90s. Did those count as “douchey”? That’s something you’ll have to decide. A DOUCHEBAG AND A SCHOLAR For my money, though, this is a bag that has no right calling itself a “douchebag.” That’s not the case with some of the company’s other bags, admittedly, as it sometimes embraces style over substance. The Scholar, though, is practically understated; its…