HUGE APPLE NEWS SPECIAL! Issue 355 macformat.com @macformat
o t o l l e h y Sa
Kit out your dream office
> Best gear and accessories for working from home
Big Sur
Revealed:
iOS 14 Your in-depth guide to all the new iPhone features
> New look > New apps > New features - why it’s a must-have upgrade Also inside:
>iPadOS 14 >watchOS >AirPods >tvOS
Reviews: > Apple Magic Keyboard > Samsung Frame TV
WIN!
One of two AOC Q27T1 27-inch monitors, prizes worth
> Painter 2021
£530
Boost your battery
Make Siri even smarter
>MacBook power tips and tricks
> Get more from Apple’s assistant
Mac
iPhone
iPad
Watch
iCloud
iTunes
Photos
Issue 355 September 2020 macformat.com
6 Apple silicon is on its way
APPLE CORE 6
RUMOUR & NEWS
Word on the grapevine about future Apple kit
9
APPS & GAMES
Our top picks of the month for Mac and iOS
10
Crave 10
Say hello to
Big Sur All the biggest and best announcements from Apple’s first virtual keynote
14
CRAVE
Hot new gear we’re lusting after
12
OPINION
Apple’s chips announcement…
Win! 13
One of two Q27T1 displays from AOC
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Issue 355 CONTENTS
APPLE CHOICE
34 Create the
perfect portrait
HARDWARE
52 FEATURE
APPLE SKILLS 32
BETTER BATTERY LIFE
Increase your MacBook’s battery life
34
FANTASTICAL CALENDARS
Bring order and clarity to your calendars
38
CUSTOMISE CONTROL CENTRE
Access all the stuff that’s really useful to you
40
LEARN WITH READWISE
Import and organise your ebook highlights
42
Create a comfortable and productive home workspace
THE PERFECT PORTRAIT
Use AI tools to enhance your subject’s features
36
KIT OUT YOUR HOME OFFICE APPLE HOME > 61
REVIEW
Samsung The Frame TV 50-inch
68
Samsung The Frame TV 50-inch
70 71
Philips 346B1C display Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro 11-inch
SOFTWARE 72 Painter 2021
SMART ASSISTANTS
74
Edison Email for Mac
76
Tyme 3
Get them to work smarter and fix niggling issues
77
eWallet – Password Manager
78
inea Sketch 3 L 6 apps to keep you entertained
MUSIC MEMOS IN iPadOS
80
Note down ideas in the music-friendly app
44
68
HOW IT WORKS
Haptic Touch: how tactile sensors work
GENIUS TIPS 46
Howard Oakley solves all your Mac hardware, software and iOS and iPadOS issues
6 APPS
80 to help keep
you entertained
66
BACK ISSUES Head here if you’ve missed an issue
89
NEXT MONTH
What’s coming in MF356 on 25 Aug
90
GOODBYE
The clever introduction of the Genius Bar
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WHAT’S NEXT FOR EVERYTHING APPLE IN 2020 Written by Adam Banks
Apple’s first virtual WWDC packed in a lot of announcements, big and small, for developers and the rest of us. Join us for a look at the highlights
S
uffice to say, it’s been a pretty weird year, and despite the familiarity of sitting down to watch Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on live stream – after all, only a lottery-selected coterie ever got to attend in person – there was little sense of normality when Tim Cook walked out on stage in an empty Steve Jobs Theater. But what followed, in an impeccably produced two-hour keynote and more than 100 online video briefings, was a reassuringly Apple-like picture of progress, polishing and surprises.
For the Mac, not only does the long-expected shift to Apple’s own chips finally become official (see p6), but macOS takes a leap forward to version 11 with what software chief Craig Federighi called a “major new design” delivering “unmatched levels of power and beauty… the biggest change since the introduction of macOS X”. iOS 14 is also transformed, with a whole new way of organising apps and widgets. Upgrades under the hood to Maps, iMessage, HomeKit and Siri bring benefits across all platforms, and there’s even more protection for your privacy and security.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED > macOS Big Sur > MacBook (2015), MacBook Air (2013), MacBook Pro (Late 2013), Mac mini (2014), iMac (2014), iMac Pro, Mac Pro (2013) or newer
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iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 >Any iPhone or iPad that could run iOS 13 or iPadOS 13
watchOS 7 >Apple Watch Series 3 or later
tvOS 14 >As for tvOS 13, an Apple TV HD (aka 4th gen) or Apple TV 4K
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By the time you read this, public betas of all OSes should be out (register at beta.apple.com), with full releases in the autumn, depending on hardware launches.
