Inhoudsopgave van May 2021 - Macworld

If recent rumors are any indication, 2021 is going to be a landmark year for the Mac. Recently, we saw reports stating that Apple will ship 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with MagSafe, Apple silicon with more cores and enhanced GPUs, and a case redesign. Now another report says that new iMacs and Mac Pros are coming this year as well. Rumor has it that the iMac will be redesigned to resemble Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterated the XDR-like redesign, with 21.5-inch and 27-inch models that have a screen with a much smaller bezel, no “chin,” and a flat back instead of the curved one that appears on the current iMac. It’s been a long while since the iMac saw a change in form. The current design of the…

The more things change, the more things stay the same. For the past several years, the comic strip Doonesbury has been in reruns for its weekday strips; this past week’s series, hailing from 1995, dated from the release of Windows 95, in which one of the strip’s characters pointed out the superiority of Apple’s Macintosh, only to be brought back down to earth by the reality of Microsoft’s platform dominance. More than a quarter of a century later, Apple has become one of the most valuable and pervasive companies in the world, but some things clearly haven’t changed that much. CEO Tim Cook said in the firm’s latest quarterly financial call, “We really don’t have a significant share in any market.” Cook was speaking specifically of the iPhone, which is…

Docks abound for USB-C connectors, whether for USB-only devices or for those—like all Macs released in the last few years—that sport the very high-speed Thunderbolt 3. The Other World Computing Thunderbolt 3 mini Dock offers the lowest price so far for offering support via Thunderbolt 3 for two 4K displays. If you need to add two displays and want to preserve USB-C ports, then this dock fits the bill. The two HDMI 2.0 ports can each handle up to 4K video at 60Hz. You can also use HDMI adapters and cables to work with other compatible standards, like DisplayPort. The dock includes just three other ports: one high-speed USB 3.0 (Type A), one USB 2.0 (also Type A), and gigabit ethernet, which tested at gigabit speeds even with all ports occupied,…

Oftentimes, your biggest strengths are also your biggest vulnerabilities. That’s just as true for Apple as it is for anyone else. While the iPhone is surely the product that catapulted the Cupertino-based company into its meteoric rise, you could make the argument that it would not have hit the stratosphere without the ecosystem surrounding the device—in particular, the App Store. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to say the success of the app ecosystem on iOS is beyond what even Apple likely expected, leaving the company to play catch-up to its breakout hit. And even as the “there’s an app for that” ethos became the hallmark of the smartphone era, the App Store has remained one of Apple’s biggest challenges, in terms of its relationships both with competitors and with developers.…

A modern smartphone uses navigational satellites—sometimes drawing from multiple orbital systems—as well as cellular towers, Bluetooth hints, and Wi-Fi router locations to produce an awfully precise location. My family’s iPhones are often tracked not just to our house but—when you’re looking in the Find My app—to each of our locations inside our home within a few feet. That might be too much when you’re giving a third-party app your location even once, but especially whenever the app is operating in the foreground or, for rare apps, continuously in the background. In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, Apple added a switch to let you choose to offer either precision or “fuzzed” locations to apps—and by extension to any third parties the apps might work with who receive location information as well.…

I’ve been a Mac user for about 30 years. And hard as it is for me to believe, I’ve spent the vast majority of that time with the modern macOS (or OS X, or Mac OS X, if we’re getting historical). In an industry that tends to move as fast as technology, a consumer product remaining relevant over two decades—never mind the 17 years the Classic Mac OS existed before it—is a pretty rare phenomenon. Despite much consternation in the years since the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, the Mac has still not been put out to pasture, forsaken in favor of its shinier new siblings. If anything, Apple’s longest-running product line has gotten a new lease on life with the advent of Macs built on custom Apple…

