Table of contents for May 2025 in MacLife

IF YOU RECENTLY got yourself one of the amazing new Macs then you may be wondering what to do with your old one. The natural thing, if you can’t think of a use, is to sell it, but does that run the risk of potentially sharing your personal data? Not at all. Whether you have a relatively new Mac, or one that Apple would deem “vintage”, there are ways of wiping a machine of sensitive information so that it can arrive with a new owner box–fresh. The process for this has changed over the years. It’s now much easier to erase a Mac and reset it to factory settings, but we’re going to try to cover all bases here, because some of our readers are sure to have very old…

IF YOU LOVE reading, chances are you’ve got a massive backlog of books just waiting to be started. Instead of despairing at the prospect of finding time for all of them, there are ways that you can take in their key teachings, even if you’re short on time. The secret is to use the Headway app on iOS. This condenses all the key ideas and elements of each book, and presents them in easy–to–digest summaries, ready for whenever you have time. You can read through the summaries (or listen to audio transcriptions, if you prefer), save key ideas and turn them into flashcards, and track your progress using achievements and multi–day courses. It’s all designed to help you expand your knowledge and enjoy the lessons contained in some of the…

From $1,999 From www.apple.com Features M4 Max or M3 Ultra chip, up to 148GB of memory (M4 Max with 16–core CPU, 40–core GPU); up to 512GB of memory (M3 Ultra with 32–core CPU, 80–core GPU), up to 16TB of storage (M3 Ultra) IT’S THE MAC STUDIO WITH M3 ULTRA THAT WILL REALLY TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY FOR MOST OF us, an iMac, Mac mini, or one of Apple’s notebook Macs is all the computer we’ll ever need, but if you spend your days flinging photos, videos, and large language models (LLMs) around, then the new Mac Studio is the obvious choice — even if it’ll cost you a pretty penny to do so. While superficially, the Mac Studio and Mac mini share a similar aesthetic, in reality the Mac Studio…

$149 From https://brandstore.rode.com Features 20Hz–20kHz frequency range, USB–C or Lightning connectivity options, 7–hour operating time SMARTPHONES MAKE FOR great digital audio recorders, but their built–in microphones are too small to offer high–fidelity capture of sound. RØDE is a pro audio company that has diversified into high–quality audio products using mobile technology — or indeed, top–end AV gear. The Wireless Micro is a more affordable sibling of the Wireless GO II system, and consists of two transmitters and a receiver housed in a charging case. Apart from recharging the case, the system is wires–free. The case charges its contents, with each transmitter holding seven hours of charge and two more charges in the case for a total of 14 extra hours. The receiver plugs into your iPhone or iPad, with USB–C…

$12.95 From https://coconut-flavour.com Needs needs macOS 12 or later WHAT DO YOU do if you want to check your MacBook’s battery status? You click the battery icon in the menu bar, of course. But really, that doesn’t tell you very much about your battery. Sure, you can find out how many charge cycles it has undergone from the System Information window, but that’s still pretty basic information. One alternative is coconutBattery. This app provides a wealth of battery data in much more granular detail than Apple provides. All the information that is hidden by Apple comes to the surface, and it’s a handy way to see the state of your battery. When you first open the app, you’ll see details on your MacBook, including its device identifier and model number. Below…

UNLIKE MOST MID–YEAR iOS updates, iOS 18.4 turns out to be a significant release. The free update is compatible with all iPhone models from XS up, although Apple Intelligence features (see next page) require iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, or iPhone 15 Pro Max. Apple has given the Photos app some love. There are new filters to show or hide items not contained in an album, or synced from a Mac or PC, in Library view, and it is possible to reorder items in Media Types and Utilities. There are consistent filtering options in all collections, including sort by oldest or newest, as well as to sort albums by Date Modified. You can now disable Recently Viewed and Recently Shared collections in Photos Settings, and hidden photos are no longer…

