Macworld UK December 2019

With the all-important holiday quarter looming and the launch of the Apple TV+ video-streaming service (see page 61), Apple has declared that it’s weathering the iPhone downturn just fine. For its final fiscal quarter of 2019, Apple posted revenue of $64 billion, an increase of 2 percent from the year-ago quarter and representing the upper end of its guidance, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.03, blowing away estimates. The quarter ended 28 September, so it includes a couple of weeks of iPhone 11 sales. Even so, iPhone sales were down roughly $3 billion, or nearly 10 percent over the same quarter last year. The same goes for Macs sales, which were down about 5 percent. Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that the iPhone 11 is off to…

A‘real’ version of Adobe Photoshop is finally available upon the iPad, over a year after Adobe first announced it was coming. Keep in mind, though, that ‘real’ Photoshop and ‘full’ Photoshop aren’t quite the same things. Adobe gets away with calling it ‘real’ Photoshop (in contrast to something like Photoshop Express) because the iPad version shares the same base code as the desktop version. This, in turns, allows iPad users to easily and swiftly switch between desktop and mobile versions of their projects thanks to the cloud version of Adobe’s PSD file format. Adobe also uses this as an incentive to start keeping your files in its cloud, which shouldn’t be too much of a storage problem if you keep included files limited to recent projects. We haven’t spent a…

Like the man said: follow the money. In looking at Apple’s most recent financial quarterly results, you can learn a lot about the company’s strategy by seeing where the company is doing well. As chief financial officer Luca Maestri pointed out on the call, Apple’s primary investments have traditionally been in research and development, and it’s a good bet that it will focus many of those funds on areas that are growing. As I listened to this week’s financial recap of Apple’s latest blockbuster quarter, I kept my ears perked for mentions of the places where the company seemed to be doing particularly well. Ready to wear If there’s one standout bright spot in this quarter’s results, it’s probably Apple’s wearables/home/ accessories category, which grew a staggering 54 percent year…

Apple is at its best when it takes fancy technology and makes it disappear: when features seem to just happen, or ‘just work’ – without consequence and without intervention. You simply use something in the way that it feels like you should, and it does what you think it should do (and does it well). This was the magic behind the original AirPods (£159 from fave.co/2qsVVva). They weren’t the first true wireless headphones, yet they elevated the platform not by doing more, but by requiring less from us. Easier pairing. Easy battery readout. Easy charging. Smaller and more portable. Turn on and off automatically. My first day with the AirPods Pro (£249 from fave.co/36EpMBp) left me feeling that same ‘magic’ again. I’ve used lots of true wireless earbuds since the…

After months of rumours and hints found in its operating systems, Apple has finally unveiled the AirPods Pro. Available for £249 (available from fave.co/36EpMBp, they feature a tweaked design with shorter stems and silicone ear tips, and provide better sound, active noise cancelling and come with a wireless charging case. Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s new high-end AirPods. Do they have active noise-cancelling? Yes, the big new feature of the AirPods Pro is active noise cancelling. The earbuds continually adapt to outside noise using a pair of microphones and software. An outward-facing microphone detects external sound to analyse environmental noise. Then, an equivalent anti-noise wave is calculated and mixed into the audio going into the user’s ear. An inward-facing microphone listens toward the ear, and the AirPods…

Nothing sets the new AirPods Pro apart from normal AirPods quite like active noise cancelling, which uses microphones to block the sound of the world around you, allowing you to focus on your music or work. Active noise cancelling immediately works when you first plug your AirPods Pro in your ears, but Apple provides several methods of controlling it beyond that. You can quickly turn the feature on and off with the AirPods themselves, you can control it through Settings or Control Centre, and you can even run a test to see if you’re using the optimal ear tips. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do all of this. One note, though: when I say you can ‘turn off ’ noise cancellation, I usually mean you can turn…