Table of contents for February 2021 in Macworld UK

After months of rumours, Apple has announced AirPods Max, the latest member of its headphone line that brings the technology of its popular AirPods earbuds to a new over-ear design to rival high-fidelity offerings from Sony, Bose and Beats. And in a nod to Apple’s other ubiquitous wearable, the Apple Watch, the AirPods Max have a Digital Crown to control your music. The new headphones, which come in five colours to match the iPad Air 4 and cost a whopping £549, include all of the features Apple has brought to the AirPods and AirPods Pro, including active noise cancellation, Transparency mode and spatial audio. The somewhat large cups are wrapped in a ‘breathable knit mesh canopy’ that spans the stainless-steel headband and is designed ‘to distribute weight and reduce on-head…

In a blog post last month, Microsoft said that the core apps of Office 365 – Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word – are now Universal apps that run natively on either Intel or Apple silicon. To install the updated apps, check the Mac App Store, or open an Office app, click the Help menu and select Check for Updates. A Universal version of Microsoft Teams is still under development. In the meantime, Teams runs under Rosetta on Apple silicon Macs. Microsoft also previewed many new features that are coming within a few weeks and in the early part of 2021. An upcoming update to Outlook will support iCloud and UI enhancements to match the look of macOS Big Sur. In January, Microsoft will release a revamped Office Start, which…

Over time, your Mac probably accumulates a lot of cruft. Old applications you no longer use, data you have no use for, a desktop full of icons (only four of which you actually ever use)... you know what I mean. With so many people working from home lately, the problem has only got worse. Now is as good a time as any to tidy up your Mac, freeing up storage space and probably CPU cycles and RAM in the process. Here are a few tips to make quick work of your Mac ‘spring cleaning’. OPTIMIZE STORAGE Open the Storage Management app, either by using Spotlight (Commandspace) or by clicking the Apple logo in the upper left of the menu bar, choosing About This Mac, clicking the Storage tab, then Manage.…

Price: £749 from fave.co/2WzknYB Size matters, and for the past four years Apple fans with small hands have been crying out for the company to make an iPhone they can hold comfortably. The SE (2016) was the last 4in iPhone – most likely last in the sense of ‘final ever’, rather than just ‘most recent’ – and nothing since has come close to that device’s combination of portability and ease of use. But this is the year of plenty, as far as iPhones go, and there’s now something for everyone: like a 20th-century rugby union team, Apple’s smartphone department welcomes all shapes and sizes. And the prop-forward iPhone 12 Pro Max has a scrum-half scurrying along behind it. The 12 mini certainly isn’t a 4in phone – its screen measures…

When it comes to Apple differentiating itself from its Big Tech rivals, there’s one area in which the company has spent a lot of time touting its record: security and privacy. From the App Store to HomeKit, Apple talks a lot about making sure that your data stays yours. This might seem like a no-brainer. After all, we trust our devices with the most intimate details of our lives and we live those lives increasingly online. But while we might think about very obvious places that security is important (like making strong passwords or using two-factor authentication), there are plenty of other ways that our private data can leak out. Sometimes that means making smaller changes, ones that may not be as understandable or as easily explainable to the average…

Apple’s new M1-powered MacBooks have made a whole lot of noise in the industry since their launch just a month ago, but according to a new rumour, we’ve just scratched the surface of what Apple’s new silicon can do. Bloomberg reports that Apple is hard at work on the chips that will power the next round of Apple silicon Macs and the top-of-the-line version could have as many as 32 high-performance cores. That’s quite a step up from the current M1 chip, which has four high-performance cores and still outperforms nearly every Mac that came before it. The high-end chip is reportedly targeted for the launch of ‘a new half-sized Mac Pro’ in 2022. Apple sells the current Mac Pro with a 28-core Xeon processor for £12,499. On the consumer…

It’s as regular as the turning of the seasons. Apple announces a new product and then the complaints that it’s overpriced start rolling in. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that selling a pair of headphones for £549 does seem a bit much. Will it succeed? That remains to be seen – and Apple sometimes does misjudge its prices, as happened with the original HomePod. But in general, you should not be surprised about Apple selling a product for a high price. Its pricing strategy shifts from product to product and from year to year, but it’s worth keeping in mind some basic rules of Apple pricing. SEEK BARGAINS ELSEWHERE Rule 1: Apple will never be the low-price leader in a category. While the company’s critics will claim its…

