Table of contents for January 2021 in MacFormat

I always think we cram a lot in MacFormat, but this issue feels really jam-packed. For those revitalising their machines or buying a new Mac with macOS 11 Big Sur, you’ll find all the advice you need to enjoy it at its best in The Great Mac Refresh on p16. Talking of buying new Macs, Apple has released its first own-silicon devices. For the kit out so far, the M1 chip – coupled with the Neural Engine – means blisteringly fast performance, enhanced machine learning, improved efficiency, and many more benefits. The fact that Apple has developed its own chip is great for future model releases as Apple will no longer be tied to third-party tech advances, and the in-house internals help to keep costs down. Check out our reviews…

Over the last couple of years, Apple has begun to transition its iPads to all-screen designs, eliminating bezels and Home buttons with extreme prejudice. Now, it looks like future iPads’ screens will be not only bigger but better too thanks to new miniLED display technology, which is rumoured to be making its way to iPads in spring 2021. That belief comes from reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a good track record when it comes to Apple rumours. miniLED screens pack in up to 10,000 LEDs – far more than the 576 in Apple’s best screen, the Pro Display XDR. Kuo also believes that Apple has up to six miniLED devices in its pipeline, including other iPads and Macs, so there could be much to look forward to. In…

Steve Jobs famously compared the computer to the bicycle – an artificial addition to the human body that makes it many times more efficient. It was a great metaphor, just possibly not ideally calibrated to a contemporary tech audience of Steve Wozniak-like nerds whose questionably coordinated attempts at riding a bike had probably ended in grazed knees and a lifelong commitment to on-screen pursuits. Read the room, Steve. Today, your Mac is more of a finely tuned semi-autonomous electric vehicle than a bike, and although it comes with sophisticated safety features and fewer ways to end up sitting in the gutter wondering where the chain went, most of us are probably driving it less efficiently than we could. In this article, we’ll point out some dials and switches you may…

Contrary to myth, thousands of small files all over your Mac’s startup drive won’t normally affect its performance. Nor do you need to defragment your hard drive, like in the old days – macOS takes care of that. The time to worry about space is when your drive gets within a few dozen gigabytes of full, and the place to do something about it is the Finder. We’ve also got tips and shortcuts for customising your workspace and organising your apps, windows, files and folders. 1 Store crazy From the Apple menu at the top left of the screen, choose About This Mac. Click the Storage tab and wait a few seconds for an overview of how much space is used by what types of content on all the drives…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN Create, manage, and use an easily accessible clipboard library YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.9 or later, CopyQ The clipboard is one of computing’s oldest time-saving tools, but it’s never evolved to keep up with the times. The main gripe is that you can only store one item on the clipboard at any time. CopyQ is a free, open-source app that bypasses this restriction by enabling you to build a library of frequently used clips that you can then place in the clipboard on-demand, or place your favourite clips at your fingertips via a universally accessible menu. The guides opposite reveal how to get up and running with CopyQ – as your clip library grows, explore its many features to help you find them…

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to change the default apps on iPhone and iPad YOU’LL NEED iOS/iPadOS 14 For now, you can only change the defaults for your web browser and email Apple’s iOS and iPadOS apps are great, but they aren’t always the best choice for everyone. That’s why the App Store is filled with alternatives: Carrot Weather (and until Apple bought it, Dark Sky) as alternatives to Apple’s own Weather; Fantastical instead of Calendar; Firefox instead of Safari, and so on. But while Apple was happy to let you install your chosen alternatives, it kept its own apps as the default – so if you clicked a link, it’d open in Safari; if you clicked an ‘email us’ button, it’d launch Mail. That’s changed…

Macs are great, but their webcams leave a lot to be desired – even an old iPhone likely has a better set of lenses than your Mac. In MF359, we showed you how to turn an old iPhone into a Mac webcam using the free Camo app. Not only is it a great way to improve your video call quality, but it can help put an old device to good use instead of just throwing it away. To get started, download Camo from reincubate.com on your Mac and the App Store on your iPhone. Connect your phone to your Mac with a cable, then launch Camo on both devices. You should see Camo working as a camera app on your iPhone. Now all that is left is to mount your…

