ALL THE NEWS FROM APPLE’S iPHONE X EVENT THE WORLD’S BEST-SELLING APPLE MAGAZINE
FROM IDG
OCTOBER 2017
: X e n o h iP ary n o i t u l o v e r ple’s p A h t i w n o Handsw handset EW Nne
+ tv
gets 4K upgrade
Why the Apple Watch Series 3 MacBook buying guide: is a must-have Find your perfect portable partner upgrade
CONTENTS
14
NEWS
4
iPhone X event recap
12
iTunes 12.7 for Mac removes iOS App Store
4
HANDS-ON
14
iPhone X: The phone
Apple always wanted to build BUYING GUIDE
18
Looking for a MacBook? We look at your choices
FEATURES
30 How the iPhone X’s screen changes everything 34 Why the new Apple Watch is a must-have upgrade 40 iPhone 8 and 8 Plus’s best new features 46 Apple TV 4K adds HDR and faster performance 50 New AirPods case offers wireless charging 60 Help Desk
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CONTENTS
18
40
REVIEW
Corel Painter 2018 70 ROUND-UP
Latest Mac games 80 HOW TO
Open Word documents in Pages 91 Open Excel spreadsheets in Numbers 95 OPINION
In Apple’s next ecosystem, Siri is the glue 99
October 2017 • Macworld 3
NEWS
iPhone X event recap Everything Apple announced at its first Apple Park event. Leah Yamshon reports
W
hile the iPhone always headlines Apple’s annual September event, the opening acts are worth tuning in for in their own right – and this year was no exception. From three new iPhones (the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X) to an LTE Apple Watch to new animated emoji (‘Animoji’), this keynote certainly was one for the books. Read on
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to see everything Apple announced at the stunning Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park in Cupertino.
Remembering Steve Jobs The keynote was the first ever event held in Apple Park’s new Steve Jobs Theater, so it seemed right that the event kicked off with a heartfelt tribute to Steve Jobs – one of his famous speeches played over the sound system shortly after the theatre dimmed the lights. “I love hearing his voice, and his inspiring message,” an emotional Tim Cook said. “It was only fitting that Steve should open his theatre.”
Our first look at the Steve Jobs Theater We also finally got to see the inside (and outside) of the Steve Jobs Theater (pictured above), with a bright, open-concept design that’s uniquely Apple.
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NEWS
Apple Town Square Not too long ago, Apple dropped the name ‘store’ officially from its retail stores, changing the nomenclature from Apple Store to Apple store (yes, it confused us a bit, too). Now, things are changing again – Apple SVP Angela Ahrendts explained that Apple’s retail stores will now be called Apple Town Squares, complete with Genius Groves, ‘plazas’ for hanging out, ‘forums’ for collaboration, ‘boardrooms’ for smaller group meetings, and ‘avenues’ for curated retail opportunities.
watchOS 4’s heart-monitoring software The Apple Watch and watchOS were the first products discussed at the event, and watchOS
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4 will have some impressive new features. For workouts, its new Gym Connect feature will let you sync directly with compatible gym equipment, like treadmills and rowing machines, so that the machine instantly has all of your fitness statistics. Thanks to better heart-monitoring capabilities, watchOS 4 will be able to tell you if you have an elevated heart rate during times when you’re supposedly not active, and you can also take a look at your pre- and post-workout heart rates, too. Apple COO Jeff Williams also announced the Apple Heart Study, a new partnership that allows Apple Watch users to participate in a Standford Health heart study on heart arrhythmia. watchOS 4 is available to download now alongside iOS 11.
Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE The latest Apple Watch is the Series 3, which features a major brand-new feature: LTE, which lets you get calls, messages, and alerts even when your iPhone is well out of range. Impressively, Apple figured out how to add LTE without increasing the Apple Watch’s size. It will also keep the same 18hour battery life. Other new features: a vocal Siri, a barometric altimeter for more accurate elevation readings when you’re working out, and a new chip. It’s priced at £399 with GPS and cellular connectivity (not including the extra provider fee – we’ll let you know when we have more info there), and £329 for the non-cellular model. It’s available to buy now. For further details see page 34.
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NEWS
Apple TV 4K The Apple TV got some stage time and a 4K upgrade. The new Apple TV 4K adds support for 4K video (naturally) as well as HDR, or High Dynamic Range. Customers who have purchased HD movies will receive upgrades in their iTunes libraries to corresponding 4K versions at no additional cost (hurrah), and new titles in 4K will be sold at the same price as HD versions – a huge win for Apple. Some other Apple TV 4K features: Live sports, live news, and Bluetooth 5.0. Prices start at £179 for the 32GB model and £199 for the 64GB option. They are available to buy now. For further details see page 46.
