Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 från Macworld UK

In August, Apple announced that it would be holding a “special Event” on 12 September. At the time of writing, it was expected the tech giant would unveil the next generation the iPhone and Apple Watch. Invites to view the event contain the tagline ‘Wonderlust’ and feature an Apple logo that appear to be composed of a sand-like substance, with parts of it being swept away in a breeze. The logo’s composition bred speculation as to what Apple had in store for the event. Although at the time of writing we don’t know specific details, Apple will almost certainly showcase the iPhone 15 line-up, which is expected to switch from Lightning to USB-C and deliver several iPhone 15 Pro and Pro max updates, including a new titanium frame and a…

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has revealed that Apple has added yet another Mac with an M3 chip to its testing suite: a Mac mini (fave.co/3EquN2y). According to his sources, the Mac in question features eight CPU cores (four efficiency and four performance cores), 10 GPU cores and 24GB of memory. Gurman believes this to be a Mac mini. The M2 Mac mini was released in January, so a new model this year would be the quickest refresh for an Apple silicon Mac. Another interesting but unsurprising note: it’s running macOS Sonoma 14.1, the first ‘point update’ for the as-yet-unreleased operating system. It’s likely that macOS Sonoma version 14 will release in September or early October, with 14.1 coming in October or November along with new M3 Macs for which it enables…

Apple’s iconic all-in-one computer recently hit a milestone: 25 years. Over that time it’s morphed from a Bondi blue gumdrop to a pastel slab, in between entertaining brief flirtations with white plastic and articulated arms. It’s also the oldest continuously updated Mac model, having survived multiple processor architecture changes since the days of the PowerPC. But even though Apple seemingly recommitted to the iMac when it released the M1-powered version in 2021, it’s now been a year and a half since that update, which also eliminated the 21.5- and 27-inch models in favour of a single 24-inch option. Apple seems to have elected to have the iMac sit out the M2 processor generation entirely, which raises the question of the venerable model’s future. Still, with a quarter-century under its belt,…

The monitor might be the most important part of your Mac’s set-up – after all, you can’t use any desktop computer without one and even the 16-inch MacBook screen can be extended to an external display twice that size. Because you’ll spend a lot of time looking at it, you’ll want to invest wisely. Not only will you want a monitor that provides a pleasing experience, but the quality of the images on the screen can also affect your work. However, picking a new monitor can be daunting. Not only are there many manufacturers to choose from, but there are also lots of sizes, resolutions and features to consider. Apple sells displays for its Macs, and you could go with its offerings, but its monitors are more expensive than alternatives.…

Price: £39 from fave.co/45uMolX For years, the name McAfee has been synonymous with antiviral and security software. Its Total Protection suite for the macOS continues to be steadily updated (version 4.19.0.0) and offers a good suite of anti-viral, anti-malware, identity protection, VPN, and scheduling tools. As expected, Total Protection’s bread and butter of antiviral and anti-malware tools remains ever-present, and it’s easy to download the software, install it, give it its requisite access to your hard drive through the macOS Privacy and Security settings, update the virus definitions, and go from there. The software allows you to perform a full scan of your hard drive as well as scan custom locations such as external volumes, schedule scan times, and control the actions of what Total Protection does when it finds…

One of the joys of Touch ID on a Mac laptop is using Apple Pay without needing an iPhone or iPad at hand to validate a secure credit or debit card transaction. This was extended to M-series Macs with the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, which allows a Mac mini, iMac or Mac Studio to add Touch ID through a wireless connection to an M-series Mac’s Secure Enclave module. But some readers have found Apple Pay disabled. In System Preferences/Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay, macOS offers the explanation ‘Apple Pay has been disabled because the security settings of this Mac were modified’. Several different causes could be the root, and Apple omits one for M-series Macs in the document linked via a Learn More button in the pane –…

