Table of contents for February 2022 in Macworld UK

Months after patching the iOS vulnerability that led to the infamous Pegasus spyware, Apple has announced that it is suing NSO Group, the organization reportedly behind the spyware, In addition to the suit, Apple is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices. The Pegasus spyware came to light after a Washington Post report uncovered a global spyware operation targeting iPhones and Android phones. The investigations, which were conducted in conjunction with non-profit groups Citizen Lab, Forbidden Stories, Amnesty International and other human rights groups, found that military grade spyware was used to hack dozens of phones belonging to “journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi”. Though it was extremely unlikely that…

With 2022 just beginning, it’s time to start looking ahead to the Apple releases we’re expecting in the next 12 months. And according to the latest report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s an awful lot to look forward to. In his latest Power On Newsletter (fave.co/3dyPlZt), Gurman outlines what he expects from Apple in 2022, and it’s nothing short of a complete overhaul of the entire catalogue, with the Mac leading the way. According to the well-connected reporter, Apple will be completing its transition to its own silicon and updating the M1 Macs released in 2020. Here’s what he expects to see: MacBook Air: Apple has long been rumoured to be releasing a dramatic overhaul of its cheapest laptop, with an M2 processor and iMac-inspired colours. It’s rumoured to release…

With macOS Catalina, Apple changed macOS’s structure on a start-up volume. Instead of a single commingled set of system and data files, with Apple trying to ensure the integrity and immutability of system files, the company split it into two parts: a system volume and a Data volume. The two are melded together into a ‘volume group’, an organizational method added in Catalina. When you boot macOS Catalina or later, the start-up volume appears in the Finder as a single entity; behind the scenes, they’re two: ‘Volume Name’ and ‘Volume Name – Data’. If you’re trying to erase your start-up volume completely – say, to sell it to someone or as a trade-in – you can make use of an easily overlooked option in Disk Utility labelled Erase Volume Group.…

If you have a newer Mac, it likely uses a speedy solid-state drive to store files, apps, music, videos, and a lot of other important stuff. But there’s one thing you may not know about SSDs: They wear out over a long period of time. Since the SSD is such a vital part of your Mac, it’s a good idea to keeps tabs on its health. While it usually takes a really long time to wear out an SSD – likely far longer than you’ll keep your Mac – problems can arise. (Earlier this year, there were various reports of Mac SSDs showing advanced wear after just a few months of use, But Apple said this was a data reporting error and fixed the problem in macOS Big Sur 11.4.)…

Mac gamers, contrary to popular belief, have plenty of top games titles to choose from these days – indeed, the most difficult part is narrowing down the options, and then finding the money to buy and time to play them. We can’t help with the latter, but the first problem is right up our alley. We’ve collected the best Mac games, dividing them into 10 categories. ADVENTURE & STORY GAMES 1. A Story About My Uncle Price: £11.39 from fave.co/3ICTZUx Every now and then you come across a little gem of a game and wonder why it hasn’t attracted a wider audience. Admittedly, Gone North Games isn’t the most well-known developer, consisting of a group of former students in Sweden, whose biggest hit seems to have been 2014’s Goat Simulator.…

The MacBook Pro has a really long battery life, but eventually you need to charge it. But for some owners of the newest MacBook Pro, that isn’t possible. Several users on Reddit have posted that the laptop fails to charge properly when connected to the 140-watt MagSafe power adapter. The issue is apparently limited to the 16in MacBook Pro and the 140-watt power adapter, which is included with the device for fast charging. The problem occurs when the MacBook Pro is shut down and then the MagSafe power adapter is connected. The laptop will make a ping sound and the connector’s LED flashes in a continuous loop. The battery doesn’t get charged when this happens, but if the battery is above 80 per cent, then the error stops. Editors at…

While we’re all waiting for the first M2 Macs to arrive sometime in 2022, Apple is already planning the third generation of its chips, which could bring a massive performance leap over the current generation. After some setbacks, DigiTimes (via MacRumours) reports that TSMC has begun pilot production of chips built on a 3nm process, which will likely form the foundation of the M3 and A17 chips. It was previously reported that TSMC’s 3nm road map was delayed due to the complexity of the process, likely meaning Apple’s next iPhone chip will be based on an enhanced 5nm processor akin to the A15. According to the report, the first products using the chip will appear in the first quarter of 2023, with volume shipping beginning in late 2022. That puts…

It’s easy to end up with piles of Word and iWork documents, PDFs, downloaded photos and other miscellaneous files strewn across backup drives and multiple Macs. Some of those items you may not have fired up in years – until you remember that something you need was never migrated to your current computer. In the spirit of end-of-the-year cleaning, you could consider consolidation through synchronization: get all the files you need either in a single place that has a copy of everything, even if other copies persist. Or pick multiple locations you want to have an identical set of files that consolidates documents in multiple locations. The task may sound daunting, but it’s relatively easy with Econ Technologies’ synchronization software. They have two versions that fit different needs. ChronoSync Express…

I brought up a Start Page in Safari 15 and a banner at the top read “Compromised Password.” I first thought that I must have been redirected to a website that looks like the Safari Start Page. The alert looked just like the kind of phishing technique that would lure someone in to entering the password for a site they weren’t visiting. But on closer examination and a little research, I realized it was legitimate. I’d never received this kind of alert from Apple in Safari, despite the feature first appearing in operating system releases in the third quarter of 2020. (That makes me lucky.) Because any legitimate security alert will be duplicated and impersonated by phishers and scammers, you can validate that it’s genuine by visiting one of the…

