Macworld April 2014

Think platform fragmentation is something that only Android users need to worry about? Over at Sophos’s NakedSecurity blog (go.macworld.com/naksec), Chester Wisniewski thinks Mac users should worry, too. Why? Because with the increasing pace of OS X updates, users who don’t or can’t update to the latest version of Mac OS may be left vulnerable to security exploits. Wisniewski claims that “Apple appears to have stopped releasing security updates for OS X 10.6.8, 10.7.5, and 10.8.5.” But before you fly into a panic and start yanking the power cords out of all your old Macs, let’s take a closer look at Wisniewski’s assertions. Enterprise Focus First of all, Wisniewski’s examples come largely from the enterprise market. According to the figures he posts, 82 percent of enterprise Mac users are at risk…

In this issue, we delve into iLife (see page 46) and iPhone photography (see page 37), while our readers share the ways they use their Macs and iOS devices to make music, create art, and cut together movies. GARAGEBAND AND iMOVIE LESSONS My wife and I jam, and we experimented with GarageBand back in the early Intel days. We even bought a Lexicon interface to get our guitars and mics into the mix. Our new quad-core i7 with fusion drive and 8 gigs of RAM may just overcome that propagation delay. Now the only question is where did we put that Lexicon gizmo?—TheHeeNow, via Macworld.com In 2005 I made a DVD on my G5 without having to read any help files for iMovie. Yesterday I wanted to edit a short…

News and Analysis About Macs, OS X, and Apple In the January issue (page 16), we reviewed the $1299 entry-level 2013 iMac, the first of the new iMac models we could get our hands on. And now that we’ve brought the other three standardconfiguration iMacs into the Macworld Lab to test, we’ve taken a good look at the rest of Apple’s iMac line. All four iMacs have a quad-core Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor, 8GB of memory, and a 1TB hard drive. The 21.5-inch units have 5400-rpm drives, while the 27-inch iMacs come with 7200-rpm drives. The memory in the 21.5-inch iMacs is not user-upgradable, whereas each 27-inch iMac ships with memory in just two of its four user-accessible DRAM slots. The $1499 21.5-inch model carries a 2.9GHz quad-core Core…

Optical cables that connect peripherals to the Thunderbolt 2 ports in newer Macs are becoming both longer and more expensive. Other World Computing now sells, for $899, a 30-meter Thunderbolt 2 optical cable (go.macworld.com/owctb30) that can carry 4K video streams from a Mac to a 4K monitor. OWC also offers a 10-meter version for $319, and a 20-meter one for $619. At the CES 2014 trade show, Corning demonstrated optical cables stretching 200 feet, or 61 meters, that are also Thunderbolt 2 compatible. The technology transfers data at speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second. Thunderbolt cables come in optical and copper varieties. For longer distances, optical offers faster data transfers but costs more. Optical cables require a power source, too, whereas copper cables carry power. Because optical cables…

As the lucky guy who got to review the 2013 Mac Pro (see page 12 in the March issue, or visit go.macworld.com/pro13), I’ve spent quite a bit of time with it. One thing that struck me is that in addition to radically changing Apple’s professionaldesktop line, it illustrates the changing face of “power-user” computing. Not long ago, if you wanted a really powerful computer, or one with a lot of storage, or one that could handle the latest games, you looked to the Mac Pro line—even if you didn’t work with video, perform 3D rendering, or do scientific modeling. The Mac Pro was as much a computer for power users as it was for people doing professional work. These days a lowly Mac mini packs an impressive amount of power,…

Considering that the new Mac Pro is more of a specialized workstation than a generalpurpose computer, we wanted to see whether upgrading our 2012 Mac Pros would help to close the performance gap with the latest model. We started with our stock 2012 quadcore and dual-six-core (12 cores total) Mac Pro systems and upgraded them with fast flash storage in the form of OWC’s Mercury Accelsior E2 PCIe SSD ($630), as well as 32GB of RAM from Crucial and a faster Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition ($500) graphics card. Speedmark 9 The stock 2012 quad-core 3.2GHz Mac Pro with a 1TB hard drive, 6GB of RAM, and Radeon HD5770 graphics earned a Speedmark 9 score of 171. After our upgrade, the same system earned a score of 241, or 41…