The last time we looked at Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac, we had concerns. We found some protection issues that were later ameliorated, but the interface didn’t impress us. That was more than two years ago, however, and moving into 2021, we find that Bitdefender is an entirely different beast. The interface has been totally overhauled, and it may be again soon as the current version on Mac is slightly behind the look of its Windows counterpart. Regardless, the basic structure is the same as what we have on Windows, and the new look is far better than what Bitdefender for Mac presented the last time we looked. MALWARE BLOCKING PERFORMANCE More important than looks, however, is how Bitdefender performs. During our spot tests, Bitdefender had no trouble detecting and deleting…

Presonus Studio One Professional is a top-tier digtal-audio workstation (think Logic X) with some unique and time-saving features. My favorite feature, a superhandy module for organizing and mastering albums, has been joined in the latest version by a clever take on organizing and managing a live performance. Presonus has also unveiled Sphere, an online service that delivers the entirety of the company’s music software portfolio as well as storage and collaborative features for a remarkably affordable $15 a month. Even if you’re a diehard user of another DAW, that alone warrants a serious look at this very powerful suite of music tools. DESIGN AND FEATURES By today’s standards, there’s nothing startling about Studio One’s design. However, at its inception in 2009, it was the first traditional track and mixer DAW…

Recent reports have shown that some users of M1 Macs are experiencing what they feel is unreasonable, excessive usage of the SSD. One in particular showed 15TB written in two months. That’s quite a bit, and it’s almost certainly attributable to swapping main memory to the SSD. The reports became a cause for alarm for M1 Mac owners, but is it really a problem? While it’s true that SSDs have a limited lifespan, how long that SSD lasts comes down to how you use your Mac. SSD LONGEVITY A common misconception about SSDs is that they don’t last very long. That’s due partially to the early days of SSDs, when the lifespan of NAND flash storage used on an SSD was severely underestimated, and drives often quit after a relatively…

Just when we thought the fabled Apple Car had driven off into the sunset for good, a flurry of recent rumors has given new life to the project. But despite some promising signs, we’re still likely many years away from driving one. The most recent rumor comes from well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via MacRumors), who writes that Apple is collaborating with several automakers on the Apple Car project, including Hyundai, GM, and Peugeot manufacturer PSA. According to Kuo, “Apple will leverage current automakers’ resources and focus on self-driving hardware and software, semiconductors, battery-related technologies, form factor and internal space designs, innovative user experience, and the integration with Apple’s existing ecosystem.” Specifically, Kuo says Apple will be using Hyundai’s E-GMP battery electric vehicle platform for the foundation of the Apple Car.…

Just a few short years ago we told you about a then-upcoming wireless technology, Wi-Fi 6. At the time, what was once known as 802.11ax was given a much more consumer-friendly name, and previous convoluted Wi-Fi standards got similar names: 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, and so on. And now we’re getting an even newer name: Wi-Fi 6E. In short, it’s an updated version of Wi-Fi 6 that includes access to the new 6GHz frequency band. But while it doesn’t bring new technology compared to Wi-Fi 6, this new frequency could be a huge deal and is likely to have a major impact on the future of wireless networking. WHAT’S UP WITH THAT E? It’s hard to believe, but the Wi-Fi standard has been using the same…

To understand the desperation Apple felt in the mid to late 1990s, look no further than to one particular T-shirt. On the front was a 3-D–rendered numeral eight; on the back, the words “Hands-On Experience” and a Mac OS 8 logo. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June 1996, many of us got to experience the future of the Mac for the first time. We got the T-shirt for test-driving Apple’s transformational new operating system, one that replaced the woefully out-of-date classic Mac OS with something that could compete with Microsoft. The operating system was nicknamed Copland and it never shipped. The “Hands-On Experience” shirts and an accompanying book, Mac OS 8 Revealed, were as good as it was ever going to get. With its back against the wall and…

The passage of time can mean the accumulation of Macs and email accounts. Many of us have been online now for long enough to have stacked up digital detritus around us that’s sometimes split across old and new computers and offline drives. It may be frustrating when you want to—for example—search across email messages from several years ago, or even decades ago, and they aren’t readily available on your newest machine. You can consolidate messages from multiple computers or backups of old ones without much fuss, though depending on the quantity of email, it might take some time. You can also pull in email from IMAP servers to store it locally. That allows you to make sure it’s backed up as you wish and it’s readily searchable. CONSOLIDATE MAIL FROM…

