MacFormat January 2016

NEW ! MacFormat is changing! Find out how on p24 Another New Year is almost upon us, and with it the prospect of another 12 months of amazing new products and innovations from those enterprising folks in Cupertino. In our ‘What Next For Apple?’ feature, we gaze into our crystal ball and speculate on the year ahead: will we finally see an Apple Watch 2 and an iPhone 7? An iPad Air 3 and a new Mac Pro? And what do the next versions of OS X and iOS have in store? Turn to page 20 to find out. But even with the mouth-watering prospect of new gear on the horizon, there are plenty of ways you can get more from your current Mac, from tips and tricks you’ve forgotten…

APPLE: "Surveillance is not security" “If you halt or weaken encryption, the people you hurt are not the folks who want to do bad things” A battle is taking place between governments and technology companies over encryption. Governments want technology firms to build backdoors into their software, arguing the strong encryption used in mobile devices makes it hard for security agencies to monitor against terrorist attack. Technology firms argue that encryption is essential to protect enterprise and consumer users against ID theft and other online threats. “I don’t know a way to protect people without encrypting”, Apple CEO, Tim Cook said. “You can’t have a backdoor that’s only for the good guys… Any backdoor is a backdoor for everyone”. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others are at present opposing these…

On our APPLE TV What we’re watching on the iTunes movie store FILM Ant-Man £13.99 (HD) Small-time crook Scott Lang becomes an even smaller superhero in this enjoyable Marvel movie caper, where Ant-Man has to protect the secrets of his super-suit against the forces of evil. TV SHOW Peep Show Series 9 £11.99 (HD), £2.49 per episode The very last series of this Channel 4 comedy reaches new levels of cringe-inducing hilarity as Mark (David Mitchell) and Jeremy (Robert Webb) prove growing older doesn’t make you wiser. GRAPHIC £22.99 Developer Autodesk, autodesk.com Requires OS X 10.6 or higher, 64-bit processor Graphic is the new name for iDraw, a vector drawing and illustration app originally created by US developer Indeeo, before it was taken over by Autodesk late last year. The good…

Hot gear on the horizon... what’s got us excited? These high end headphones promise the very best sound quality, but at a very hefty price! What is it? “The best headphones in the world”, according to Sennheiser But they should be, as the updated Orpheus headphones cost a whopping €50,000 a pair – although that price does include a high end hi-fi pre-amp housed inside a slab of marble in order to reduce vibrations. When’s it due? Available 2016. Why are we excited? They really do sound wonderful – especially on classical music where you can close your eyes and imagine that you’re sitting in a concert hall with the orchestra right there in front of you. Pulse From about $99 (about £65) www.alpinelaboratories.com What is it? There are some…

I asked to cancel the repair and have the iPad returned – that was a week ago In nature, every animal has a predator. It’s the same with technology, whose predator is the human toddler. My son’s reign of technological terror has claimed an Xbox and a PlayStation, various remote controls and more iPad screens than I care to count. In most cases I can fix the problems myself. So, for example, a PlayStation 4 is pretty straightforward to mess around with. Apple stuff is more complicated, and with each new version it gets a little bit harder for mere mortals to fix. Recent iMacs and MacBook Pros are “nearly impossible” for ordinary people to repair, according to everybody’s favourite Mac dismantlers, iFixit. I wouldn’t know where to start with…

Apple would much rather have Skylake processors in every iMac, but it’s waiting for Intel… iMacs, MacBooks and Mac Pros The current iMacs and MacBooks are great, but better things are coming Apple’s most recent Mac update was to the iMac, which now has Intel Skylake processors and 5K displays in the 27-inch models and Intel Broadwell processors in 21.5-inch models, one of which now has a 4K display. Those Broadwell processors are a compromise: Apple would much rather have the more powerful Skylake architecture in every iMac, but it’s waiting for Intel to add integrated graphics. Once it does, you can expect Skylake to appear across the Mac range – including the MacBook Pro sometime in 2016. There are several key benefits to Skylake processors beyond the usual speed…