Peering through the mists, we’re always soothsaying for signs of unity in the smart home world. If the fractured smart home landscape could unite itself as a compatible whole, without the need to add rickety bridges to join its many islands together, that would be a good thing. It would mean a wider choice of hardware, stronger platform understanding, widespread compatibility, and (probably) an easier point of entry. One app could, as Apple’s Home app tries to do, manage every smart device in your home – and you could take your pick of the app you wanted to use. Pie in the sky stuff, right? The entire history of computing is one of rival platforms battling it out; today, after 40 years of the home computer, it’s a punch-up between…

From £1,299 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 13.3in Retina display (2560x1600 resolution), Apple M1 chip, 8GB unified memory (16GB available), 256GB storage (512GB/1TB/2TB available), 802.11ax Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, 2x Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, headphone socket There are a few other things that distinguish the 13in MacBook Pro from the MacBook Air While there’s a huge difference in performance between the late 2020 MacBook Air and its Intel-driven forebear, the difference between the Air and the new 13in MacBook Pro feels more nuanced, chiefly because the two laptops have much in common – at least on paper. With a starting price of £1,299, the new 13in MacBook Pro also comes with an M1 system on a chip (SoC), complete with eight CPU cores and a 16-core Neural Engine, although this time the GPU…

Pro Type £139.99, Pro Click £99.99, Pro Glide £9.99 FROM Razer, razer.com FEATURES Bluetooth, 2.4GHz wireless, USB-C charging, backlighting, multi-device connection The mouse is a lovely thing to hold – comfortable for endless hours Let’s get one thing out the way right off the bat: this mouse and keyboard combination from Razer isn’t designed specifically for Macs. It’s a Windows-style setup, meaning you won’t see a ç or å key where it normally would be, the mouse doesn’t have any macOS gesture functions, and you can’t create custom macros because Razer’s Synapse software only works in Windows. But don’t let that put you off. This is a solid combination worth considering if you want a setup for both office work and gaming. Razer usually only focuses on gaming peripherals, but…

£86.56 FROM adobe.com NEEDS macOS 10.14 or later Guided Edits provide a springboard to a variety of montage effects Like iMovie, Adobe Premiere Elements 2021 is a non-linear video editing app that’s designed to help video makers trim, fix and share their video footage as polished programmes, complete with titles and transitions. However, compared to iMovie, Premiere Elements 2021 boasts a more sophisticated set of post-production tools, such as the ability to make selective adjustments to the colours and tones of a sky without changing the foreground exposure. iMovie only lets you apply one effect filter at a time. Premiere Elements enables you to apply multiple effects as non-destructive adjustment layers, giving you more freedom to experiment with a range of creative looks. Stay organised These days we may shoot…

£8.99 FROM Ginger Labs, gingerlabs.com NEEDS iOS 12 or later Notabilty Shop enables you to purchase additional features, stickers, and themes Notability is one of our favourite note-taking apps for iPad. It enables you to combine handwriting, illustrations, images, typed text, audio recordings, and external files such as MP3s in a single document; it enables you to import PDFs or scan printed documents and annotate or highlight them; and it has good support for a wide range of cloud-based services. It’s particularly good with the Apple Pencil on compatible iPads but it also works well on iPhone, and there’s a desktop version (£1.99) for easy syncing between mobile and desktop. The biggest change in version 10 is the arrival of the new Notability Shop, which enables you to purchase additional…

