Macworld September 2013

The iOS 7 preview that Apple showed off at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference sports an overhauled look. With its parallax animation, flatness, and 3D effects, iOS 7 seems like a brand-new mobile operating system, albeit one you already know how to use. But don’t imagine that iOS 7’s changes are only screen deep. Ultimately the dramatic visual changes may be the OS’s least exciting update. (For our in-depth coverage, see “Here Comes iOS 7” on page 32.) The previews that Apple provided during the WWDC keynote and on its website clearly indicate that though iOS 7 appears very different, it’s still basically the same operating system we’ve become familiar with since the original iPhone. The buttons look less like buttons, however, and there’s a lot more white space and…

IS $5 AN APP TOO MUCH? “How Cheap Apps Could Kill the App Store” [From the Editor’s Desk, July] brought home the sense of entitlement and “free” that seems so rampant today. As a design professional for over 20 years, I have seen a distinct change in people’s attitudes about value and ownership of one’s work since the advent of the Internet. Regardless of your industry, work has value, and the creators of such work should be compensated fairly. Lisa Wendt, via email I don’t like to pay for stuff if I don’t know what I’m buying. So the way I see it, the lack of a brief trial period for apps is a much bigger issue for the app economy than apps being too cheap. If apps came with…

Review RATING PRICE $1199 (lowest price) COMPANY Apple URL apple.com Most of the products Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June won’t ship until later this year, but the new MacBook Air is here. It didn’t undergo a dramatic, Mac Pro–like redesign. Even compared with last year’s MacBook Air—which brought Thunderbolt and USB 3.0—this new Air is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Under the Hood The biggest change is the inclusion of Intel’s latest generation of Core processors, code-named Haswell. These fourth-generation Core processors replace the Ivy Bridge chips in last year’s MacBook Air. The Haswell processors require less power than Ivy Bridge, a change that improves battery life in portable computers like the MacBook Air. Haswell also includes new integrated graphics technology in the form of the Intel…

While the Macworld Lab didn’t experience the 12-hour battery life Apple cites, our tests did show that the new MacBook Air lasts considerably longer than its predecessor. We ran two different tests on the new models, last year’s models, and a 2013 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. In the first test, we looped a movie clip in full-screen mode with Wi-Fi disabled. The new 11-inch MacBook Air lasted 6 hours, 6 minutes, in contrast to 3 hours, 34 minutes for the 2012 version. The new 13-inch MacBook Air model lasted 8 hours, 18 minutes, or 36 percent longer than the new 11-inch model, and 65 percent longer than last year’s 13-inch model. Compared with the 2013 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the 13-inch MacBook Air lasted 75 percent longer. We also ran…

One exciting aspect of the new MacBook Air release is the prospect of greater Wi-Fi speed and performance. That’s because Apple’s updated laptop sports built-in compatibility with the newest draft networking standard, 802.11ac, an upgrade of the current 802.11n standard. That draft standard (established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is also built into Apple’s newly released AirPort Extreme Base Station and AirPort Time Capsule hard drive. New Radio Spectrum Here’s what makes this new technology so fast: The 802.11ac standard uses the unlicensed 5GHz radio spectrum, which is considerably less crowded than the 2.4GHz spectrum, where devices ranging from cordless phones and baby monitors to microwave ovens can stomp all over your network. What’s more, the 5GHz spectrum provides many more available channels: 21 nonoverlapping channels in…

Ten years ago, Apple introduced the Power Macintosh G5, the first of a new generation of Macs based on IBM’s PowerPC G5 architecture. Unveiled during the 2003 WWDC, the G5 replaced the aging Power Mac G4 and carried the banner for the Mac market until Apple released the Intel-based Mac Pro in 2006. At the time of the G5’s debut, Apple claimed it was the “world’s fastest personal computer,” a controversial statement that held up with mixed success in lab tests at the time of its release. But it was fast, no doubt, and capable: The high-end model shipped with dual 2GHz CPUs, and as Apple’s first 64-bit computer, the Power Mac G5 could utilize up to 8GB of RAM. To add extra oomph, each of the three introductory G5…