Table of contents for July 2019 in Macworld

Apple announced recently that the MacBook Pro is getting a speed boost. The company revealed that the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is now available with eight-generation Intel processors, while the 15-inch MacBook Pro now sports ninth-generation CPUs, including the first 8-core Mac laptop. Apple also said that the 2019 MacBook Pro features changes to the butterfly keyboard mechanism that should help prevent the problems that users have experienced in previous MacBook models. The new models are also included in Apple’s Keyboard Service Program, which means that the company will repair the keyboard for free up to four years after purchase. Apple is offering the new MacBook Pro models at the same price points as those released in July 2018. 15-INCH MACBOOK PRO The $2,799 15-inch MacBook Pro could be…

Apple may end up making Macs with processors of its own design, but that’s not expected to happen soon. And if it does happen, it probably will take several years before the entire Mac lineup has transitioned to Apple-designed chips. In the meantime, it’s safest to assume that the Macs of the next couple years will primarily use Intel processors. So any time we can get a look at Intel’s road map, we’re getting a peak at the heart of the Mac. During a recent investor presentation, Intel extended its public road map through 2020 and gave an update on future products and manufacturing processes. Here’s what that means for the Mac. Ice Lake processors use Intel’s brand-new Sunny Cove CPU architecture, which should deliver the first real boost in single-thread…

At its annual I/O developer’s conference in May, Google took the wraps off a pair of brand-new phones that are Pixels through and through. They’ve got big screens, great cameras, and all-day battery life. They run the latest version of Android and promise three years of updates. And they have a headphone jack. But the Pixel 3a and 3a XL aren’t $900 phones—they’re cheaper than Apple’s iPhone 7. Google has built a pair of handsets that retain the heart of their flagships but dispense with the luxury. In short, they’re Pixels for those who can’t afford a Pixel 3. Apple should follow suit. I’m not talking about throwing a new processor in the iPhone 8 as has been rumored. What Google has done with the Pixel 3a is craft an entirely new…

Game controllers have been a part of the extended iPhone experience for years, but Apple’s older certification requirements kept them from fully mimicking the same experience you get from an Xbox One controller or Sony DualShock 4. Even with the best ones, there’s usually a catch. Sometimes you need to mash the buttons before they register. In other cases the latency is awful (particularly when the controllers run on Bluetooth). Worst of all, you usually can’t press down on either of the controller’s thumbsticks, which effectively makes some games all but unplayable. That’s why I’m so happy to see the Rotor Riot Game Controller. It’s the first MFi (Made for iPhone) controller that takes advantage of Apple’s looser restrictions that dropped with iOS 12. It has a handful of its…

VERY LITTLE NIGHTMARES Little Nightmares left a big impact when it crept into what seemed like every gaming system apart from the Mac back in 2017, as its tense 2D stealth spawned more scares than many of its 3D cousins in the horror genre. And now, at last, that experience has made it to the iPhone with Very Little Nightmares ($6.99), right down to the yellow-slickered hero who stays a step and a shadow ahead of the monsters. The main difference is that she’s now sneaking her way through a mansion rather than a scary ocean facility. ORDIA Ordia ($3.99) plays a lot like Angry Birds: Pull back on your avatar with your finger, and it fires off in the direction you aimed in. But that’s about where the similarities…

I love using my Mac. And yet when I am confronted with a fresh new device running macOS, I am taken aback by the barren expanse that is the default Mac experience. That’s not on the Mac, that’s on me—I have become incredibly reliant on some fantastic utilities that enhance the Mac experience in countless ways. Every now and then I mention these utilities to friends who are Mac users, or they see me using them, and they are often completely baffled. This reminds me that, quite shockingly, there are lots of Mac users who never take advantage of utilities to make the Mac far more powerful than it comes out of the box. Here, then, are some of the utilities that make the Mac feel like home for me.…

