Inhaltsverzeichnis für September 2017 in Macworld UK

No new iPhone, no problem for Apple’s bottom line. The company just reported its third quarter results for fiscal year 2017 and they’re awfully good: $8.7 billion profit, or $1.67 per share, on revenue of $45.4 billion. That breaks down to 41 million iPhones, a slight increase from the third quarter of 2016, when Apple moved more than a little more than 40 million handsets. Sales were down when compared to last quarter’s 50.7 million, however. But the big surprise was the iPad. On the back of the new 10.5in iPad Pro released at WWDC in June, Apple moved 11.4 million tablets, its biggest non-holiday quarter for the tablet in more than two years. That’s an increase of nearly 30 percent from last quarter and 15 percent from Q3 2016.…

At first glance Macs might still seem expensive, especially when compared with the £300 laptops that you’ll find on offer in Tesco and PC World, but while those cheaper machines are built down to a price, Apple believes firmly in creating devices that are powerful and meant to last. A Mac you buy for university should quite happily see you through all the adventures of your course and still be something you’ll want to carry on using for a few years afterwards. But deciding which model is best for you can be tricky. Some of this depends on what type of student you are, and of course your budgetary arrangements will be a significant factor. To help you buy the right model we’ve gathered together all the facts you need…

As there always are at this time of year, there are lots of rumours out there about what the next iPhone will be. This year we’re hearing that Apple is going to release a high-priced, next-generation phone in addition to the expected iPhone 8 models. The idea that Apple might make an ultra-high-end phone with a huge price tag has rubbed many people the wrong way. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber did the math, and while this potential move makes a lot of sense, it’s also a gamble on Apple’s part. But if Apple didn’t release a next-generation phone this fall, it would also be risking the fortunes of both its brand and its most important product. The trouble with the cutting edge In the early days of the smartphone market,…

This summer, iPad users who are testing out the iOS 11 Public Beta are getting their first taste of the future of iPad multitasking. From a redesigned app switcher to an entirely transformed Dock, iOS 11 will make things quite different. While so many of these changes are welcome – I’ve been running iOS 11 on my iPad Pro since the very first beta release because I’ve been so desperate for some of these improvements – there are still some interesting wrinkles. It remains to be seen just what will change before iOS 11 goes final this fall, but here’s a look at where we are today, and where things might go in the future. The Dock is... different Since the early days of iOS, the Dock has been nothing…

Summer is a pretty great time to dig into a new game or two, and this month we’ve a bunch of exciting new releases. Epic Games’ Fortnite is the biggest of this bunch, as this cooperative shooter pairs shooting mutant beasts with building elaborate bases, but there’s plenty more worth considering, such as Serial Cleaner, Sundered and Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. 1. Fortnite Price: £34.99 from (tinyurl.com/y92n64g3) It’s rare that the Mac gets a big, multiplayer shooter at the same time as other platforms, so if Fortnite looks remotely appealing, you might want to jump on it now. Developed by Epic Games, the same studio behind juggernaut shooters like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, this online blaster blends in a bit of tower defence with its gunplay.…

The desktop is back. Okay, sure, technically the desktop never left. But over the last decade, we’ve increasingly focused on mobile devices: tablets, smartphones, even laptop computers, which make up the bulk of Apple’s – and probably other PC makers – sales. But this year, one message you could have easily taken away from Apple’s WWDC keynote is that there’s still plenty of love for not just the Mac platform, but the desktop computer specifically. Having just purchased a new iMac of my own, I can personally vouch for it: sometimes, there’s no replacement for a desktop. The full desktop press There hasn’t been much talk since that keynote of Apple’s commitment to the Mac. It’d be hard to argue against it, given that the company not only announced revisions…

Every 90 days there’s a new Apple financial quarter, a new raft of federally-mandated financial disclosures, and another hour-long conference call that lets us hear Apple CEO Tim Cook (and CFO Luca Maestri) take questions from inquisitive Wall Street analysts. Earlier this summer Apple announced its quarterly earnings and followed it up with that exciting phone call. (If you’d like to read a complete transcript, I made one.) Here are seven highlights that I gleaned from Apple’s quarterly exercise in extremely limited disclosure. 1. Cook didn’t defend the iPad For the first time in a while, Tim Cook didn’t have to express publicly his belief that everything will be just fine with the iPad. That’s because, for the first time in three years, iPad sales grew when compared to the…

Apple is keen to make inroads into the education market, and students are a big market for the company. To this end, the firm has an entire separate Education Store (tinyurl.com/yd9rjzw9)that offers a hefty discount on Mac computers and iPads. At the time of writing, Apple is offering free Beats wireless headphones when you buy a Mac or iPad Pro through the store until early October. That’s on top of the huge student discount you’ll already get if you shop there, so it’s well worth investigating. Most Apple customers aren’t aware of the Education Store, or don’t think it applies to them. This is a mistake because the education net is quite wide, and chances are you can easily pick up a Mac from the education store and get the…

