Índex per January 2022 a Macworld

Even before Apple’s M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBooks hit the market, rumblings of future Apple silicon were already hitting the wire. Dubbed the M2, this chip is the likely successor to the M1 that powers the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and the 24-inch iMac. According to reports, it will arrive in the first half of 2022. And look at the calendar—here we are in 2022. So if you’re wondering whether you should wait for the M2 instead of investing in an M1 MacBook Air or M1 Pro MacBook Pro, we’re here to help. M1, M1 PRO, AND M1 MAX Apple’s first three Mac chips are all built on the same architecture but they’re quite (see below). M1 SPECS Here’s how the different M1 chips compare. As you…

The Mac’s cursor is designed with a white outline and a black fill. It’s a good combination, making it easy to spot no matter where is on screen. But man, is it boring. In past versions of macOS, you couldn’t change the cursor color without using a third-party utility. That’s no longer the case in Monterey. With Monterey, you can easily change the colors of the cursor to something that is easier to catch visually or just add some flair to reflect your personality. You can find it in the Accessibility pane in System Preferences. Here’s how it’s done. HOW TO CHANGE THE COLOR 1. Go to System Preferences and click Accessibility. 2. In the left column, look for the Vision section and select Display. 3. Click on the Pointer…

Apple imposed limitations in its M1 series of Macs about how many external displays could be attached. It’s just one for most models; a Mac mini lacks an integral display, and can support two. DisplayLink technology offers a way to add more displays for M1 Macs by effectively encapsulating video over USB 3. This works with M1 Macs as well as Intel Macs that lack all the output ports you want, PCs, and other devices. Synaptics, the creator of DisplayLink, licenses its technology to manufacturers. I tested the only 4K UHD adapter that appears to be in stock anywhere right now: the StarTech.com USB 3.0 to HDMI Adapter, which is DisplayLink certified. It supports resolutions of up to 3840 by 2160 pixels and a display refresh rate of up to…

When Apple bought the scraps of Intel’s modem business in 2019, it was just a matter of time before it started selling phones without Qualcomm modems. According to a new report, that time is rapidly approaching. Japan-based Nikkei Asia reports that Apple has tapped TSMC to build the new modem, which will use 4-nanometer chip production technology. The current modem in the iPhone 13, Qualcomm’s X60, is built on a 5nm process. The report says production for new modem will begin in 2023. According to the report, Apple is building the modem from the ground up with its own radio frequency and millimeter wave components as well as a custom power management chip. However, the first iteration might not be integrated into the processor. DigiTimes reported last week that Apple’s first 5G…

To celebrate 15 years of partnering with (Product) RED to combat the global spread of AIDS, Apple is offering a selection of six Apple Watch faces in red, available for download for Apple Watch Series 3 and later. The faces are part of Apple’s watchOS 7 feature, which lets you share faces with friends. To download them on your Apple Watch, you must visit Apple’s (RED) site on an iPhone and tap the Add Apple Watch Face button below the ones you want. The faces available are World Time, Numerals Mono, Gradient, Stripes, Color, and Typograph, and all feature the color red prominently throughout. All faces are compatible with the Apple Watch Series 4 and later, with Numerals Mono and Color also available for the Apple Watch Series 3. Along with offering the…

Since the days of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Onyx has been in the arsenal of Mac techies to help fix Macs and assorted operating system weirdness. It’s been a long time since the heady days of 2003, and along the way, French developer Joël Barrière has continuously released steady updates of the popular free customization and maintenance tool. With Onyx at hand, permissions can be repaired, databases rebuilt, file structures reorganized, hard disk structures checked, and indexes restored. The program is excellent at digging into deeply rooted chunks of macOS, setting and repairing Unix-level functions that would otherwise only be accessed through the Mac’s Terminal program and the command line, and rooting through odd settings to restore functionality after you’ve slogged through strange errors and weird behaviors from your Mac.…

Thirteen years ago, when I was lucky enough to interview a then-22-year-old Lady Gaga on the verge of mainstream success, she described her collaborative songwriting style as a process that allowed her to “synthesize other people’s ideas and edit them and make them better.” I’d like to think she’d be proud of how I remixed “Free Woman” using just my iPad and GarageBand. The latest GarageBand update for iOS and iPadOS includes two Remix Sessions that allow you to create new versions of songs by pop stars Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa. Using GarageBand’s Live Loops feature, you can manipulate and record sounds from their tracks as well as hundreds more to be found in the app. The sound loops are represented visually as circular waveforms that you can touch or…

WANT TO USE AN iMAC AS AN EXTERNAL MONITOR? YOU NEED AN OLD VERSION OF MACOS One of the most common reader questions we get is, “Can I use my iMac as an external monitor?” We previously provided an almost-comprehensive answer to the question before Apple restored a page on its site that offered technical details. The general answer is that only iMacs models shipped from 2009 to mid-2014 (the seventh- and eighth-generation models) had the right graphics circuitry for this Target Display Mode feature. Since then, many people have asked about what seemed to them a bizarre, unnecessary, and inaccurate requirement—that is sadly absolutely true. Does an iMac have to be running an old version of macOS as well to support Target Display Mode? Yes, it must. And so must…

