D. Griffin Jones - page 20

It’s annoying when a book you want to read doesn’t have an audiobook version — they’re great while you’re driving, doing dishes or folding laundry. Apple is now offering authors AI-generated audiobooks of their work. Novels you otherwise wouldn’t be able to hear, you can now find in the Apple Books app. Let me show you how you can find and listen to them if you’re curious.

Apple launched a new Mac mini Tuesday, an upgraded model that uses the M2 chip seen last summer in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. A higher-end version runs on the brand-new M2 Pro chip, which also powers the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, also introduced today.

“Bringing even more performance and a lower starting price, Mac mini with M2 is a tremendous value,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a press release. “And for users who need powerful pro performance, Mac mini with M2 Pro is unlike any other desktop in its class.”

The computers are available to preorder today and will arrive January 24.

Update: This prediction came 100% true. Apple took the wraps off a pair of Macs on January 17. Don’t miss Cult of Mac‘s full coverage:

• New MacBook Pro models come supercharged with M2 Pro and Max chips
• Apple launches powerful new Mac mini at a lower cost
• Apple’s new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips raise the performance bar … again
• How the new M2 Pro and Max MacBook Pros compare to M1 models

Rumors suggest Apple is preparing for a quiet release of new Mac computers as early as Tuesday. These will include updates to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models in addition to the Mac mini. The updates reportedly will be minor, bringing the new M2 chips to the computers.

There won’t be an Apple event — the company will announce the new computers by press release, if the rumors prove correct.

I’ve been on a quest to discover the perfect Mac keyboard. I’m looking for a compact keyboard with modern Mac styling — and the best key switches money can buy.

That’s when I discovered Model F Labs, whose keyboards are truly one-of-a-kind. They offer plenty of normal designs — but I ordered one in silver with blank unprinted keys. Keep reading to find out why I ordered what I did, why I love it and why I’ll be keeping it on my desk.

Apple now has engineers “actively engaged in the project” of adding touchscreens to Mac computers, starting with the popular MacBook Pro. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, a consistent and reliable leaker, the first Mac with a touchscreen display could ship as soon as 2025.

The product is evidently still being tested internally, with no definitive plans for a product launch set in motion.

Most people don’t really use AM and FM radios anymore, but streaming live content is hardly dead. Lots of podcasts do live streams — and you can still tune into radio stations online. Broadcasts, an app by independent developer Steven Troughton-Smith, makes listening to live music and streaming radio on your iPhone very easy.

Let me show you how it works.

The Mac is hardly ever the focus of events like CES. But at this year’s massive tech conference in Las Vegas, two promising displays were announced by Samsung and Dell.

Any new Retina display options for the Mac are a welcome treat. Let’s see how these new monitors stack up.

Over the past 20 years, Apple’s Safari web browser grew from a speedy young upstart to a polished professional. Released on this day in 2003 as a free download, Safari has been bundled with every version of the Mac operating system since.

Take a trip down memory lane as we look at how Safari has evolved over the years.

After Apple killed Dark Sky on January 1, many fans found themselves lamenting the loss of the groundbreaking weather app that offered hyperlocal forecasts. Luckily, you can re-create Dark Sky’s main features using a competing app called Carrot Weather. Alternatively, you can quickly tweak Apple’s built-in Weather app so it acts more like Dark Sky.

Let me show you how to enjoy Dark Sky’s beautiful user interface, and its uncannily accurate weather alerts, using other weather apps.

After testing a version of Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset with an internal battery, the company’s engineers have resorted to using a separate battery pack connected by a wire, according to a new report about the secret project.

Other technical details emerged Tuesday about the long-rumored headset as well. The cutting-edge device reportedly delivers a surprisingly short two-hour battery life. And it reportedly comes with an H2 chip to pair with AirPods Pro, a dual-chip architecture that supports more than a dozen built-in cameras, and an adjustable dial to turn VR on and off.

Notes and Reminders, two stock apps that come with every iPhone, iPad and Mac, can do so much more than write shopping lists and apologies on Twitter.

With tagging, you can quickly filter and search through a big folder of notes or a long to-do list. You can easily put together a bunch of filters by date, location and tag to create a smart list of everything that needs your attention in Reminders. You can even set up template Reminders lists that you can copy at any time.

Let me show you how to set it all up.

Do you find some of Cupertino’s more innovative Apple Watch bands a bit ridiculous? Well, feast your luddite eyes on the Durham band from Nyloon. It’s made of nylon and comes in exactly one color: navy blue.

It’s a very traditional Apple Watch band at a lower price than any of Apple’s offerings.

Daily practicality is often at odd ends with whimsy. A Nissan Pao will not carry your lumber back from Home Depot. A big, wacky phone case will not fit in your pocket or purse. No matter how much I desperately want one, I know that a plastic trumpet will sound terrible (even if it’s in gorgeous white). But you can have both practicality and whimsy with Nyloon’s Stark Apple Watch band.

