Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i Macworld UK

Apple sold 45.5 million iPhones in the fourth quarter – also its final quarter of fiscal 2016 – though that includes just two weeks of iPhone 7 sales and only the earliest signs of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 catastrophe impact. The iPhone sales were better than expected. Analysts had forecast 44.8 million phones shipped in Q4, which Apple handily exceeded. The firm made a $9 billion profit off of $46.9bn in revenue in Q4, down year-over-year from an $11.1bn profit off $51.5bn in Q4 of 2015. And while profits and revenue are down pretty much across the board, Apple is again choosing to focus on its services, a bright spot in the company’s portfolio. Services revenue, which includes iCloud, Apple Music, iTunes, and the App Store, grew 24 percent to…

From £1,449 inc VAT • apple.com/uk It’s thinner, lighter and smaller all around, but the new MacBook Pro makes a big impression. The trackpad on the 15in version is downright ridiculous – twice as large as the trackpad on the previous generation – but we didn’t look down and say, “Wow, that is a seriously huge trackpad”. That is until we’d been using it for a couple of minutes because it’s all about that gorgeous Touch Bar. Apple doesn’t do touchscreen Macs, but the Touch Bar adds a strip of ultra-handy iOS-style contextual controls right where you need them, and the rest of the MacBook Pro got great updates, too. After our limited hands-on time, we think it’s got the right mix of power, portability, and ports to satisfy users…

As we’ve already seen, Apple’s two new MacBook Pros have slim OLED displays that replace the keyboard’s function keys. Apple launched its latest products just one day after Microsoft unveiled its massive Surface Studio desktop designed for creative professionals, a demographic once solidly in Apple territory. Why didn’t Apple go fully touchscreen with its new MacBooks? Is the Touch Bar an interim step, a sign that Apple is unsure of its footing? No. Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, told Cnet that Apple had decided “many, many years ago” that touchscreen Macs were not the right approach. Why? Well, Ive didn’t really get into specifics (of course): “When we were exploring multitouch many, many years ago, we were trying to understand the appropriate application and opportunities for [it]. We just…

1. Messages: Per-conversation read receipts Messages: Per-conversation read receipts Instead of having Messages send a read receipt for every conversation, you can do it on a per conversation basis. During a chat session, click on the Details link at the top right of the window. You’ll see information on your chat partner, and below you will find a checkbox for ‘Send Read Receipts’. Check the box to activate. 2. Apple Mail: Quick filter In your Apple Mail inbox, you’ll see a new icon of a circle with an upside-down triangle of lines. Click on it and ‘Filtered by’ will appear it will filter your email based on what the blue text says. Click on the blue text to adjust the filter. Reader @dogolaca points out that the quick filter will…

Been a while since you played a new Mac game? Well, it’s a pretty great time to change that, as we’ve a stack of standout releases. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is easily the biggest of the bunch, launching the same week as the PC version and delivering an even larger and more engrossing take on the legendary turn-based strategy experience. Other large-scale options include Farming Simulator 17 and Mad Max, while smaller indies such as Oh… Sir! The Insult Simulator, GoNNER, and Burly Men at Sea all have their charms as well. 1. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Price: £49.99 from Steam ( tinyurl.com/j2u2f5q ) Wave hello to your new time sink, strategy fans. Firaxis Games’ beloved historical simulation series is back with a brand-new entry, and Sid Meier’s…

You may think you have to wait for Siri to appear in macOS Sierra before you can talk to your Mac, but your Mac already has a way to listen to everything you say and to turn what it hears into text. You can enable this feature, which supports over 30 languages and many more dialects, using the Dictation & Speech preference in System Preferences. Apple’s speech to text features are turned off by default, so before you can use this feature you need to turn it on. 1. Open System Preferences 2. Click Dictation & Speech, which you’ll find in the middle of System Preferences’ fourth row 3. Click the radio button that says On. You will see a message warning you that using your Mac’s dictation option the…

As with every Apple event, the online Apple Store closed its doors for a few hours while the company took the wraps off its latest MacBook Pro. What we hadn’t expected, though, was for those doors to reopen to price hikes in the UK, even on products that were not new. It’s thought that the fall in the value of the pound following the vote to leave the European Union is to blame. An Apple spokesperson said: “Apple suggests product prices internationally on the basis of several factors, including currency exchange rates, local import laws, business practices, taxes, and the cost of doing business. These factors vary from region to region and over time, such that international prices are not always comparable to US suggested retail prices.” iPhone iPhone SE…

