Macworldの April 2021 の目次

For all the great and revolutionary products and features Apple has released over the years, there are just as many head-scratching decisions that have taken away or ruined things we love. They’re usually gone forever, like USB-A ports or headphone jacks, but every so often Apple hears our wails and reverses course. It happened most recently with the butterfly keyboard. Way back in 2015, Apple shifted away from its very excellent scissor-switch keyboards to a proprietary “butterfly” model that was thinner than its predecessor. Apple claimed it was superior, but unhappy users loudly complained about the keyboard, which was so prone to sticking and unresponsive keys that Apple launched a service program extending to every butterfly MacBook ever made. Apple finally retired the butterfly keyboard once and for all in 2019, and…

With macOS, Apple allows for the automatic hiding of the menu bar. In versions of macOS prior to Big Sur, the setting to turn this on or off is located in the General system preference. But in Big Sur, Apple has moved the setting. It is now located in the Dock & Menu Bar system preference. To set the menu bar to hide and show when you move the cursor to the top of the screen, check the box.…

Modern digital photographers have plenty of options for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom plugins, including my longtime personal favorite, Tiffen Dfx. Following the release of version 4.0 in 2014, the future looked uncertain after the software was sold to Digital Film Tools, which was in turn acquired by leading visual effects publisher Boris FX last year. Despite changing hands, the heart and soul of Dfx thankfully remains intact under a new moniker. Billed as “visual effects for photographers,” Optics 2021 retains everything that was great about Tiffen Dfx (including the intuitive user interface), infusing it with a liberal amount of the Hollywood magic Boris FX is known for. A standalone application that doubles as an Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom plugin, Optics offers 160 filter types across nine categories, each with a ton…

A new report from Bloomberg gives us some updated information on Apple’s virtual reality and augmented reality plans. Mark Gurman, who has a very good record with these sorts of insider-info leaks, says that Apple plans to first sell a very high-end virtual reality (VR) headset as early as next year before moving on to augmented reality (AR) glasses in a few years. The report claims that Apple “isn’t looking to create an iPhone-like hit for its first headset,” but rather a high-end, expensive, niche product that would appeal to developers and well-heeled consumers, preparing everyone for an eventual mass-market AR glasses product. The headset, code-named N301, is expected to be more expensive than VR products from Oculus, so much so that Apple may only sell a single unit a day…

There’s no doubt that Apple’s new M1 Macs have shaken up the marketplace with its low power consumption and fantastic performance—even with nonnative Mac apps, surprisingly. But users who want to run Windows on the Mac are officially and natively left out in the cold. Admittedly, those of us who run Windows on a Mac are a distinct minority. I run Windows 10 quite a bit on my iMac for professional reasons (and sharper small fonts), and the M1 Mac’s lack of Boot Camp support seemed to be a nonstarter for me. And after witnessing the M1’s scintillating performance in the testing for this article, I was not happy about it in the least. Fortunately, the situation is far from hopeless. Thanks to Parallels, the venerable Apple virtual machine software…

If you have two macOS accounts on a single machine and want to merge them into one, macOS doesn’t offer a simple way to carry this out, but it’s nevertheless not very difficult. While you can mess around with file and folder permissions, my suggestion is to kill multiple birds with one stone by archiving and deleting the unwanted account. BEFORE MIGRATING Confirm there’s nothing in the old account you need to access from there to export. Contacts, reminders, calendars, notes, and Safari bookmarks. These five kinds of data can be tricky to deal with if iCloud sync is off in the macOS account you’re getting rid of and you have just the raw data available in your consolidated macOS account. Instead, follow the directions in this article about deleting your…

In my AirPods Max review, I noted that Apple’s headphones sound and feel great, but are perhaps a little on the heavy side and cost more than they’re worth. I also noted that the so-called Smart Case is neither smart nor a case—it’s an embarrassing piece of junk. Apple should have included a real case with the AirPods Max. In fact, for the price, it should have included a nice premium leather or nylon case. Fortunately, WaterField Designs has just such a case, available for $99 ($89 for the nylon version). It’s absurd that you need to buy something like this after shelling out $550 for the headphones themselves, but that’s not WaterField’s fault. For its part, the company has made a simple and fantastic case that is reasonably priced…

Don’t let the petite dimensions and minimalist design of the $899 Bluesound Powernode 2i deceive you. This self-amplified, multiroom streaming music player is packed with audio goodness and will deliver blissful sonic experiences from nearly any source: local or network storage, a disc player, your mobile device, or your streaming service of choice—including their high-res tiers. You can use a turntable, too, but you’ll need to plug it into a preamp first. Just be prepared for a user experience that’s, shall we say, a wee bit rough around the edges. In my book, the Powernode 2i’s features, capabilities, and performance are worth dealing with a few operational quirks that must be mastered, tolerated, or fixed (more on that in a bit). Its pluses far outweigh its negatives, just like that…