From £1,299 In November 2020, Apple rather surprised the tech world with an earlier-than-expected release of the first MacBook Pro with its own custom designed 5nm Apple M1 chip. The eight-core CPU is said to offer 2.8 times faster performance over its predecessor, while the 8-core GPU offers five times faster graphics. The 16-core Neural Engine completes the powerhouse spec sheet for advanced machine learning. All this, coupled with a 61W battery, translates to the longest battery life for a MacBook Pro so far, with an impressive 17 hours of web browsing and 20 hours of video play. The Pro comes with 8GB of unified memory but you can upgrade to 16GB. Storage starts at 256GB SSD, and can be configured up to 2TB. The physical build remains the same…

We’ve scoured the App Store to bring you the best apps for everything – and they’re all gratis Shortcut hacks Think Shortcuts are too complicated to set up? Think again. Follow our guide to simplify your life ALSO INSIDE… Create your own custom widgets Run Linux in a virtual machine Look better on FaceTime! … and much more! Contents subject to change ISSUE 361 ON SALE 12 JAN 2021 DON’T MISS IT – SUBSCRIBE TODAY! IN PRINT & ON YOUR iPAD Our print and digital bundle gets you the paper magazine as well as our iPad edition magazinesdirect.com/macformat-magazine-subscription ON YOUR MAC Read digitally on your Mac: subscribe with Zinio at bit.ly/ziniomacf…

A side from the excitement of Apple revealing the first M1 Macs at its One More Thing event in November, there was other big news: the launch of macOS Big Sur. Apple’s latest Mac operating system is one of the biggest updates the Mac has received in years, with a complete redesign and many new features making it a real sea change. Like almost everything Apple does these days, Big Sur is tightly integrated with the Mac hardware. Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi explained, during the One More Thing keynote, that this has enabled the new Macs to instantly wake from sleep and launch apps much faster. The improvements brought by the new chips combine with optimisations in Big Sur for a zippier experience overall. Apple also touched on how…

[MAC APP] Wondershare Filmora X From $44.99 (about £33) Video editing on the Mac made simple Editing videos on your Mac may feel like a daunting task, but it does not have to be. There are plenty of tools out there that make the process simple, and Wondershare’s Filmora X is among the best. The latest version of the video-editing app brings a raft of new features while aiming to keep things simple. That has seen the interface become more approachable, as well as the addition of new drag-and-drop features that make editing a bit more straightforward. Other new features include motion tracking and keyframing to help enhance movements and animations, colour matching that applies to multiple clips at once, and one-click audio fading and overlapping. There are also improvements…

We all have photos that we wish came out better, but taking a deep dive into photo editing can feel rather intimidating. Add Luminar to your arsenal, though, and that concern becomes a thing of the past. The software’s clever use of artificial intelligence (AI) takes the stress out of improving your pictures. Beyond the standard tweaking tools you would expect to find, Luminar can scan your images and suggest AI edits. You then apply the changes with a slider, meaning the app does the hard work for you but you still retain control over how much or how little is changed. It is a great way to perform complex edits without the fuss. One of its standout features is its sky replacement tool. There is a whole host of…

Big Sur brings a revamp for those funny little icons that sit at the top right of your screen challenging you to remember what they do without the aid of text. Obviously, text would take up too much room. Cleverly, Big Sur spaces out the icons, taking up too much room. Look, we don’t make the rules. It is now easier to turn these little helpers on and off, and with many duplicated in the new Control Centre, off can be a very practical option. Meanwhile, notifications and widgets have a whole new relationship. Aww. 1 Drag race Here’s a cool feature of Big Sur’s Control Centre that you may not have noticed. Click the icon with the little sliders to drop down Control Centre, then click any panel within it…

