Indice dei contenuti per September 2022 in Macworld UK

A pple has released macOS 12.5, an update to the Mac operating system. The update includes enhancements to the TV app and Safari, as well as bug fixes and security patches. Here are the release notes: macOS Monterey 12.5 includes enhancements, bug fixes and security updates. • TV app adds the option to restart a live sports game already in-progress and pause, rewind, or fast-forward • Fixes an issue in Safari where a tab may revert back to a previous page Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices. This update is full of security updates, according to the macOS 12.5 support document (fave.co/3b0FXAf). APFS Impact: An app with root privileges may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges Description: The issue…

Apple’s next major update to the Mac operating system is called macOS Ventura. It’s slated to be released this autumn, with a beta version available to developers now and to the general public. You might be wondering about whether you should upgrade or not – after all, Ventura has a lot of new features to go over. To help you decide, here are five Ventura features – other than Stage Manager – that will change the way you do things on your Mac. MAIL: BETTER SEARCH & UNSENDING MESSAGES As I did my research for this article, I remembered an email with info that I thought I could possibly use. So I searched for it and eventually found it, but it took a while. Experiences like this make email a…

Apple doesn’t make budget phones. The closest thing you can find is the iPhone SE–updated roughly every other year and starting at £419. In the Android world, there are lots of budget phones, where a brand new model is £300 or less. They’re not bad, but most people would be happier with something ‘mid-range’, and that’s where Google’s Pixel a-series phones come in. Google’s newest budget phone is the Pixel 6a, easily the most comparable thing in the Android world to the iPhone SE: it’s a mid-range phone made by the same company that makes the software ecosystem in which it operates, and with a price of £399 it costs nearly the same. Our sister site TechAdvisor reviewed the Pixel 6a (fave.co/3oznLk1) and loved it, saying it “crams in the…

Waves of extreme heat have already passed across the UK, Europe, and other parts of the world so far this summer. While people are at the greatest risk from high temperatures, your Mac may be even more fragile. An iPhone or iPad will warn you when it detects it’s too hot before shutting down, while a Mac may simply suddenly power off. If it doesn’t power down, you may be running it to close to its maximum capability and putting a lot of additional wear in the process on components that might fail later during other seasons. Knowing the temperature is one thing. The other is how hot should your internal components run? Apple says you should only use a Mac when the ambient temperature – the temperature around you…

Every Mac sold since the mid-2000s with few exceptions included a Wi-Fi card, module, or chip that’s part of the motherboard. Thus, it’s surprising to any Mac user who fires up their Mac or is in the middle of using when they see a message that reads ‘Wi-Fi: No hardware installed’ in the system Wi-Fi menu; equally vexing is ‘Wi-Fi: Not configured’ when you’ve made no changes and were just using it. In both cases, a hardware problem could be the root. But you should run through other troubleshooting first. FIX WI-FI: NOT CONFIGURED It’s possible that network settings were disrupted or corrupted, disabling Wi-Fi access in a way that can be easily fixed through the Network preferences pane. To find out if that’s the case, follow these steps: 1.…

Migration Assistant has long provided a straightforward way to move your macOS set-up from one Mac to another. Instead of performing a fresh set-up and copying files, Migration Assistant can move over all your files, users, applications and preferences. Restart after migrating, and the experience is often just like your old Mac. But what if you want to move just a single user over? We receive emails from readers who are consolidating from multiple computers to a single one and want to retain separate accounts for family members ‘joining’ the shared Mac. Fortunately, Migration Assistant makes this simple, too. Before starting, make sure both Macs are as up to date with macOS as possible, at least within their current version. Apple continuously improves Migration Assistant, so having the most recent…

HOW TO RECEIVE TEXTS TO A PHONE NUMBER ACROSS ALL YOUR APPLE DEVICES The oldest parts of the cellular phone system are figuratively held together with chicken wire and chewing gum, and wireless carriers have little motivation to change it because it works and nets them billions upon billions of dollars. Apple created iMessage for an improved (and secured) messaging ecosystem and married it on the iPhone with ‘traditional’ SMS (text) and MMS (multimedia) cellular messaging systems. On your iPhone, you can send and receive cellular texts and iMessages. Apple extended the iPhone’s phone network capability to your other iCloud-linked devices many years ago to provide that same access to the non-Apple world of texting. To make sure it all works as you like, you may need to check and…