If you have a newer Mac, it likely uses a speedy solid-state drive to store files, apps, music, videos, and other important stuff. But there’s one thing you may not know about SSDs: They wear out over time. Since the SSD is such a vital part of your Mac, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on its health. While it usually takes a really long time to wear out an SSD—likely far longer than you’ll keep your Mac—problems can arise. Most recently, users started noticing that new M1 Macs and some Intel-based ones are showing advanced wear after just a few months of use, a troubling sign that could cause drives to burn out years before expected. So even if you have a brand-new M1 Mac, you might want…

No matter what Apple product you were lucky enough to get this holiday, you can be assured of three things: It’ll “just work” out of the box. It’ll do exactly what you want it to do. And it’ll last as long as you need it to. That’s the not-so-secret secret to Apple’s success. Apple might sell more devices than ever, but it’s never going to be like Google or Amazon and blanket the landscape with products, so the ones it makes are built to have an instant impact. Instead of cramming as many features as possible into the latest iPhone, for example, Apple chose the features that will matter most, even if it means lagging behind its competitors in terms of features like super zoom and 120Hz displays. It’s all…

The iPhone 11 is still a fantastic phone, so we understand if you’re going to hold onto it for a little longer. And now you have a little extra peace of mind: Apple has launched a new repair program that will effectively extend the warranty of your display by an extra year. The iPhone 11 Display Module Replacement Program for Touch Issue covers iPhone 11 models manufactured between November 2019 and May 2020 and covers displays that “may stop responding to touch due to an issue with the display module.” The issue does not extend to the Pro models. Apple has launched a support site that includes a serial number checker to see if your phone is one of the affected devices. If it’s eligible, you can contact Apple to get…

Apple’s latest expansion of the AirPods brand is a set of large over-the-ear wireless headphones. The AirPods Max look great, sound great, and are quite comfortable despite their heavy weight. They’re also $549, a difficult price to justify when the competition (primarily the Sony WH-1000XM4 and the Bose 700) are around $200 to $250 less. In some ways, the AirPod Max give you what you pay for. Build quality is unmatched at any price, and there are some clever design flourishes. But there are also a few compromises worth noting, like a “Smart Case” that is anything but. For those embedded in the Apple ecosystem, the AirPods Max will be worth considering when they’re on sale for $449 or less, but it’s otherwise hard to justify the price tag, and those…

AirVPN is a popular service among privacy-conscious users. The VPN is well known for transparency about its network, reasonable costs, and attention to privacy. It’s not a perfect service, but it’s well worth considering for anyone who wants to ensure a good amount of anonymity. AirVPN started life in 2010 as a free project developed by privacy-conscious “activists, hacktivists, and hackers,” according to the VPN’s about page. It then became its own entity with a dedicated company around 2012. Currently AirVPN offers connections in 21 countries, with 240 servers. Anyone who wants to see the status of all of AirVPN’s servers can head to the Status page on the company’s website. Here you’ll see each server location to the city level, current load, and even the number of users on that…

Elgato is a brand best known in the game streaming community. Its video capture devices are the go-to solutions for Twitch superstars and YouTube gaming channel creators. Not satisfied with enabling great home video capture, the company teamed up with Lewitt to produce a USB microphone that aims to give content creators professional results at an affordable price. The result is the Wave:3, a $160 USB microphone that delivers remarkably good sound quality for vocal recordings (a simpler Wave:1 is also available for $130). While Elgato aims many of its other products at PC gamers, the Wave mics are marketed equally toward podcasters and YouTubers, where the Mac has a much larger presence. A combination of high-quality, affordable hardware along with an excellent software mixing panel makes the Wave:3 an especially…

Not too long ago, you would have been right to doubt the quality of any true wireless earbuds with active noise canceling selling for less than $100. The $60 Aukey EP-N5 thus serve as a pleasant reminder that the technology is no longer as out of reach as it once was. These buds still fall short in features like mic quality and water resistance when compared to pricier competition from the likes of Apple, Samsung, and Sony, but they’re worth checking out if you’re hunting for good sound and decent ANC above all else. From a distance, the EP-N5 earbuds look even more expensive than they actually are, in part because the design of both the case and the buds pulls so heavily from Apple’s AirPods and AirPods Pro—save for…

We’ve heard rumors for about a year or so that Apple is on the verge of launching some products with Mini LED display technology. It could come to MacBooks, iPads, iMacs—really anything with a display, though it’s quite unlikely to ever end up in Apple Watch or iPhone (which use OLED displays). What is a Mini LED display and what exactly will it do for you? This short explanation may help you understand why this technology could represent such a big step forward into the future for Apple’s products. A BETTER BACKLIT LCD To understand Mini LED, you first have to know the basics of how a traditional backlit LCD works. That’s what we have in all our iPads, MacBooks, and iMacs today. It can get complicated, but in short, there’s…

