Macworld November 2019

Apparently, one piece of online folk wisdom goes as follows: If you’re having trouble with your Apple ID, just create a new one and abandon the old one. This actually isn’t a good idea in most circumstances. It usually makes a bad situation worse. Apple IDs can be a problem, especially if you have legacy accounts from pre-iCloud Apple cloud services. Apple has made it easier over the years to use one Apple ID for purchases and another for iCloud, which was a big help. The upcoming macOS 10.15 Catalina rejiggers account management so your various Apple IDs are consolidated into a preference pane that replaces the iCloud one, very similar to iOS’s Settings app. If you’ve wound up with multiple Apple IDs because of this advice, you can simply…

Primate Labs has released a major new update of its popular Geekbench performance measurement tool. Geekbench 5 comes three years after the release of Geekbench 4 and features all-new test methods, workloads, and a new measurement scale. As such, it should be a much more accurate representation of modern workloads on modern hardware, and the scores are not at all comparable with those from Geekbench 4. We often use Geekbench here at Macworld to give an overall picture of the CPU and GPU compute performance of iPhones, iPads, and Macs. It’s one of the few cross-device and cross-operating-system comparable benchmarks available; while it doesn’t paint a perfect picture of the difference in performance between an Intel chip running Windows, an Android phone with a Qualcomm processor, and an iPad with Apple’s…

The Apple Card is now available to tens of millions of U.S. consumers. And it’s definitely getting plenty of hype. With that slick white titanium card, the purchase tracking, the security features—it’s easy to understand why you might want it. But it’s ultimately still a MasterCard credit card backed by a big multinational bank, and before you apply for it, you should really ask yourself these five questions. 1. CAN YOU ALWAYS PAY IT OFF? Do you intend to fully pay off your Apple Card every month, or will you run a balance? The Apple Card interest rate is between 12.99 and 23.99 percent, and that’s low for a cash back card, but it’s not at all low compared to other cards that don’t have rewards. The Apple Card interest…

By the time an application reaches version 7.0, users anticipate fewer whiz-bang new features as developers focus on refining core functionality and required compatibility updates. The question then becomes, has the software improved enough to justify buying an upgrade to the latest and greatest version, often on an annual basis? Such is the case with ExpanDrive, a venerable macOS utility that mounts cloud and network-attached storage in the Finder so you can more or less use them like locally-attached volumes. Despite a recent focus on eye candy, it’s what’s under the hood that makes the latest update worth a look. NEW LOOK, NEW PROBLEMS ExpanDrive 6 ditched the traditional compact user interface in favor of a free-floating, expandable window opened by clicking a familiar menu bar icon that clutters the…

For modern Mac users, the imminent demise of venerable QuickTime 7 is unlikely to ruffle too many feathers. After all, the media player lacked the simplistic elegance of successor QuickTime X, despite richer codec support and pro capabilities like the ability to add and remove audio tracks. Worse yet, Apple has yet to bring feature parity to the updated QuickTime Player a decade after its introduction. This glaring oversight paves the way for third-party Mac media player apps like JustPlay, a lightweight alternative capable of playing nearly any kind of video or audio you can throw at it, from Apple-friendly MP4 and MOV (including ProRes) to pesky AVI and MKV files, all without conversions or installing codecs. JACK OF ALL PLAYERS Hardware-accelerated decoding provides fluid playback of HD, 4K, and even…

RING SMART LIGHTING STEPLIGHT BATTERY If you’ve invested in other Ring Smart Lighting products, then you can consider the Steplight Battery as a way to add light to darkened pathways and steps outside your home. Steplight requires a $50 Ring Bridge to connect to your Wi-Fi network, bumping the cost to illuminate a single step to $75. The lights can also work in concert with any of Ring’s video doorbells, security cameras, and the excellent Ring Alarm home security system. You can group Ring Steplights together as well as with other Ring devices and control them as one. —MICHAEL BROWN ARLO PRO 3 The weather-resistant Arlo Pro 3 security camera has a 2K HDR resolution, a 160-degree field of view, and two-way audio. The integrated spotlight can be activated automatically…