A long with iOS 15.6 and macOS 12.5 Monterey, Apple released watchOS 8.7 with bug fixes, performance improvements, and security updates. Since the Apple Watch Series 3 isn’t compatible with watchOS 9 this autumn, this is very likely the last update it will receive. Unlike iOS and macOS, Apple doesn’t release watchOS updates for older devices. The Apple Watch Series 3 was the last model with Apple’s older design, with a 38mm or 40mm square display and few sensors. Apple still sells it, though is almost certainly to be removed or replaced in the fall. SECURITY UPDATES The update won’t change much about the Apple Watch, but it does include more than two dozen security updates affecting all corners of the OS, from audio to the neural engine to Wi-Fi.…

Stage Manager is a new feature in macOS 13 Ventura for organizing your windows. If you work in several applications at a time, Stage Manager can be used to easily switch between apps and documents, saving you from the headache of finding the window you need. This article covers how to turn on and off Stage Manager, how to customize it to your liking, and how it works. It’s very quick and easy to set up. SET UP STAGE MANAGER You can turn on/off Stage Manager in the Control Centre, but you can also activate and customize it in System Settings. Here’s how. 1. Open System Settings and select Desktop & Dock in the left column. In the main section of the window, scroll down until you find the Stage…

Price: $29.99 (around £25) from fave.co/3aVcQyf If your work - or fun - involves robotlike repetitive actions taken on images, Retrobatch can put the automation in your workflow and leave you time to handle more creative tasks. The app, in development across 20 years, lets you create processing workflows for simple operations, like adding a border and changing resolution, up through massive chained sets of transformations using rules that let you choose one or more paths for an image to take. That power is controlled through visual connections, creating a flowchart-like set of connected nodes. Nodes are specialized, like applying an effect or resizing an image. Each node can have multiple inputs or outputs. A typical flow reads images from a source (a folder, a selection dialog, the Photos library,…

Each year, we take a look at the trajectory of Apple’s A-series silicon (which premieres in iPhones and is often used in iPads) in order to get an idea of how the next chip will perform. By combining what we know of state-of-the-art chip manufacturing and packaging processes and Apple’s past improvements, we can generally glean what’s coming from the next system-on-chip (SoC). This year, as we look ahead to the A16, making this call is harder than ever. The strongest rumours suggest that the A16 will not move forward to a major new manufacturing process node, and that it will only appear in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max – with the regular iPhone 14 models utilizing the same souped-up A15 in the iPhone 13 Pro models. What’s…

If your Mac is beginning to sound like it has a jet engine spinning up inside it’s not just annoying, it may also be a sign that something is wrong. There could be an issue that is causing your Mac to overheat, or you might have a faulty fan. Here’s what to do if those fans keep whirring even if nothing appears to be wrong. WHY IS MY MAC’S FAN SO LOUD ALL OF A SUDDEN? Having the fans going at full pelt isn’t a sign that things are necessarily wrong with your Mac, as the reason they’re installed in the first place is to cool down the insides of your computer by increasing the airflow around the components. If you’re running computationally intensive applications such as HD video editors…

MacOS treats networks connections as entries in the Network preference pane. When you add a hardware connection, like an Ethernet port that’s part of a Thunderbolt dock, the preference list should automatically update to include it. But readers find that sometimes entries disappear. This is particularly common with Wi-Fi for reasons that aren’t apparent. You can recreate a missing Wi-Fi interface entry (and that of any other interface). The steps are simple: 1. Go to System Preferences > Network.2. Click the plus sign in the lower-left corner of the window.3. Wi-Fi should appear in the Interface pop-up menu. If so, select it. (If not, read below.)4. Enter whatever descriptive label for Service Name you like; just Wi-Fi is fine.5. Click Create. This process should recreate the Wi-Fi connection on your…

If you have multiple Macs you want to use in the same rough space, it can be a hassle to manage multiple keyboards, mice, and other pointing devices. What if you could use a single set of input devices to control multiple Macs – and sometimes iPads? The latest OS updates from Apple offer Universal Control for Macs and iPads, a solution for sharing keyboards and mice in many situations. Where Universal Control doesn’t fit, you can try a hardware or software KVM, which can share a set of input devices among multiple computers. UNIVERSAL CONTROL Universal Control lets you use a keyboard, mouse or trackpad across multiple devices logged into the same iCloud account and that are in proximity to one another. MacOS Monterey 12.4 or later and iPadOS…

We live in a wonderful era for Apple laptops. The 14- and 16in MacBook Pros provide desktop power and stunning HDR displays. The new M2 MacBook Air has now joined the family, with a similar striking design and the Air’s trademark smaller size and weight. After a dark period where Apple struggled with flawed laptop keyboards, a painful transition to USB-C, and an increasingly frustrating relationship with Intel, things haven’t looked this bright in quite some time. That’s why, as Apple looks on proudly at the new line of laptops that it has fashioned over the past couple of years, I have only one request: more, please. LAPTOPS ARE THE BEST Let’s start with the facts. For decades, the overall percentage of new Macs sold that are laptops kept going…