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APPLE SKILLS Mac software
Make your battery better Increase your MacBook’s battery life and on its health IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN Where to find your battery’s condition status and how to make it last longer
Battery life is the Achilles heel of any laptop and, while Apple has made huge strides with batteries, there’s always room for improvement. That’s why it introduced an iPhone-style Battery Health feature in macOS 10.15.5, although you’ll only see it if your laptop has Thunderbolt 3 ports: older Macs don’t have the necessary hardware.
YOU’LL NEED You’ll need a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro
Battery life is the Achilles heel of any laptop
Battery Health monitors your battery temperature and its charging patterns, and it optimises charging in order to make your battery last as long as possible. We don’t mean last as long as possible between charges; we mean last as long as possible before you have to buy a new battery. Batteries become less efficient as they age, and Battery Health aims to reduce the speed at which that efficiency degrades.
Power anxiety
The new battery health feature will only appear in System Preferences if you have a relatively recent Mac; older ones lack the necessary hardware.
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Doing that is a delicate balancing act, because prolonging battery life could mean slightly less battery life between charges. If that’s a concern, you can disable the feature in System Preferences > Energy Saver > Battery Health. Of course, battery life isn’t just a concern to people with relatively new Macs. We’ve all experienced power anxiety when we’ve got stuff to do and we’re far from a plug point. The good news is that a few simple tweaks can make a big difference to any mobile Mac. Carrie Marshall
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Improve battery life APPLE SKILLS
HOW TO Make your Mac last longer
Jargon buster
1 Make it darker
2 Adjust energy settings
3 Plug in baby
4 Check the battery
One of the biggest power drains on any laptop is its display; eke out a bit more life from your battery by turning its brightness down. Unlike recent iPhones, Dark Mode won’t help here: Macs use different display technology.
The settings that work best for long battery life don’t always work for your Mac when it’s plugged in. In the Power Adapter tab, you can specify different settings for your Mac when it isn’t using its battery.
Thunderbolt 3 is a connection technology for very fast data transfer. On Macs it’s often used for external storage or displays.
System Prefs > Energy Saver is your friend here. This screen lacks a Battery Health button as this is an old Mac, but we can make changes. Under the Battery tab, disable Power Nap and make the display turn off more quickly.
Batteries become less efficient over time. Apple provides a way to check the condition. First of all, click on the Apple menu then on About This Mac. Take a note of the kind of Mac you have, such as the 13-inch Early 2015 here.
Genius tip! In System Preferences > Users > Login Items, disable apps that automatically run at startup – and unplug any USB devices you’re not using.
5 Get the cycle count
Select System Report > Power. In the middle of the window, you’ll see a section marked Health Information. This tells you how many charge cycles your Mac’s battery has completed and what condition it’s in.
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6 Check with Apple
Apple has a list of batteries and how many charge cycles they’re good for (the UK one is at bit.ly/macnotebatcc). Simply find your model; in this case, our battery shouldn’t need replacing for another 800ish cycles.
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THE PERFECT KIT FOR YOUR HOME OFFICE Written by Alex Blake
We’ve rounded up all the best devices and accessories to make working from home easier than ever
F
or many of us, the last few months have involved far more working from home than we have ever done before. Going from an office-based job to spending the vast majority of your time at home can mean you are thrown into a world you are unprepared for, with little in the way of tools to help you work efficiently and effectively. That is the problem this guide aims to solve. We have rounded up the best accessories for your home office, whether you use a MacBook, a desktop iMac or Mac mini, or even an iPad. Take the products on the following pages for a spin and you will hit the ground running in your new environment.
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But this article is not just for home-working novices. There is plenty here for seasoned veterans, with handy products that can revamp any makeshift office space and give your working life a serious surge in productivity. After all, anyone who has been working from home for a long time has likely built up a collection of accessories that are – let’s be honest – probably past their sell by date. Isn’t it time to update your setup once and for all? So, whether you are a first-time home worker or an experienced old hand, there is something for everyone here. Read on for our picks of gorgeous external monitors, port-laden docks and hubs, fantastic iPad keyboard cases, and much more.