APPLE’S PHOTOS APP offers multiple ways to organize your shots, such as adding them to the Favorites album or browsing collections of recognized people. However, Photos lacks Adobe Lightroom’s extra asset management and filtering tools that enable you to find photos according to Pick or Reject flags, keywords, and star ratings. Lightroom also boasts a more powerful set of artificial intelligence (AI) photo–fixing tools. There are two versions of Lightroom: the original Lightroom Classic and the newer Lightroom CC (which has now been rebranded to Lightroom). Lightroom is more streamlined than its Lightroom Classic cousin, but still offers a powerful suite of photo organizing and fixing tools. To enjoy Lightroom, you’ll need to subscribe to an Adobe Creative Cloud plan. This gives you the ability to sync your Lightroom library…

MOISES IS AN Apple App of the Year, and for good reason: it’s wonderful. It enables you to sing or play along with your favorite musicians. Simply add the song you want to play, and Moises can break it into its individual instruments, enabling you to remove tracks, change the key, or adjust the speed. It can even show you the chords and lyrics, karaoke style. The secret sauce here is artificial intelligence (AI). When you add a new song to your collection, Moises runs it through a powerful AI system that’s been trained on most genres and eras of music. The AI identifies the individual tracks – the guitar, vocal, drums, and so on – and enables you to adjust and play them as if you’d recorded them in…

SPRING IS UPON us once again, which means it’s time to swap the luxury of your sofa for the comfort of outdoor seating. With an iPad and some great reading apps, an iPhone paired with active–noise canceling AirPods 4 or a MacBook playing your favorite movie, you can sit back and relax with a cool, refreshing drink while soaking up the rays long into the evening. But you don’t need to stop there. By investing in some smart kit, you can transform your yard into a stunning space that requires less effort to maintain and offers a host of entertainment options. You can light it up, enjoy delicious food, watch great shows on a large screen, or get a party going with some thumping tunes. Armed with an iPhone or…

From $599 From www.apple.com Features 11-inch Liquid Retina display (2360x1640), Apple M3 chip, 128GB of storage (256GB/512GB/1TB available), Wi-Fi 6E (aka 802.11ax Wi-Fi), Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, Touch ID, 12MP Wide and Centre Stage cameras THE iPAD AIR continues to be the iPad most of us will want to own, thanks to its balance of price and performance, which makes it feel neither as “barebones” as the entry-level iPad (from $349), nor as expensive as the iPad Pro (which starts at $999). For upgraders, Apple has kitted out this year’s iPad Air with an 8-core CPU/9-core GPU M3 chip and offers it in four different colors: Blue, Purple, Space Gray, and Starlight, and in two different sizes: the 11-inch, which we’re testing here, and the 13-inch, which boasts a 2732x2048 pixel…

$99 From https://nomadgoods.com Features USB–C to USB–C cable, built–in Apple Watch charging puck, 100W Power Delivery, Kevlar braiding, electroplated metal connectors, USB 2.0; requires 20W adaptor (or higher) for multi–device charging THE NOMAD UNIVERSAL Cable for Apple Watch is a USB–C to USB–C cable that comes with an Apple Watch charging puck attached to one end. That means you can charge two devices at once; an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook at one end, and an Apple Watch at the other. The drawback is the price; Nomad is charging $99. That’s more than you’ll pay from Apple, where you can pick up a USB–C to USB–C cable and Apple Watch charging puck for a lot less. That means buying two cords, but Apple’s USB–C cable can carry up to 240W, compared…

$69.99 From https://civilization.2k.com Needs macOS 15 or later, 8–core M1 chip, 8GB of memory, 25GB of available storage Recommended 10–core M2 Pro chip, 16GB of memory, M2 Pro graphics IT HAS BEEN OVER 30 years since legendary games designer Sid Meier crafted the first Civilization game. One of the most influential titles of all time, it founded its own genre, the 4X game; eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Now in its seventh iteration, Civilization has grown enormously, but those four challenges form the heart of the game. You explore your surroundings, founding a settlement and sending out scouts; expand your capital by growing your population, spreading your buildings and using settlers to found other towns; exploit nearby resources to feed your population, build, train new military units and fuel technological…

Big changes are afoot for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac — and we’re not talking about the hardware. Instead, the look of the operating systems for these devices will be undergoing something of a revolution. In the case of the iPhone, it’ll be the first major alteration for a whopping 12 years. News of the changes were revealed by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s highly respected tech journalist. He said they will part of “one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history”, and added that it will fundamentally change the look and feel of these devices’ operating systems in order to bring greater consistency across the platforms. What’s becoming clear is visionOS’s influence. It would seem that the operating system for Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset has been…

