Table of contents for July 2020 in Macworld UK

Apple CEO Tim Cook has released an open letter to address the current unrest due to the killing of George Floyd. A link to the letter, titled ‘Speaking up on racism’, has been added to the Apple.com home page – see fave.co/3f6Mc1y. The letter acknowledges the “senseless killing of George Floyd” but is primarily concerned with the longer history of racism and the way it is, in Cook’s words, “still present today – not only in the form of violence, but in the everyday experience of deeply rooted discrimination”. Cook’s statement comes on the heels of many such letters from corporate brands and their leaders. Compared to most of them, the statement from the CEO of the most valuable company in the US is modest (it certainly lacks the verve…

Anew report from Bloomberg claims Apple is changing up its strategy for the Apple TV+ streaming service. Until now, Apple has pitched the service as only for original content you can’t find anywhere else. Now, according to the report, it will bolster its original series and movies with a bit of licensed content. On page 78, you can see a six-month check-in with the service, which launched on November 1, 2019. After watching nearly everything Apple TV+ offers, we concluded that the overall quality is fine, and the price is competitive (£4.99 per month and a year free with most new Apple device purchases), but the volume of content makes it hard to justify. Competitors, from Netflix to Amazon to Disney+, make their name on original content but add value…

In the spring of 2019, Apple took the wraps off the service we all knew was coming: Apple TV+. It clearly had designs on competing with Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and the rest of the market. The first handful of shows were available on 1 November 2019, and a new show or movie has been released every few weeks since then. So how is Apple doing? Half a year in, is Apple TV+ a must-have streaming service, or can you ignore it without missing much? So far, Apple has landed somewhere in-between. If we were giving Apple a letter grade, it would get a ‘C’ with a special teacher’s note: ‘shows potential’. Apple is doing as well with overall content quality as any of its competitors, has expanded the TV app…

How to cope with a FileVault recovery key disappearing while you write it down FileVault is an extraordinary bit of macOS technology. Introduced years ago, it encrypts the entire contents of your start-up volume so that when the data is at rest – when your Mac is powered down – the drive is effectively full of garbage nonsense to anyone who doesn’t possess either the password to an account authorized to log in via FileVault or the special recovery key set when you turn FileVault on. When you use the Security & Privacy preference pane’s FileVault tab to enable this encryption, macOS prompts you with two choices: • Allow my iCloud account to unlock my disk • Create a recovery key and do not use my iCloud account In both…

Apple has released a small but important update to all its operating systems. The notes for version iOS and iPadOS 13.5.1, watchOS 6.2.6, tvOS 13.4.6 and macOS 10.15.5 are practically non-existent: “This update provides important security updates and is recommended for all users.” The iOS update also includes 13.4.6 for HomePod. Typically, when Apple is so vague about a security patch, it is trying to make sure users have a change to update without tipping off hackers. This latest patch is probably related to a new jailbreaking tool that apparently works even on newer hardware running iOS 13.5. We can get a little more information by looking at Apple’s security updates page. The security update details for all these operating systems is exactly the same: “Arbitrary code with kernel privileges”…

Apple has been granted a patent by the USPTO for “generating synthetic group selfies”. A patent is not a product, but if the software worked as described therein, it would allow multiple users who are not physically near each other to each take a photo with their own devices and have them combined into a single group selfie. According to the patent, the group selfie would be an artificial composition of individual selfies, and the individual selfies can be “still images, stored video images, or live streaming images”. As most patents are, it is written to be slightly vague and broad – a patent needs to be specific in order to be granted, but companies want them to cover as much potential ground as possible. It describes what this group…

Security researcher Björn Ruytenberg with the Eindhoven University of Technology recently published a report (fave.co/37o2QqT) detailing a series of serious security vulnerabilities in Thunderbolt 2 and Thunderbolt 3, collectively called ‘Thunderspy’. They affect every single computer with a Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt 3 port, including old-style port connectors and new Type-C connectors, whether the computers are running Windows, Linux, or macOS. How badly does this security flaw impact Mac users? Should you worry about someone hacking into your MacBook the next time you get up from your desk to refill your coffee? Seven Thunderspy vulnerabilities Ruytenberg describes seven vulnerabilities in his paper. They are as follows. 1. Inadequate firmware verification schemes. 2. Weak device authentication scheme. 3. Use of unauthenticated device metadata. 4. Backwards compatibility. 5. Use of unauthenticated controller…

Hot on the heels of the launch of the new iPad Pro and Magic keyboard, Apple is reportedly readying new iPads models at the low-end of the spectrum as well. A report by oft-accurate analyst Ming-Chi Kup of TFT Securities says Apple will be launching two new sizes of iPad later this year: a 10.8in iPad and an 8.5-to-9in iPad mini. Both of those sizes are bigger than Apple’s current line-up, which includes the 10.2in iPad, 10.5in iPad Air, and 7.9in iPad mini. Kuo says the iPads “will follow iPhone SE’s product strategy, and selling points will be the affordable price tag and the adoption of fast chips”. The iPad Air and iPad mini both use Apple’s A12 Bionic chip, while the 10.2in iPad is powered by the older A10…

Apple has unveiled what it’s calling “the biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X” in 2013, bringing it more in line with GarageBand while also adding powerful sampling, sequencing and editing tools. Most notably, the X.5 update brings, according to Apple, “a professional version” of GarageBand’s Live Loops that debuted in January 2016. As one of GarageBand’s most popular features, Live Loops let musicians ‘play, edit, and arrange musical ideas in real-time’ by either selecting from a library of instruments and pre-recorded cells or creating their own sounds. Live Loops works the same on Logic Pro X as it does on GarageBand, though Apple says tracks can be “further refined using all of the professional production features in Logic”. To complement Live Loops, Apple is also…

For a company with a reputation for sudden bursts of industry-shaking creativity, Apple’s pretty conservative most of the time. The company has a years-long product pipeline, and while we’re beginning to anticipate the 2020 iPhone, its hardware engineers are finishing work on the 2021 model while its component designers are pondering the chips and sensors that will power the device into the mid-2020s. For so many of Apple’s product choices, a decision now is likely to be a decision that sticks for years to come. Think of how many years it took for the company to backtrack on the butterfly keyboard in the MacBook line, even after it was obvious that it had made a mistake. More to the point, consider the continued existence of the low-end, two-port version of…