I have two desktop Mac setups, one at home and one at the Macworld office (ah, going to the office, those were the days). Both those setups have Logitech mice. My work setup has the Performance Mouse MX that I’ve been using for over ten (!) years. At home, I have the original MX Master, which I’ve been using for four years. Suffice to say, I love these mice. They have a similar design that fits my hand beautifully, they feel great, and they’re highly functional. Logitech recently released the MX Master 3, the latest entry in its MX series that also works with the iPad. It has many of the same features as the two mice I’ve been using, but it has one design change that’s an improvement, making it…

Apple launched its hotly-anticipated new fitness service in December, but after the initial shine of a “new Apple thing” wore off, it has proven to be rather unremarkable. Fitness+ is just…okay. If you want to work out along with fitness videos, and you own an Apple Watch, it will let you do that. It’s a quality set of videos, well produced, with excellent instructors. But that’s really all it is. The launch of Apple’s new Time to Walk feature this week offers hope that Fitness+ will break out of its ho-hum existence in the well-trodden ground of so many other fitness video services. Apple’s opportunity in fitness is so much greater than streaming prerecorded workout videos. WELL-MADE WORKOUT VIDEOS ARE NOT ENOUGH At its heart, Fitness+ is a nice set of well-made…

The Control Center’s networking pane can help you deal with a weak Wi-Fi network connection by taking advantage of its temporary and “soft” nature. You may have a place inside your house or outside where your iPhone or iPad claims it can still connect to your Wi-Fi network, but in practice throughput is low or the connection stalls entirely. This might also happen if you join an overloaded public network or if you simply want to use a 20 to 50 Mbps 4G LTE connection that’s available when the local Wi-Fi is much slower. In Settings → Wi-Fi, you have the option to turn Wi-Fi off, which effectively disables the Wi-Fi radio. But swipe to reveal Control Center and then tap Wi-Fi, and the button’s blue background color in the…

Presentation software and videoconferencing tools mix like oil and water. That’s a particularly unfortunate thing when tens of millions of teachers are forced to use PowerPoint or Keynote to remotely educate kids daily. These apps weren’t designed for interactive remote presentation, and about nine months into the pandemic, the seams aren’t just showing—they’ve ripped out like one of Bruce Banner’s shirts. The fundamental problem is the full-screen presentation mode. It makes perfect sense for in-person presentations. With two screens available—one a laptop and one a projector or a feed into a broadcast or webinar system—presenters can view notes, use tools for markup, run builds and play videos, and see their next slide or even the set of upcoming slides. They don’t need another screen to also see participants, or they’re…

Anyone looking for a simple, straightforward antivirus suite should consider G Data’s Antivirus for Mac. This simple antivirus app offers protection without overcomplicating itself. There are no extra frills like a VPN, encrypted cloud storage, or system maintenance utilities, for example. PROTECTION TESTS If simplicity is what you’re looking for in virus protection, then G Data is worth looking at. Currently, there are no third-party tests pitting G Data against Mac malware. In our spot tests, however, we found that G Data was able to detect malware once it was unzipped. It wasn’t quite as fast at detection as other suites, but it always threw up an alert by the time we had opened the infected folder. We also noticed that in some cases where multiple examples of malware were…

Before I discovered the price of Tribit’s XFree Go headphones, which wasn’t provided until weeks after the product showed up, I was thinking they’d retail for $100—or maybe $80 given Tribit’s penchant for lowball pricing. In my book, they sound every bit as good as the Sony set I use on a regular basis. Discovering that they were selling on Amazon for just $25 was darn shocking. I’ve never heard a worthwhile headset priced less than $50, let alone one that sounds as good as this. But then I started watching movies. A SHOWSTOPPER OF A FLAW I quickly discovered a major problem: The XFree Go became unresponsive after a relatively short period of sustained use. They’d still produce sound, as long as the Bluetooth connection remained, but I couldn’t…

APPLE PHOTOS, iCLOUD PHOTOS, AND MY PHOTO STREAM: FIGURING OUT WHAT TO USE When online and local storage were scarcer, Apple added an interesting option to let you have access to recent photos captured or imported across all your mobile and desktop devices. What’s now called My Photo Stream, when enabled, would feed newly taken photos (but not videos) to all other connected devices, so you could view them on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV. The service at introduction and today keeps up to 1,000 images for up to 30 days. It only starts removing the oldest images when the set of photos from the 30 days exceeds 1,000 or when an image is more than 30 days old. The space occupied by My Photo Stream doesn’t count…