It’s a day with a Y in it, so Apple must be getting sued. This time, the Cupertino company stands accused of profiting heavily – and anticompetitively – by giving its own Apple Pay service preferential treatment on the iPhone platform. The class-action lawsuit was filed in US district court in Northern California last month by the law firms Hagens Berman and Sperling & Slater. It complains that Apple allows its own Apple Pay service to access the NFC chip on the iPhone, while prohibiting rival services such as Google Pay from doing the same thing. This means there is only one tap-to-pay option for iOS users. The suit further claims that Apple makes a huge amount of money each year thanks to its exclusive Apple Pay policy, which enables…

With macOS Ventura, Apple decided to rename and redesign System Preferences. It resembles the one in iOS, but Apple didn’t completely make the two UIs mirror each other. The Mac and iPhone have different screen and user dynamics, so Apple made interfaces that take advantage of the platform while achieving a sense of uniformity. Here’s what you can expect to see. SYSTEM PREFERENCES IS NOW SYSTEM SETTINGS Apple changed the name of System Preferences in macOS to System Settings to match the Settings app in iOS. It’s still located in the Apple menu under About This Mac. Why Systems Settings and not just Settings, as it’s called in iOS? It’s to clarify that these settings are macOS settings and there are no settings for any apps on the Mac in…

Price: £1.99 from the Mac App Store A pple didn’t invent the concept of the clipboard – the place where an item goes when you copy (Command-C) – but the company has made great use of it across decades. It’s handy to always have a place to drop something temporarily. I’ve been baffled, however, since Apple declined to bring the multi-page Scrapbook from System 9 to Mac OS X 10.0 over two decades ago that macOS has never had a built-in way to retain older clipboard items. This has given rise both to dedicated clipboard utilities, like competitor PasteBot, and clipboardhistory features in unrelated apps. Paste is among the best of these, providing not just a potentially infinite clipboard history but also synchronization across macOS, iOS, and iPadOS at no…

Apple’s MagSafe technology presents a more efficient way of wirelessly charging compatible iPhones. MagSafe is the ring of magnets around the iPhone 12 and 13’s internal charging coil, which senses compatible accessories and magnetically snaps securely into place with the right accessories. It is supported by all models of iPhone 12 and 13. It allows certified and compatible accessories to magnetically clamp to the back of the iPhone, creating a strong and less wasteful connection. MagSafe charging can be twice as fast as standard Qi wireless charging for a number of reasons. First, it supports 15-watt iPhone charging, compared to the usual 7.5 watts from a Qi charger; note, though, that this is 12 watts for the iPhone 12/13 mini. Standard non-MagSafe magnetic chargers – also known as MagSafecompatible wireless…

When your Mac dies or an iMac or laptop Mac’s screen fails, you probably had files on it you want to bring to a new Mac. You have several paths that you can follow: External Time Machine volume: If you had an external Time Machine volume connected, you can plug the drive into a new Mac. Networking Time Machine volume: If you were backing up over the network to a Time Machine volume, you can connect to that volume from the replacement Mac. Dead display: Assuming attaching an external display to your iMac or laptop didn’t work, you can use Target Disk Mode to mount your old Mac as a volume on your new Mac. Internet backup: If your files can’t be retrieved through the above methods and you had…

In macOS you can choose to optimize your usage of local storage by having your Mac automatically offload files that it is already syncing to iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, and other services. The logic is that you might have limited local storage and dozens to hundreds of gigabytes of data you don’t need access to all the time, such as filed documents and photos from years past. You want them on-demand – with an active Internet connection – but not necessarily filling your drive. However, there’s a big catch: socalled optimized files are backed up only at iCloud. Because there’s only a local placeholder for the synced file, Time Machine, third-party sync and backup software, and Internet-hosted backup services cannot make copies. You might decide that’s okay! You trust the…

Finding files of a particular kind is a breeze using Spotlight, whether as a search in a Finder window or by creating a smart folder. You can specify a file’s type by using the right syntax in a free-form search or the correct option in setting up a smart folder. As a practical example, one reader asked how to find all their Photos libraries. The Photos app will list all the libraries it’s aware of if you hold down the Option key while launching the app. You can Control-click any of the libraries in the list and choose Show in Finder. But you have to repeat that for each entry. To create a file type search, start with the Finder to see how macOS lists a file’s type under the…