With the release of macOS Monterey, Apple’s oldest platform is embarking upon its latest journey around the sun. And while this newest update brings with it a whole host of features, from Focus mode to FaceTime improvements, it also puts into stark relief some of the Mac’s shortcomings—especially when compared to iOS. Apple’s been working hard to get its platforms in sync and, to the company’s credit, many of the new features that it rolled out this year have arrived on both platforms—even if not in simultaneous releases. (SharePlay and redesigned Memories in Photos are lacking from the initial Monterey release, despite already coming out for iOS.) While attention often focuses on places where iOS is still catching up to the Mac, that street runs both ways. There remain places…

On external monitors, 1440p resolution is supposed to represent the sweet spot, offering a sharper picture than HD without the high costs of 4K. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t agree. On Macs with M1 processors, Apple reserves Retina or HiDPI display scaling options for monitors with at least 4K resolution. Unless you set the display to its native 1440p—which can look insufferably tiny on smaller external displays—text and icons come out blurry and fuzzy. Programs that used to fix the problem on Intel-based Macs no longer work on M1 machines, and users have been complaining about it for months to no avail. Now a third-party developer has come up with a workaround. It’s called BetterDummy, and it essentially tricks macOS into thinking you’ve plugged in a 5K monitor. Using Apple’s display mirroring features,…

Apple gets a lot of flak for its “my way or the highway” approach to, well, pretty much everything: App Store terms, product design, colors, and so on. While that’s an approach that definitely has its benefits—you can tell when committees start getting involved in the design, and the end result is rarely good—it also lends itself to a degree of obduracy that can be frustrating for any other parties that have to deal with the company. But that philosophy doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t willing to make changes when it needs to. Innovation is, after all, another one of the company’s hallmarks, and sitting on one’s laurels in the technology market is rarely a path to success. It’s just that sometimes that change doesn’t come from people inside the…

It’s not often that a major new Apple product could be fairly, and completely, reviewed in a single tweet. This may come as close as any review ever has: “It’s a Series 6 with a slightly bigger display and faster charging” is far less than 250 characters. But it feels like a stretch to find other things to say about the Series 7. This could be the least-significant yearly update to the Apple Watch ever, and while that in no way makes it bad (this is still the best smartwatch around), it’s hard not to be disappointed. A BIGGER DISPLAY The star of the Series 7 is the display. It’s about 20 percent larger than in the Series 6. Most of this increase in size comes from thinner bezels, but the…

Sometimes your Mac may not run as smoothly or as quickly as you expect. The culprit may be a single application. A lone app can bump into performance issues, slowing down not just itself but your entire computer. It may even freeze or become unresponsive to the point that you can’t close it the usual way. Whatever the problem, one tool that can help is Activity Monitor. Built into macOS, Activity Monitor shows you a list of all running apps and processes and reveals the biggest hogs based on CPU, memory, energy use, disk use, and network bandwidth. And if a specific app is unresponsive and can’t be shut down the traditional way, you can force it to close. Here’s how it works. To open this tool from Finder, click…

We’ve all had to get on our hands and knees and climb under a desk or pull it away from the wall to find a spare outlet on a power strip or surge protector. Or to dig for an available USB charging socket on our computer, or to find an AC adapter to use. The AmazonCommercial AC and USB Desktop Outlet with Surge Protection cleverly offers a combination solution for people who work at a desk that answers those needs. Using a lever backed by a powerful spring, you can slide the horseshoe-shaped surge protector onto any side of a desk or tabletop that has about 4.5 inches of clearance from front to back and is between 1 and 2.5 inches thick. The power “strip” puts its on/off switch and…

In 1950, Joseph Grado started making phonograph cartridges at his kitchen table in Brooklyn. Once he exceeded the limits of that table, he moved the operation to a more professional venue nearby and founded Grado Labs in 1953. Now, three generations later, the company is still family owned and run, continuing to make highly regarded phono cartridges as well as headphones, which were added to the product catalog in 1991, by hand at its Brooklyn location. The GW100 is Grado’s first wireless Bluetooth headphone. It was first introduced in 2018 and was recently upgraded to version 2. The company cut no corners and took its time to get the sound just right, and the result was well worth the effort. FEATURES The GW100 v2 is a lightweight, on-ear, open-back design…

I know what you’re thinking. For the past five years, we’ve questioned, lambasted, and otherwise reviled the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. And now that it’s gone for—checks notes—a little over a week, we already want it back. But the problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t actually the Touch Bar itself. It’s that it wasn’t a Pro feature. The concept of a small touchscreen designed for carrying out common tasks was a good one—and we’ve heard from many people who enjoyed using it. The MacBook Pro just wasn’t the right product for it, and Apple’s flagship laptop is better without it. The most disappointing part of the Touch Bar was that Apple never really improved it. We got the Escape key back and developers worked it into their interfaces, but otherwise Apple’s…