When your Mac’s startup drive (called Macintosh HD by default, even if it’s an SSD) runs out of room, don’t worry, there are other places where you can store your files. Even if you can’t upgrade internally, you can plug in external drives. Or you can keep more files in the cloud, which will probably mean upgrading your iCloud storage plan to more than just the basic 5GB. To do so, go to System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud, click Manage at the bottom right, then Buy More Storage (or Change Storage Plan). 200GB is a good option for many people at £2.49 per month. 1 Drive harder iCloud Drive is a private online storage space that’s synced to your Mac and other devices on your Apple ID. You…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to use your iPhone or iPad as inputs for Notes on your Mac YOU’LL NEED iOS 12 or later, macOS 10.14 or later You can use your device as a camera and scanner for your Mac One of our favourite Apple innovations is Continuity, which makes all your Apple devices work together. Sidecar uses your iPad as a second display; Handoff enables you to start work on one device and pick up from where you left off on another; Universal Clipboard can copy from one device and paste to another; and Sketch enables you to draw on your touchscreen device and save it on your Mac. Of all the Continuity features, we think Continuity Camera is one of the most useful.…

These days, many people are going increasingly digital. What were once huge collections of DVDs, CDs and video games in physical cases can now be ripped to a Mac and served up over the internet to anyone in your house who needs them, whenever they need them. But to do this, you need a file server. This is a perfect role for an old Mac. File servers have very low system requirements, and even old-school Macs usually have more than enough power to serve your files throughout your house. This method is probably better suited to an old desktop Mac like a Mac mini rather than a MacBook – you need your file server to be turned on pretty much 24 hours a day, which will take a toll on…

If there is one thing Apple’s November event showed us, it is that the company knows how to make amazing processors. But the M1 chip in the latest Macs is nowhere near the first of its kind – Apple has been outfitting its iPhones and iPads with its own chips ever since they first launched. That is good news if you want to turn an old iPad into a dedicated gaming machine. Pairing its powerful A-series chip with its spacious display, lightweight portability and numerous handy accessories, the iPad is an ideal games device for portable play. Apple Arcade (£4.99 per month) is a great place to start. Apple has explicitly said that games on the platform must work across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, and that cross-compatibility means…

£699 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES M1 chip, 8GB of memory (16GB option), 256GB SSD (512GB/1TB/2TB options), 802.11ax Wi-Fi, 2x Thunderbolt/USB 4 The Mac mini is quick to boot, offers instant wake from sleep and launches most apps in a trice Apple’s third M1 Mac is the new Silver-clad Mac mini, which at £699 is the cheapest way for anyone to jump on the Apple silicon bandwagon. The new model is £100 less than its entry-level Intel predecessor and there’s an obvious reason for that. While the previous Intel-powered Mac mini came with four Thunderbolt/USB 3 ports, the M1 Mac mini makes do with two (albeit now Thunderbolt/USB 4) and it also eschews the optional 10Gb Ethernet upgrade available in the Intel model, in favour of plain old Gigabit Ethernet. And…

GEEKBENCH 5 SINGLE-CORE TEST We use this cross-platform benchmarking tool to measure a device’s performance, with a singlecore processor baseline of 1,000. 3DMARK WILD LIFE This cross-platform benchmarking app measures a device’s graphics performance, running a one-minute test at 2560x1440 resolution. Higher frame rates are better. PERFORMANCETEST MOBILE (PASSMARK) Another cross-platform benchmarking tool for mobile devices. Here we’re measuring storage read/write speeds. As mentioned, the wider f1.6 aperture on the Wide lens is perfect for sharp shots in low-light locations without the camera having to use noise-inducing fast ISO settings or blur-inducing slow shutter speeds, even without the aid of a tripod. The combination of that wider aperture and a 47% larger sensor certainly gives the 12 Pro Max the edge over other iPhones when it comes to night shoots.…

From £349 (4TB) FROM LaCie, lacie.com FEATURES Built-in storage drive (4/8/16TB), Thunderbolt 3 port More and more hard drives and storage devices now use high-speed Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C ports. LaCie’s 1big Dock is more than just a back-up drive though – it also includes a built-in dock that can connect Thunderbolt, USB, and other devices. The 1big Dock is indeed rather big, with a weight of 1.7kg (4TB model) and a large external power supply that will keep it stuck on your desk. It’s available with 4TB, 8TB or 16TB of storage – complete with five-year warranty – and you can open the front panel and replace the hard drive yourself if you want to. The hard drive inside recorded read and write speeds of 230MB/s – good for…

