Innehållsförteckning för June 2022 från Macworld UK

Apple has formally announced that this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will once again be held as an online-only event from 6 to 10 June, with free attendance for all developers. Apple’s announcement contains the typical language, stating: “Building on the success of the past two years of virtual events, WWDC22 will showcase the latest innovations in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, while giving developers access to Apple engineers and technologies to learn how to create groundbreaking apps and interactive experiences.” In other words, expect the keynote on 6 June to reveal iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and tvOS 16, macOS 13 and watchOS 9. Apple’s developer conference almost always takes place in June. The image accompanying the announcement is a stylized version of the logo for Apple’s programming language…

Apple has acknowledged an extremely serious fault afflicting some units of the Apple Watch Series 6, which can cause their screens to go blank permanently. It has agreed to service affected devices for free. A similar fault, known colloquially as the Black Screen of Death, has been seen from time to time with a variety of Apple Watch models, including the Series 2, Series 3 and Series 5. But complaints became more frequent with the Series 6 in the second half of last year, and Apple has now admitted there is a problem, while doing its best to emphasize the “very small percentage” of devices that are affected. Affected Apple Watches often appear functional in other respects, making the usual sounds when the user taps the screen or clicks the…

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is just a few weeks away, with the keynote kicking off the week-long event on 6 June. While it’s an event geared toward developers, WWDC is the day Mac enthusiasts look forward to, because Apple takes this opportunity to introduce the next versions of its macOS operating system. Though we haven’t heard much about macOS 13 from the rumour mill just yet, we do have thoughts on what we’d like to see in the next major revision of macOS. FIXES, OPTIMIZATIONS AND STABILITY If Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi came on stage and said, “macOS [insert name-of-idyllic-California-location-that-fits-the-macOS-nomenclature here] will feature ONLY optimizations and updates to make it the most stable OS on the planet”, dropped the mic and walked off stage, I’d be…

The arrival of the Mac Studio marks the first time in a while that Apple addresses a group of Mac users who have long been neglected. These users had largely turned to the 27in iMac to fit their power and budget needs, and Mac Studio gives them a headless Mac worth considering. The Mac Studio is in some ways a brand new Mac, and in other ways, it’s an evolution of Macs that came before. Obviously, the Mac Studio fills the gap left when Apple discontinued the 27in iMac, but at the same time, it’s also an evolution of the Mac mini and a call back to the Mac Pros of old. So whether you’re looking to upgrade from an old all-in-one or add a new Mac to your collection,…

Price: £7.99 from the Mac App Store Apple invented skeuomorphic drag-and-drop: you see things like that look like documents, drives, folders and images on a virtual desktop, and you can drag them to new locations, including nesting them in other folders. For around 40 years, that physical/visual metaphor created by the late Jef Raskin has remained fairly static in how it operates within the macOS Finder. macOS doesn’t offer a staging centre for drag and drop. The closest is creating a folder on the Desktop into which you’d drag items, but macOS limits the kinds of items you can easily place into such a folder. The Yoink utility from Eternal Storms Software might be some new growth at last beneath the Apple tree. Introduced over a decade ago, Yoink provides…

Price: £29.99 from fave.co/3OCUQaJ Batch processing is a powerful process for applying the same operations to a set of inputs – raw text, images, and more – as a set that’s cycled through instead of manually, one at a time. The first batch implementation arguably dates back to 1890, with the first punch card-based processing of the US Census. It’s a constant theme in modern software, particularly when dealing with a group of similar things, such as images in one file format and with the same starting parameters you need to convert. Realmac Software’s Squash is a single-minded batch-processing imaging app that offers configurable compression along with automatic application of image correction, colour and monochrome grading effects, and stripping out metadata. If you work with lots of images regularly, it…

Long after its initial announcement back in August, and following considerable controversy over an as-yet-released component, Apple is expanding to the UK an iPhone feature designed to protect children against sending or receiving sexual content. Communications Safety in Messages eventually launched as part of the iOS 15.2 point update in December. Until now, however, this has been limited to the US. The Guardian broke the news that Apple announced plans to bring this feature to the UK, although the time frame remains unclear. When enabled on a child’s device, the feature uses an on-device AI tool to scan all photos received over Messages for nudity. If one is found, the image will be blurred and the user will receive a warning that it may contain sensitive content as well as…