When you turn on your Mac, various apps, add-ons and invisible background processes start running all by themselves. This is usually what you want, but you may sometimes see items running that you don’t recall adding yourself. Where do they come from? Because such items can increase your Mac’s start-up time and may decrease its performance, you’ll want to make sure your Mac is loading only items that are useful to you. Here’s a quick primer on the various kinds of start-up and login items and how to manage them. LOGIN ITEMS Open System Preferences and click on Users & Groups, then click the Login Items tab. You’ll see a list of apps (and even files and folders) that open every time you log in. This list is different for…

Price: £129 from fave.co/37C096S The best thing I can say about the MagSafe Duo charger is that it does what it’s supported to do: charge your iPhone 12 and Apple Watch at the same time. But if you’re looking for a revolutionary MagSafe charging experience – or quite frankly, even a good one – you should probably wait for something better and cheaper to come along. At £129, you should expect the MagSafe Duo to bring a level of charging akin to the fabled AirPower charger, which promised a new charging solution that, according to Phil Schiller, would “actually help the entire industry move forward”. The MagSafe Duo doesn’t do that. If anything, it’s a step backwards. The MagSafe Duo charger is very pocketable and clearly made with travel in…

HOW TO TAKE PHOTOS OF PARTICULAR PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR PHOTOS LIBRARY Let’s face it: sometimes you may need to cut someone out of your life – not just in the walking-around world, but in the digital one. Because of the efficiency and ability to collect and store images and videos indefinitely, you can have constant unwanted visual reminders of an ex or exes pervading your media library, or of family members and friends who are no longer in your life. If you’ve lost someone dear, you may also want to remove their images from your Photos library and retain them elsewhere. This is certainly in part because of Apple’s desire to help us relive wonderful moments from our past, which can include celebrating past birthdays of people now dead…

2020 delivered a host of improvements to Apple’s silicon offerings, including the A14 Bionic and M1 processors, and it appears that the company is looking to bring even more components in-house. A recent report from Bloomberg claims that Apple has begun working on its first cellular modem to bring 5G to its growing system-on-chip components. The development of a 5G modem isn’t a surprise, as Apple paid a billion dollars on the remains of Intel’s smartphone modem chip business back in 2019. According to the report by Mark Gurman, Apple senior vice president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji told attendees at a recent town hall that Apple “kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition”. Development will likely take years to…

Price: £999 from fave.co/3h8sDrP When Apple said it would start producing Macs with its own system-on-chip processors, custom CPU and GPU silicon (and a bunch of other stuff) to replace parts from Intel and AMD, we figured it would be good. I never expected it would be this good. Looking at the incredible performance of Apple’s A-series SoCs for iPhones and iPads, one could extrapolate to a laptop chip that offers really good efficiency and performance. To say that Apple delivered would be the understatement of the year. The MacBook Air with the new M1 processor so absolutely and thoroughly trounces the Intel version released earlier this year (with Intel’s ‘Ice Lake’ Y-series CPU/ GPU) that it defies belief. Unfortunately, Apple changed practically nothing else about the MacBook Air. This…

Apple’s new M1 processor took the laptop world by storm, with many proclaiming it had ended the PC’s whole career. Hyperbole and irrational fan boy flexing aside, Apple’s M1 is indeed a powerful chip. But to get a better feel against its contemporaries we sat down and retested a pile of current Windows 10 laptops to get an idea where the 13in MacBook Air (M1) lands in the pecking order of laptops. THE LAPTOPS WE TESTED Apple’s 13in MacBook Pro (M1) features its brand-new M1 Arm-based SoC/CPU, a 512GB custom SSD, 16GB of LPDDR4X/4267 memory, a 13.3in 2,560x1,600 screen and lap weight of 1.4kg. For our PC comparisons, we decided to pick from laptops that are similar in size and weight: • MSI’s Prestige 14 Evo is equipped with a…

2020 was a wild and unpredictable year for smartphones. Samsung started the year by shipping its most expensive phone ever in the S20 Ultra and finished with one of its best bargains in the Galaxy S20 FE. Google dropped its flagship Pixel 5 to the mid-range and delivered its best design ever, while a OnePlus phone topped a grand for the first time. Plus Apple shipped its smallest iPhone since the iPhone 5. And everything came with 5G on board. But amid all that, which phone emerged from the chaos as the champion of 2020? THE PHONES Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra: The Galaxy Note20 Ultra is Samsung’s best phone to date even if it has a slightly inferior camera and a smaller battery than the S20 Ultra. OnePlus 8 Pro:…