Table of contents for September 2022 in MacFormat

Making regular backups of the files on your Mac often feels like one of those housekeeping jobs that you should do, but rarely get around to – like tidying the garage or clearing out the shed. It’s often when you can’t find something on your Mac only to find that it’s vanished without a trace that you realise the importance of Time Machine and a backup scheme. This month’s lead feature (p20) will provide you with all the tips, tricks and techniques you need to knock your backups into shape – and keep your Mac clear of clutter at the same time. The aim being to help you get ready for the arrival of macOS Ventura this autumn. Talking of new things, this month’s lead review (and our cover star)…

Apple’s forthcoming mixed-reality (MR) headset is finally approaching its launch date, according to rumours. We’ve seen a new round of details emerge, giving hints as to what we can expect. As we covered on the previous pages, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman believes the headset will be powered by Apple’s M2 chip. That’s in contrast to other leaks, which have stated it could come with two chips rather than just one. Either way, we’re sure Apple will use its own silicon to ensure the chips stay cool, helping to keep the headset comfortable. As for a release date, Apple tipster Ming-Chi Kuo has alleged the headset will be announced in January 2023. Kuo believes it will be a “game-changer” with “significant competitive advantages” that will force rivals to play catch up, “leading…

Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com LETTER OF THE MONTH! MONEY, HONEY I have been a subscriber to MacFormat now for about 15 months and as yet haven’t seen anything about personal finance apps. Having run Microsoft Money for 15 years or so, I found that I couldn’t upgrade anymore. I discovered a company called Jiosoft and their program was as near to the Microsoft one and very good. Then came my quantum leap over to a MacBook and I had foolishly assumed it would be easy to get a suitable new app. It turns out it was the opposite! Jiosoft do a Mac version but, after a week or so, it went awry to such an extent that I appeared to have a million pounds…

PRIZES WORTH £698! The Mac is a great machine for content creation, but it gets even better when you pair it with a few tools that speed up your workflow. That’s what you get with the Loupedeck CT and Loupedeck Live, two superb desktop consoles that make creation a breeze, and this issue we have a pair up for grabs. The Loupedeck CT’s buttons, dials, and LCD panel can all be customised to your needs. You can group tools and functions together and sort them by project type or editing stage, or edit with exact detail thanks to the device’s precision dials. Even better, it works natively with apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and many more. And if that’s not enough, there are over 70 downloadable profiles…

A ccidentally saved the wrong edit of a crucial document? Time Machine! Spent hours on a Logic Pro project only for someone else to save an old version on top of it? You need Time Machine. Recovering messages you accidentally deleted? You need Time Machine. Although Time Machine can store backups on your Mac, that’s not great from a disaster-proofing point of view; it’s best used to back up to an external drive, a networked drive or another Mac. As with any kind of backup, don’t put all your important eggs in one basket. Time Machine isn’t just a brilliant way of retracing your steps. It’s a very efficient backup app too; once you’ve set it up it happily runs in the background, making incremental backups every hour, every day…

IT WILL TAKE ➤10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤How to record audio on your Mac, how to schedule a recording, how to route audio YOU’LL NEED ➤Audio Hijack 4, $77 (about £76, rogueamoeba.com), macOS 10.14.4 or later, an internet connection, an external audio source Audio Hijack is an app that’s able to intercept any audio stream on your Mac from a hardware source like your microphone or a record player and also from any application or from macOS itself. Using a clever system of configurable drag-and-drop blocks, it lets you route one or more sources through a virtual recorder, capturing the sound to a digital audio file. You can even add effects like noise reduction, add multiple recorders for compressed and uncompressed recording, and schedule recordings to begin at specific…

IT WILL TAKE ➤15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤How to customise Control Centre for instant access YOU’LL NEED ➤iPhone or iPad Genius tip! ➤In addition to Control Centre’s various buttons, you can also use Home Screen widgets to show data and provide quick access to many apps. 2013 was a great year for iOS users. That’s when Apple introduced iOS 7, one of the biggest and most welcome redesigns of iOS in Apple’s history. It solved all kinds of iOS irritations and introduced one of our very favourite features: Control Centre. The first version was pretty good, but over time it became even better and more useful. Control Centre is designed to make it fast and easy to access key settings without having to venture into the depths of the…