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APPLE HOME Smart asssitants
HOW TO MAKE YOUR
smart assistant smarter
Fix issues and get more from any smart assistant very smart assistant, like every computer platform, is different in its own way. Your Mac is not the same as someone else’s Windows PC or Linux box; although they share a vast amount in terms of concept and design, while they might use some of the same components or even (technically) some of the same underlying code, they are distinct. They’re powered by very different engines, they have different levels of knowledge available to them, they have different hardware makeup and methods of connectivity. But one thing does tie Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and minor assistants like Bixby and Cortana together: they can all be as dumb as a box of frogs when they feel like it.
E
Say what? Whichever platform you’ve staked your claim on, whether it’s Siri or not, there are things you can do to improve both your AI assistant’s ability to listen and its ability to deal with what it thinks it has heard. If you use discrete hardware to talk to them – an Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod or Nest Home device, for example – you should be careful about where that device is positioned in the room. These tend to use an array of far-field microphones to listen for their wake word, but if they’re not catching the sound correctly they
may well miss (or at least mishear) what you’re trying to say. Begin by shifting the unit away from the wall slightly, so that they’re not catching too many echoes from nearby walls; this can also fix any network connectivity issues you might be having. Make sure there’s no noise in the vicinity that could drown out the sound heard by those microphones; fans, open windows, air conditioners and the like can block an assistant’s ears significantly. If you’re using an Amazon Echo device, there’s a handy test you can do to see if any of the microphones might be blocked or obscured somehow – just call out the wake word from different locations in your room. The blue ring will light up, with one of its segments a brighter blue to indicate the direction it thinks the sound came from. A broken or blocked mic (and sometimes wall echoes) will cause issues with triangulation, and the indicator will point in the wrong direction. Try a little compressed air to clean out any blockages, and make sure there’s nothing obscuring the top of the device. Third-party assistants support systems like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant without necessarily using the same hardware, and thus may have even less acute hearing; be extra careful where these are placed. It goes without saying that, even with a microphone array listening all
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around, smart assistants can be baffled or misactivated by TVs and speakers. There’s some delicious irony in there, but we’ll just say that you’re better off leaving the volume at a lower level (or moving the hardware away from the source of noise) if you’re likely to be talking to your smart speaker a lot. On a phone or Mac, you don’t quite have the same positional luxury. Phones usually aren’t so difficult to deal with, because you can (and naturally will) pick them up and put them near your mouth; the lack of a far-field array is probably a benefit here, because it cuts down on most accidental actuations. In terms of Siri on a compatible Mac, voice actuation offers a little conundrum; do you fight to make sure you can always be heard, or ignore it altogether? Siri can be brought up in a couple of clicks, or a tap of the MacBook Touch Bar. Adding an external mic like that from your headphones can help – make sure it’s selected in Sound Preferences – but is it really worth worrying about given that you’ll likely be physically next to your Mac at any time you’d want to use it?
Testing, testing Assistant stupidity is not always entirely the fault of microphones. The things you say to an AI are not processed locally by the device, generally – they’re sent off, worked on by some faceless computer in the cloud, and the results are
Image credits (left to right): Bose, Google
9000
Which is smartest? Not all smart assistants are created equal
There are things you can do to improve your AI assistant’s ability to listen to commands
If you’re smart, your smart speaker can offer up tunes, facts and all the rest when you’re in the garden.
We’ve looked at Loupe Ventures’ research in these pages before, and the company’s most recent suite of AI IQ tests has determined that the Google Assistant is the smartest thing going. That’s both in its digital assistant form (as in, when accessed through a phone) and when powering a smart speaker. It understands best, and it provides relevant responses most frequently. That said, each time Loupe Ventures does a new test, every major platform improves a little; Alexa took the ‘most improved’ crown in the most recent suite. Too bad for Siri? Not so fast – it seems that Apple’s assistant is, by their metrics, by far the smartest in the ‘command’ category, which relates to its ability to perform on-phone functions like texting, calling and emailing. We’re not surprised, as that’s very much Siri’s wheelhouse: there’s a subtle divide between it and the other pair that makes each side of it independently good. It’s probably not worth the hassle of running Google Assistant or Alexa on an iPhone when Siri can do the job so much better; similarly, if you don’t want to invest in a HomePod, it’s cheaper and makes more sense to opt for one of the others around your home.
Want the ‘cleverest’ home assistant around? Go for Google.
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