Macworld October 2018

Stop the presses, we have a new Mac mini rumor. Well, at least the germination of a rumor. According to Bloomberg’s very connected Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu, Apple is planning “a professional-focused upgrade to the Mac mini desktop later this year,” and “new storage and processor options are likely to make it more expensive than previous versions.” That’s a lot of words for not really saying anything at all. While Gurman and Wu are basically confirming Ming Chi-Kuo’s earlier report that the long-in-the-tooth mini will be getting an update before the year’s out, they leave an awful lot of blanks to be filled in between now and its release, presumably sometime in mid- to late fall. Even if they’re right about the new pro focus, everything else about the new…

The Apple rumor mill never sleeps. This week, it was Mark Gurman and Debby Wu at Bloomberg who spurred discussion with their somewhat vague report about a new MacBook and a “professional” update to the Mac mini. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has already spent a lot of time ruminating on what said MacBook update might look like and where exactly it fits into Apple’s laptop lineup, but I find myself focusing more on the Mac mini news. I’ve long been a fan of the diminutive desktop Mac, and I’ve owned two or three of them over the years, most recently a 2012 model that currently acts as my file and media server. It’s a great little computer, especially after I spent the time to upgrade it a little bit,…

Once Apple finally introduced support for third-party NVMe drives in macOS 10.12 Sierra, NVMe over Thunderbolt storage became only a matter of time. And for a while, the path to external storage nirvana was a bit of a rocky road—but the bumpy ride is over now thanks to Samsung’s Portable SSD X5, a ready-made NVMe over Thunderbolt 3 storage solution that delivers blazingly fast 2GBps-plus read and write speeds The X5 is now the portable drive for multimedia pros, or anyone who doesn’t like to wait for their files to copy—if you can afford it and, of course, have Thunderbolt 3. NOT CHEAP The X5 is a blazingly fast and expensive drive: $400 for 500GB, $700 for 1TB, and $1,400 for 2TB. If it helps, that’s actually not as “Apple-priced” as it looks;…

Apple at last has an external graphics processing unit on the hallowed shelves of the Apple Store, and as you might expect, it’s a looker. The Blackmagic eGPU (from Blackmagic Design) was designed in collaboration with Apple. With its brushed aluminum casing and the spot-on space gray coloring, the Blackmagic eGPU, MacBook Pro, and iMac could pass for cousins in a family portrait. It belongs. It also follows many of the same design philosophies that make Apple’s own products so beloved. It’s quiet and sleek, with its noise reaching only around 15dB at peak performance, thanks to a tangle of cooling tubes. It’s inconspicuous and easy to set up, to the point that it doesn’t even have a power switch. You simply plug it into your Mac’s Thunderbolt 3 port and it…

With the release of Toast 17 Pro (as well as DVD-only sibling Toast 17 Titanium), Roxio is sending a clear message that optical media is here to stay. Following last year’s purely cosmetic overhaul which added a dark UI, the latest version sports an under-the-hood tune-up. The application is finally 64-bit, in time for the release of macOS Mojave this fall, the last macOS to support 32-bit apps. That means Toast will continue working when macOS goes 64-bit–only, but users won’t have to wait that long to reap the benefits. Aside from initial post-installation problems with the application refusing to launch after the first time, Toast 17 Titanium is the snappiest it’s ever been. I’m not sure if my issue was caused by the new, sleeker internet-based installation (which downloads content…

In our age of divisiveness, the World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth expansion begins with a premise that cuts deep. It’s nasty stuff. Greed (and quite a bit of petty hate) led the Horde to burn the Night Elves’ tree city a few weeks before launch, potentially killing thousands. The Alliance sought revenge, leading to an assault on its old capital of Lordaeron. And all because a godlike figure thrust his gigantic sword into Azeroth itself, causing a powerful new substance called Azerite to erupt from its core through fissures and even small volcanoes, spread over the entire world. At a time when everyone should have been working together, suddenly everyone was at each other’s throats. Considering what the world had just gone through, the conflict seemed unnecessary. It was all…