Because of the decreasing value of older computers and the reality that sometimes children depart the nest and leave their old computers behind, you could wind up with an older iMac that no longer meets your day-to-day needs but that you could transform into a monitor. All the iMac models that can work in what Apple called Target Display Mode as a secondary display for a modern Mac require an adapter to connect a Thunderbolt 3 port on the iMac to a Mini DisplayPort or Thunderbolt 2 port on the older iMac and have things function as expected. iMacs released from late 2009 through mid-2014 can be used as external displays. Those that followed, starting with the 27-inch 5K late-2014 edition, cannot. (You’ll find a bit more information about this…

JBL is on a retro kick. The speaker manufacturer introduced the $4,000-per-pair L100 Classic loudspeaker at CES in 2018. Those were a nod to JBL’s best-selling speaker of all time: the iconic L100. The company now has a downsized and more affordable follow-up in the form of the L82 Classic, which promises to deliver much of the L100 Classic’s performance in an enclosure with a smaller footprint and at a considerably lower price of about $2,500 per pair. But don’t let the bookshelf label mislead you into thinking the L82 Classic has anything in common with the typical mass-market speaker you’ll encounter at a big-box store. This is an audiophile product featuring state-of-the-art components and design. And it probably won’t fit on the average bookshelf, since each 28-pound cabinet stands…

Mackie’s Freeplay Live Bluetooth speaker caught me by surprise. I’m familiar with personal speaker systems (those little boxes on stands that you see next to some of your higher-class street performers). Personal public address systems that also sound excellent playing tunes—not so much. That’s the Freeplay Live in a nutshell—hence the initially raised eyebrows and subsequent appreciation. For those unfamiliar with the Mackie name, the company has been building affordable, high-quality studio mixers and monitors, live sound reinforcement, and other professional audio products since 1988. It’s much less known in the consumer electronic circles we typically cover. DESIGN AND FEATURES Measuring 7.75x14x7 inches (HxWxD), the Freeplay Live is no dainty little travel speaker, which is what we usually review, It’s actually on the small side for a personal PA, and…

Maybe someday there will be a tell-all book written by someone inside Apple during the 2010s. Maybe we will eventually know exactly what happened that led to a bit of a lost decade for the Mac, one that will be remembered for a failed attempt to rethink the Mac Pro and a series of questionable hardware decisions that seriously hobbled Mac laptops for years. But until then, we’re mostly left to speculate about what happened—and how Apple turned it around, ushering in a new decade that has the potential to reinvigorate the Mac in a way not seen since the early days after the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. In my opinion, there’s a single Mac model that tells a good portion of the story all on its own. It’s…

As a professed digital hoarder, I have thousands of files on my iMac, external hard drives, cloud services, and network-attached server. I’ve made a habit of archiving utility bills, bank andcredit card statements, and other PDF documents that gradually consume available storage capacity. Barring a complete purge (oh, the horror!), shrinking the hoard would be the next best thing. That’s exactly what PDF Squeezer 4 is designed to do. This minimalist macOS utility makes it a snap to reduce the size of one or more PDF documents using three predefined compression levels (Light, Medium, or Strong), or using custom-made profiles of your own. At every turn, PDF Squeezer makes the process as frictionless as possible. You drag and drop files onto the app window, and they are immediately processed with…

It’s officially spring now, which is when the internet’s fancy turns to rumors of 2021’s first Apple announcements. Over the last few years, Apple has generally released at least some of its new products in early spring, and there’s no reason to think this year will diverge substantially from that pattern. Most of the attention in recent weeks has focused on updates to the iPad. That’s not terribly surprising: Though Apple updated both the iPad Air and base-level iPad last fall, the iPad Pro received only a minor speed bump last spring, with the addition of the A12Z processor—far overshadowed by the addition of cursor support and the release of the Magic Keyboard. But that modest update has created a strange state of affairs where the current top-of-the-line Pro is mostly outclassed by…

