Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2017 in Macworld Australia

Some months ago, the publisher of Macworld Australia, Joanne from Niche Media, wrote an article describing the many challenges we face delivering Macworld Australia in an increasingly challenging business climate. That’s an environment I see as being hard work not just for us, but right across the entire tech publishing industry. When I look at readership audit results for some of the most widely read tech magazines of the last 20 years, there’s only one trend I see – downward. Publications that boasted hundreds of thousands of readers now measure their readership with two fewer zeroes, if they still exist. Macworld Australia has not been immune to this trend. In part, it is due to increased competition. It is very difficult to produce a magazine that delivers timely information when…

Apple released new Mac laptops at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference and you’d be right in thinking that this is a really good time to buy one. So, you head over to your local Apple store or you peruse the pages of Apple’s website, and you find yourself with money to spend but no idea of which MacBook to buy. Don’t worry! That’s why we’re here. In this guide, we’ll go over Apple’s current MacBook line-up, point out their differences and similarities, and provide you with the information you need to pick the right MacBook for you. MEET THE TOUCH BAR Long-time Mac users may remember when the MacBook Air made its debut nine years ago as Apple’s entry into the ultra-portable laptop market. But times have changed and, starting…

Apple CEO Tim Cook and friends gave us a full overview of iOS 11 during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. New features include sweeping new upgrades to Siri, a redesigned Control Center and App Store, and a brand new Apple Pay feature that lets you send or receive money to your contacts via iMessage. In addition, developers can now create apps that tap into your iOS device’s potential to create augmented reality experiences via the new ARKit. Plus, there are new productivity features for the iPad, including drag-and-drop capability and a new Mac-style Dock. WHAT IOS DEVICES WILL IT RUN ON? iOS 11 will run on: • iPhone 7/Plus • iPhone 6s/Plus • iPhone 6/Plus • iPhone SE • iPhone 5s • iPad Pro (12.9in, 10.5in and 9.7in) • iPad…

My mission with the Intuos Pro Wacom tablet was to improve on my digital art and it was definitely helpful. I’ll admit, even when I was going to open the box I was scared about what I’d have to do to get the tablet to work and whether I would be able to set it up without getting help. But it was really easy. The box included all the information I needed and I was able to install all the programs on my MacBook with no trouble. The website was relatively easy to navigate; my only real problem was when I was redirected to the German site with no explanation. The instructions on how to use the more complex aspects of the tablet once I had it connected to my…

For a while there, I was thinking the days of external hard drives, directly connected to my Mac, were numbered. Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have matured significantly and are now easy to use for both local storage and Time Machine backups, and cloud storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive take care of my need to carry data around or share it with friends and colleagues. But then, contrary to what had happened for the previous decade, the amount of storage in my Mac stopped growing. In fact, it shrunk! The last iMac I owned was equipped with 2TB of internal storage. But my desktop workhorse is now a Mac mini, upgraded with a 1TB SSD. While 1TB is a lot of capacity – the computer program used in the…

It’s been nearly two years since Apple updated the iMac, which may not seem like such a big deal, especially for a desktop computer. So, understandably, if you bought an iMac in the past three or four years, maybe you aren’t looking for a new computer right now. But if your Mac is older than that, you’re probably looking to upgrade, and it’s hard to convince yourself to invest in a computer that was released so long ago. Apple has finally updated the iMac, so if you’re in the market for a new computer, now’s the time to do some shopping. In this review, I take a close look at the high-end 21.5in iMac with a 3.4GHz Core i5 Kaby Lake processor, which sells for $2199. KABY LAKE UPGRADES, NEW…

APPLE’S DRIVE TOWARDS AN AUTONOMOUS CAR Over the past few years, rumours of a self-driving car have swirled around Apple with more intensity than almost any putative product since the iPhone. It remains unclear whether or not the company will build an entire car, but the fact that the company is interested in technologies that support a self-driving car is no longer under dispute. In a recent Bloomberg TV interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company views autonomous systems as a major area of interest, describing it as a “core technology”. If in fact any such product does surface, it will likely be more than a few years from now. But looking at the announcements out of June’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), it’s not hard to point to…

The next version of Apple’s operating system for the Mac is called macOS High Sierra. While the OS is mostly about software refinements, it also lays the foundation for future innovations in the worlds of VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). You can learn more by taking a look at our favourite High Sierra features listed below. This is followed by an FAQ, where you can get details on High Sierra’s release date, system requirements, installation instructions and more. A NEW FILE SYSTEM Ever since System 8, the Mac has used the HFS+ file system to keep our documents and directories running smoothly, but at last year’s WWDC a new Apple File System (APFS) was announced. It made it into iOS with the iOS 10.3 update, and with High…

At WWDC 2017, we learned that Apple’s rumoured smart speaker is real, and it’s called HomePod. Now the wait begins – until it ships in December. Sure, a few of us lucky souls were able to listen to a HomePod at Apple’s developer conference, but nobody outside of Apple has talked to one or picked one up. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s because this is a product that’s not finished yet. Apple doesn’t want to publicly commit to a feature and then realise it can’t ship it; the product as the company conceives it today may not be the product that ends up in customers’ hands in December. WHAT WE KNOW The HomePod’s hardware has to be nearly final by now. At this point, some aspects of…

When your Mac starts acting up, you’ll probably run through some common troubleshooting procedures, such as restarting it, running Disk Utility and perhaps performing a Safe Boot. Your repair repertoire should also include a couple of additional procedures that can occasionally eliminate otherwise inscrutable problems – zapping the NVRAM and resetting the SMC. ZAP THE NVRAM (OR PRAM) Back in the day, the standard list of quick fixes for random Mac ailments always included ‘zap the PRAM’. The P in PRAM stood for parameter (the RAM was just RAM – random access memory), and it referred to a small amount of special, battery-backed memory in every Mac that stored information the computer needed before it loaded the operating system. If the values in this memory got out of whack for…