IT WILL TAKE ➤10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤How to control devices with your Apple Watch YOU’LL NEED ➤appleWatch, watchOS 8 or later Genius tip! ➤Shortcuts enable you to control all kinds of things via Complications or Siri. You can create your own in the iPhone Shortcuts app. There’s a saying: the best camera is the one you have on you. It’s a similar story for remote controls: the best controller is the one that isn’t somewhere down the back of the sofa when you’re trying to change the channel. Your Apple Watch is that controller, and it can do more than control your TV. You can use it to control your Mac, your HomePods, your iPhone camera and your smart home tech too. Being able to control your various…

Why do I get a privacy warning with new router? > This doesn’t mean your devices are vulnerable to attack; it shows your service provider can learn about connections made. If in doubt, try enabling iCloud+ Private Relay in Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Private Relay. Normally the warning will go away of its own accord. Why don’t I see SMS text messages on my iPad? > Unlike iMessages, text messages are only received on iPhone and other devices with mobile phone connections, and don’t arrive through iCloud. To see and respond on other devices, on your iPhone use Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding to enable your other devices individually.…

How to create a TOC for a EPUB book in Pages? > Use consistent paragraph styles to enable them to build the Table of Contents (TOC). Click the View menu button in the toolbar and pick Table ofContents, then click Edit to select styles. Adjust indentation using the buttons. When exporting to EPUB or PDF, the TOC is updated automatically. How to customise the pointer for Keynote? > Go to System Prefs > Accessibility, select Display and the Pointer tab. There you can increase size, and give it outline and fill colours. For a pro look, there are several apps in the App Store, among them Cursor Pro which is customisable, even having a magnifying glass tool. Why does Microsoft AutoUpdate keep opening itself? > This occurs when AutoUpdate has…

Migrate backups to Monterey Q I’m migrating from Catalina to Monterey. My backup disk has two HFS+ volumes, one for Time Machine, the other for documents. How can I convert those to APFS? by TOM LEWIS A Disk Utility can convert Mac OS Extended (HFS+) volumes to Apple File System (APFS) format, but any holding Time Machine backups can’t be usefully converted. To convert your document volume in Disk Utility, select it in the list at the left. Check that it’s not your backup volume, then ≈-click on it for the menu with ‘Convert to APFS’ at its foot. This is a one-way trip: once converted, there’s no going back, as nothing can turn APFS back to HFS+. The problem with Time Machine backups is that those made to HFS+…

A ska group of Mac users for their favourite built-in app and you’d be hard pressed to find many that would say Disk Utility. Yet, it has dug many of us out of trouble, fixed problems that looked terminal, and allowed us to do all manner of things with drives and volumes that would otherwise require investing in third-party software. Despite having a simple interface and being easy to use, Disk Utility’s use of some arcane terminology often puts people off using it. It shouldn’t. Whether you want to erase a drive, force an external drive to mount, create a partition (or container in APFS, more about that later), or fix a drive or volume that’s misbehaving, it’s straightforward to do in Disk Utility. Disk Utility is also a key…

Mac FORMAT VERDICT The View Plus makes it easy to keep tabs on your home atmosphere – there’s no HomeKit support though. ★★★★☆ Air quality monitoring No HomeKit support Being able to monitor the air quality in our homes is more important than ever. In April, the Central Office of Public Interest (Copi) and Imperial College concluded that 97% of UK homes exceeded World Health Organisation (WHO) deadlines for safe levels of pollutants. The pill-shaped Airthings View Plus comes with six sensors for measuring different pollutants – from Radon levels to CO2, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to particulate matter (PM2.5). It can even warn you when your home is too hot, too humid or whether rooms are suffering from excessive levels of humidity. The results are listed on a 7.37cm…

Mac FORMAT VERDICT A superb app for artists of all levels. ★★★★★ Extremely powerful Friendly workflow Procreate is a graphics app that caters to artists of all levels. Priced at a reasonable £8.99 one-off purchase, with no IAPs, it represents excellent value. Supporting up to 16x8K canvases on the latest iPad Pro models, it allows for very large creations even on less powerful iPads. It’s powered by the Valkyrie 64-bit painting engine that offers buttery smooth performance, and supports keyboard shortcuts and the Apple Pencil. There are hundreds of brushes and textures available, each with over 100 customisation settings. With Brush Studio, you can create your own, and import Photoshop brushes. Graphical elements can be imported via the Files app and placed into layers. The layering system is easy, with…