There’s a gulf of difference between bitmap and vector graphics. Bitmap art is made of pixels and has a scale attached: each pixel represents black or white, or some gray or color tone. The resolution of the file—how many pixels wide by how tall—defines the amount of information in it. Scale it up and you start to see the individual pixels. A vector graphic, however, defines just the relationship of arcs and lines, which can be colored or filled with tints or patterns, and can be scaled to any size large or small. At whatever size they’re scaled, they render to the screen: the geometrical data gets converted to pixels for display. (Text included in vector files are almost always made of vectors themselves!) It’s not uncommon that you have…

Periodic Audio’s Nickel portable headphone amplifier will break you of the habit of listening to music on headphones plugged into your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. And that’s how most of us listen to music these days, right? Dedicated high-resolution digital audio players deliver superior audio performances, but mobile devices are just so much more convenient—even when we’re using the type of high-end, high-impedance cans that more general-purpose mobile devices find so difficult to drive. Modern computers and mobile devices have much better digital-to-analog (DAC) converters than they used to, but the headphone amplifiers on those products remain the weakest link in the audio reproduction chain. The Nickel is a high-end, battery-powered, portable headphone amp that promises to wring peak performance from just about any wired headphones, including high-impedance models. HOW IT…

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DELETE AN ALBUM IN THE MAC’S PHOTOS APP? Deletion seems so final, and it’s worthwhile to pause a moment and reflect before clicking any Delete button or selecting any Delete menu item. In Photos for macOS, you’re presented with many opportunities to delete items and collections, but Apple fortunately spells out the effects. One area that confuses people regularly is how Photos deletes albums—both the regular static kind and “smart” albums that use criteria to select what appears within them. Surely, deleting an album might drop the photos and videos the albums contains into the trash? Fortunately, it does not. In its internal structure, Photos separates out the actual media files from all the containers and organizing structures it makes available. When you delete any album…

According to Apple, a vast majority of users of recent MacBooks are happy with the butterfly-switch keyboard, which was introduced in 2015. But it’s not difficult to find users who are not happy. So Apple is offering a solution. Along with its recent announcement of new MacBook Pros (see page 7), Apple announced that the company will now fix any problems with the MacBook keyboard at no cost to the owner. This offer is only available for the following laptops: > 12-inch Retina MacBook (2015 to 2017) > MacBook Air (2018) > 13-inch MacBook Pro (2016 to 2019) > 15-inch MacBook Pro (2016 to 2019) Also, to reduce the inconvenience to the user, Apple said that it has shortened the time it takes to implement repairs to the keyboard. Apple…

Trunkspace Hosting is an interesting company. It offers virtual private server (VPS) and website hosting, music bots for the Discord chat service, and even game servers for titles such as Minecraft, CS:GO, and Team Fortress 2. The company also has its own VPN service dubbed PrivateVPN—not to be confused with PrivateVPN.com. It’s a very straightforward and simple service that promises not to track your actions online, and delivers connectivity options for 48 different countries. SECURITY, SOFTWARE, SERVERS, AND SPEED Trunkspace says it does not log any of your information at all when connected to its service. And according to its updated Privacy Policy, “IP addresses, connection timestamps, disconnect timestamps, bandwidth usage, and DNS requests are not at all logged. We achieve (and guarantee) this by having all log data output…

If you’re not using the customizable controls in your iPhone’s Control Center, you’re simply not getting the optimal experience. There’s a good chance you’re not, as personal experience has taught me that many people don’t even know Control Center exists. In fact, iOS now includes 20 different Control Center shortcuts to key Apple apps and features on your iPhone, all of which are better uses of your time than sifting through the pile of apps on the home screen. Even better, you don’t even need to unlock your phone to get to them. You can add all 20 if you wish—at least on the iPhone, as Apple doesn’t include a couple of them on the iPad for whatever reason—but you’ll get the best experience if you use the ones listed…