Typically, Apple stays quiet about its future processors, preferring to announce them along with a new product. For example, we didn’t get specifics about the M1 until Apple unveiled the new MacBooks powered by it, and we knew very little about the A14 before it showed up in the iPad Air. So we probably won’t hear about the A15, the first of a new generation of Apple system-on-chips (SoCs), until Apple unveils the iPhone 13 later this year. However, we can still piece together a picture of our possible future. By studying the trend for past A-series processors and what we know about cutting-edge silicon manufacturing, along with making a few educated guesses, we can get a pretty good idea of what to expect from the A15. STILL 5NM, BUT ENHANCED With the…

Mac OS X has been through a lot in 20-plus years. As someone who was sitting in the front row at Macworld Expo when then-CEO Gil Amelio brought Steve Jobs on stage to celebrate Apple’s purchase of NeXT, it feels like I’ve been a witness to the whole story. The macOS we use today is the result of iteration—sometimes rapid, sometimes painfully slow—over 16 major OS releases during those 20 years. Here are the highlights. BEFORE THERE WAS MAC OS X, THERE WAS RHAPSODY Before it was Mac OS X, the next-generation Mac OS was code-named Rhapsody. Software written for NextStep—what would become Cocoa—ran natively. Classic Mac OS apps ran in a compatibility window. Rhapsody aped Mac OS 8 in its design language, but Apple would throw that design away before…

Time Machine is designed to back up your selected volumes every hour, writing any changes you’ve made into a new snapshot that captures only the differences between the current and previous backup. (Apple software, like Pages and Numbers, and a lot of third-party software create a version every time you save, providing backups within apps much more frequently than hourly.) But some readers wonder what happens if they don’t keep their Time Machine drives powered up all the time. Apple designed Time Machine to be resilient, so it doesn’t skip a beat if one or more of the destination volumes you use for backups isn’t always available. The ideal situation is that any drive you use is always plugged in and thus backups always happen while it’s on. This is…

Apple updated its iWork suite of productivity apps recently with helpful new features and tweaks that make the apps easier to use. Most notably, the iOS apps now have “Precise editing controls in the Arrange Inspector” to make it easier to fine-tune projects without a Mac. The update to version 11 affects the iPad, iPhone, and Mac versions of Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. The apps jumped to version 10 last March from 8.2.1. iPAD AND iPHONE UPDATES According to the release notes, the iOS iWork apps all have the following updates: > Precise editing controls in the Arrange Inspector for adjusting the look and placement of objects. > Onscreen keypads for entering exact values for text size, spacing, table size, and more. > The ability to add or remove objects…

I’m a huge fan of the way the House of Marley does business, minimizing its environmental impact by using recycled and recyclable, sustainable materials to build its products. The Positive Vibration XL over-ear headphones are a prime example: They leverage reclaimed aluminum, steel, and plastic to deliver good sound with hardware that won’t add to a landfill at the end of its useful life. You can read more about the materials used at House of Marley’s website. DESIGN AND FEATURES The Positive Vibration XL are available in three color combos: all black, blue and black, and copper and white, each of which costs $100. Okay, black-on-black isn’t really a combo unless you count the FSC-certified wood inserts in the cups with the House of Marley logo. Regardless of literary license,…

GOT A MAC WITH AN SD CARD SLOT? DON’T RELY ON IT AS A STORAGE UPGRADE Spinning disks are slow and solid-state drives (SSDs) used to cost a digital arm and a leg. That led many people to stick with hard drives or purchase Macs with low-capacity SSDs—like 250GB or 500GB—because the next increment up added many hundreds of dollars to the cost. (I’m sitting here with a 2017 iMac with a 1TB Fusion drive, so I am one of you.) If you’ve got a hard drive in your Mac or a low-capacity SSD, you’re surely tempted to update your system by adding speed or capacity. And some of you might be tempted to trim costs on that upgrade by using an SD Card (typically in the Micro SD format)…