Apple has released the second developer and public betas for macOS Monterey 12.4. It likely mostly includes bug fixes and security updates, though it’s possible that it also includes hidden references to new hardware releasing at WWDC in early June. Developers can get the update through the Apple Developer website (fave.co/3EI841g), or, if you are running the beta, by performing a Software Update. To install the public beta, you must be enrolled in the Public Beta programme (fave.co/3g7Ld4O). Then go to the Guide section, click on the ‘macOS’ tab and then ‘Enrol your Mac’ in the Get Started section. Version 12.4 includes an important note for Universal Control. If you install 12.4, all devices that you want to use with Universal Control must also be updated to the latest betas.…

While Apple’s HomePod strategy has been somewhat scattered, with the original high-end speaker discontinued last year and the cheaper HomePod mini struggling to compete against the Amazon Echo and Google Nest Audio, Apple reportedly hasn’t given up on its smart home vision. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple is “absolutely” still working on a new HomePod, though it won’t be another standalone speaker. Gurman says the new device will combine a HomePod, Apple TV and FaceTime camera into a single “combination product will probably be at the centre of Apple’s approach”. We’ve heard this rumour before, but it’s been a while. Last April, Gurman reported that Apple was working on a product that combines “an Apple TV set-top box with a HomePod speaker” with “a camera for video conferencing…

This two-year Mac roll-out with Apple silicon sure has been fun, hasn’t it? Not only do we get to see how the M-series processors are developing, but we also get fresh takes on Mac designs and features. It’s been years since Mac customers have had something meaningful to look forward to besides processor bumps and a new laptop keyboard and the Apple silicon transition has made things exciting again. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Apple’s initial announcement that it would be switching to its own silicon. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop seeing new Macs. We know the M1 roll-out is done, and now we’ll start to see what else Apple can do with its Mac silicon, so we could see more exciting design changes. The excitement…

When I started working for MacUser magazine in 1993, I was assigned to a grey cubicle with an old Mac IIci inside. (The summer intern didn’t get the latest and greatest.) I don’t know how that was nearly 30 years ago, but here we are. Over the past few years, I’ve spent a little time buying a few old Mac models and getting them up to speed. Within five feet of me as I write this are a working G4 Cube, G4 iMac, Mac Plus, PowerBook 170, and even a Power Computing Mac clone. As much as using old computers can be a fun nostalgia trip, it also makes me appreciate what we have today all the more. You remember the good times, but forget the bad. As someone who…

Price: ¤29.99 (around £25) from fave.co/3MvNW54 Few pieces of Mac software can claim the history of PopChar, a utility that makes it a click and a hover to see the appearance of individual characters in fonts installed on your Mac. Released in 1987 for System 5 and revamped as PopChar X for Mac OS X 10.2 in 2002, many current users weren’t born when some of us relied on PopChar as a critical part of our daily workflow in PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and InDesign. (Or even Ready, Set, Go!) From its earliest days, PopChar popped. When you click in a preferred corner of the screen, the utility pops out, giving you easy access to hundreds to tens of thousands of characters in a given font in its palette-like window. Examine the…

Apple announces its big yearly operating system updates at WWDC in June. No platform is bigger, or more important to Apple and its users, than the iPhone and thus no OS update is more important than iOS. After a successful reception to iOS 15 in 2021, we expect iOS 16 to add plenty of new features, though without radical design changes. Nothing is really official until we hear it from Apple at WWDC, but rumours about upcoming iOS features leak out all the time. Here’s what we’ve heard about iOS 16 so far. RUMOURED NEW FEATURES Little is known about what to expect from iOS 16 so far, but the months leading up to WWDC in June are usually filled with new leaks and rumours. We’ll update this guide as…

While most of the phones you see on store shelves are six inches and above, Apple hasn’t forgotten about people who like small phones. It sells two different phones with small displays: The iPhone SE, which received a massive redesign in 2020 and an update in March 2022, and two models of the iPhone mini, iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 13 mini, which are about the same size as the SE. After the iPhone 13 launched in 2021, Apple dropped the price of the iPhone 12 mini to £579 and moving it ever closer to the price of the iPhone SE. But now that the new iPhone SE is here, which small phone should you spend your money on? FEATURES AND SPECS Here are the top-line differences in features and…

More than two decades after its introduction, Apple has quietly announced that macOS Server, has been discontinued. The end of macOS server comes just over 23 years after its introduction on 16 March 1999. The final version of macOS Server is 5.12.2. During the latter part of macOS Server’s run, Apple incorporated many of its features into macOS as part of a phasing out of the software. For example, the File Server, Caching Server, and Time Machine Server were included in macOS High Sierra. The command-line tools to manage Xsan (Apple’s storage garage network/clustered file system) were included in macOS Big Sur. Apple outlines which services and features are available through a support document (fave.co/3vb5JZA) announcing the discontinuation. There was a time when the software was an inexpensive way to…

