Macworld February 2018

Surely by now you’ve heard about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, but you might not fully understand what the issue is and how you can protect yourself against the risks. We’re here to help. Here’s how these vulnerabilities affect your Apple devices and what you can do to keep them safe. MELTDOWN AND SPECTRE FAQ One more time, what is the issue here? There are three separate potential security issues at play here, one named Meltdown and two named Spectre. They all take advantage of something called speculative execution. Basically, modern CPUs try to speed things up by taking educated guesses to predict what the next operation will be, and will go so far as to execute them ahead of time. If the prediction is correct, the CPU has an answer…

Macs see a fair number of new games—enough for us to comfortably pick 10 strong options for our monthly roundup, at least—but the selection still lags well behind Windows PCs. Release parity has gradually climbed over the past few years, but while we get a lot more indie games day-and-date with or soon after their PC counterparts, most bigbudget, AAA games arrive late on the Mac, if at all. Hopefully that situation continues to improve over time, but Nvidia has another solution in mind: PC games streamed over the internet to your Mac with minimal delay. It’s a service called GeForce Now, and it’s currently available in a free, open beta for the Mac. Essentially, Nvidia has powerful, GTX 1080 GPU-equipped servers running high-end Windows games remotely, and you can…

Apple’s new iMac Pro is mostly just a faster Mac. It’s the first professional Mac desktop the company has released in over three years and the fastest Mac yet made, granted, but still entirely familiar. Yet in many ways—some noticeable, some entirely invisible—this new Mac is completely different from all past Mac models. The iMac Pro may be an outlier today, but in the future we’ll probably look back on it as the start of a new era for the Mac, all because of the Apple-built T2 chip it carries inside. Here’s how the T2 makes this iMac Pro unlike all other Macs. THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE The T2 processor isn’t doing the heavy lifting in the iMac Pro—that’s the Intel Xeon processor with between 8 and 14 processor…

Recently, in taking stock of my primary computing hardware, I noticed an interesting trend: Over the course of the last year, I’ve swapped out almost all of the devices that I use every day. I replaced a 2011 iMac with a new 2017 5K model. My iPad Air 2 got superseded by a 10.5-inch iPad Pro. And, of course, my iPhone 7 was turned in for an iPhone X. Some of this is the nature of the job. I write about tech, and people want to know about the latest and greatest devices, and there’s not much to say if I don’t have access to those devices. But some of it is about my own usage, too. That iMac was getting too long in the tooth for some of the…

NEST CAM IQ OUTDOOR The all-new IQ Outdoor shares many traits with the Nest Cam Outdoor, including a 130-degree field of view, up to 1080p video, and a similar sturdily built cup-style design. But in every other way, the IQ Outdoor is a leap forward, with features such as a 4K color sensor, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and person detection. If the IQ Outdoor sees a human, it will zoom in up to 12x without any loss in clarity and follow the person’s movements. It will also balance lighting conditions so that details aren’t blown out in highlights or lost in deep shadows.—MICHAEL ANSALDO iHOME IAVS16B The iHome iAVS16B is an alarm clock and speaker combo that is fully internet-connected, so in addition to, you know, telling the time, it…

The dividing lines between Apple products are clear. Apple makes phones and tablets that run iOS, and laptops and desktop computers that run macOS. But it’s time for Apple to start breaking down those barriers and experimenting with new kinds of products that cross the streams. It’s time for Apple to expand beyond the MacBook and MacBook Pro. It’s time for the first iOS laptop. Consider the iPad Pro. With screens that measure 10.5 and 12.9 inches diagonally, they’re practically the size of Apple’s old MacBook Air models. The iPad Pro was the first iOS to ship with an Appledesigned keyboard, the Smart Keyboard. When the Smart Keyboard is engaged, at a glance the iPad Pro already looks like a strange laptop. The problem with the iPad Pro is that…