Macworld June 2018

It’s been a rough year for Apple’s batteries. After announcing a program to replace batteries in the iPhone 6 and 7 earlier this year, Apple has now launched a program to swap them out in the 13-inch non–Touch Bar MacBook Pro (affectionately known as the “MacBook Pro ESC” due to the presence of actual function keys). So if you have a laptop that’s been dying out mid-way through your day or just noticed some performance oddities, you might be able to get your battery replaced with a new one. Here’s everything you need to know about the new program: WHAT’S THE REASON FOR THE PROGRAM? Apple has said that a component inside “a limited number” of 13-inch MacBook Pro units could fail, “causing the built-in battery to expand.” Apple did not specify…

Folks with more coding knowledge than I have (and a greater willingness to potentially brick a $2,400 machine) have been hooking up external graphics cards to Macs for years, but the support now comes bundled into macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra. In layman’s terms, Apple officially supports some graphics cards that you’d normally only find in a bulky PC tower—so long as you have a separate external chassis to stick them in and a Mac with Thunderbolt 3. I hoped eGPU support would be revolutionary. Beyond that, I hoped it’d allow me to break with PCs entirely, as I really only use them for gaming these days. Anyone who watches Apple Arcade knows I’ve been a little frustrated with the current state of Mac gaming, and an external graphics card struck me…

Apple’s transition from 32-bit to 64-bit technology on the Mac has been in the works for a while for the company and developers, but so far users haven’t really been affected. That started to change beginning in mid-April. NEW 32-BIT ALERTS IN MACOS 10.13.4 HIGH SIERRA If you’re using an old 32-bit app on a Mac, macOS will display an alert to let you know that it may not run optimally and that you should check with the developer to see if an update is available. The alert is similar to the ones that appeared when Apple transitioned iOS from 32-bit to 64-bit. The alerts appear only when a 32-bit app launches, and will have a Learn More button that takes users to an Apple Knowledge Base article that explains the 32-to-64-bit transition. If…

There was some minor news recently: In another step along the transition to 64-bit apps, Apple began warning users of 32-bit apps (see the prior article) that these apps would need to be updated or they will stop running. The warning was news, but this is actually a story long in the making. Last year, Apple warned Mac developers that 32-bit apps would stop running “without compromise” this fall with the release of the successor to macOS High Sierra. The writing’s been on the wall, more or less, since all the way back in 2009 when Apple began its 64-bit transition with the release of Snow Leopard. The writing’s been on the wall, more or less, since all the way back in 2009 when Apple began its 64-bit transition with the release…

Over the past year or so, Apple’s spent a lot of time talking up its Services division—which includes not only Apple Music, but also the likes of iCloud, the iTunes Store, and Apple Pay—and for good reason. Analysts have been paying a lot of attention to Apple’s Services, not least of all because it’s shown solid growth, even at times when other segments of Apple’s financial results have been more lackluster. So you can bet that Apple’s not about to walk away from the services business anytime soon. In fact, if recent reports are any indication, the company is devoting even more effort to the segment, with at least two brand-new services in development and the shifting of two of its biggest storefronts to a more subscription-focused angle. DIGITAL NEWSSTAND The most recent…

Pages 7 is the latest in a series of ongoing and gradual improvements to the 2013 “reboot” of Apple’s iWork suite or productivity apps, which also includes Numbers and Keynote. That reboot rewrote the apps from the ground up, but also omitted features that users had relied upon for years. Over time, many of these features were restored even as the apps expanded what they did in other areas. Pages 7 continues on this path. While it’s numbered as a major release to keep it in harmony with Pages for iOS, the iOS release has a greater number of significant additions. BOOK CREATION The flagship change includes book templates for interactive EPUB ebooks, allowing an end-to-end workflow for creating rich digital documents without the compromise of starting with templates and pages designed for…