Macworld May 2021

If recent rumors are any indication, 2021 is going to be a landmark year for the Mac. Recently, we saw reports stating that Apple will ship 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with MagSafe, Apple silicon with more cores and enhanced GPUs, and a case redesign. Now another report says that new iMacs and Mac Pros are coming this year as well. Rumor has it that the iMac will be redesigned to resemble Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterated the XDR-like redesign, with 21.5-inch and 27-inch models that have a screen with a much smaller bezel, no “chin,” and a flat back instead of the curved one that appears on the current iMac. It’s been a long while since the iMac saw a change in form. The current design of the…

Recent reports have shown that some users of M1 Macs are experiencing what they feel is unreasonable, excessive usage of the SSD. One in particular showed 15TB written in two months. That’s quite a bit, and it’s almost certainly attributable to swapping main memory to the SSD. The reports became a cause for alarm for M1 Mac owners, but is it really a problem? While it’s true that SSDs have a limited lifespan, how long that SSD lasts comes down to how you use your Mac. SSD LONGEVITY A common misconception about SSDs is that they don’t last very long. That’s due partially to the early days of SSDs, when the lifespan of NAND flash storage used on an SSD was severely underestimated, and drives often quit after a relatively small amount of…

Maybe someday there will be a tell-all book written by someone inside Apple during the 2010s. Maybe we will eventually know exactly what happened that led to a bit of a lost decade for the Mac, one that will be remembered for a failed attempt to rethink the Mac Pro and a series of questionable hardware decisions that seriously hobbled Mac laptops for years. But until then, we’re mostly left to speculate about what happened—and how Apple turned it around, ushering in a new decade that has the potential to reinvigorate the Mac in a way not seen since the early days after the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. In my opinion, there’s a single Mac model that tells a good portion of the story all on its own. It’s a…

The more things change, the more things stay the same. For the past several years, the comic strip Doonesbury has been in reruns for its weekday strips; this past week’s series, hailing from 1995, dated from the release of Windows 95, in which one of the strip’s characters pointed out the superiority of Apple’s Macintosh, only to be brought back down to earth by the reality of Microsoft’s platform dominance. More than a quarter of a century later, Apple has become one of the most valuable and pervasive companies in the world, but some things clearly haven’t changed that much. CEO Tim Cook said in the firm’s latest quarterly financial call, “We really don’t have a significant share in any market.” Cook was speaking specifically of the iPhone, which is a…

Just when we thought the fabled Apple Car had driven off into the sunset for good, a flurry of recent rumors has given new life to the project. But despite some promising signs, we’re still likely many years away from driving one. The most recent rumor comes from well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via MacRumors), who writes that Apple is collaborating with several automakers on the Apple Car project, including Hyundai, GM, and Peugeot manufacturer PSA. According to Kuo, “Apple will leverage current automakers’ resources and focus on self-driving hardware and software, semiconductors, battery-related technologies, form factor and internal space designs, innovative user experience, and the integration with Apple’s existing ecosystem.” Specifically, Kuo says Apple will be using Hyundai’s E-GMP battery electric vehicle platform for the foundation of the Apple Car. This isn’t…

As a professed digital hoarder, I have thousands of files on my iMac, external hard drives, cloud services, and network-attached server. I’ve made a habit of archiving utility bills, bank andcredit card statements, and other PDF documents that gradually consume available storage capacity. Barring a complete purge (oh, the horror!), shrinking the hoard would be the next best thing. That’s exactly what PDF Squeezer 4 is designed to do. This minimalist macOS utility makes it a snap to reduce the size of one or more PDF documents using three predefined compression levels (Light, Medium, or Strong), or using custom-made profiles of your own. At every turn, PDF Squeezer makes the process as frictionless as possible. You drag and drop files onto the app window, and they are immediately processed with the chosen…