Tablet sales continue to slip, and not even the iPad Pro has helped salvage the market. Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and other tablet vendors shipped just a combined 43 million units in the third quarter of 2016, according to a new report by IDC. These figures mark a year-over-year decline of 14.7 percent. IDC analysts blame the tablet sales slump to low-cost two-in-one laptops flooding the market. Despite Apple pushing sales for its latest high-end iPad Pro models, the earlier iPad Air and iPad mini models are Cupertino’s best-selling tablets, accounting for two-thirds of its shipments in the third quarter. Apple continues to be the tablet leader, but it still saw sales decline by 6.2 percent year-over-year. IDC points out that revenues remained flat, however, thanks to some sales of the…

After September’s annual iPhone-focused event, it was time for the Mac to have its turn in the spotlight. Apple recently revealed three new MacBook Pros, two of them featuring the Touch Bar, the firm’s brand-new touch control panel at the top of the keyboard. The MacBook Pro got a minimal refresh in October 2015 to introduce the Force Touch trackpad, but it’s been a minute since the line has seen a major update. As new products come in, old products must go out, so the MacBook line-up now looks a little different. Here’s a look at each of Apple’s laptops. MacBook Pro The 2016 MacBook Pro is available in three versions: two 13in models, one featuring the Touch Bar and one featuring standard function keys; and a 15in model with…

Apple has never been shy about shaving off features in its quest for slimmer, faster computing. The new MacBook Pro line-up is no exception. Following in the footsteps of the radical 12in MacBook, Apple’s latest laptop culls five old standbys from its design. 1. MagSafe The MacBook’s vaunted, brilliant MagSafe used magnets to gently attach your power cord to your laptop, rather than relying on a hard connector jammed inside a port. MagSafe clamped on tightly enough to stay stable under normal conditions, but lightly enough to disconnect when tugged. The new MacBook Pro relies on USB-C for power instead, just like the aforementioned 12in MacBook. 2. SD card support The SD card slot on MacBooks comes in handy for photographers and folks looking to expand their laptop’s storage –…

If you’ve ever looked at the Console app in OS X, you’ve seen how frustrating it can be to glean any useful information from its overladen logs. Console displays log information that can help you troubleshoot on your Mac, but it also records a plethora of status messages. Wading through a never-ending stream of messages in Console has always been difficult, but Apple has reworked Console in macOS Sierra, making it a lot more usable. Here’s a brief overview of what’s new. In the current Console, log entries show up as long lines of text. The names of processes and applications are bolded, but that’s about it. In Sierra, Console gets a whole new display. As you can see on the next page, there are now columns that make it…

Macworld reader Alfabeck Lauder finds the way in which Apple manages Wi-Fi logins at public networks a bit maddening: When I’m travelling, I frequently gain access to the Internet on my Mac via public Wi-Fi networks. Before I can connect, I’m invariably confronted with a window, (‘magic window’) giving me instructions and the means for connecting/disconnecting to/ from the internet and monitoring my usage. What on earth are these? He dislikes these windows because they float above everything else, can’t be resized, and don’t seem to be attached to any app. Lauder lives in a remote location and uses a combination of mobile hotspot and Wi-Fi router, so he sees this magic window (we like the term) all the time, and it interferes with his ability to manage his setup.…

Twitter buddy Michael Fessler alerted us to a great help for those who frequently type in keyboards for two different character sets, like Latin and Hebrew, Chinese, Arabic, and others. You can make a quick-switch option from the keyboard without resorting to a menu, by turning a tap of the Caps Lock key into a keyboard swap. The option appears in the Keyboard system preference pane in the Input Sources tab. It has a lot of explanation: “Use the Caps Lock key to switch to and from UK Press and hold to enable typing in all uppercase.” This won’t appear when you have two keyboards that use the same basic underlying set of characters. That may be confusing, because, for instance, you can add a French keyboard that uses a…

There’s a lot of unease out there among Mac users. First, there was the lack of 2016 updates to any Mac model that wasn’t the littlest MacBook. The Mac Pro and Mac mini have languished for several years with nary an update. And MacBook Pro users were hungry for a new model – and fuelled by constant rumours all year of brand-new laptops that were just over the horizon. Then we finally got the new MacBook Pro, and it’s loaded with a lot of cool stuff, but the reaction wasn’t quite what Apple might have expected from the hungry crowd of Mac users. I suspect that the long delay between major Mac announcements has made everyone a bit anxious about what might come next. Certainly, a lot of people seemed…

