Macworld UK的February 2016目录

Sure, it’s just an iPhone battery case, but what marks this one out from the many others is the manufacturer: Apple. The £79 iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case is the first sign that Apple is ready to acknowledge that its phones are too thin to contain adequate batteries. The case adds 80 percent to the battery life – and about 100 percent to the thickness – of an iPhone 6 or 6s. Unlike most third-party battery add-ons, the back of the case isn’t flat, but has a bulge in the middle housing the battery. Apple claims the iPhone 6s allows you to surf the Internet on LTE for “up to” 10 hours, a figure that could reach up to 18 hours with the external battery. The battery could also boost…

Apple updated its iMac lineup, and a set of new peripherals alongside: a new Magic Mouse, a Magic Keyboard and an updated Magic Trackpad 2. These peripherals can be bought as part of the new iMac bundles, but they are also available separately, and work with some older Macs. The question is, how old can your Mac be and still work with the Magic Trackpad 2? In fact, the important factor is the version of Mac OS you’re running rather than the age of your hardware. We’ll look at the system requirements of the three new peripherals individually, but they’re pretty much the same: we just find that the Magic Trackpad 2 is a little stricter about the version of Bluetooth that it requires. Magic Trackpad 2 The official documentation…

£139 inc VAT • apple.com/uk The iPad Pro launched on 11 November, and with it came a new and Apple Pencil stylus and Smart Keyboard accessory designed specifically for the iPad Pro review. We’ve spent time with all three, but here we’re focusing on the Smart Keyboard, which is not only a keyboard to help bring laptop functionality to the 12in iPad, but also acts as a stand and a case to protect the iPad’s screen. Typing experience I’m writing this review using the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard, and am surprised to find that it’s suitably speedy once you get the hang of it. To begin with, I was making mistakes in almost every word, but it only took a few paragraphs to figure out the positioning of the keys…

By the time Apple began its event on Wednesday, we already knew most of the basics: leaks had soured the surprise of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, the iPad Pro, and certainly the long-awaited Apple TV refresh. However, one pre-show rumour didn’t come true, which left some people disappointed: The new set-top box isn’t a gaming powerhouse. It plays games, certainly. The addition of the App Store means that the new Apple TV is designed to run big-screen games, with Apple demonstrating a multiplayer version of Crossy Road, a new Rayman, and a rhythmic, family-oriented sports game from Rock Band maker Harmonix. And with the touchpad remote, iOS devices, gamepads, and other peripherals all supported, there’s some versatility to what developers can do with it. But the idea that…

Wow. What a year 2015 was for Apple. The 12in MacBook, the iPad Pro, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Beats 1 and, of course, the Apple Watch, have given us plenty to talk about over the past 12 months – and these releases do more than just hint at what might be coming up in 2016. Apple Watch Apple hasn’t exactly bet the farm on its Watch. It was launched with appropriate fanfare, but the company’s played it slow and sure since then. In store display areas are discreet, and overshadowed by its longer-established lines. Perhaps it realises that a fair few of us are waiting for the first revision. Expect that to come in 2016 – around April, when the original model will be 12 months old. If anything appears…

Apple will hold its next event in March 2016, at which it will unveil the Apple Watch 2, alongside the rumoured iPhone 6c and the iPad Air 3, according to reports. Rumours suggest that the Apple Watch 2 will appear at that event but that it won’t ship until April, a year after the first Apple Watch went on sale. Apple has held events in March over the years, including the launch of the Apple Watch and MacBook in 2015 and the launch of the iPad 3 back in 2012. It seems likely that the Apple Watch 2 won’t be the only new product to launch at the March event. A number of Apple products are due an update around that time. We think we may see the following new…

Put simply, a Retina display is any display to which Apple has decided to apply the name. Retina is an Apple brand for which there’s no specific definition. There are however, features that set Retina displays apart from non-Retina screens. The first, and most important is pixel density. When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 4, and with it the first Retina display, he described it as having a screen with so many pixels packed closely together that they were imperceptible to the human eye at a distance of twelve inches. He went to great lengths to explain that, because the iPhone 4’s screen packed in 300 pixels per inch, most people wouldn’t see them at all when the phone was a foot from their eyes. Since then, Apple has launched…

If you have a large iTunes library, you may have reached the point where you need to offload some of your media files to another drive. There are several ways you can do this. You can connect an external hard drive to your Mac, and use that to store your iTunes Media folder. If you use an iMac, this is probably the easiest choice. However, if you use a laptop, you may not want the hassle of connecting and disconnecting an external drive whenever you want to use iTunes. Another option is to use a network attached storage device, or NAS. This is a storage device that your Mac connects to over your network – usually via Wi-Fi, but you can also use ethernet – and that can give you…