£229.99 FROM Brydge, brydge.com FEATURES SD card, USB-C (out), Ethernet, 3x USB-A, Thunderbolt 3 Brydge’s Stone Pro is a real multiport Thunderbolt hub. There’s a Thunderbolt 3 cable for connection to your Mac, and a corresponding port on the hub. This is because it’s able to directly power your laptop, supplying over 87W to charge up to four extra USB devices. This comes via the wall power supply, which is significantly heavier than the hub itself though it means you don’t need to connect your laptop’s own power supply. Most ports are on the rear, barring an SD card slot on the side. The wall power port is small despite the power brick being large, which helps to keep the size of the device down. There are three USB-A ports…

$39 (about £30) FROM iterate, mountainduck.io NEEDS macOS 10.12 or later Mountain Duck would like to be your one-tool-fitsall option for accessing cloud storage. It’s a soupedup version of the company’s free Cyberduck application, adding Finder integration to supported services, which include a variety of cloud storage providers, plus FTP and WebDAV. Version 4’s highlight is the ability to view the progress of the current file being synced, along with a list of recently changed files on the computer and server. This is accessed via the main menu, which is unfortunately becoming rather unwieldy with all the extra features being added. Elsewhere, changes are less radical. Microsoft Office and LibreOffice documents open in read-only mode if they’re already open elsewhere, and you can now add labels to bookmarks, which then…

iPadOS 14 adds some great new features that apps can include to make them easier to use and more useful in a wider variety of situations. At the more subtle end, Apple is encouraging apps to use a new sidebar interface for making it simpler to see what more complex apps can do. But one of the biggest features is Scribble support, which enables you to use Apple Pencil to handwrite into text fields or make copyable written notes. And the new approach to widgets allows many apps to create new ways to see what’s happening from the Home screen. Everyday Habit Tracker Free (IAPs) NEEDS iOS 9 or later The Everyday Habit Tracker app takes advantage of the new rich widgets on iPadOS 14 and is designed to help…

From £999 Apple’s thinnest, lightest laptop now also gets the M1 treatment. But without a price hike! Prices still start at just £999. The next step model (with increased SSD storage and eight-core GPU) even costs £50 less at £1,249. Like the MBP, Apple’s own unified memory silicon enables faster performance and better graphic speeds. And the 16-core Neural Engine results in nine times faster machine learning. It may be Apple’s most affordable laptop, but the MacBook Air certainly doesn’t feel like a budget machine, thanks to its 100% recycled aluminium unibody, and 13.3in LED-backlit Retina display, which has a resolution of 2560x1600 (227ppi) and True Tone, which automatically adjusts the display’s colour temperature depending on the ambient light. The inclusion of the M1 chip has changed none of the…

The iPhone 12 and its sibling phones are the first smartphones to use Apple partner TSMC’s 5nm process in their chips, which helps give them a huge speed advantage over rival devices, most of which are stuck on larger 7nm manufacturing processes. As we found in our iPhone 12 Pro Max review on p80, Apple’s latest phones can smash through almost any task you throw at them thanks to their incredible chips. According to industry analysts TrendForce, Apple is not stopping there, and is already planning on whittling its process down to 4nm as soon as possible. That could mean 4nm iPhones hitting the shelves as soon as 2022 in the form of the iPhone 14 range (or whatever name Apple opts for), complete with A16 chips far faster than…

While we value touch-scrolling Magic Mice and gesturesensing Magic Trackpads, the Magic Keyboard is often the fastest way to activate commands. Even as the Mac’s legendary role as cursor-armed slayer of the green-screen command line slips into the same mists as St George’s, there’s a bit of an aversion, chez Cupertino, to keyboard navigation. But if you know your way around, with a few tweaks, you can invoke many of the commands you need without having to point a little arrow at them. 1 Keep tab with Tab You probably use Tab to move between text fields. You may know you can use it to switch the blue outline between buttons in a dialog box, then press [spacebar] to click (Return selects the solid blue button regardless). You may have noticed…