HOT TOPIC! Apple is set to unleash a deluge of new products in late 2022 and early 2023, according to a prominent Apple journalist. That could include iPhones, Macs, iPads, a near-mythical top-secret project, and even some old devices resurrected and given a new lease of life. The news comes from Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who has a strong track record with previous Apple leaks and rumours. Let’s see what he had to say. iPhone mini waves goodbye Starting with the iPhone, Gurman explains that Apple will release four models this autumn: iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Max, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max. The iPhone mini is noticeably absent, being replaced by a larger 6.7-inch version of the iPhone 14. Gurman says one of the main features of…

When Apple unveiled the M2 MacBook Pro at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2022, it was clear the device was a ‘point five’ update rather than a revolutionary upgrade. Now, however, it seems the performance of its M2 chip is even more restrained – and in some cases disappointing – than we expected. The revelation comes from YouTube channels Max Tech and Created Tech, who each put the M2 MacBook Pro to the test. Both discovered that the M2 MacBook Pro’s SSD performance was as much as half that of the previous-generation M1 MacBook Pro. How could this be? It seems that in lowercapacity models such as the 256GB M2 MacBook Pro, Apple has used only a single SSD NAND chip, rather than the two used in the…

APP OF THE MONTH [ MAC APP] RapidWeaver is a favourite among Mac web designers, and Realmac, the company behind it, has just announced a big change in how it works. Gone is the single-app approach of the past, and instead seems to be a direction that’s likely familiar to Adobe fans. Now, there will be two apps: RapidWeaver Classic and RapidWeaver Elements. Starting with the former, it is basically a continuation of the existing, familiar RapidWeaver – current plug-ins, themes and projects are all compatible. Realmac says there are new features in the works and plenty of continued development and support in the future. Details are sparse on RapidWeaver Elements, but Realmac says it’s coming later this year and that, “Having two versions allows us to make more impactful…

It has long been the case that older devices have been unable to take advantage of all the new features Apple offers when it upgrades its operating systems. Indeed, this is true of tech firms more broadly, and it can often be for good reason, namely that a hardware upgrade helps facilitate that new software feature. We’ve seen this with the iPhone’s camera many times. This issue came to the fore once again in the wake of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. While there was much excitement about the forthcoming features unveiled at WWDC, it quickly emerged that lots of people would not be able to use them. The key example of this is Stage Manager, which greatly improves multitasking on the iPad, allowing for multiple overlapping windows.…

NEW IDEAS Your in-depth guide to getting more from your Apple kit Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com Master Apple shortcuts iOS A tap is a brief contact of (usually) one finger on your device’s screen. To drag is to move a finger across the screen to scroll or pan around content. Swipe means move one or more fingers across an item or the screen, then let go. A flick is like swiping, but it’s quicker, and is often used to scroll content more quickly. Pinch means move two fingers together or apart, usually to zoom in or out. Touch and hold means lightly rest your finger on an item and wait for a reaction. WHAT’S INSIDE 38 CREATE GREAT DOCUMENTS Use Craft to add visual…

IT WILL TAKE ➤15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤How to add computer-generated sunrays and relight your landscape to suit YOU’LL NEED ➤Luminar Neo (£7.99/month), macOS 10.14.6 or later Landscapes are a common source of photographic inspiration, so it’s no surprise that Luminar Neo is packed with landscape enhancing tools. As well as a considered composition, a successful landscape relies on the weather to provide drama and impact. If you have the patience to wait till dusk, you might capture a romantic landscape scene bathed in the warm rays of the setting sun. However, if you’re on holiday, your family may not appreciate having to hang about until the ‘golden hour’ for you to enjoy a perfect landscape photo opportunity, so you’ll need to call upon Luminar Neo’s landscape enhancing tools…

IT WILL TAKE ➤30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤How to make the most of Siri on iPhone and iPad YOU’LL NEED ➤iPhone or iPad Siri is more than just a helpful voice assistant on Apple’s devices. It’s become integral to the way we use them. Think about the suggestions that appear on screen recommending apps to launch, people to contact, or tasks to complete inside apps. Those are all controlled by Siri. Shortcuts use Siri in lots of ways to make them easier to use and more powerful. Ever noticed that when you receive a text message with a two-factor authentication code, the code appears at the top of the keyboard ready to be filled in while you’re still in Safari? That’s Siri. If you use AirPods, Siri can tell…

