Innehållsförteckning för March 2020 från Macworld UK

What a difference a year makes. Just 12 months after Apple surprisingly revised down its quarterly earnings and reported lagging iPhone sales, the grass is much greener on this side of the calendar. You might say Midnight Greener. For Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2020 (which includes the final three months of 2019), it posted record revenue of $91.8 billion, topping its own estimates and besting last year’s holiday quarter by nearly 10 percent. iPhone sales alone were up more than 7 percent, as the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro proved to be strong holiday sellers. That’s not quite a record – Apple sold $61bn worth of iPhones in the 2018 holiday quarter – but it’s the strongest results in two years. Of course, the iPhone wasn’t the only performer.…

Apple buys a lot of companies throughout the course of a year, with only a couple of them rising to the level of intriguing news. Last year’s purchase of Intel’s smartphone modem business certainly qualifies, as does the 2018 acquisition of Shazam, but for the most part, Apple scopes out companies that we’ve never heard of for reasons we’ll never know. Its most recent acquisition might be different. The company, Xnor.ai, might not be one you’ve ever heard of, but they’re hardly unknown. Since last summer, the Seattle-based start-up’s tech has been the brains behind the popular Wyze cam’s marquee feature: people detection. Simply put, it allows the $20 camera to distinguish between faces, pets and dust, and vastly improved its abilities, putting it a somewhat level playing field with…

We aren’t likely to hear anything about Apple’s new phone processor until September when the firm unveils the iPhone 12. But it takes years to design these chips and months to get production ramped up, so the A14 is likely already set in stone and has probably begun test production. Year after year, Apple’s phone chips have held the crown for overall performance, and despite some big promises from the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, we expect Apple to hold the crown when the new iPhones are released this year. One can never tell exactly what features or performance an unannounced A-series processor will deliver, but we can make some informed guesses. Here’s what we think we might see from Apple’s A14 SoC later this year. A jump to…

Apple spends a lot of time talking up its secret sauce: that combination of hardware, software and services that allow it to make what it believes are the best technology products on the planet. And, as users of Apple products, most of us probably agree that this is generally the case. But even as good as the integration between these three legs of the company’s stool is, there are still some places that it falls weirdly short. Hardware and software that don’t work together, services that don’t provide the necessary glue. Maybe they’re use cases that Apple doesn’t consider particularly necessary, or maybe the company just hasn’t gotten around to them yet. Whatever the case, they stick out like a sore thumb. Here are just a few examples of integration…

As battery cases go, Apple’s Smart Battery Case is one of the best around, with a slim fit, excellent monitoring and, of course, great battery life. But if yours isn’t working as it should, Apple might replace it for free, even if it’s out of warranty. And if it is working, you just got a free extra year of warranty. Apple has launched the Smart Battery Case Replacement Programme for iPhone XS, XS Max and XR, which covers all cases made through October of 2019. That’s basically every model ever produced, since the case only launched on 13 January 2019. There are two issues that Apple has identified: • The battery case will not charge or charges intermittently when plugged into power. • The battery case does not charge the…

Even the cheapest iPhone models now include a really high-quality camera, and there are dozens of free and affordable iOS apps available that will allow you to quickly add a variety of filters and effects to your photos. That’s fine for uploading a few selfies to Instagram, but if you’re a keen photographer and want to have more creative control over your work, then it’s worth looking at some more advanced apps that provide a wider and more powerful set of photo-editing tools. And if you really want to edit your photos in fine detail, then it makes sense to do it on the larger screen of a Mac. Apple does include Photos on all new Macs, but this app is primarily intended for organizing your photo collection, and only…

It’s hard to believe that 27 January marked the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the iPad. As impressive as that first iPad was in terms of hardware, a decade later it’s clear that the iPad succeeded because of Apple’s focus on native iPad apps from the very first day. Sit down and lean back If you go back and watch Steve Jobs’s keynote introducing the iPad, you’ll see the brilliance of Apple’s roll-out strategy fave.co/2tbLM7Y. To start it all off, there’s a big comfy chair on stage, something you never see at Apple keynotes. That chair allowed Jobs and other presenters to illustrate that the iPad was a comfortable device meant to be used casually. After revealing of the iPad itself, Jobs sat down and spent a very long…

When you tell someone that Apple made $90 billion in its most recent quarter (see page 4), it might sound like the kind of ridiculous number that you throw out there to emphasize a huge, unthinkable quantity, but no, the company literally generated ninety billion dollars in revenue. It was a banner quarter for the iPhone, Wearables, and Services, all areas that Apple spent a lot of time on in 2019. But as 2020 gets underway, it seems clear that there are other areas that haven’t received a commensurate amount of attention. Places that Apple’s products aren’t performing as well as they could – and not just in a financial sense. No company fires on all cylinders all the time, but with those previously mentioned areas holding their own, perhaps…

Well, here we are again. Apple once again announced its biggest financial quarter of all-time in January. During the three months that ended calendar 2019, Apple generated a staggering $91.8 billion in revenue, up from the previous record of $88.3 billion generated at the end of calendar-year 2017. The company also generated a record $22.2bn in profit. Sometime this decade, Apple’s going to drop a $100bn holiday quarter on us, and I’m not sure my brain can count that high. In any event, after dunking on us all via press release, it was time for Apple’s executives to do their quarterly ritual of spending an hour on the phone with a handful of questioning financial-industry analysts and a bunch of silent journalists. There’s always something interesting to glean from that…

The Photos app for macOS has improved substantially since its introduction, especially in the variety and sophistication of its image editing tools. On the iPhone and iPad, Photos lagged considerably. But with iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, Apple offers a catch up with its image-editing tools, even exceeding the Mac version in some areas. Let’s look at what’s new and how to best use these tools to crop, revise, and enhance images after capturing pictures. What’s new in Photos editing Apple changed and expanded the controls available while editing, while also improve the way in which each control is accessed and modified. Intensity slider. Nearly every tool now has an adjustment slider you can slide left and right or up and down, depending on your editing orientation. This allows fine…

Last year, I put together a list of features I hoped to see in iOS 13. And Apple listened. Okay, it’s not likely that anybody at Apple read my article and altered a single plan based on it, but the company did give several of the things I’ve been asking for. There’s still a lot left on the table, though. So many more features and significant changes that seem easy to identify (if not easy to develop) that would make iPhones more useful. I want about a million things for iOS 14 (multiple timers, for example), but many are small tweaks not worth getting worked up about. Here’s a list of the ten biggest and most far-reaching features I hope to see in iOS 14. Note: now that iOS and…