Macworld January 2014

With the latest iPhone models racking up sales, Apple clearly isn’t in any rush to make handsets with a bigger screen. To be fair, a change in screen size would have been unlikely for this year’s iPhone; we’ve seen the product undergo a radical refresh roughly every other year, so it’s no surprise that the iPhone 5c and 5s are incremental updates to the iPhone 5. Still, big phones are everywhere, and it’s only natural to wonder whether Apple will follow suit. When Bigger Is Better Of course, not so long ago the iPhone was the big phone. When the product launched in June 2007, it entered a market in which manufacturers had spent decades miniaturizing the large, unwieldy handsets of the 1970s and 1980s. Even the smartphones of the…

IS APPLE DUMBING DOWN iWORK? I’m in the camp that dislikes the direction Apple software is taking. The dumbing down of things makes it more difficult to get what you want done. If you fit Apple’s mindset, and don’t want to do anything other than the prescribed workflow, maybe it’s slightly more efficient. When you deviate from that, the simplified interface is now in the way more often than it is helpful. Maybe as I use the software more, I’ll get used to it, but that’s a pretty drastic change from the past, where the software just made sense. I don’t remember having to hunt so much to find what I’m looking for as I do now with the latest updates. My 2009 apps are working just fine. I will…

You may not know it to look at them, but the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display models are thinner and lighter than the Retina systems they replace. Lighter is always better in a portable—but factor in the new MacBook Pro’s increased battery life and the faster integrated graphics, and you have a laptop you can love. The 13-inch models aren’t the only new laptops in Apple’s MacBook Pro line. The company is also releasing a pair of new 15-inch models: a $1999 Retina MacBook Pro with a 2.0GHz quad-core Core i7 processor, and a $2599 Retina MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 CPU. Macworld will have a full review of these two laptops in an upcoming issue. The new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros look very similar…

Around the time you read this, power users with money to burn will have a present to buy for themselves, as Apple’s new Mac Pro desktop workstation—which the company previewed back in June—finally becomes available for purchase. The company announced the Mac Pro shipping time frame in October. The $2999 configuration includes an Intel 3.7GHz Xeon E5 processor with 10MB of L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, 12GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM (installed as three 4GB modules, leaving one RAM slot open), 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage, and two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs (2GB of VRAM each). Apple also offers a $3999 model, which has a six-core 3.5GHz Xeon E5 processor with 12MB of L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, 16GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3…

The new 21.5-inch iMac is a beautifully designed all-in-one computer. Its gleaming aluminum body, seamless ultrathin edges, and bright, LED-backlit IPS screen make the iMac a droolworthy desktop. Its design, though, is externally identical to the late-2012 iMacs. The updates are all internal. The $1299 entry-level iMac has a 1TB hard drive, 8GB of RAM, a 21.5-inch screen with 1920 by 1080 resolution, and a 2.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 CPU—just like the 2012 entry-level iMac. But whereas those iMacs used Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core i5 CPU, the 2013 units incorporate Intel’s fourth-generation Core processors, code-named Haswell, which are higher-performing and more efficient. Unlike other 2013 iMacs, the low-end iMac in this review uses Intel’s Iris Pro integrated graphics; Intel claims that it should perform similarly to a discrete GPU…

The new 2013 iMacs come in four standard configurations: two 21.5-inch models, and two with 27-inch screens. You can have these new iMacs configured to order (CTO) at the time of purchase with an assortment of options. Macworld Lab obtained an “ultimate” configuration of a 2013 iMac that combines most of the upgrades. CTO Configuration Our CTO 27-inch iMac takes the $1999, high-end configuration and upgrades the processor from a 3.4GHz quad-core Core i5 CPU to a 3.5GHz quad-core Core i7, a $200 option. The memory stays at 8GB. Our ultimate iMac upgrades the standard 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive to a 3TB Fusion Drive, a $350 upgrade. It contains an upgraded graphics card as well—an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB of video memory rather than the standard GTX 775M…