Macworld Australia May 2020

We live in strange times. I’d wager that a lot of you are now working from home, either for the first time or for a lot longer than you’re used to. I used to work in an office more or less every day, but for the past five years I’ve been working in my garage every day. As a result, I’ve learned a lot about the tools, techniques, and behaviors that can help you work more efficiently on your Mac or iPad from home. I hope what I’ve learned can help you be more productive and healthier at home. GIVE YOUR MAC MORE SCREEN SPACE If you’re used to working from a Mac with a big monitor and are now working from a laptop, you may be frustrated by a lack of…

Even in these trying times, it’s good to have something to look forward to. The March release of new models of the iPad Pro (see page 76) and the MacBook Air (see page 82) may be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but they at least gave us a distraction from everything else that’s going on. More than that, though, they may be the first real indication of Apple’s behavior during this current world situation. Not just in terms of the products that the company is delivering, but how it’s prepared to deliver them. Because the Apple that we’ve all become accustomed to watching, the one that has the business of product releases down to a science, has to deal with these major upheavals like the rest of us,…

Over a year ago, I argued that Apple should replace Intel with AMD in its Mac lineup (go.macworld.com/rpin). Today, the choice seems even clearer. From low-power laptops to the big iron in the Mac Pro, Apple would be well-served to consider AMD alternatives to Intel CPUs. THE MAC PRO: THREADRIPPER The Mac Pro is a big, expensive, high-power system made for heavy multithreaded workloads. So Apple equips it with Intel Xeon workstation processors, from the 8-core, 16-thread W-3223 to the 28-core, 56-thread W-3275M. The cheapest, slowest model retails for $750 and has a thermal design power of 160 watts, and that scales up to almost $7,500 and 205 watts on the high end. How does AMD’s latest Ryzen Threadripper processors compare? At the low end, AMD is more expensive—the Threadripper 3960X is a…

Apple isn’t canceling its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this year, but it is changing the format. According to a statement (go.macworld. com/20on) released on March 13, Apple will hold WWDC 2020 entirely online in order to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In the statement, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller referred to the pandemic as the “current health situation.” Schiller also said Apple aimed to create a “new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world.” Schiller did not specify the actual dates, but he confirmed that the event would be held in June as usual. In our event calendar (go.macworld.com/evcl), we speculate that the most likely dates for the…

If you worked at an office job before the novel coronavirus pandemic, there’s a good chance you’re now working from home. It can feel limiting, especially if you only have a MacBook. Fortunately, you can drastically improve your productivity by hooking up an external monitor to your workstation, usually by using one display as a reference and doing your actual work in the other. (Less wholesomely, you could work in one and watch a movie in another—but I didn’t say that.) An HDMIcompatible TV should do the trick if you don’t have an extra monitor sitting around, but the pixel density and refresh rates likely won’t be as satisfying. First off—here’s the bad news. It’s usually a lot easier to hook up an external monitor to a PC rather than a Mac,…

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have made a huge impact on software in recent years, but nowhere more prominently than digital photography. Any image editing app worth its salt has implemented at least a little of this technology to manipulate pixels in ways we could only have imagined a decade ago. A cross between longtime favorite Adobe Lightroom and more powerful sibling Photoshop, Luminar 4 (go. macworld.com/lmn4) is a Mac image editor which relies heavily on AI technology to accomplish previously complicated tasks with ease. The result is an application designed for photographers who want to quickly enhance photos without a steep learning curve or the fiddling that typically comes with it. Nowhere is this more evident than Luminar 4’s new AI Sky Replacement, which turns a bland, boring skyline into something…