The ancient GIF format isn’t going away anytime soon. With the birth of social media and memes, the three-decade-old format for lightweight, looping, sound-free animation has found a new lease on life. There are better formats for capturing animation, but none so widely supported. You don’t need fancy editing software on your PC or Mac to make a GIF. All you need is your iPhone. While there are lots of ways to make a GIF with your iPhone, these three should cover most of your needs. 1. SAVE LIVE PHOTOS AS GIFS Live Photos capture a couple seconds of animation on either side of the picture you take. Hold down on them, and you can see it animate. To capture Live Photos, press the concentric circles at the top…

The $27 RAVPower 6700mAh External Battery Pack fulfills its promise of providing a single wall adapter, two USB ports, and a portable battery pack all in a tidy design. The pack is very similar to Anker’s Powercore Fusion 5000, only RAVPower’s fails to deliver in overall performance and has one design quirk I just can’t look past. Included in the box are a carrying case and a mircoUSB cable. The square footprint of the pack easily fits into a backpack or purse. On the front of the pack you’ll find two USB ports, each one capable of 5V/3A of output, or 5V/2.4A max output when you’re using both ports at the same time. There’s also a single microUSB port for charging the battery pack itself, four indicator lights, and a…

You probably think you know your iPhone well. After all, these days we probably look at our phones more than we look at our loved ones. But the truth is, even those of us who’ve remained loyal to Apple’s handset since 2007 can still be surprised by the tricks in each new version of iOS. The biggest ones get explained in the tutorials for the heftiest patches, but many others must be coaxed out of the Settings app. Below, you’ll find our favorites. If you also want to see the tricks your iPad is capable of, we’ve made a guide for that, too. 1. TURN ON SMART INVERT FOR AN IMPROMPTU iOS DARK MODE iOS doesn’t have a true Dark Mode yet—although believable rumors suggest we’ll be getting one in…

One of the major announcements (among many) at Apple’s 2018 WWDC was that macOS 10.14 Mojave, the current version of the Mac operating system, is the last version that supports 32-bit software. With macOS 10.15, only 64-bit software will be supported. The clock is ticking. We’ll probably see macOS 10.15 this fall, after it’s previewed at WWDC this June. If you decide to upgrade to the new macOS, you need to do a bit more than usual to prepare your Mac—you need to make sure your apps are 64-bit versions. If your app is a 32-bit version, it will not work. Apple actually started to warn people about the change with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. If you launch a 32-bit app in High Sierra, an alert pops up to tell…

For the first time since 2015, Apple has announced a new iPod touch, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. It has the same 4-inch screen, color selection, and bezel-heavy outdated design. But now it’s fast enough to run AR apps and Group FaceTime. Apple has updated the A8 processor in the iPod touch with an iPhone 7-era A10 Fusion chip, the same silicone that powers the low-end iPad. That’s still nowhere near as fast as the A12 Bionic chip in the iPhone XS, but it’s definitely an improvement. Like the old model, the new iPod touch starts at $199 for 32GB, but there’s an extra 256GB option now for $399, in addition to the $299 128GB model. Unfortunately, the new iPod touch ignores many of Apple’s newer…

In May, Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro lineup (see page 7), boosting performance with the latest Intel processors but making no other significant changes. Except one: There’s now another revision of the infamous “butterfly” keyboard mechanism, using new materials in a bid to further improve reliability. To go along with this new design, Apple extended the keyboard repair and replacement program to include virtually any Mac laptop with the butterfly keyboard (including the new ones), offering free repair for up to four years. What exactly is new? The reliable tinkerers at iFixit have torn apart the newly-revised 2019 MacBook Pro. While the rest of the laptop is almost identical to previous models (earning it a horrible repairability score of 1), there are a few noticeable difference in the keyboard mechanism. The…

Your hard-disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) “know” quite a bit about how well they’re functioning. Nearly all modern drives of both kinds have internal diagnostics and track other information about usage and wear. But it can be hard to surface that without Terminal commands, and tough to interpret the context, especially for SSDs. DriveDx from Binary Fruit puts a friendly face on complicated data, and can offer critical information about the state of your drives before a failure. With a database of drive information that the company has compiled, it offers insight that would take far longer to assemble for anyone but a technical expert. The app reads S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) information that a drive’s internal operating system records. This can include read and write errors,…

