MacFormat July 2016

Pictar Take your iPhoneography further – who needs a DSLR? There are many iPhone accessories that claim to revolutionise your phone’s photography, but few are as interesting as Pictar. It’s a DSLR-like grip for your iPhone that massively extends its camera’s capabilities. From a multistate shutter release to zoom control, exposure compensation wheel and a customisable ‘smart wheel’, Pictar gives you much more control over the pictures you shoot. It’s even got a cold shoe mount so you can attach lighting accessories, and a tripod socket too. It’s the ideal accessory for taking your iPhoneography to the next level. $90 (about £62) INCLUDES Pictar, wrist strap (neck strap also available) WEBSITE mymiggo.com WORKS WITH iPhone 4 to 6s (Pictar Plus model for 6 Plus/6s Plus)…

Apple’s annual conference for developers is just around the corner and will fill us in on new features in the brand-new version of OS X, which we’ll be able to try out in beta form this summer, ahead of its full release in the autumn. Until then, we know you’ve mastered most of the features of El Capitan, but it’s time to make your Mac even better with some of the very best add-ons for it. In this month’s cover feature you’ll learn how to speed up OS X, manage your Mac’s memory, tweak the most important apps, improve your workspace, add custom icons and perform many more tricks. Also this month, we delve into the world of smart security in our Apple Home section. With an iOS device at…

For all its noteworthy design chops, the iPad Pro has one rather glaring omission: 3D Touch. Sure, the Apple Pencil is a superb drawing tool and helps you produce amazing artwork, but its pressure sensitivity isn’t used to replicate the functionality of the iPhone’s 3D Touch tech. Besides, we’d rather see those features in the form of 3D Touch on the larger screen, so that you don’t have to spend an additional £79 on Pencil to use them. Will 3D Touch make it into the next-gen iPad Pro? KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo doesn’t believe so, citing production issues in Apple’s supply chain as the main obstacle. Apple may not be able to scale up the tech to iPad Pro screen sizes, and it may not be able to meet…

$3m THE COST OF iPHONE PARTS IN 1991 PRICES Think the iPhone 6s Plus is expensive? If you went back to 1991 and assembled the components in an iPhone, it would cost over $3m. Back then, 1GB of memory would set you back roughly $45,000; today, it’s worth about 55 cents. 14,000 TOTAL PEOPLE WORKING FOR APPLE IN 2007 Today Apple is a gigantic global company with over 100,000 employees, but before the launch of the first iPhone it was much more modest, with a ‘mere’ 14,000 workers. 2,700 THE NUMBER OF LISA COMPUTERS IN LANDFILL Apple’s Lisa computer was not a success. Launching at $9,995 ($23,700 today), it was discontinued in 1986, after just three years of availability. In fact, up to 2,700 of them are buried in a…

Apple is reportedly working on a dedicated HomeKit app, which is expected to be unveiled as part of iOS 10 at WWDC on 13th June. Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem enables developers to connect their products to iOS devices. For example, it allows users to control a Philips Hue lighting system from their iPhone, adjusting its colour and brightness all from Philips’ own app. Thermostats, locks, security cameras and more can also be controlled using HomeKit. In its current incarnation, though, HomeKit is merely a framework. This means that every product that uses it has its own app – the result is that users with a lot of HomeKit-enabled items have to access them through a mass of different apps made by their manufacturers, and so each presents features in different interfaces.…

Sales of Apple laptops have fallen 40.4% since Q4 2015, twice the market rate of 19%. That puts Apple in sixth place in the laptop market with estimated sales of 2.53 million in Q1 2016, down from 3.4 million in the last quarter of 2015. Its market share now sits at 7.1%, which is a big drop from the 9.7% that it controlled in late 2015. While Apple remains well ahead of rivals Samsung and Toshiba, Lenovo swept to the top spot with 22.2% market share, slightly ahead of HP on 20.4%. TrendForce, which conducted the research, blamed the drop on Apple’s inactivity in the laptop market for its declining sales. While its PC rivals were offering consumer laptops equipped with Intel’s Skylake architecture, Apple didn’t bring any new MacBooks…