IS YOUR USB-C DEVICE GETTING THE PROPER CHARGE? IT’S ALL SORTED OUT FOR YOU Many people found – and some still find – USB-C confusing because of the variety of data standards supported by different hosts (computers, mobile phones, and so on) and devices (headphones, other computers, gaming systems, drives, and so forth). But mixed in there was the issue that a USB-C cable has no preferred end and can carry power over any cable, often at high wattages necessary for charging laptops or recharging USB battery packs. When you plug in multiple devices that can provide power over USB-C, will you fry a computer or other equipment? Will their voltages combine for faster charging? If they’re competing to charge, which one ‘wins’ when you have two sources with different…

Remember those serious Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws (fave.co/3Za1Kdd) from five years ago? Well, Intel’s in hot water again with another serious vulnerability that affects years worth of processors. Known as ‘Downfall’, the vulnerability exploits a flaw in the AVX vector extensions of every Intel CPU from the Skylake generation onward until we get to the more recent 12th-gen Alder Lake processors. Macs with these processors started appearing in late 2015 with the 21.5-inch iMac, and just about every Intel-based Mac – desktop or laptop – since that time is on the list of affected processors. Apple switched to its own chips in 2020 rather than using the newer 12th- and 13th-generation Intel processors (though those aren’t affected by the flaw anyway). WHAT IS DOWNFALL? Researcher Daniel Moghimi, who discovered…

As we report on page 12, Apple is testing multiple Macs using its upcoming M3 processor line. Most recently it was revealed that the Mac mini with a base-level M3 is on Apple’s test benches, but that’s just the latest in a string of future Macs in testing. The latest is the most powerful yet: a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max. That’s the largest single-die configuration of the upcoming chip, and the most powerful to appear in a MacBook Pro – the M3 Ultra would be two M3 Max chips connected together and reserved for the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. A recent report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg (fave.co/481SdsQ), who has about the best record of Apple’s secret activities of anyone, details the specs of the new chip…

It’s time for everyone’s favourite development in the world of Apple tech: a port change. Yep, that’s right. After what will have been about 11 years, the iPhone is once again changing its charging port, this time from Lightning to the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C. (For comparison sake, the previous 30-pin dock connector, lasted just nine years, from the third-generation iPod to the iPhone 5.) We all know the benefits that the USB-C transition will bring: interoperability, less cable waste, and improvements in speed. But it’ll also cause some pain for those who have loads of Lightning cables lying around that will be, if not useless, then at least superfluous. However, even with the big change that is the iPhone’s charging port, Lightning won’t be excised from across Apple’s line-up. Along…

Price: £89 from fave.co/44EC0GX For many Mac users, running Windows applications is a necessity. Perhaps your employer uses software that’s available only for Windows, or requires the use of a website that relies on some Windows-only technology. Or perhaps you want to play Windows games on your Mac. Or maybe you need to test applications and services on alternative operating systems – the only way you can install macOS alongside Windows is on a Mac, because Apple won’t allow macOS to be installed on anything else. When Apple moved to Intel CPUs back in 2006 running Windows on a Mac became easier with the introduction of Apple’s own Boot Camp, which made it simple to run both Windows and macOS natively on a Mac. But times have changed and Apple…

Apple made it easier to resize partitions – logical divisions of a storage device into separate mountable volumes with different properties – several releases of macOS ago. A Macworld reader resized their main volume to 369GB to set up a Boot Camp partition, but then realized it was too small. They wondered how to fix this. In the right circumstance, you can simply follow these steps without having to back up the entire drive, erase and reformat it, and add new partitions. Always back up your drive before attempting to resize partitions in case something goes wrong, or you accidentally click to proceed on a destructive operation. 1. Launch Disk Utility. 2. Select the disk (not the volume) in the left-hand lists of disks. 3. Click the Partitions button. 4.…

Time Machine offers a powerful continuous archiving tool for files on your Mac. By design, Apple keeps it simple: it lets you select just a single set of volumes (and excluded volumes, folders, and files) on your Mac for all Time Machine backups, Time Machine can back up automatically only in one of three intervals (hourly, daily or weekly), and whenever Time Machine volumes are plugged in, macOS rotates among them across the specified interval. (For instance, if you have Time Machine Volume A and Volume B and are set to hourly backups, macOS backs up to Volume A at 3pm, Volume B at 4pm, Volume A at 5pm, and so on.) However, you can gain some control by mounting and unmounting volumes. For instance, say you have a 1TB…