It was barely two years ago when we lamented the loss of the headphone jack on the iPhone. The iPhone 7 had just arrived with a gorgeous jet black color, a solid-state home button, and a dongle in place of the 3.5mm headphone jack. At the iPhone 7 introduction, Apple VP Phil Schiller talked about having the “courage” to make the change, to leave the headphone jack behind. At the time it was kind of cringe-worthy. Rather than try to convince the audience of the benefits of wireless charging or the annoyances of wired earphones, Schiller basically told the audience that they might not understand now, but one day they will. You could hear the snickers in the audience when he said that removing the headphone jack required the “courage…

Touch ID is old hat, having first appeared in 2013 with the iPhone 5s. However, some features still remain obscure, based on reader email and conversations I have. A key one is that you don’t have to use only your own fingerprints for Touch ID for a device that is nominally yours. Touch ID allows you to set up to five fingerprints total, including one you enroll initially when first configuring the phone, tablet, or laptop. In Settings > Touch ID & Passcode, enter your passcode, then tap Add A Fingerprint to enroll more. On a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Touch ID, open the Touch ID preference pane. While this has been possible since the start on each model and platform, it’s clear that many people think of…

Rolando: Royal Edition In 2008, Rolando: Royal Edition vanished from the App Store for a few years in the wake of architecture changes to iOS, but it’s still wonderful enough to justify the near-perfect score we gave it in our original review. Cultist Simulator I’m hesitant to recommend Cultist Simulator, even though it’s easily the most remarkable game to hit the App Store last month. There’s intentionally no tutorial, for one thing, which means you may spend hours just figuring out this barely describable roguelike card-based narrative adventure. It’s fairly involved, for another, and the gameplay board gets so busy that you’ll probably want to play it on an iPad rather than on the tiny display of an iPhone. Distraint 2 The story in Distraint 2 wastes no time getting dark. The main character of…

The indicator lights for active Ethernet connections might help you troubleshoot problems with a Wi-Fi router. While Wi-Fi and Ethernet may seem like two utterly different pieces of technology, they combine in a wireless router, in which the device’s software interconnects networking traffic across the two types—and on some models, across a third via DSL or cable standards. That can provide a problem if the Wi-Fi part of the gateway remains active and healthy, meaning that client devices, like smartphones and laptops, can connect to the network and report back that everything’s fine, but the Internet connection appears dead. I’ve found frequently that when a Wi-Fi router appears at fault, Ethernet is the actual culprit. While Ethernet is an extremely reliable and long-running technology, cables fail through wear (if you…

With all the features Apple has crammed into iTunes for macOS, it’s a Swiss Army knife of an app (or maybe more like 20 pounds of potatoes in a five-pound bag). But despite all of its non-audio parts, iTunes can help you with music files. Notably, you can correct or modify metadata—information about the files—in bulk. But beware! These changes are made to the files, not just within iTunes, and there’s no warning and there’s no undo. My strong suggestions before you make bulk metadata changes in iTunes: > If you have iCloud Music Library enabled (via iTunes Match or Apple Music), make sure all the files you want to modify have been downloaded to your Mac and aren’t stored in the cloud. (See this September 2018 column on how…

Nuheara’s IQbuds Boost are expensive—even at their current street price of $399 ($100 off the MSRP of $499), they still cost a lot of money. By comparison, the B&O Beoplay E8, our current pick for best-sounding true wireless earbuds, can be had for $299. That said, $399 (or even $499) isn’t exorbitant for a hearing augmentation appliance. In fact, audiologist-prescribed hearing aids often cost thousands of dollars. The IQbuds Boost are designed to boost one’s hearing for a fraction of the cost of a traditional hearing aid, making them a tempting purchase for anyone who has trouble hearing, but hasn’t yet committed to rigorous testing and ultra-expensive hardware. Can the IQbuds Boost really replace bona fide hearing aids? And how do they perform as true wireless earphones for music playback? I…