Q Which f ile compression and archive format should I use? by NATHAN ROWLANDS A This is largely determined by who’s going to decompress those archives, and what’s in them. For general use with other Mac and PC users, standard Zip archives are universally accessible and reasonably efficient. Use Archive Utility, an app hidden in /System/ Library/CoreServices/Applications or found using Spotlight, ensuring its preferences are set to use Zip and not Apple Archive, which is Mac-specific. For your own use, you can be more adventurous and try more efficient methods like 7z, XZ and others offered in a utility like Keka from the App Store. Although not quite as efficient, Apple Archive format should prove quicker than most, particularly when used on Apple silicon Macs, where it makes best use…

Q Disk Utility keeps reporting errors whenever I try First Aid on my Time Machine backups. How can I check and repair them properly? by MIKE TILLOTSON A macOS Monterey usually can’t check and repair volumes containing its Time Machine backups when running normally. The simplest way around this is to restart into Recovery mode and use Disk Utility there. The reason this doesn’t work when running normally is that Disk Utility can’t eject the many snapshots of old backups from a special hidden volume. You can do this yourself, and that should let First Aid work normally on your backup volume. Check that Time Machine isn’t due to make a backup soon, or turn it off temporarily. In the Finder, eject each volume on the backup disk, then press…

Once you’ve chosen your hardware and apps, it’s time to record your first podcast. Ideally, you should know what it’s going to be about before you begin – and who your intended audience is – as well as whether your podcast is going to be a one-off recording or an entire series with a workable plan for each episode. In other words, think about the starting point, the journey and the destination. It also’s important for you and your guests to know what the key talking points are, then structure each podcast accordingly. That way you won’t test your listeners’ patience with your ramblings and repititions. Above all, think about your audience and how you are going to engage them and keep them listening. Think about what they might want…

P erhapsthe most frequently used tool in Disk Utility’s arsenal is Disk First Aid. It scans whichever drive you select for problems in the structure and integrity of the drive. If you select the whole drive, rather than a single volume, it checks the partition maps for the drive and the directory, then checks each volume. If you only select one volume, it just checks that. Volumes appear under the main drive in Disk Utility’s sidebar. For example, the internal drive on your Mac contains a Macintosh HD volume which, in turn, has volumes for data and for system information. If Disk Utility finds problems on your startup disk, it will notify you but won’t attempt to fix them. That’s because to You can run Disk First Aid on any…

£1,949 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES Apple M2 chip (8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 1TB storage, 16GB of unified memory, 13.3-inch Retina display (2560x1600 pixels resolution), 2x Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax Wi-Fi), Bluetooth 5.0, Touch Bar T here’s a lot to love about the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s the first laptop of the Apple silicon era to come with the company’s new M2 chip (our in-depth review of the new M2 MacBook Air will follow next issue) while retaining the same long battery life as before (up to 20 hours) thanks in part to the M2’s incredible energy efficiency. And yet. And yet… Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. Firstly, the MacBook Pro 13-inch is the latest in a long line of…

Mac FORMAT VERDICT A great way to charge three devices wirelessly at once – but not the most stylish charger. ★★★☆☆ 3-in-1 wireless charging No power adaptor included Designed for iPhone 12 and iPhone 13, the Intelli StepUp is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charging dock with two shelves. One on the left for an Apple Watch; one on the right for wireless earbuds such as Apple’s AirPods. It’s slim (not much wider than an iPhone) with a thin metal body and a USB-C port on the back for connecting to a power source using the USB-C to USB-C cable supplied. (Intelli doesn’t include an adaptor.) In use, the Intelli StepUp supplies 5W of wireless charging for AirPods, 2.5W of wireless charging to your Apple Watch and up to 15W of wireless…

The iMac – new or old – can only be adjusted for tilt, but what if you want to raise the height of your screen to suit your head height? By adjusting the height of your screen’s display, you’ll hugely improve your ergonomics, so it’s clearly something that’s worth investing in. Obviously, a stand can help you achieve this, by raising the Mac off the surface you’re working on. Some stands simply raise your iMac up, while others have built-in storage, or even extra ports. All the stands included in this roundup work with external displays as well as iMacs, but it’s worth checking the footprint of your monitor to see if the stand you like will accomodate it. Nick Odantzis Twelve South HiRise Pro £149.95 FROM twelvesouth.com FEATURES Internal…