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iPhone 8 Of course, the event’s big draw was the iPhone, and we weren’t disappointed. Apple announced three new iPhone models – the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which are the follow-up phones to last year’s iPhone 7 and 7 Plus – and the futuristic iPhone X. The 4.7in iPhone 8 still features the Home button, body bezels, Touch ID, Lightning port, and an LCD screen, but has some improvements, too. Namely: a glass back (like the iPhone 4), wireless charging using the Qi standard, a TrueTone Retina display, and an A11 Bionic chip. The iPhone 8 is available to buy now in silver, space grey, and gold, priced at £699 for the 64GB option, and £849 for the 256GB handset. For further details see page 40.
iPhone 8 Plus The 5.5in 8 Plus has all the same specs as the iPhone 8, but with a dual-camera setup featuring f/1.8 aperture and f/2.8 aperture lenses (the iPhone 8 only has a single camera). The phone comes with has a beta feature called Portrait Lighting. You pose a photo, turn on Portrait Mode, and then the camera creates a depth map to pull the subject out of the background, then detects ‘facial landmarks’ such as your nose, forehead, and cheekbones, and then adjusts the lighting on all of them. The 8 Plus is available in silver, space grey, and gold is on sale now. Prices start at £799 for the 64GB phone, with the 256GB option setting you back £949. For further details see page 40.
October 2017 • Macworld 9
NEWS
iOS 11 ship date Apple’s mobile OS is available to download now.
macOS High Sierra This will be ready to download on 25 September.
iPhone X Apple’s ‘one more thing’ may not have been a huge surprise, but it was well received nonetheless: The iPhone X (pronounced “ten”). With the new thin bezel and no Home button, holding the iPhone X will feel like you’re holding a screen. That screen is 5.8 inches diagonally, and uses an OLED display instead of the LCD screen in past models. It’s got a resolution of 2436x1125, for a shocking pixel density of 458ppi. Apple’s calling it Super Retina. Like the iPhone 8, it supports TrueTone to adjust the colour temperature to the ambient light around you. Apple will take pre-orders for the iPhone X starting 27 October, and the phones ship 3 November. iPhone X starts at £999 for 64GB of storage (the highest starting price of any iPhone to date), with a 256GB upgrade for £1,149. For further details see page 14.
Face ID and Animoji Without a home button for Touch ID, how does one unlock the iPhone X? With your face! Apple demonstrated Face ID, which uses a TrueDepth camera-and-sensor system along the top edge to detect your face quickly, even in the dark – and even with glasses on, or after a dramatic haircut.
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The TrueDepth face-recognizing camera system has more tricks than just Face ID. A new feature in Messages called Animoji can mimic your mood and expression. They track 50 facial muscles to sync the emoji with what you’re saying, and then send your ‘talking head’ to a friend. You get a dozen options at launch.
AirPower Now that the iPhone has inductive charging, Apple is working on its own wireless charging mat: The AirPower. It won’t ship until 2018, but it will be able to charge your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods all at once, saving you valuable nightstand real estate.
October 2017 • Macworld 11
NEWS
iTunes 12.7 for Mac removes iOS App Store Latest iTunes update drops App Store, writes Roman Loyola
i
Tunes 12.7 is available for download with a major change in the app. Apple has redesign iTunes so that it focuses on sales of music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, and podcasts. It no longer has an App Store for buying apps for your iPhone or iPad. This means that in order to buy an iOS app, you must do it on the iOS device itself. You no longer can buy an iOS app within iTunes, and then load the app to your device when you perform a sync. Apple announced in August that iTunes U content can now be found in the iTunes’ podcasts section.
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NEWS
If you purchased ringtones through iTunes, Apple says that you can download them through your iPhone using the App Store app, or through Settings > Sounds > Ringtone > Store.
How to upgrade to iTunes 12.7 1. On your Mac, launch the App Store app in your Applications folder. 2. Click on the Update button at the top of the app. 3. The app will use the Internet to look for new updates. If you don’t see the iTunes 12.7 update, try reloading the page by pressing Command-R. 4. When you’re ready, click the Update button next to the section about the iTunes 12.7 update. If the iTunes app is open, your Mac will tell you that the installation cannot proceed until you close iTunes. Click Continue to have your Mac close iTunes and continue with the upgrade. 5. The installation will take a few minutes. You should not need to restart your Mac, unless you also decided to click the Update All button, which installs any other OS updates available. 6. When you launch iTunes 12.7 you’ll see a disclaimer about the changes.
October 2017 • Macworld 13
HANDS-ON
iPhone X: The phone Apple always wanted to build Jason Snell gets his hands on new high-end smartphone and gives his first impressions
T
he iPhone X is real, though it won’t be arriving in customers’ hands until November. I got to use one for a few minutes at the Steve Jobs Theater after Apple wrapped up its latest media event. My first impression is that, in many ways, this is the iPhone that Apple has always wanted to build – one where the front face is almost entirely covered by a screen. And what a screen – a bright, colourful OLED display that Apple claims is the best by far that it’s ever put on an iPhone.