If your Mac feels like it’s struggling, the first step is to narrow down exactly why. Age is one obvious possibility: there’s not much inside that’ll get slower before it actually dies, but hard disks and batteries can definitely get glitchier towards the end of their life. Ultimately, as you keep upgrading your OS and apps but not your hardware, it’s eventually going to fall behind. That’s due in large part to the CPU, which can’t be replaced, and this is why we have the Apple Store and its enticing selection of shiny new Macs. Before things get to that stage, though, your first port of call to find fixable causes of slow-downs and other shenanigans is Activity Monitor. It lives in Applications > Utilities, but it’s easiest to find…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN About the key new features in Safari 14 YOU’LL NEED macOS 10.14 or later When Apple revealed the new version of Safari that is included with macOS 11 Big Sur, it said that this would be Safari’s “biggest update ever”. As well as providing faster browsing and, therefore, helping to prolong your MacBook’s battery life, the new version of Safari is packed with features that make browsing your favourite sites easier, as well as providing stronger controls to protect your privacy online. The new features focus on three main areas – the revamped Start Page, improved privacy, and more versatile tab management. The Start Page can now be customised to suit your personal browsing preferences, with a new Options menu that enables…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to customise Control Centre in Big Sur YOU’LL NEED macOS 11 The menu bar at the top of the Mac screen has been a fixture of the macOS for decades. The handy bar provides a convenient set of tools in the top-right corner of the screen, allowing you to quickly access and control key features on your Mac, such as Wi-Fi settings, Bluetooth and sound. But, over the years, that little corner of the menu bar has become rather cluttered, so Big Sur’s introduction of the new Control Centre – borrowed, of course, from the iPhone and iPad – represents one of the biggest changes to the Mac’s interface in years. By default, there’s a fixed set of nine specific features…

IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to add and manage media files on your device using iMazing 2 YOU’LL NEED iMazing 2 (from £39.99), OS X 10.9 or later, iOS 4 or later It is no secret that Apple’s own apps are hardly the most elegant way to manage your media on your devices. Even though iTunes is no longer with us, its legacy of clunky media management lives on in the form of Music, Podcasts, and TV. The Photos app is marginally better, but it is still far from perfect. If you are looking for an alternative, iMazing should be top of your list (and a free trial is available). It makes transferring media between devices a real breeze, with a smooth workflow that is super…

Want to keep your valuables safe without breaking the bank on an expensive camera? With good lenses and plentiful storage, old iPhones make great home security cams. Before you do anything on the software side, you will want a stand for your iPhone. Ideally it will be a charging stand to keep your phone juiced up, but you could use an ordinary stand and plug in a cable if required. You might also want to consider disguising your phone in some way, perhaps behind other objects, so that it is not immediately obvious to an intruder. Finally, a wide-angle lens attachment is a good way to enlarge the field of view and ensure more coverage. Next, you will need a recording app. Alfred Home Security Camera is a good choice…

LIVE SMARTER The smart home is here – live the Apple dream today! The main problem is, that to make automations happen between kit that speaks different languages (whether that hardware is deliberately obtuse or that’s just the way it is), you need to rely on some flaky intermediary to get the job done. Ever wonder why we don’t talk about IFTTT so much any more? It’s because, in my experience, If This Then That has turned into more of an If This Then Wait A Few Minutes And Maybe That If You’re Lucky. IFTTWAFMAMTIYL is not quite as catchy an acronym. Stringify has bitten the dust, Yonomi seems to have a very limited number of supported devices; if you want X to talk to Y, you’re in for a…