Luminar from Californian company Macphun is a highly adaptive fully-featured Mac-only photo editing utility that can run as a stand-alone or as a plug-in for image editors such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture, Elements and Mac Photos. At launch Luminar gives me the choice of using it as a plug-in with the image editors it has found on my system or as a standalone. I choose my unusual workhorse, but Luminar informs me that my ageing Photoshop is no longer compatible, so I decide to go it alone. A rather unimpressive little screen then asks me to open an image to begin work. Conveniently I have a folder of scanned photographs from the 1970s that need quite a bit of work with colour balance and noise reduction. Boom! My first chosen…

For the past year, I’ve had a dilemma: having to choose between the 12in MacBook or the 9.7in iPad Pro. Now, the new 10.5in iPad Pro has solved those issues for me, making it the best iPad and the one most likely to replace the MacBook. The iPad Pro has many benefits because of its portability and versatility, but before the new model came out, I’d still err on the side of choosing my MacBook. When it comes to productivity and multitasking, the MacBook was a safer bet. The 10.5in iPad Pro is a step closer in that direction. If any iPad will ever replace your MacBook, it’s this one. SIZE AND PORTABILITY The 10.5in display may sound like major jump from 9.7in, but in terms of overall form factor,…

NordVPN is a popular choice among VPN users. NordVPN manages to create an interface that’s simple yet feature-rich enough to satisfy power users willing to dig a little deeper. When you first fire up NordVPN, you’re confronted with a world map and a marker for each country where it has servers. The map is zoomed-in by default, otherwise it would be too difficult to choose from the many servers located in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. If you don’t like the map approach, the list option summons a slide-out panel where NordVPN lists all of its country options in an alphabetised list, along with options for its P2P, Onion over VPN, Double VPN, Anti DDoS and Dedicated IP servers. FEATURES AND SERVICES NordVPN has a number of specialised…

Did you hear cries of regret and maybe a few curse words in the background during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote? If you did, it was from folks who bought a MacBook Pro in the past few weeks. You see, during WWDC, Apple revealed an upgrade to the MacBook Pro to replace the models that were released just last spring. Now, on the surface, the new MacBook Pro looks exactly the same, but all of the changes are found under-the-hood via performance bumps. And our test results do show an expected increase in speed, but it’s not enough to induce serious buyer’s remorse in anyone who recently bought a MacBook Pro of the previous generation – though it may spark a bit of envy. WHAT’S CHANGED? The first transition was…

GROWING APPLE DEVICE USAGE POSES CHALLENGES FOR IT MANAGERS As organisations increasingly allow employees to choose their own mobile devices for use in the workplace, effective management is becoming an issue. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) programs are creating challenges for IT teams as they struggle to maintain security of systems and data. Rather than managing a standard fleet, they have to deal with a range of different operating systems and configurations. A survey conducted by JAMF earlier this year found that, in organisations where staff have a choice of laptop, 75 percent of them choose a MacBook over a Windows-based device. When asked about mobile handsets, those surveyed reported that 79 percent of employees choose iPhones over other options. Overall, the JAMF survey…

The Apple Watch may still feel like a new product, but its already on the fourth version of watchOS. And each one has brought some pretty major changes. Version 2 brought nightstand mode and third-party complications, and version 3 introduced the dock, a new Breathe app and better overall navigation. However, watchOS 4, unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote in San Jose in June, is more of a maintenance release than a full new version. Still, it brings some cool new ways to interact with our favourite apps and adds a little fun to the screen we see the most. WHEN WILL IT BE AVAILABLE? Apple will release watchOS in the spring, most likely on the same day as it releases iOS 11 for download. CAN I TEST THE…

Fellow Macworld Australia contributor Kirk McElhearn recently built a mini Hackintosh; a generic PC styled like a Mac mini, on which he installed and ran macOS. But I thought it’d be interesting to build a new high-end Hackintosh. Why build a Hackintosh? My current machine is a late 2014 5K iMac and, while it works well for most tasks, it really suffers when I pursue my avocation: flying the X-Plane flight simulator. Frame rates can vary from decent to slow, and the iMac’s fan ramps up nearly as soon as I launch the simulator. In the end, the simulator is what really drove my desire to build a new Hackintosh: I wanted a machine that could run X-Plane really well, without a screaming loud fan, and hopefully be used as…

The days of wires dangling from our ears are slowly fading into obscurity. Apple AirPods weren’t the first wireless earbuds around – there were plenty of other options before – but they put the idea of wireless earbuds into the hearts, minds and ears of iPhone users. Sol Republic’s Amps Air earbuds lack the AirPod’s trailing stalk, which makes them look as if the wires were snipped off, preferring a more ‘in-ear’ look that resembles a hearing aid rather than earbuds. The Amps Air come in a small, but solid case with four small LEDs on the front. The case isn’t just for holding the earbuds. It’s a charger. When the buds are placed into their neat alcoves in the case, they recharge using the case’s integrated battery. This is…

I’ve just spent an hour or so in the studio testing out an iRig Nano Amp from IK Multimedia. So, it’s a mini amp that sits in the palm of my hand and weighs around 250g, not including the three provided AA batteries. I also get a TRRS cable to connect to my iOS devices, more about which shortly. First, I plugged my guitar directly into the unit and used the Volume, Gain and Normal/Bright controls to get the sound I wanted. I got the best effect by ramping up the Gain control, which makes the most of the inbuilt British tone stack circuit. It’s pretty impressive for such a small device and ideal for practice. There’s a headphone jack if I need to do it in private. For a…