Macworld UKの October 2018 の目次

It’s that time again. Time for Apple to unveil its latest iPhones and get us all excited about the steady march of technological progress. This year, Apple had plenty to cover. There are three new iPhones, all of them with the powerful A12 Bionic processor and TrueDepth camera and Face ID system that was previously exclusive to the £1,000 iPhone X. There’s also a hot new Apple Watch Series 4. Over the following pages we round up all the major announcements made at the September 12 event. Apple Watch Series 4 When Apple introduced the new Series 4 Apple Watch, it said: “Everything about it has been redesigned and re-engineered.” And truly, this is the first Apple Watch to have major, obvious design changes rather than the minor tweaks we’ve…

The iPhone XR is technically Apple’s ‘budget’ phone from this year’s line-up, but you’d have a hard time telling that from specs alone. After all, it’s quite similar in specs to the new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. At £749, it’s also still relatively pricey, partly because so many of the innards are the same. The differences are mainly exterior, such as its LCD screen, its single rear camera, and its aluminium casing. All of which means that if you want to upgrade to a new iPhone from your iPhone X, you’ll probably be well-served with the iPhone XR when it finally ships on 26 October if you don’t want to go whole hog with the XS. You’ll lose the lovely OLED screen, of course, but you’ll get a…

At the recent ‘Gather Round’ event, Apple announced that its HomePod wireless speaker will be received several new features in a free software update. The features mostly involve improvements to Siri, to further enhance the HomePod’s ability as a digital assistant. The Siri improvements in HomePod are available now and include the following. Song search by lyrics: HomePod users will be able to make song search based on the lyrics of a song. You can ask, “Hey Siri, play the song that goes…” and then you can state the lyric. No word on whether the lyrics field in your iTunes library will need to be completed for this feature to work. Support for phone calls: Users can tell Siri via HomePod to call someone in Contacts, or to call a…

RATING: £139 inc VAT from fave.co/2O72fPN With the release of Toast 17 Pro (as well as DVD-only sibling Toast 17 Titanium), Roxio is sending a clear message that optical media is here to stay. Following last year’s purely cosmetic overhaul which added a dark UI, the latest version sports an under the hood tune-up. The application is finally 64-bit, in time for the release of macOS Mojave this fall, the last macOS to support 32-bit apps. That means Toast will continue working when macOS goes 64-bit only, but users won’t have to wait that long to reap the benefits. Aside from initial post-installation problems with the application refusing to launch after the first time, Toast 17 Titanium is the snappiest it’s ever been. I’m not sure if my issue was…

You may think you own that application you just downloaded, but chances are high you merely license it. If Apple has anything to say about it, that fact may soon have a much bigger impact on your wallet. Recently, Business Insider reported on a ‘secret’ meeting last year between Apple and some iOS app developers. Apple apparently encouraged the developers to switch from one-time, standalone purchases to a subscription-based model. The move is reportedly intended to give developers a more stable source of recurring revenue. It would also, of course, provide that recurring revenue to Apple as well, which takes a 30 percent cut on the first year of subscriptions, and 15 percent thereafter. Services have become a big part of Apple’s revenue stream. In the company’s last earnings call,…

MERGE TWO APPLE ID ACCOUNTS It sometimes seems like the Apple ID back-end systems run on ancient mainframes, given how inflexible the company is about allowing changes – especially in not providing a way to merge accounts, data, and ownership associated with multiple Apple IDs. I, like many who have kicked around in the Apple ecosystem for a while, have two Apple IDs, and use one for purchases and the other for iCloud stuff. I’d rather have one, as many of you would. Macworld reader Deb writes in with a related question that may have a better solution. She’s been using an Apple ID connected with her Gmail address for several years. However, her daughter set up an iPad and iPhone for her with a fresh Apple ID that generated…

Sure, there’s ample underground parking and free food, but the biggest attraction at any Apple media event is the chance to get your hands on new Apple products more than a week before they go on sale to the general public. I was there at Apple Park to see (and use) Apple’s latest iPhones and Apple Watch. Here’s what I learned. iPhone X, everywhere A year ago, Apple declared the iPhone X the future of the smartphone. From the perspective of September 2017, this is the future – and the biggest story out of the event is that all of Apple’s new iPhones are a part of the iPhone X family. Every single one of them has glass front and back, with edge-to-edge screens and Face ID. If you buy…

While we had been hearing for months that Apple would be updating its budget 4in iPhone SE (pictured) sometime this year with a new design and screen, it seems that this plan has been scrapped. In fact, any reference to the phone is gone from Apple’s website. Click on the previous landing page for the iPhone SE and you’ll be taken to the general iPhone page, where all mention of the iPhone SE has been scrubbed. In its place at the bottom of the pack is the two-year-old iPhone 7, which now starts at £449 for the 4.7in model with 32GB in Black, Silver, Gold, or Rose gold. That’s £100 more than the £349 iPhone SE, but you’re also getting a bigger screen, newer chip (A10 Fusion vs A9), better…

RATING: £599 inc VAT from fave.co/2Nvqom1 Apple at last has an external graphics processing unit on the hallowed shelves of the Apple Store, and as you might expect, it’s a looker. The Blackmagic eGPU (from Blackmagic Design) was designed in collaboration with Apple. With its brushed aluminium casing and the spot-on Space Grey colouring, the Blackmagic eGPU, MacBook Pro, and iMac could pass for cousins in a family portrait. It belongs. It also follows many of the same design philosophies that make Apple’s own products so beloved. It’s quiet and sleek, with its noise reaching only around 15dB at peak performance, thanks to a tangle of cooling tubes. It’s inconspicuous and easy to set up, to the point that it doesn’t even have a power switch. You simply plug it…