Each one of these ballistic-grade nylon bands comes with a unique black-and-white pattern (with seemingly random splashes of red). And they feel soft enough for comfort, but rugged enough to take some abuse.

Independent developers working to get Linux running on Apple silicon have made a significant breakthrough — the release of the first graphics driver. This is an important step toward running operating systems other than macOS on Apple’s powerful new computers.

“We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here,” wrote developers Alyssa Rosenzweig and Asahi Lina in a Wednesday blog post announcing the GPU driver release. “This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games.”

In the 40-odd years that the Mac has been on the market, very few people have actually used all of Apple’s keyboards. I haven’t either, but I’ve come close. Here is my review of every Apple keyboard I’ve got my hands on — ranked from worst to best.

Røde’s new NT-USB+ microphone brings exciting new features to the company’s well-reviewed NT-USB from 2014.

Like its predecessor, the NT-USB+ is an all-in-one microphone for streaming, capturing vocals, playing instruments and recording podcasts. The refreshed version adds higher bit depth, a built-in low noise/high gain preamp and a high-powered headphone jack to the classic model. Plus, it connects over USB-C at both ends.

Perhaps you, like many others, would like to move away from Twitter. If you read news, webcomics or blogs, you can follow all the same stuff with an RSS reader. But if you want to follow people in your community and talk to others online with the same interests, there’s a Twitter alternative you may have heard about: Mastodon. It’s a full-blown Twitter clone that a lot of people you may know are moving to.

Recent changes at Twitter did not instill confidence in the platform’s future. That’s about the shortest and most diplomatic way I can summarize the cavalcade of poor decision-making that has trickled down from their new CEO, he-who-shall-not-be-named, Rocket Car Tunnel Guy. It’s the last straw for a lot of people.

Despite the memes you may have seen, signing up for Mastodon isn’t that hard. There are just a few things you need to consider. Let me show you how to use Mastodon.

We all have our favorite news sites, independent blogs or webcomics. A lot of people keep up with new posts on Twitter — it’s where a lot of Cult of Mac traffic comes from. With a mass exodus of Twitter users after you-know-what happened, there’s a way you can still keep up with your favorite sites. It’s a technology that has powered the web for over twenty years called RSS; let me show you can follow the news without Twitter.

Apple’s Weather app for iPhone, iPad and Mac soon will incorporate local news sourced from the Apple News service.

In the latest beta of iOS 16.2, certain cities have an additional section for weather news, slotted between the 10-day forecast and the air quality meter. On iPadOS and macOS Ventura, this section occupies an even larger widget in the corner.

Days after reports of Foxconn employees hopping fences and fleeing from their jobs, a report late Wednesday from Taiwan News says Apple’s biggest iPhone factory is now on “total lockdown.” These new restrictions may have a big impact on Apple’s sales during the crucial holiday period.

Foxconn, whom Apple contracts to manufacture the lion’s share of iPhones, Macs and other Apple products, has had employees stay in on-site dormitories in a “closed-loop system” to prevent COVID outbreaks. Employees have been complaining about the “increasingly unsafe and inhumane working conditions” of the dorms.

It’s taken a while to fully unpack and understand the technical improvements to the cameras in the iPhone 14 Pro. Camera nerd Sebastiaan de With, co-founder and designer of the highly-respected Halide camera app, has written a detailed review of the improvements to the camera system.

His professional opinion? These are not just great iPhone cameras, they’re great cameras, period.

Rewind is a Mac app coming soon that promises to create a searchable, rewindable index of everything you read online, write in conversation, work on or even say in meetings.

We’ve all had this happen: you remember seeing something that you want to share, but you don’t remember where you saw it nor enough details to find it on the internet. Rewind promises to make everything that you’ve “seen, said or heard” searchable.

Sometimes, you need your iPhone and your Mac to be very different tools throughout the day — Focus modes are all about customizing them for everything you do.

Apple’s Focus modes are a powerful way to change how your iPhone, iPad and Mac look and feel whether you’re driving, sleeping, relaxing or working. It’s all about fully immersing yourself in whatever you’re doing. You can change all kinds of things: from who can reach you and which apps send notifications to custom lock screens, home screens and more.

After Apple began running new advertisements in the App Store on Tuesday, some developers checked their product pages to find banner ads for adult video chat apps, video poker apps and gambling apps of all varieties.

The fact that some of these advertisements appear on apps for children and apps for addiction recovery adds insult to injury. I asked a few independent developers to get their reaction to the news — and they were not happy.

Update (October 27): Apple has revised the types of ads that may appear, but the new ad placements remain.

Apple’s “Take Note” product blitz on Tuesday did not include any Mac news. Instead, iPad stole the spotlight: a new iPad Pro with M2, a new entry-level iPad that isn’t actually priced at the entry level, a new Magic Keyboard Folio and yet another lease on life for the original Apple Pencil (now with a dongle!). A surprise entry is a new Apple TV 4K at a lower price with a USB-C Siri Remote.

But according to Bloomberg, new Macs are “highly likely to launch before the calendar turns into 2023.” What can we expect soon — and what’s on the roadmap?