Those of us who watch the M-series Mac rollout have been wondering what to expect with the highly anticipated M3 chip. Thanks to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, we have an idea of what the M3 specs may look like (fave.co/3Z4nJCh). Based on developer logs, Gurman has provided core configurations and Mac models for the M3 series. The M3 could debut this October, with Pro, Max and Ultra chips following throughout 2024. The actual specs could change during production, or the consumer-level chips could be reconfigured. Here is a breakdown of the M3 line-up based on rumours and speculation. M3: 8 CPU cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency); 10 GPU cores; 13-inch MacBook Pro, 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air, Mac mini, iMac. M3 Pro: 12 or 14 CPU cores (6 or 8 performance,…

A cross the ever-growing streaming landscape, the free trial seems to be going away. Once a staple of streaming services, you can’t easily ‘try before you buy’ with Netflix, Disney+ or many others. At least in the UK, the same is now true of Apple TV+. While the US site lists a ‘Free 7-day trial’ in its pricing information, the UK site now says ‘No commitments’, simply indicating that you can cancel your subscription at any time. Apple didn’t exactly announce the news, it simply changed its UK website (fave.co/3Es4ppb), scrubbing all mention of the free 7-day trial. The change doesn’t show in other regions yet, so we don’t know if the UK is just first, or will be an outlier. However, there are still other ways to try Apple…

If you’re wondering which Mac to buy, you’ve come to the right place. In our 2023 Mac buying guide, with expert buying advice to help you choose the machine (and configuration) that’s right for you. Apple makes six different types of Mac: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, iMac, Mac Studio and Mac Pro; and within each of those categories there are variations in the size, specs and features, so things can get pretty complicated. That’s where this guide comes in, helping you make the right decision. We are now three years into Apple’s transition from Intel processors to its own silicon that includes CPU, GPU and unified memory. This began with the introduction of the M1 in November 2020, followed by the M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra.…

Price: £67 from fave.co/3JHAQD1 Adobe Photoshop is for image editing like Microsoft Office for the office: absolutely dominant and in a professional environment you can’t get around it. However, if you aren’t using Photoshop and the Creative Suite, or Creative Cloud as it is now called, for professional reasons (and even if you are) the package has become very unattractive since the introduction of the subscription model more than a decade ago. If you only want to edit a few photos every now and then you probably won’t think that a monthly subscription for around £9.98 is worth it – because most of the time it is not. A cheap and affordable alternative to Photoshop is Affinity Photo, which was released in its second major version in late 2022. Here…

Unicode is a massive, sprawling effort that pairs a number to every unique character in a language, every punctuation mark, every math symbol, and much more. And nearly all of it is available within macOS, but not always easy to find. There’s a semi-hidden way to access special symbol sets in Unicode, and a somewhat obscure method of searching for specific symbols across all of macOS’s included Unicode characters. First: In macOS 12 Monterey or earlier: Go to System Preferences > Keyboard and make sure that ‘Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar’ is checked. In macOS 13 Ventura or later: Go to System Settings > Keyboard, click Edit next to Input Sources (under Text Input), and enable ‘Show Input menu in menu bar’. Now, in the menu bar,…

If you’ve just prepared yourself for an important Zoom meeting or have been looking forward to catching up with friends online, only to discover that the webcam on your Mac suddenly isn’t working, the most obvious response is to tear your clothes while screaming at the sun about the futility of it all. But before you berate the old gods, here are a few solutions you can try to get the camera working once more. CHECK THE CAMERA ISN’T BEING USED BY A DIFFERENT APP If you’re planning to use FaceTime but Zoom is still running in the background, it could be that the latter still has control over the camera. Try shutting down any apps that use the camera and see if that helps. You may also have to…