Macworld July 2023

In 2023, Apple is sitting on top of the world. At times ranked as the most valuable company around, its influence in technology and media—and even some realms beyond—exceeds that of almost any other single corporation. But it wasn’t always that way, and much of where the company is today can be attributed to a product released 25 years ago: the original iMac. I vividly remember the first time I saw a picture of that machine: Sitting in my high school library, just a few days shy of graduation, I was leafing through my copy of this very publication, in classic dead-tree format, devouring the cover story on this weird new computer that, unbeknownst to any at the time, would set the course for Apple for years to come. As…

Everyone wants to talk about AI. Most of them don’t know what it is (artificial intelligence), but they still want to talk about it. Who’s got it and who doesn’t. What industries it’s ripe to disrupt. And the one company that’s not in the middle of that conversation is Apple. Viral images generated by Stable Diffusion and pathological chatbots from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are the story of the day. Apple, meanwhile, has nothing. Or perhaps, considering the current state of Siri, less than nothing. Apple’s nowhere when it comes to AI. That’s the narrative. The thing is, that narrative is not true. At least, it’s not true yet. PRESENTING THE NEURAL ENGINE It’s hard to imagine that you could portray Apple as a company that’s been asleep at the…

Thanks to Apple’s move to its own chips, the Mac has been on a roll recently, after a frustrating spell of bad keyboards, poor ports, and overheating with pre-M1 Macs. But not all of those old Macs are bad—many of them are actually still cherished by their owners. For example, the Intel-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air were tremendously popular and held down the fort on the affordable end of the MacBook lineup for many years. These laptops may not be considered “modern” by the new standards set by Apple, but they are still supported with the latest version of macOS. They were somewhat upgradeable, easy to fix, and had tons of spare parts available. Within the secondhand community, even Macs with soldered-down components are looked at as having…

While we’re all wondering when a chip update is coming to the current iMac, Apple is working on potential new features we could see down the road. Patently, Apple reports that it has been granted a new patent for a feature that would allow the iMac to project an image on a wall, desktop, or other surface. Patent US-11630485-B2 is titled “Housing structures and input-output devices for electronic devices,” and Paul X. Wang and Joshua P. Song are listed as the inventors. The patent’s abstract describes a “rear housing wall [that] may have a glass portion or other transparent structure through which projectors project images onto nearby surfaces” and says there could also be sensors that receive light, feasibly for wireless connections. The patent also states that the iMac would include “gaze…

MacBooks can quickly and easily hook up to external displays for greater desk-based screen space. While the plain M1/M2 MacBooks support just one extra screen, the 16-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Max) supports up to four monitors. On its own, the built-in 16-inch screen is gigantic compared to that on the 13-inch MacBook Air, but rather poky when you’re working on a complex spreadsheet or wanting to enjoy a big-budget streaming movie in more glory than in-flight entertainment. What the large built-in laptop screen does offer, of course, is portability. You can’t lug that 32-inch 4K Samsung display to your local coffee shop or fit it on your airplane-seat foldout tray. You can buy portable external displays at up to 17 inches—not much larger than the laptop’s own. The INNOCN Portable…

Some security products that offer both Windows and macOS versions seem to devote equal time and resources to both versions. Others more heavily favor the Windows version, leaving the Mac edition lacking certain features and options. Such is the case with F-Secure Total for the Mac, which seems to be a full-featured security program at first glance but isn’t quite on par with its Windows counterpart. INSTALLATION To use F-Secure Total, you can select one of the paid subscriptions right off the bat or go for the free 30-day trial, all of which prompt you to set up an account. The trial requires no credit card and even gives you free technical support if you need it. At the main screen, you’re asked if you want to add your own…