A funny thing happened to the Mac mini recently. The single Mac model that’s the most long in the tooth surpassed 1,000 days without an update. But this shouldn’t be too surprising to Mac mini fans: that update, in October 2014, was 723 days after the previous Mac mini update, in October 2012. The quad-core Mac mini released in 2012 (and discontinued in 2014) still stands as the fastest Mac mini ever made, since the 2014 models maxed out at two processor cores. What I’m saying is, the Mac mini hasn’t been loved by Apple for a long time. And yet it lingers as an active Apple product, with no promise of a future update like the one Apple gave the Mac Pro in April. (“The Mac mini remains a…

In macOS High Sierra, third parties will have a more difficult time sharing any tracking information via Safari. It’s all part of Apple’s approach to privacy, and it’s not just lip service. While such policies certainly helps the company from a marketing standpoint, they’re also routinely turned into product features. The new feature seems to have the potential to make it harder for unrelated sites to follow you around the Internet. But some experts believe that, while a noble technology to deploy, the action has already shifted to a different front that Apple can’t help with directly. You are the product Apple has long taken the stance that it doesn’t treat our private data and online behaviour as property it can sell or lease to others. This notion is partly…

Night Shift is an optional feature (added in Sierra) that warms up the colour palette of a device’s screen, particularly late in the day. It’s believed that cooler (bluer) artificial light from a screen can affect a person’s circadian rhythms and disturb their sleep, and Night Shift is designed to stop this happening. It was first made available on iPhone and iPad as part of the iOS 9.3 update, but it’s since been added to macOS. Turn on Night Shift manually If at any point you decide that your Mac’s screen is making you feel tired or straining your eyes, you can switch on Night Shift mode manually. This is very easy to do. Notification Centre Open the Notification Centre sidebar by clicking the icon with three dots and three…

Apple has removed the iPod nano and iPod shuffle from its website, signalling that the company has discontinued the two portable audio players. The iPod line-up now consists only of the iPod touch. “Today, we are simplifying our iPod line-up with two models of iPod touch now with double the capacity starting at £199 and we are discontinuing the iPod shuffle and iPod nano,” Apple said in a statement. Apple moved on from the iPod as a featured product a long time ago, but until this summer the company still made the two iPods available for purchase. The iPod nano was Apple smallest touchscreen device, while the shuffle had no screen at all, relying on a circle of click controls that you use to navigate through a playlist of songs.…

If you were following Apple back in 2010, you remember the infamous iPhone 4 leak. The handset that introduced the world to FaceTime, the Retina display, and a stunning design that lives on to this day in the iPhone SE was plastered all over Gizmodo some two months before its formal introduction. Even in the age of rumour sites and Reddit, it was a rare red-faced moment for Apple. And from the looks of it, it has happened again. No, the iPhone 8 wasn’t left in a California bar by an absent-minded Apple employee, but a ton of information about the next iPhone was inadvertently leaked by an unwitting engineer. A pre-release version of the HomePod firmware was accidentally uploaded to a public server recently, and naturally, developers quickly downloaded…

It’s pretty clear that the HomePod was one of the star attractions of this year’s WWDC. For a product that had little in the way of actual stage time (and even less in terms of what was demonstrated to journalists) and won’t ship for several months yet, it certainly grabbed a lot of the airtime directly following the event. And in that, it follows in the merry tradition of products like the original iPhone and the iPad. But it’s hard to tell from the meagre time devoted to it just how important Apple thinks the HomePod is. Its ‘kicker’ placement at the end of the keynote would suggest that the company thinks the device is positioned to make a big splash, but the intense focus on music also seems to…

WHEN YOU CAN’T TYPE A CERTAIN CHARACTER ON YOUR MAC, HERE’S HOW TO TROUBLESHOOT IT Q In macOS 10.12.5, the lower case ‘y’ is not working in some situations, such as replying to email in Gmail, and when filling out some forms or comments on certain sites. How can I fix this? A My first reaction was that the reader needed a new keyboard (sorry), but that’s probably the last resort. I’d go down this list. Is it only in a browser this problem occurs? Try a different browser with the same sites. It’s possible some setting is grabbing or suppressing y, although I’d be hard pressed to guess what. A text-expansion program or system shortcut would seemingly consistently intercept that letter in all circumstances in a single app or…

Since the spellcheck in macOS is system-wide, you should be seeing this in more than one application if it’s happening in Facebook via a web browser. There is a language setting for your Facebook account, but it doesn’t seem to interact with spellcheck, which is a system function. Further, if you change your Facebook language, it changes its interface to use that language, which would be obvious to you. You should look in two places to see if macOS preferences changed: • In Safari or any app that lets you type, click in a field or a page to get a cursor and then select Edit > Spelling & Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar. This floating palette may be set to Automatic by Language. Set it to UK English…