Price as reviewed: £32.95 from fave.co/3rRcTkD Default Folder X 5.6 offers sophisticated, easy-to-access file-navigation options that Apple should have built into macOS decades ago. It’s fortunate for Jon Gotow, its developer, that the company did not, because it’s given him a canvas to explore, and it has grown and matured along with the operating system. With Default Folder installed, all your open and save dialogs have a highly configurable overlay that lets you click icons to one side or use keyboard shortcuts to get quickly to the folder location you want to be in. Apple’s built-in navigation feels like a cranky old jalopy compared to the jet-powered race car of Default Folder. That overlay hides a massive array of useful and usable features, many of which I use every time…

WANT TO USE AN iMAC AS AN EXTERNAL MONITOR? YOU NEED AN OLD VERSION OF MACOS One of the most common reader questions we get is, “Can I use my iMac as an external monitor?” We previously provided an almost-comprehensive answer (fave.co/3a4jmi8) to the question before Apple restored a page on its site that offered technical details. The general answer is that only iMacs models shipped from 2009 to mid-2014 (the seventh- and eighth-generation models) had the right graphics circuitry for this Target Display Mode feature. Since then, many people have asked about what seemed to them a bizarre, unnecessary, and inaccurate requirement – that is sadly absolutely true. Does an iMac have to be running an old version of macOS as well to support Target Display Mode? Yes, it…

Apple has honoured the top apps of 2021. The winners included developers whose ‘apps and games were selected by Apple’s global App Store editorial team for delivering exceptional quality, innovative technology, creative design and positive cultural impact’. Here are the winners as selected by the App Store editorial team: iPhone App of the Year: Toca Life World, from Toca Boca iPad App of the Year: LumaFusion, from LumaTouch Mac App of the Year: Craft, from Luki Labs Limited Apple Watch App of the Year: Carrot Weather, from Grailr iPhone Game of the Year: League of Legends: Wild Rift, from Riot Games iPad Game of the Year: Marvel Future Revolution, from Netmarble Corporation Mac Game of the Year: Myst, from Cyan Apple TV Game of the Year: Space Marshals 3, from…

Barely a week after Apple sold more devices than we can possibly count over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday frenzy, Bloomberg started spreading gloom and doom regarding iPhone sales. According to the publication’s sources, Apple had alerted suppliers that demand for the iPhone 13 had weakened heading into 2022. As usual, any Apple report is headline-grabbing news, especially if it’s negative. But also as usual, these reports should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m not doubting the veracity of Bloomberg’s “people familiar with the matter”, but it’s something like a supply-chain version of telephone. Every year about this time someone writes an article about how iPhones sales are slumping because Apple is chopping orders. I’m quite sure that Apple is indeed warning that it may need to cut January…

You can keep an ongoing deep backup of not just your start-up volume with Time Machine but any qualifying drive you connect to your Mac. The provisos? It has to be formatted as HFS+ or APFS, and cannot be a Time Machine volume. But what happens if you don’t always have one of your external drives plugged in – how do you access its Time Machine backups if you can’t use the Time Machine system menu’s Enter Time Machine option with the volume open in a Finder window? Easy: use the backups directly on your Time Machine volume. With a Time Machine volume directly connected to the Mac, you can simply browse its snapshots list. Look through the dates and times in the snapshot names to find the one that…

Over the years, I’ve used iPhones of all sizes. My first smartphone was the original 3.5in iPhone, and I’ve carried every size screen at some point – the 4in iPhone 5s, the 4.7in iPhone 6s, the 5.5in iPhone 7 Plus, the 5.8in iPhone X, the 6.1in iPhone 11, and most recently, the 5.4in iPhone 12 mini. So when the iPhone 13 launched, I naturally ordered the one missing from that list: the 6.7in iPhone 13 Pro Max. That’s a full 1.3 inches bigger than the iPhone 12 mini that I’ve been using for the past 11 months, so it definitely took some getting used to. But along with the size and the weight – both not insignificant hurdles to overcome – I’ve learned some surprising things about the differences between…

Price as reviewed: £14.11 from fave.co/31D0VR3 The macOS menu bar can be a convenience. It’s great to take in information at a glance or click an icon that drops down to reveal a number of options you can choose without launching an app or a preference pane. But it bulges, and Apple is just one culprit. The kind of utilities we recommend in Mac Gems is another! Apple tried to deal with its own creeping menu bar overload in Big Sur by reforming many icons into the Control Centre. This change helped, but I can still find myself with nearly three dozen icons and indicators and a third or more are invisible because of an app’s menu blocking them. Bartender 4 provides an intuitive pathway out of this mess. For…

Apple gets a lot of flak for its ‘my way or the highway’ approach to, well, pretty much everything: App Store terms, product design, colours, and so on. While that’s an approach that definitely has its benefits – you can tell when committees start getting involved in the design, and the end result is rarely good – it also lends itself to a degree of obduracy that can be frustrating for any other parties that have to deal with the company. But that philosophy doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t willing to make changes when it needs to. Innovation is, after all, another one of the company’s hallmarks, and sitting on one’s laurels in the technology market is rarely a path to success. It’s just that sometimes that change doesn’t from…