Macworld May 2023

The release of the M1 processor was a milestone. Apple finally migrated the Mac to its fast, low-power mobile processors, and the results were incredible. They were a hard act to follow—and after about a year and a half, the M2 processor arrived with a (not unexpected) set of incremental gains. You can’t reinvent the wheel every time out, and clearly the M2 was a careful follow-on to the M1, designed to keep the ball rolling. But now reports abound that the M3 is on the way—not at the end of the year or in early 2024, as you might expect from the 18-month gap between the M1 and the M2, but very soon, perhaps as soon as late spring or early summer. Surprise! It turns out that Apple may be more…

I’ve never felt the need to choose between the iPad and the Mac. I use and value them both. But over the last few years, it’s started to feel like both the Mac and the iPad are increasingly limited by an artificial barrier that Apple has placed between them. The iPad has slowly become more Mac-like without ever really reaching the promised land. The Mac, meanwhile, has failed to pick up many desirable features from the iPad. I admire the discipline Apple has had in keeping its product lines separate, but it feels like that decision is starting to harm the futures of both products. The Mac and the iPad are on a collision course, and I’m concerned that they’re both about to run into the brick wall Apple has erected between…

This August the iMac will be 25 years old! Way back on August 15, 1998, Apple introduced the G3 iMac. Could we see an M3 iMac this summer to celebrate the anniversary? It’s possible. In a recent newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman revealed that, according to his sources, Apple is “at an advanced stage of development called engineering validation testing,” which means Apple is already conducting production tests on a new iMac. This doesn’t mean the new iMac will be shipping imminently. Gurman says the new iMac is not expected to go into mass production for at least three months, and that it “won’t ship until the second half of the year at the earliest.” This new iMac is expected to feature the same screen size as the current model (24 inches) and…

Security researchers have published a report detailing the arrival of new malware that goes after sensitive data that’s stored on your Mac, including passwords and credit card data. According to the security team at Uptycs, the “MacStealer” malware can attack Macs running macOS Catalina or later, with either Intel or Apple M-series chips. Uptycs found that MacStealer can get passwords, cookies, and credit card data from Firefox, Google Chrome, and Brave browsers. It can extract several file types, including .txt, .doc, .jpg, and .zip, and it can extract the KeyChain database. According to information Uptycs gathered from the dark web, MacStealer’s makers are working on the ability to harvest Safari passwords and cookies, as well as data in the Notes app. “The bad actor uses a .DMG file to spread the malware.…

If you yearn for the days of old Mac OS versions—we’re talking pre–OS X here—then your time has finally come. Software engineer Mihai Parparita has unveiled his latest project: Infinite Mac, which features 42 (!) virtual machines that run classic versions of the Mac operating system released between 1984 and 2000. The collection starts with the original Mac operating system, System 1.0, and goes all the way up to 9.0.4. Each VM runs within a browser; when you go to the Infinite Mac website and click a VM, it launches that version of the Mac operating system—and it’s fully operational. You’re essentially running a classic Mac OS on top of your current Mac. For #MARCHintosh this year I’m launching https://t.co/VHuLGI4Zto. It features runnable versions of almost every classic System Software/Mac OS release,…

ChatGPT made its debut last December, and this AI-based text-generation tool opens up a world of possibilities not just for anyone doing research on the web, but also for anyone who needs to write about any topic. It can quickly become an indispensable tool. And an equally indispensable tool we recently discovered is MacGPT, which is nothing less than a Mac Gem in the making. To access ChatGPT, you first have to sign up for an account on the ChatGPT site. Once you do that, you can use ChatGPT through a browser. But if you find yourself using ChatGPT often and want a more efficient way to access it, you can use MacGPT, a utility by Jordi Bruin. MacGPT simply loads the ChatGPT UI into a window separate from your main…