With help from AI, you can create a mask to selectively adjust a complex shape Earlier this year, Adobe announced major updates to its Lightroom apps so we thought the time is right to take look at what’s new, plus compare the two versions of Lightroom to see which one might best suit your needs as a photographer. Lightroom comes in two ‘f lavours’– the original desktop-based Lightroom (rebranded as Lightroom Classic) and the newer streamlined Lightroom. We’ll refer to the newer version as Lightroom CC (Creative Cloud) to help differentiate between the two apps in this review. So what are the differences between the two versions? The original desktop Lightroom Classic has long been the app of choice for professional photographers who need to organise and edit a large…

Log on and see next issue’s big question! twitter.com/macformat facebook.com/macformat ‘Many upgrades’ for AirPods Pro > If you’ve been holding out for major AirPods Pro upgrades, you might be in luck. A report from 52Audio claims that AirPods Pro 2 will retain the current design, but almost every other aspect will be improved. That includes an updated chip, support for Find My, heart rate and temperature detection, audio quality improvements, and a USB-C port. You might even be able to use them as proper hearing aids. Some of these rumours have been touted in the past. Suggestions that the chip and audio capabilities will be improved seem sensible enough, and the hearing aid function would tie in with Apple’s push for device accessibility.…

1 Dyson Zone > £TBC > dyson.co.uk > Air pollution is a real problem, with harmful gases and particulate matter clogging up lungs in cities the world over. Dyson thinks it knows how to fix it, though, and its answer is this Zone headgear. This quirky-looking device combines a set of headphones with an air filtration device. As well as a speaker, each earcup contains an air purifier and a miniature motor. These connect to the Zone’s magnetically attached mouth covering, which blows purified air across your face. Oh, and it also makes you look like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. The plan seems to be to focus the Zone on cities where pollution is a real problem, and that makes sense. Will they become the next must-have day-to-day…

Apple’shomage to its home state continues, with macOS Ventura due for release this autumn. As the next version of macOS is near, it’s a great time to get your system ship-shape, your storage streamlined and your Mac Ventura-ready. As in real life, we all know that we should strive to stay on top of our Mac housekeeping – but as in real life, it’s often tempting just to skip it, just this once, because we’ll totally catch up next week. Or the week after. Or the week after that. Before long you’ve got a cupboard full of spiders, a chair barely visible under a pile of clean laundry or a Mac that’s full of unwanted apps, duplicate photos and remnants of long-deleted documents. That doesn’t just look bad. It’s inefficient…

IT WILL TAKE ➤30 minutes WILL LEARN ➤How to use Craft to create beautiful notes, emails and essays YOU’LL NEED ➤Craft (Free, IAPs), macOS 10.15 or later Craft combines creativity and organisation in one handy app. It’s a cross between a document creation tool like Pages, where much of the emphasis is on physical documents that you print, and a note-taking tool like Notes, where the emphasis is on capturing thoughts and ideas. The idea is that you should be able to capture say meeting notes, or ideas for a project, or even draft an email but still present it in a way that looks beautiful. At its heart, Craft is a rich text editor with support for Markdown and code blocks. And, of course, you can add images, video,…

IT WILL TAKE ➤10-15 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤To gain more control over your monitors YOU’LL NEED ➤Lunar Pro (lunar.fyi), at least one external monitor, macOS 11 or later If you use external displays with your Mac, you’ll know macOS doesn’t give you much control over them. That all changes when you install Lunar, a superb little app that puts you back in the driver’s seat. There are tons of ways it lets you tweak your monitors, with controls for beginners and experts alike. With Lunar on your Mac, you’ll be able to change settings for each monitor individually, save presets and set keyboard shortcuts, adjust the brightness above or below the constraints set by macOS, and much more; it really is the brightness tool Apple forgot to include with…

IT WILL TAKE ➤5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN ➤About art history YOU’LL NEED ➤iPhone and/or iPad, DailyArt (Free, IAPs), iOS 10 or later DailyArt makes some of the world’s greatest art, and the stories behind it, accessible The world of art can seem lofty and cut-off, with too much to take in for those of us without an Art History degree. DailyArt makes some of the world’s greatest pieces, and the stories behind them, accessible. It sends you a daily notification highlighting a single work and provides accessible background information on it and the artist. The app works across iPhone and iPad (and notifications can also appear on your Apple Watch). As well as being educational – DailyArt brings to attention works you may have never seen before – the…

