Essential Apple User Magazine November 2021

James Gale Managing Editor This may sound bizarre but I really love the wallpaper. The choice of colours and how they darken during the hours of the day is strangely calming. Martin Smith Group Senior Designer Universal Control for me. Being able to run a couple of Macs and an iPad from the same controllers, and transferring files between them? Yes please! Alan Hulme Staff Writer FaceTime improvements for me. The new Grid View in Group FaceTime is awesome, and I’m really looking forward to film night with the SharePlay features. David Hayward Staff Writer I think the Intelligent Tracking Prevention is the best improvement to Safari in Monterey. Stopping trackers from IP profiling is always a must-have feature. Ian Osborne Editor The thing I like best about the new macOS is the way it’s designed to work seamlessly with Apple Silicon processors. It’s…

Welcome to the new issue of Essential AppleUser Magazine, the world’s leading digital publication for Apple fans. This month’s mag is a Macs and Monterey special, with an in-depth report on the new MacBook Pros and a hatful of indispensable guides to using the latest Mac operating system. We’ve been telling you about Apple’s macOS 12: Monterey for a few issues now, but at last it’s here, and it has some great new features. So many so, that we’ve given the entire tutorial section over to Monterey guides, tips and tricks. The Messages app and its new features are laid bare, with instructions on how to use Photo Collections and Shared with You. There’s a lot new in FaceTime, including new audio shaping and a great way of conducting new Group…

On 18th October 2021, Apple lifted the lid on some great new products. A refresh of the MacBook Pro range gave us new Apple Silicon processors as well as new notebooks, and as well as the Macs, we got new AirPods, new colours for the HomePod mini and a new tier of Apple Music subscription. For pro notebook users, there’s a new 14-inch and 16-inch range of MacBook Pros, with new chips, new screens and some returning features that we all missed while they were gone. For music lovers, there’s new AirPods, new Blue, Yellow and Orange smart speakers and a new Voice Plan for Apple Music. And for Essential AppleUser Magazine readers, there’s a feature giving you the inside story on all these things.…

Apple’s Mac range is a year into a two-year transition from Intel processors to the company’s own Apple Silicon chips. Even before the October announcement, you could buy a Mac mini, iMac, MacBook Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro powered by the first Apple Silicon processor, the M1 system-on-a-chip. Now Apple Silicon has found its way into even more notebooks in the MacBook Pro range. Apple’s new 14-inch and 16-inch high-end notebooks have two new Apple Silicon chips to power them; the Apple Silicon M1 Pro and M1 Max. The two new chips take the already-powerful Apple Silicon processor to a whole new level. According to John Ternus, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, “the M1 Pro is the first pro chip on a Mac”. It features scaled up architecture…

The new MacBook Pros represent a welcome mea culpa from Apple. For the last few years, each new generation of high-end Mac notebooks have risen to new heights in some respects, but in others, taken the MacBook Pro range in directions it didn’t really need to go. No one asked for the full range of connectivity ports to disappear, to be replaced by Thunderbolt ports alone. The ‘butterfly mechanism’ keyboard design, which has already been abandoned, was almost universally disliked and although the Touch Bar was very clever on paper, it wasn’t highly regarded in practice. With the new 2021 MacBook Pros, Apple has looked to its past as it moves into the future, correcting the missteps that have held back the high-end notebooks while taking their power and efficiency to…

According to Apple boss Tim Cook, Apple’s AirPods are the most popular Bluetooth wireless earbuds in the world. The brand new third generation of Apple’s popular AirPods features an all-new design. They’re lightweight and contoured, sitting at just the right angle for comfort and to direct audio into the ear. The stem is shorter than the previous generation, but features the same intuitive force sensor as AirPods Pro for media control. AirPods (3rd generation) feature a custom driver and a high dynamic range amplifier that together produce powerful bass with crisp, clean high frequencies. The microphone is covered by an acoustic mesh to help reduce the sound of wind, so the speaker’s voice comes across distinctly on calls. AirPods also feature AAC-ELD, a superior speech codec that offers full HD voice…