You’re planning on buying a new Mac laptop. 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 on which MacBook to buy. Don’t worry. That’s why we’re here. 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. The affordable choice: MacBook Air Longtime Mac users may remember when the Air made its debut back in 2008 as Apple’s entry into the ultra-portable laptop market. But times have changed, and starting in 2015 the MacBook was repositioned as Apple’s affordable laptop. Line-up Two standard configuration Airs are currently available. The difference between them…

With all the new features coming to macOS 10.14 Mojave, there’s one feature that’s going away when Apple officially releases the upgrade this autumn: Back to My Mac. As pointed out by MacRumors, beta versions of Mojave started to alert users that Back to My Mac will end soon. An Apple support document (posted on August 9, 2018) confirms that the feature will not be supported in Mojave. What is Back to My Mac? Well, it allows users to remotely access Macs to perform file sharing and screen sharing. It requires the Macs involved to use the same iCloud account and run at least OS X 10.7.5 Lion. If you don’t upgrade to Mojave, you can still use Back to My Mac. Apple has a support document on how to…

So you have a Mac but also want to run Windows? You’re in luck: shortly after the first Intel-based Macs arrived on the market in 2009, Apple released a tool called Boot Camp, which lets Mac owners install and start their machines natively in Microsoft Windows. With the press of a button, you can switch between Mac and Windows every time your computer turns on. Probably the most common reason Mac owners use Boot Camp is to play Windows-only games. For instance, PC MMOs such as Star Trek Online, Tera, and Star Wars: The Old Republic only run on Windows. Boot Camp is also better at running Windows software than virtual machines such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion, which are programs that simultaneously run Windows inside Mac’s operating system. Without…

At its ‘Gather Round’ event, Apple announced its latest high-end premium phone: the iPhone XS. As the name implies, it’s something of an upgrade to the iPhone X, with a handful of improvements but the same overall design and features. That doesn’t mean it’s a bore. Quite the contrary: for those who found last year’s iPhone X just a little too expensive for what you get, this year’s improvements might be enough to win you over. Here are the five ways the iPhone XS really differs from the iPhone X. 1. It comes in two sizes The iPhone X only came in one size: 5.8 inches. That sounds big, but the taller, narrower aspect ratio enabled by the slim-bezel design and removal of the Home button makes the phone considerably…

For the first time since its introduction four years ago, the Apple Watch has a new design – and we don’t just mean the addition of a red dot on the Digital Crown. The new fourth-generation watch includes a larger screen and a slightly bigger case, but still retains the classic styling that has made the Apple Watch a worldwide hit. But the beauty of the new Apple Watch isn’t skin deep. We can’t wait to get our fingers on that new display, but there’s way more to it than a few extra pixels. Here are six more reasons you’ll want to upgrade to a new Apple Watch and one reason why you might want to wait. 1. The design is better than ever If you look at Apple Watch,…

RATING: £660 inc VAT from fave.co/2wWLeAE Once Apple finally introduced support for third-party NVMe drives in macOS 10.12 Sierra, NVMe over Thunderbolt storage became only a matter of time. And for a while, the path to external storage nirvana was a bit of a rocky road, but the bumpy ride is over now thanks to Samsung’s Portable SSD X5, a ready-made NVMe over Thunderbolt 3 storage solution that delivers blazingly fast 2GB/s-plus read and write speeds The X5 is now the portable drive for multimedia professionals, or anyone who doesn’t like to wait for their files to copy – if you can afford it, and of course, have Thunderbolt 3. Design and features The first thing that struck me about the X5 is that it doesn’t look particularly like external…

Some months can be pretty slow for new Mac games, but thankfully, this isn’t one of them. We’ve a strong list of critically acclaimed indie gems, bigger-budget crowd-pleasers, and other offbeat curios in the mix. Into the Breach and Dead Cells, two of the year’s best-reviewed games on any platform, lead the list, while other picks such as LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2, Donut County, and Two Point Hospital are sure to find fans. 1. Into The Breach Price: £11.39 from Steam (fave.co/2LZ64FM) One of the year’s best-reviewed PC games made the move over to Mac this month. Into the Breach is the latest game from FTL: Faster Than Light creator Subset Games, and while that might seem like a tough act to follow, it’s more than lived up to…

Stop the presses, we have a new Mac mini rumour. Well, at least the germination of a rumour. According to Bloomberg’s very connected Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu, Apple is planning “a professional-focused upgrade to the Mac mini desktop later this year”, and “new storage and processor options are likely to make it more expensive than previous versions”. That’s a lot of words for not really saying anything at all. While Gurman and Wu are basically confirming Ming Chi-Kuo’s earlier report that the long-in-the-tooth mini will be getting an update before the year is out, they leave an awful lot of blanks to be filled in between now and its release, presumably sometime in mid- to late autumn. Even if they’re right about the new pro focus, everything else about…

It’s a good thing I’m a tea drinker, because we here in the Apple pundit business spend an awful lot of time trying to read the company’s tea leaves. At best, we can glean only the slightest of indications of what Apple might have in store; the company rarely makes public-facing moves, preferring to keep its cards close to its chest. In recent months, however, the company has actually done a few things that could hint at some of its areas of interest over the next few years. Let’s take a quick look at those decisions and what they might mean for the future of Apple’s product lines – both the ones it has today, as well as the ones it might have tomorrow. microLED machines The next big display…