Compress the volume of audio Q How should I compress the dynamic range of audio files, to make their volume more even for when I listen to them in noisy environments? by G GOLDENTHAL A If you can, avoid doing so. The best but most expensive solution is to use active noise cancellation, in AirPods Pro or Max, or their equivalents. You should then be able to listen without interruption by extraneous noise. Even if you can’t do that, you should think twice about changing the dynamic range of the files, as that can’t be undone once it has been applied to them. GarageBand has an audio compressor plug-in available in its Smart Controls. Open the audio file and in the View menu Show Smart Controls. Drop the Plug-ins section…

With your podcast created, you need to get it out to the world to be heard. The easiest way to do this is to use a podcast hosting service. There are many of these, all with different feature sets and costs but one that does get great reviews is Buzzsprout. Services like this take care of the technical stuff for you so your first step is to create an account with them, choosing the account type that best serves your needs. Then you ‘create’ your show on the site, complete with text, pictures and all the information your listeners and potential listeners will need. After this, you upload your audio files – the podcast episodes – to your account, as many as you want to broadcast, and they are stored…

Repairing drives and volumes is far from all that Disk Utility can do. You can use it to partition a hard drive, or on an APFS drive create containers (see Partitions, Volumes, Containers opposite). Disk Utility can also create and manage Disk Images – afile that contains both the structure and contents of a volume or an entire storage device. When physical media was more commonly used, disk images were useful for making exact copies of one disk and transferring it to, say, a CD or DVD. Disk images can still be useful for creating or duplicating installers. In Monterey, Disk Utility can also be used to view and manage snapshots of APFS volumes. Snapshots are created by Time Machine and capture the state of an APFS volume at a…

Mac FORMAT VERDICT The Excitrus 4-in-1 power bank delivers plenty of juice on the go. ★★★★★ Huge battery Fairly bulky and heavy This Excitrus charger will help ensure that you don’t run out of power while out and about. Covered in hard-wearing green fabric and weighing in at 482g, the charger comprises a 20,800mAh battery pack with MagSafe-compatible QI wireless charging plus three additional ports for connecting your kit: 1x USB-C port with 100W output/65W input via Power Delivery (PD) – handy for charging a MacBook or the power bank itself; 1x USB-C port with 45W PD output for charging an iPad or iPhone; and 1x USB-A port (USB 3.0) with 18W Quick Charge capacity for other accessories. You can charge up to four devices at once with its side-mounted…

Group test Reviewed by HOLLIN JONES ON TEST… Camera + Focos Halide Mark II Obscura 3 Pro Camera by Moment ProCam 8 They say the best camera is the one you have with you and iPhones have made that more true than ever. We always carry our phones and over the years their cameras have got so good that they have effectively taken over the market for small and mid-level point-andshoot digital cameras. Apple’s iOS Camera app however isn’t as fully featured as it could be. You may be surprised to learn that iPhone camera hardware supports an extensive range of features that aren’t in the standard iOS app including manual shutter, exposure and ISO setting and manual focusing. On top of this, developers add software features like focus peaking,…

EXPECTED OCT 2022 UPDATED APR 2021 iMac ➤FROM £1,249 ➤Ever since the Bondi Blue iMac debuted in 1998, Apple’s all-in-one desktop computer has been setting standards for design and performance. The current 24in model is certainly Apple’s finest yet – thanks to its 4.5K (4480x2520) Retina display and the Apple-designed M1 chip, which is available with either an 8-core CPU/7-core GPU at the entry-level, or an 8-core CPU/8-core GPU on the mid-range and top-tier versions. All models come with 8GB of memory as standard (upgradeable to 16GB), with solid-state drive (SSD) storage ranging from 256GB on the entry-level and mid-range versions to 512GB on the top tier, although you can add more – up to 1TB on the entry-level and up to 2TB on the mid-range and top-tier models if…

While I was watching the June’s announcement of the new iOS 16, live from the shiny new Apple HQ I couldn’t help but let my mind drift back 15 generations to the very first iPhone from 2007. You can still watch that original announcement on YouTube, but it fails to convey the sense of wonderment we all had watching Steve Jobs produce this strange new device from his pocket, then start browsing websites on it, using his fingers to launch apps and making phone calls too! It was a truly game-changing moment. As impressed as I was with iOS 16’s amazing new customisable Lock Screen, improved dictation features and Undo Send capabilities in Mail, I couldn’t help but ponder how today’s iPhone 13 isn’t that different to the original iPhone.…