Macworld January 2023

As a Mac enthusiast, the news that 2022 will end with no new Mac announcements was disappointing. But what was even more of a letdown is that we’ll have to continue waiting—probably until March 2023—to see the rumored update to Apple’s most affordable Mac, the Mac mini. But even before the news, I was ready for more frustration. This unofficial delay only cements the sad fact that the Mac mini gets no respect from Apple. It’s a shame because Apple’s smallest computer was once its most exciting Mac—and it doesn’t deserve to be so neglected. THE BYODKM MAC The Mac mini was born in 2005 and at the time, Apple was much more aggressive about increasing its share of the PC market. The Mac mini was marketed as an affordable Mac for users…

Best Buy on Monday announced a new MacBook buying plan that lets customers finance a laptop for 36 months and at the end of the term have the choice of upgrading to a new laptop, paying off the current laptop, or returning it and ending the program. Best Buy’s plan, called Upgrade+, is similar to Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program. When a customer enters the Upgrade+ program, the price of the MacBook is spread over 36 months, with the final payment due at the end of the plan. For example, an M1 MacBook Air at $999.99 would have payments of $19.99 per month for 36 months. At 37 months, a final payment of $280.35 can be made to purchase the laptop outright. But customers can also choose to return the laptop and…

Apple’s most recent financial quarter has come and gone, and the company posted (yet again) record revenues, pulling in a zillion dollars and ending its latest fiscal year with just shy of $100 billion in profit alone. Let that sink in. A hundred billion dollars is such a large number as to be utterly incomprehensible to most of us who will never approach anywhere near even a single billion in our lifetime. It’s bigger than the gross domestic product of some countries—and not just a few, but more than half of the countries in the world. Most of them. And again, that’s profit, not revenue, which was a soaring $316 billion, putting it in around the top 40 countries. On the one hand, good for Apple. There was a time in living…

Apple has matured its Photos app for macOS substantially in the several years since the company cut the thread for iPhoto and declared Photos its new approach. The current version mostly resembles the one introduced but with everything working reliably most of the time. However, Photos still has substantial missing pieces for managing libraries. Fat Cat Software’s PowerPhotos has filled that role since 2015, and the company released a major update in 2022 to version 2 that offers even more refinement. The app is the solution for many of the problems with Photos that people routinely write to us about at Mac 911. The program lets you merge Photos libraries, view multiple libraries without quitting Photos and re-selecting them (including in separate windows simultaneously), create libraries on external files, and move…

Established Mac-centric vendors have lately been forsaking hardware RAID for the more versatile but CPU cycle–stealing software variety. Hence our interest in UGreen’s CM335 hardware RAID enclosure, which tips the monetary scales at a svelte $149 yet won’t tax your computer’s CPU while doing its business. It’s a good performer, albeit requiring high-quality cables. DESIGN AND FEATURES The CM335 is inexpensive for what it is, though it sometimes shows. The construction is all plastic but still manages to strike a reasonably elegant profile on the desktop. Being largely plastic also makes it light at around 5 pounds, although it’s 8.4 inches deep by 5.3 inches wide by 5.7 inches (all approximate measurements). But the lack of heft can also translate to a somewhat insubstantial feel, at least if you’re populating it with 2.5-inch…

WYZE MESH ROUTER The Wyze Mesh Router is a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 router powered by a dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A53 processor. It supports more than 50 devices per router with up to 3Gbps of Wi-Fi bandwidth and 1Gbps of internet throughput. Available in a white low-profile shell with the “Wyze” logo stamped on top, each Wyze Mesh Router node offers up to 1,500 square feet of wireless coverage. You can set up and configure the Wyze Mesh Router using the Wyze app, which also lets you check the status of the router and prioritize which connected devices should get the most bandwidth.—BEN PATTERSON LOGITECH MX MECHANICAL MINI FOR MAC Mechanical keyboards have a unique feel all their own, one that many users prefer. Logitech’s first mechanical keyboard optimized for the Mac uses…