From £699 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES 5.4-inch Super Retina XDR display (2340x1080 pixels), A14 Bionic chip, 64/128/256GB storage, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, 5G, 12MP camera system with Ultra Wide (f/2.4), Wide (f/1.6) lenses, MagSafe charging The mini’s performance is astonishing given its size Not everyone wants a supersize smartphone. If you’ve been considering the iPhone 12 but think its 6.1in screen is on the large side, the iPhone 12 mini may be for you. The mini is almost identical to its bigger counterpart, but in a smaller form. At just 131.5x64.2x7.4mm, small hands rejoice! And, while it’s easier to hold, the mini also gets Ceramic Shield protection for the screen, which offers superior drop performance. The mini has a 5.4-inch edge-to-edge display. The Super Retina XDR OLED screen is really…

£54.99 FROM Logitech, logitech.com FEATURES iOS shortcut keys, rechargeable battery, protective covering Logitech’s new Keys-To-Go keyboard is designed for ultimate portability, weighs in at 180g, and is available in four colours. It comes with a USB-A to micro USB cable for charging and a single charge lasts three months, based on two hours of typing per day. Pairing is done by holding the power key to activate pairing mode, and works quickly. We weren’t able to pair a second device without unpairing the keyboard from the first, though this isn’t something most people will need to do that often. The power indicator shows green for good battery, but the keyboard didn’t report its battery percentage to iOS 14 on the devices we tested. The keyboard is covered with a liquid-repellent…

£86.56 FROM adobe.com NEEDS macOS 10.14 onwards The Moving Photos tool takes 2D static images and gives them an animated 3D look Photoshop Elements has always been considered a cutdown version of the full version of Adobe Photoshop. For many years, this was a fair description (especially when Elements lacked key tools such as layer masks.) However, with the release of Elements 2021, the app is less of a cut-down version – it’s more of a streamlined one. The various Guided Edit modes give you easy access to the key tools required to help fix particular picture problems. Thanks to features such as Adobe Sensei AI it also enables you to give your shots a creative makeover without having years of experience with the full version of Photoshop. Elements also…

£19.99 FROM Playdead, playdead.com NEEDS OS X 10.11 or later Inside has no heroes. You have no superpowers, you can’t fight, you can’t even speak. All you can do is run. There is no glory here, only survival. That Inside offers no story exposition only heightens its urgency. You’re never told how its dystopian world has gone so very wrong. A world where people are rounded up and driven away in trucks in the dead of night, where faceless guards shoot you on sight, where ghastly human experiments become more perverse as you progress. All you know is that you, a helpless child, must escape, overcoming its fiendish puzzles in any way you can. Every aspect of Inside feels measured to perfection, from the bleak, grey-clad locations to the stunning…

Curated picks of third-party kit DESKTOP SPEAKER Ruark MR1 £329.99 ruarkaudio.com Winner of MF357’s head to head, the MR1 speaker set looks and sounds the business. The dome tweeter and longthrow woofer can handle a variety of audio styles with aplomb. You get a good variety of connectivity options, and we love the chunky function/volume dial too. IN-EAR EARPHONES M&D MW07 Plus £279 masterdynamic.com Master & Dynamic’s MW07 Plus offer 10 hours of listening time, and the charging case holds an additional three charges (so you get 40 hours in total). These greatsounding earbuds are IPX5 rated, so they’re excellent for workouts and commuting. The marble-effect finish gives them a premium aesthetic, as does the stainless steel charging case. USB FLASH DRIVE SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive Luxe 1TB £243.99 shop.westerndigital.com…

Best known for his editorship of MacUser magazine, Adam Banks was a hugely accomplished writer and virtuoso designer. But he was also a man with a big heart: kind, generous, witty and always keen to offer a word of encouragement. For those of us in the interlocking worlds of Apple, publishing and design – and we are many – it seems unreal Adam will never again pop up on Twitter to offer a pithy comment or sagely bite of wisdom. There’s that feeling in the gut – a desperation to have one last chat on the phone. But time is weird: you seem to have so much of it, and then you have none at all. Adam knew a lot about time. Although he’d drive printers mad with a fluid…