In the January issue, we take an in-depth look at the new MacBook Pro with touch bar and discover the best bits of iOS in this new laptop. And with the 25th anniversary of the PowerBook, we review the evolution of Apple’s laptops.
For years, people have speculated about whether Apple would ditch macOS in favor of iOS, shedding desktops and turning laptops into something like an iPad Pro in a fixed clamshell. A version of iOS has apparently come to the Mac, but not in a way that anybody expected. The new Touch Bar has a separate brain, a custom T1 ARM processor system-on-a-chip (SoC), that looks to be running a stripped-down variant of iOS, possibly derived from watchOS. Steve Troughton-Smith, an iOS developer known for deep examinations of how the operating system ticks, put the pieces together, some of which rely on information provided by Apple during on-the-record press briefings and on its site, and some from examining files within the newest release of Xcode, which allows developers to take advantage…
With every release of a new iPhone powered by another cutting-edge processor designed by Apple, the rumbling grows. It’s amplified by the perception that the Mac is being delayed and hamstrung by the moves of the Mac’s chip supplier, Intel. It’s the theory that, one of these days, Apple is going to break from Intel and power its Macs with an Apple-designed processor related to the ones in the iPhone and iPad. It’s a story with a certain amount of sense behind it. It seems like several Mac models have been delayed because Intel’s chips just weren’t ready in time, or weren’t ready in enough supply. The latest hubbub about the MacBook Pro being limited to 16GB of RAM is due to Apple’s choice of a low-power Intel chipset that couldn’t…
In mid-November, Apple let go of Sal Soghoian, who was the company’s Product Manager of Automation Technologies—meaning he was responsible for AppleScript and Automator. The news about Soghoian, who worked at Apple for nearly 20 years, raised concern in the Mac community that Apple no longer was interested in automation features in macOS. Maybe the latest news from Apple will help ease the concerned. According to 9to5Mac, one of its readers sent an email to Apple Senior VP Craig Federighi about the future of macOS automation. The reader received the following response and forwarded it to 9to5Mac, which has verified the email: Hi [redacted], We have every intent to continue our support for the great automation technologies in macOS! Thanks for being an Apple customer! — craig As you can…
Mac users are fortunate to have not one, but two excellent commercial virtualization software packages to choose from, not to mention less-polished free alternatives like Virtual Box. In what has now become an annual ritual, VMware and Parallels have updated their respective Fusion and Desktop products to coincide with the recent release of macOS Sierra. Last year, both companies delivered ambitious new versions to capitalize on back-to-back debuts of Windows 10 and OS X El Capitan, but the 2016 editions are somewhat more subdued by comparison. VMware marked the occasion by launching Fusion 8.5, a maintenance update with no new features. Having celebrated its tenth anniversary for Desktop earlier this year, Parallels encouraged engineers to come up with at least one unique new feature to justify the upgrade to version 12, although the company’s…
Although macOS looks deceptively simple to end users, anyone who’s launched Activity Monitor may be shocked to discover just how many helpers, daemons, services, and other processes actually run behind-the-scenes, helping power your favorite software. Such background tasks often feed off available Internet bandwidth, consuming precious memory at the same time. If you’d like to curtail this kind of covert background activity, there’s an inexpensive, well-designed, and easy-to-use Mac utility that not only keeps tabs on which apps are beaming signals back to the mothership, but also selectively blocks them from doing so. FIREWALL BUDDY Four years ago, Macworld reviewer Brendan Wilhide praised Radio Silence as “perhaps the easiest firewall [he’s] ever used” and like fine wine, this Mac Gems utility has only improved with age. Radio Silence 2.0 ($9) loses…
Readdle’s PDF Expert is a fast, slick document viewer with annotation tools that gives Apple’s Preview a run for its money. ACROBAT WHO? With the release of PDF Expert 2, Readdle not only delivers PDF editing, but also comes surprisingly close to feature parity with the reigning PDF heavyweight, Adobe Acrobat DC. Want to add links or redact text inside a PDF document? No problem. Need to keep PDF files from potential prying eyes by protecting documents with a password? Consider it done. By far the most impressive new features are the ability to edit text and images. Whether fixing a last-minute typo or swapping out a company logo, PE2’s slick user interface makes it a snap, although the tools are fairly basic. I successfully replaced one image from a magazine…