The introduction of the Mac Studio was exciting for many reasons – one of which was the unveiling of yet another addition to the M1 series of Apple’s System on a Chip (SoC). The M1 Ultra, found in the £3,999 Mac Studio, brings an entirely new level of performance, adding to the dust that the Intel processors were already left in. It’s essentially two M1 Max chips fused together to bring double everything: 20-core CPU and 64-core GPU, 32-core neural engine, four video encoding engines, four ProRes encode and decode engines, and up to 128GB of LPDDR5 unified memory with 800GB/s of bandwidth. But is the M1 Ultra really twice as fast as the M1 Max? Data can give us an idea of how it compares to the M1 Max…

Apple’s two-year introduction of its own silicon in Macs may be wrapping up, but that’s only the beginning of what’s to come. Now that the chip cycle is in full swing, it’s now time for the next series of processors after the M1. And according to a new Bloomberg report, it could happen very soon. Mark Gurman reports Apple has started “widespread internal testing” of several M2-equipped Macs. Developers’ logs note that Apple is testing nine new Macs with four different M2 chips with third-party apps in the App Store. Testing of these Macs does not necessarily mean every model will reach the market, but the move does indicate that a decision on when these Macs will be released is close. Gurman notes that the Macs being tested include a…

Price: Free from the Mac App Store It happens every spring and autumn. For a period of weeks, countries that observe daylight savings time fall out of sync. For instance, in the spring the UK is offset by one fewer hour from the US than it is the rest of the year for about two weeks. The reverse happens in autumn. If you work or have family across international time zones a bit east or west of you, or you’re just trying to remember ‘how far ahead/back is Pacific Time, anyway?’ the free app Clocker provides those details at a glance – and some warnings, too. You populate Clocker with one or more cities or time zones around the globe and mark your most commonly consulted ones as favourites. Favourites…

Price: £19.18 from fave.co/3EMdyrL Apple’s AirPlay lets you stream audio or audio and video to other devices on your local network. This could be an embedded video on a web page in Safari on an iPhone that you stream to your Apple TV, or an album from the Music app on a Mac that has its audio playing simultaneously through several devices. Apple added support for AirPlay mirroring and desktop extension to the latest release of macOS, allowing Apple devices (at least iOS 14, iPadOS 14, or macOS Monterey) to stream to Mac models released started in 2018 and running Monterey. (Some features work at lower resolutions on older devices; see Apple’s support note.) That’s a lot of provisos. To wipe away Apple’s requirements and enhance compatibility beyond the Cupertino…

If you want an iPad, you have three basic choices: the basic 10.2in iPad, the more expensive iPad Air, or the even more expensive iPad Pro. The standard 10.2in iPad is the budget option, with an ageing design (big bezels, home button, Lightning port) and older processor, and the 12.9in iPad Pro starts at a whopping £999 and is geared toward only the most demanding of users. So if you want the most tablet without breaking the bank on a £999 12.9in iPad Pro, you have just two options: the £569 iPad Air and the £749 11in iPad Pro. The iPad Air was just upgraded with an M1 processor, making it as powerful as the iPad Pro. But a tablet is more than its processor, and the Pro model does…

WWDC is just a couple of weeks away. Unless there’s a dramatic break from tradition, Apple will preview its new operating systems – iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16 and watchOS 9 – while highlighting all the biggest features and design changes they bring during the keynote event on 6 June. While those of us who follow Apple closely always get excited about new hardware, these major operating system updates are a big deal – the digital lives of over a billion people can shift dramatically by what Apple chooses to do with its software. As we do every year, we’re going to highlight some of the areas we hope to see Apple address in its next big yearly update. It’s not as if Apple makes its decisions…

WHAT TO DO IF YOU CAN’T LOG INTO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT ON YOUR MAC Apple makes it simple to log into accounts for email, calendars, reminders, and notes run by other ecosystems, like Microsoft and Google. But you may have been bitten by some Apple/Google bug that prevents successful completion of a Google account login. This can occur either in System Preferences > Internet Accounts when you click Google and then click the Open Browser button, or in Mail when you go to Mail > Preferences > Accounts, click the ‘+’ sign, select Google, and click Continue. What you expect to see isn’t a moderately large empty dialog box with a grey spinner inside and a Cancel button at the bottom. You would prefer to see a page that lets…