MacLife June 2022

Summer is finally here! (For those of you in parts of California, Florida, and Arizona, and other parts of the US that experience great weather all the time, that’s the part of the year when it kinda stops being miserably cold, and bodily joints start working again.) What better way to celebrate this joyous period than a collation of the best tech that can help to make it an even better experience? Over on page 28 you’ll find a selection of awesome gear for the great outdoors, whether that’s relaxing in your back yard, hitting the open road, or heading to the great outdoors on your next vacation. We’ve also got something a lot of you have been asking about for some time now: a feature on helping you make the…

OVER THE TIME I’ve been following Apple, it’s always (ish) been skating to where the digital platform puck is going, even in ways that were controversial. Take its refusal to support Flash. It was a drawn–out battle of wills, but Apple not only prevailed, it was proved to have taken the more forward–thinking stance all along. In less controversial examples, it always wanted to remove DRM from the iTunes music store, and was one of the first stores to do so. It stood firm that its iTunes movies store should give free upgrades to higher qualities, which reportedly caused a rift between it and Disney — but Disney now offers its movies the way Apple wanted them. Even MobileMe was really a precursor to Google Suite and other cloud–connected ecosystems.…

I found the DAC article in the April issue (191) quite interesting, but one topic wasn’t addressed. I play music from my MacBook Pro via an HDMI cable to one of the HDMI ports on my AV receiver. I do this either from my older MacBook Pro, via a USB–C to HDMI adapter; or from my M1 MacBook Pro via its HDMI port. Would a DAC device make the sound better, or does my AV receiver take care of that? And are there DAC devices that take a signal from USB–C and output HDMI? Should I use an alternative input on the receiver? Thanks. STEVE JOHGART Thank you for your letter on this, Steve — others may be pondering similar questions, too. Cliff Joseph wrote this one for us, so we asked him…

THE STREAMING MARKET is facing a shakeup as Netflix slumps while Apple TV+ grows. At the 94th annual Academy Awards in March, CODA won the Oscar for Best Picture — the first time this award has ever gone to a movie released by a streaming service, not in theaters. (Afterwards, however, Apple rereleased CODA for a limited run in over 600 US movie theaters, no doubt to help recoup the record $25m it paid for worldwide streaming rights to the movie.) Since the launch of Apple TV+ in November 2019, Apple’s original series and feature films have won many awards — 953 nominations and 240 wins, to be exact — but the milestone Oscar win gave Apple TV+ a significant boost. Variety reported that views of the movie were up more…

APPLE HAS RELEASED iMovie 3.0 for iPhone and iPad with new beginner–friendly features: Storyboards and Magic Movie. Storyboards help novice creators get started. Instead of starting with a blank timeline, they can choose from 20 templates for popular video types including cooking tutorials, Q&As, news reports, and more. Each storyboard has a guide shot list and step–by–step advice on which clips to capture for each video type. Shots can be added, reordered, and deleted as needed. Titles, transitions, and filters can be added and customized. Music tracks dynamically adjust to fit the length of a project, and users can refine each clip with intuitive editing tools like trim, split, clip speed, and clip volume. For even faster results, Magic Movie instantly creates a polished video for you — simply select an album…

WHEN IT INTRODUCED its latest chip, the M1 Ultra used in the Mac Studio, Apple explicitly stated that this completes the M1 lineup. Will new Mac models from here on have a newer chip inside? Apple has reportedly begun testing of “at least nine” new Mac models with next–generation M2 processors, including: > MacBook Air, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro models powered by an M2 chip with eight CPU cores and 10 graphics cores (compared to eight graphics cores in the current MacBook Air); > 14–inch and 16–inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, the latter with 12 CPU cores and 38 graphics cores (compared to 10 CPU cores and 32 graphics cores in the current model); > A new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chip. Two or more…