£79 inc VAT • apple.com/uk Apple’s pressure-sensitive Pencil is a home run, exhibiting remarkable performance on the new iPad Pro, but that should not come as a shock. The two were engineered to work together and only with each other. The iPad screen recognises when you are using the Pencil, and in response, dynamically boosts its scan rate to 240 times per second (twice the speed it scans for your finger) to minimise latency, the time between the Pencil’s point touching the glass and a mark appearing on the canvas. Simultaneously, the Pencil’s sensors work with the display to detect its position, force, and tilt via APIs in iOS 9.1 that not only register current location but predict future movement. Press lightly to get a thin stroke, press harder to…

“What’s with that Apple battery pack?” If you’re the resident Apple know-it-all in your family/office/school, you probably heard this question more than once this week. It’s an appropriate one to ask when the biggest company in the world dropped one of its strangest releases: a battery case with a weird hump that promises to extend the life of your iPhone 6 or 6s by 25 hours. I won’t say it’s awkward, but had it been released by a company like Griffin or even Mophie, it would have a hard time finding someone to sit with in the cafeteria. But since it’s Apple, the whole world noticed. The timing of the release was curious in itself – on a random Tuesday, just 17 days before Christmas – but even if it…

The new Apple TV is more than just a ‘hobby’, it’s now a fully-fledged television system complete with apps, and even more importantly, games. Now the Apple TV is available online and in store, you’re be able to play games using the Siri Remote or an MFi (Made For iOS) controller. All this is set to turn the Apple TV into one of the best video games consoles on the market. While it’s tempting to think of the Apple TV as a games machine for casual and non-traditional gamers – the sort of device that Nintendo specialises in – the quality of gaming on the iPad and iPhone has risen tremendously in recent years. And with the new A9X processor and Metal software, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the…

As Apple makes more and more money by selling more and more iPhones, it seems like the company barely has to try to remain at the top of the heap. And yet 2015 was one of Cupertino’s biggest years ever in terms of innovation, with product refreshes almost across the board (sorry, Mac Pro), a new device category (hey, Apple Watch), and a streaming service to rival Spotify (Apple Music). But the shiny patina of new devices didn’t distract anyone when Apple missed the mark this year, as it sometimes does. From the weird staggered rollouts of the Apple Watch in spring and Apple Pencil in fall to Apple Music’s iCloud disaster, Apple wasn’t without its missteps in 2015. Then there were the head-scratching rumours, the indecipherable product decisions, and…

Macs were at the forefront of the desktop publishing revolution, bettering PC rivals when it came to colour accuracy and typography. The differences between OS X and Windows systems are less pronounced these days, and file compatibility is typically strong when using suites available on both systems, such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Nonetheless, the Mac still finds favour with the majority of designers. This is down to several factors: reliability; excellent niche apps only available for Mac (such as Sketch); and, frankly, Macs looking a lot nicer than PCs. (Designers aren’t shallow, but they do like style.) So you want a Mac, but is right for you? We’ve gone through Apple’s range and figured out the best machine for certain types of designers, but first want to cover some general…

From £299 inc VAT • apple.com/uk In all the hubbub of the iPad Pro, Apple TV, and iPhone 6s launches, you could be excused for forgetting about this year’s previous Apple darling, the Apple Watch. There’s been a lot of discussion of late over the Watch, in particular how it’s doing and whether or not it’s a flop. As someone who’s been wearing one pretty much daily for eight months now, I feel like I’ve finally integrated it into my life enough that I’ve got a good idea of both its capabilities and its limitations. And believe me, it’s got plenty of both. Watch this I’ve worn watches on and off for my life – I even went through a brief phase, and I’m not proud of this, where I…

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus provide up to 128GB of storage, which makes them ideal for home entertainment and storing all your music and video files – even those with 16GB devices can stream the latest music through the likes of Apple Music and Spotify. With music becoming more easily available, you’ll need a good speaker system to go with them, and you’re really spoilt for choice these days. There are dozens of speaker manufacturers fighting for a slice of the Apple pie, with speakers in all shapes and sizes, designed for both indoor and outdoor use. Many speakers talk the talk – but do they walk the walk? Here we explain various features you should look out for when in the market for a new speaker for your…

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Apple releases a new product that forgoes a standard piece of legacy technology. We read all about how said product is going to fail and how we can’t possibly live without whatever it is that got left off. Millions of people buy one anyway, unaware or unaffected by the change, and the rest of the industry comes around to Apple’s way of thinking. So when I read the rumour that Apple is exploring an iPhone that ditched the 3.5mm headphone jack, I barely batted an eye. Even if it turns out to not be true with regards to the iPhone 7, it’s a move that is inevitable at some point in the iPhone’s evolution. The universal port has been a function of every…