Macworld December 2019

With the release of the latest version of macOS 10.15 Catalina, Apple introduces a slew of new features. You should (and will) try them all, of course, but where should you start? Well, we’ve been using the macOS Catalina betas, so we have ideas on which new features you should try first. These are the major new features that you’ll want to start with in the macOS update. 1. GET TO KNOW THE MUSIC, PODCAST, AND TV APPS The iTunes app is no more in macOS Catalina—it was an app that had too much going on, and Apple wisely broke up the app up into Music, Podcasts, and TV. You now manage the respective media in each app, and if you connect your iOS device to your Mac, you use…

MacOS 10.14 Mojave, the version of the Mac operating system before the new macOS Catalina, is the last version that supports 32-bit software. With Catalina, only 64-bit software will be supported. Catalina is here and if you decide to upgrade to the new macOS, you need to do a bit more than usual to prepare your Mac. You need to make sure your apps are 64-bit versions. If your app is a 32-bit version, it will not work. Apple actually started to warn people about the change with macOS 10.13 High Sierra. If you launch a 32-bit app in High Sierra, an alert pops up to tell you that your app needs to be updated. The alert appears only once in High Sierra, and in Mojave, it appears every 30 days.…

MacOS Catalina is here, and with it, a bunch of top-line features (see page 7): Mac Catalyst, new apps, Sidecar, Screen Time, and Voice Control. But as you might expect, Catalina also includes dozens of small feature changes that are worth investigating. Here are a few of its most interesting hidden features. 1. HOME THEATER AT LAST For the first time, the Mac will have access to the 4K HDR versions of popular movies and TV programmes. This comes courtesy of the new TV app—but it has limits. All Macs introduced in 2018 or later are capable of playing videos in HDR and Dolby Vision formats for high dynamic range, and can play audio encoded with the high-quality Dolby Atmos format. As for full-on 4K HDR streaming, it’s enabled only…

An external drive that you can use as an installer for macOS Catalina is a handy thing to have. If you have multple Macs to upgrade, it’s a lot more efficient to plug in the USB installer drive and run the installer than to log into the App Store, download the 8.09GB OS installer, and then run it. In this article I’ll go over the different ways you can create a bootable macOS Catalina installation drive. But before I give instructions on how to create the drive, I’ll go over the items you’ll need and how to get them. GET AN EXTERNAL DRIVE AND MAYBE AN ADAPTER The macOS Catalina installer software isover 8GB, so you need a USB external drive that can hold that much data. The drive can…

Ever since the introduction of the iPod in 2001, Apple has had to navigate the intricacies of a multi-device ecosystem. In the earliest of days, that meant dealing with the iPod as an ancillary media device, reliant upon a Mac (or later a PC) for everything from activation to syncing media. Over the last twelve years, the Apple ecosystem has gotten only more complex, with the addition of iPhones and iPads, the Apple TV, the Apple Watch, AirPods, the HomePod, and more. And while the Mac may be the elder statesperson of this assemblage, it’s found its responsibilities decentralized. No longer does the iPhone or iPad require a Mac just to function; newer devices like the Apple Watch and HomePod never have. But the Mac still remains a member of…

Every year there are events we look forward to—the changing of seasons, favorite holidays—and those which evoke a sense of dread—filing taxes, standing in line to buy the latest iPhone. The now-annual upgrades to Parallels Desktop fall squarely into the former camp. That’s because new releases of this magical application which allow Mac owners to run multiple operating systems at the same time are almost always a big improvement over previous versions. And wouldn’t you know it, they’ve done it again this year, too. HEAVY METAL For those who spend as much time in a Windows virtual machine as they do native macOS, Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac is a godsend thanks to support for Apple’s hardware-accelerated Metal graphics API, which replaces aging OpenGL. As a result, Parallels now supports Windows…