Is Apple phasing out the MacBook Air? It certainly seems so, with the 11in Air no longer for sale and the 13in model getting a new rival in the 13in MacBook Pro. That’s right, Apple introduced two 13in MacBook Pros at its recent ‘Hello again’ event in Cupertino. One has a Touch Bar, which replaces the keyboard’s function keys. The other keeps all of its keys, but is 12 percent thinner than a MacBook Air with two Thunderbolt 3 ports to replace the MagSafe connector and standard USB ports. Apple won’t be updating the 13in MacBook Air going forward, according to CNET, but you can still pick one up for £949 if all you care about is price – oh, and battery life. The Air lasts up to 12 hours…

Apple has confirmed that the release of the new AirPods has been postponed, though it didn’t divulge a new release date or any other specifics as to what caused the delay. Apple first announced the £159 AirPods during its iPhone 7 even in early September, and claimed that they truly-wireless version of the EarPods would go on sale in late October. It’s now looking as though we’ll have to wait until early next year before we can get our hands on them. “The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. The AirPods have a first-of-its-kind W1 chip for improved wireless connection,…

1. System controls are all there When we first heard rumours of the impending Touch Bar (or the so-called ‘Magic Toolbar’ at the time), we were afraid that it would get rid of our beloved system controls, including the Escape key. The good thing about this digital bar is that it can transform into anything. The Esc key is still there, albeit it’s not a physical key anymore, as well as playback controls and buttons to adjust the volume and brightness. These controls are now tucked away in a Control Strip to make room for other contextual commands and for the all-new Touch ID button. Lastly, pressing down on the function key reveals the function commands, as well. 2. Touch ID to unlock and verify Apple Pay The new Touch…

Apple, a company that has led the laptop industry in its use of PCIe solid-state drives (SSDs), again upped the ante in performance with its latest refresh of the MacBook Pro, which may be the highest performing stock system on the market. The early 2015 refresh of the MacBook Pro sported an M.2 form factor, PCIe SSD that boasted peak sequential read speeds of 1.6GB/s and max sequential write speeds of 1.5GB/s. Benchmark tests with Blackmagic software on a 2015 13in MacBook Pro with Retina display revealed it could pin the needle at more than 1.4Gb/s for writes and more than 1.3Gb/s for reads. The new MacBook Pro’s specs smoke its predecessor. The 2016 13in MacBook Pro’s specs claim it has sequential read/write speeds of 3.1GB/s and 2.1GB/s, respectively. The…

How to resurrect a Fusion drive from a destroyed Mac Q: A very long story short, but I’ve an iMac that suffered catastrophic damage in shipment. I’ve extracted the 1TB hard drive and the 128GB SSD from the carcass of the machine, but the rest of it (save the RAM and processor) is rubbish. In the end, I simply want to pull the files off the hard drive, but none of the local computer-repair shops seem to know what to do. Any suggestions Christopher Bender A: Apple’s Fusion system is a combination of a high-capacity hard disk drive and a low-capacity but superfast SSD. You can uncouple them and reformat them, but this problem was new to me. He tried mounting the hard drive, but it’s unrecoverable separate from the…

Your Mac’s menu bar is a useful tool. It displays ‘menu bar extras’, little icons that give you status information about your Mac, or that offer quick-access menus to certain settings. For example, you can click the Wi-Fi icon to turn Wi-Fi on or off, or to select a Wi-Fi network. You can click the User icon to go to the login window, or to select a different user and switch to their account. Or you can click the keyboard icon to change input methods, if you work with different keyboard layouts. It’s not just OS X that puts menu extras at the top of your display; third-party apps do as well. Some offer similar features, such as access to oft-used functions, and others can provide status information. But all…

You know how to launch Mac apps: you click an icon in the Dock, or you double-click an icon someplace else, such as in the Applications folder. But there are also a number of ways that you can launch apps without taking your hands off the keyboard. 1. Spotlight The simplest way to launch an app from the keyboard is to use Spotlight. Press the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (by default this is Cmd-Space) and type the first couple of letters of an app’s name. For example, if you want to launch Safari, type SAF. Spotlight should put Safari at the top of the list; press Return to launch it. If the app you want to launch isn’t the first one in the list, use the arrow keys to select it,…