APPLE’S FAMOUS iWORK applications are powerful, user–friendly, and free. Available on Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and across all platforms online via iCloud.com, the three iWork apps offer an excellent suite of productivity software. The individual iWork apps are Pages, a word processor and desktop publisher; Numbers, a powerful spreadsheet; and Keynote, for presentations. They can open their equivalent Microsoft Office apps — Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — and even export documents to MS Office formats. Each app has a huge range of exciting templates, so you can get started quickly and easily. When you’re ready to take things further, they have powerful tools to help you create dynamic and informative documents. They’re great for collaboration, too. You can invite others to work on an iWork document with you, and changes…

YOUR MAC IS pretty good at keeping itself in order, but occasionally it may need a little help. That’s where CleanMyMac (from $39.95/year, https://macpaw.com), from Ukrainian developer MacPaw, comes in. A complete suite of tools for keeping your Mac healthy and running well, CleanMyMac can clean your system to keep your computer running speedily, check for threats and vulnerabilities, run maintenance tasks to optimize performance, clean–uninstall applications, remove files left over by deleted apps, and identify large files you’ve not used in a while, so you can delete them. We’re going to walk through the app’s |key features, exploring the various ways it can keep your Mac running leaner, faster and safer. We show you how to use CleanMyMac’s Smart Care feature, which scans your Mac for potential problems using…

THE iPOD REVOLUTIONIZED the way we listened to music thanks to its innovative, intuitive Click Wheel and the ready availability of music in the iTunes Store. With the rise of the iPhone, though, the iPod was consigned to history — until now. While we can’t bring back the physical iPod, you can get the next best thing in the form of the My Classic–Retro Console app ($2.99 on the App Store). This lets you play your tunes from Apple Music, wrapped up in a look and feel that’s convincingly based on the iPods of old. Although it’s dressed up as a Game Boy–style app on the App Store, its most intriguing aspect is its iPod theme. You get all the familiar features from Apple’s music player, including the classic Click…

MOVE OVER HDMI 2.1! There’s a new video cable standard in town — HDMI 2.2 — and it’s about to turn up the quality dial to unprecedented levels. Set to make a big difference to the images you’ll see on televisions and monitors in the future, it was announced by the HDMI Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. But to discover why you should be excited and to better understand what it does, it’s worth rewinding a little. HDMI (High–Definition Multimedia Interface) dates back to 2002, when a handful of top tech companies (among them Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Silicon Image, Thomson, and Toshiba) sought to design a new industry–wide standard for transmitting video and sound between devices. It led to the unveiling of HDMI…

Back in April 2015, Tim Cook unveiled “Apple’s most personal device yet”: the Apple Watch. It was the first new Apple product created under Cook’s — ahem — watch, and some pundits expected it to fail. In an echo of the famous iPod criticism posted on Slashdot (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame”), some critics pointed at the better specs of rivals, and predicted an embarrassing failure. But by 2020, Apple was selling more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry put together. However, the critics had a point. Like the original iPhone, the first Apple Watch was unfinished. It was also slow, its interface wasn’t great, it had terrible battery life, and Apple didn’t seem clear about what it was for. But despite all of these things,…

$189 From https://a2d2.net Features RCA (phono) input/output, 3.5mm headphone jack, USB–C, Wi–Fi (2.4GHz), Ethernet; supports AirPlay 2, Sonos, Chromecast THERE ARE A number of AirPlay receivers, such as Belkin’s SoundForm Connect, that can be connected to wired speakers, enabling you to stream music via AirPlay from your Apple devices to your speakers. The A2D2 Stream takes the opposite approach, acting as a transmitter that lets you connect a wired audio source — such as a CD player or turntable — to your Wi–Fi network. The Stream supports AirPlay 2, so you can stream music to a HomePod or other AirPlay speakers, and works with other smart speakers, such as Google Chromecast and Sonos. The compact metallic box measures just 44mm high, 53mm wide, and 90mm deep. There are RCA input…