The fast and light G-Drive SSD is as attractive and fast as its branding is arcane. It can be purchased from the WD (Western Digital) store under the SanDisk Professional brand, and is part of the G-Drive line. Some might remember that G-Drive was a boutique Mac storage vendor some time ago. WD bought G-Drive as well as SanDisk, which develops nearly all of the parent company’s solid state technology. Hence, it’s the SanDisk Professional G-Drive SSD from WD. Who cares, you say? Just filling you in. The drive is excellent, so let’s get on with it. DESIGN The G-Drive SSD is a USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps), Type-C solid state drive available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB flavors for $150, $250 ($230 on sale), and $360, respectively. That’s actually…

Over the years, I’ve used iPhones of all sizes. My first smartphone was the original 3.5-inch iPhone, and I’ve carried every size screen at some point—the 4-inch iPhone 5s, the 4.7-inch iPhone 6s, the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus, the 5.8-inch iPhone X, the 6.1-inch iPhone 11, and most recently, the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 mini. So when the iPhone 13 launched, I naturally ordered the one missing from that list: the 6.7-inch iPhone 13 Pro Max. That’s a full 1.3 inches bigger than the iPhone 12 mini I’ve been using for the past 11 months, so it definitely took some getting used to. But along with the size and the weight—both not insignificant hurdles to overcome—I’ve learned some surprising things about the differences between Apple’s smallest and biggest iPhones. PHONES REALLY…

Smart home alarm systems are all the rage, but they’re also very expensive. A relatively simple setup can cost hundreds of dollars, with things like installing glass-breakage and leak sensors driving the price up. Or you can use this iPhone trick. Scroll a bit down in the Accessibility tab in Settings (1), and you’ll find a tab for Sound Recognition. Switch it on (2) and your iPhone will listen for over a dozen sounds (3) using on-device intelligence and “notify you when sounds may be recognized.” Sounds are organized by category and include many common ones: Alarms: Fire, Siren, Smoke Animals: Cat, Dog Household: Appliances, Car Horn, Door Bell, Door Knock, Glass Breaking, Kettle, Water Running People: Baby Crying, Coughing, Shouting You can select as many as the sounds as…

The iPhone mini went from the iPhone everyone wanted to the one no one wants. After intense anticipation, the iPhone 12 mini reportedly accounted for just 6 percent of iPhone sales in 2021, so it’s somewhat surprising that Apple decided to give the mini one more year. While rumors swirl that the iPhone 14 will nix the tiny iPhone for good, it appears as though this is your last chance to get a small iPhone that isn’t the iPhone SE. But should you? In essence, the iPhone 13 mini is identical to the iPhone 13, save for its smaller size and therefore smaller battery and shorter battery life. This summary review will focus primarily on those differences. DESIGN AND DISPLAY The 13 mini features a 5.4-inch OLED display, the same size…

Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple hardware roam best across Wi-Fi networks that are made up of multiple wireless routers when the routers all share the same network name, known obscurely as a Service Set Identifier (SSID). This name allows your devices to recognize the collective set of routers as all equally available to switch between, preserving a connection when the signal for one network in particular becomes weak. Along with setting the network name to be exactly the same, you also need to choose the same encryption method and identical password on all networks. This can get a little fuzzy. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is the baseline, but the WPA2 version covers devices dating back nearly 15 years and should be your baseline. Newer hardware can also support WPA3,…

Apple just started selling a new AirPods Pro model that is cheaper, sounds a little better, fits a lot better, and even has physical buttons and comes in several colors. They even cost less! Only Apple did all this under its other headphone brand, Beats, with the new Fit Pro. While these don’t have everything the AirPod Pro do (wireless charging is absent), they are better in most ways and for most people. Simply put, if you think you might want to buy AirPods Pro, you should buy these instead. In fact, those considering the 3rd-gen AirPods might even want to spend a little more for these. ANYTHING YOU CAN DO… Apple purchased Beats back in 2014, and within a few years it was making Beats headphones that use its own W1 and…

Building a sound system on a tight budget and high hopes? Cast your eyes and ears on Q Acoustics’ newest and biggest passive bookshelf speaker, the 3030i. These stylish speakers deliver an acoustic performance way out of proportion to their $399-per-pair price tag. Designed in Britain, the Q Acoustics 3030i deliver detailed and robust audio reproduction accurate enough that they could be used as studio monitors. Be forewarned, however; such honest articulation and dynamic range also has a downside: They will lay bare any performance or production weaknesses present in a recording. And with added oomph comes the potential for real-world environmental issues, as these mighty mites could expose the quirks of smaller listening-room resonances, demanding a bit of sleuthing (and tweaking) to resolve. Not to worry, mates. We’ve cracked…