No Home button, no problem Losing a physical home button will require users to adapt, but it should be an easy process. When I wanted to change apps, I reached down
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HANDS-ON
instinctively with my thumb to click the home button – but then, realizing I was using an iPhone X, I simply redirected my thumb to swipe up from the bottom of the screen, just as I would today to call up Control Centre. One quick swipe and the current app goes away, replaced by the home screen. Likewise, double-tapping on the sleep/wake button to trigger Apple Pay seemed natural, as did holding down that button for a moment to bring up Siri. I don’t think iPhone X users will miss the home button for very long.
Face ID I wasn’t able to train the iPhone X to recognize me for Face ID, but the Apple employee assigned to the phone had been. Face ID unlock seemed to work with her just fine – and only when she looked at the screen, as intended – but there were a few quirks. Sometimes the screen would go to sleep before she unlocked the phone, and more than once she accidentally pressed the side button and triggered Siri. I’m going to chalk this up to a new product and a scenario pretty far out of the norm.
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HANDS-ON
Animoji Once the phone was unlocked, I got a few minutes to pose with Apple’s new Animoji images, which will use anyone’s face (not just a face that’s connected to Face ID) to animate cute emoji icons. This feature is incredibly novel and fun and I suspect will launch a zillion memes – as well as a million home-made animated movies featuring the adventures of pig and fox.
Display Though the iPhone X will probably be referred to by most people as having a screen covering the entire face of the device, that’s not actually true – there’s a notch at the top of the display that packs in the TrueDepth camera system as well as a speaker, microphone, and more. It’s a little weird having the
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HANDS-ON
notch there, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it’s a little weird to have active display around the notch. You can swipe down from the upper right corner of the screen to reveal Control Centre, for instance. I did notice that Apple has built the TV app to properly frame a video without the notch – when holding the phone in landscape orientation, the video is sized so that the side that’s on the same side as the notch ends right at the notch. If you want to make the video bigger, you can double tap as usual, and it will fill the screen – which means that part of the film’s image will be masked off by the sensor area. You get to choose if it bothers you. Still, the iPhone X is familiar – when you hold it, it’s undeniably still an iPhone. Even if it doesn’t have the home button that was once the trademark of the iPhone line.
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BUYING GUIDE
Looking for a MacBook? We look at your choices Roman Loyola’s guide will help you find the right one
A
pple offers a wide range of fantastic laptops, but finding the best one can be tricky. Don’t worry, though. Over the following pages, we’ll go over Apple’s current MacBook line-up, point out their differences and similarities, and provide you with the information you need to pick the right MacBook for you.
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BUYING GUIDE
The affordable choice: MacBook Air Longtime Mac users may remember when the Air made its debut nine years ago as Apple’s entry into the ultra-portable laptop market. But times have changed, and starting in 2015, the MacBook was repositioned as Apple’s affordable laptop. How many models can I choose from? Apple offers two standard configuration MacBook Air models. The difference between the two comes down to the amount of file storage you get. The £949 model (available from fave.co/2t2PZtf) has 128GB of flash storage, while the £1,099 model (available from fave.co/2sOU67Z) has 256GB. Otherwise, the two models are identical. What are the Air’s specifications? • 13.3in (1440x900) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display • 128GB/256GB PCIe-based SSD • 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 2.9GHz, with 3MB shared L3 cache. Configurable to 2.2GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz, with 4MB shared L3 cache • Intel HD Graphics 6000 • 8GB of 1,600MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • 45W MagSafe 2 Power Adaptor • Two USB 3 ports • Thunderbolt 2 port • SDXC card slot • 3.5mm headphone jack • 720p FaceTime HD camera
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BUYING GUIDE
• 54Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.0 • 3-17x227x325mm • 1.35kg What is it good for? The MacBook Air doesn’t use Intel’s latest processor, but it’s powerful enough to handle typical tasks, like Internet access, writing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other productivity-related jobs. It also has enough processing punch for using Apple Photos to edit and manage your pictures, or to create short YouTube videos in iMovie. The MacBook Air doesn’t have a high-resolution screen, though, so images on screen won’t look as sharp as they would on a MacBook or MacBook Pro.
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Macworld’s buying advice: Budget-conscious buyers will like the MacBook Air’s £949 price. You’ll make a several compromises, but the MacBook Air is a capable laptop for your everyday work – and it won’t take up a lot of room in your bag.
The lightweight choice: MacBook Apple’s MacBook is designed for the person who is always on-the-go and needs a laptop that won’t leave you with an aching back at the end of the day. It’s also Apple’s smallest laptop, able to fit in most backpacks, briefcases, satchels, and bags. How many models can I choose from? Apple has two standard configurations of the MacBook. Pay more money, and you’ll get a slightly faster processor and more file storage space. Also, all MacBooks are available in Silver, Space Grey, Gold, or Rose Gold. What are the prices for the MacBook? There are two models of the MacBook. The £1,249 model (available from fave.co/2sZW1Lc) has a 1.2GHz dual-core Intel Core m3 (Kaby Lake) processor and 256GB of flash storage. The £1,549 model (available from fave.co/2tJhLs4) has a 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Kaby Lake) processor and 512GB of flash storage. What are the MacBook’s specifications? • 12in (2304x1440) LED-backlit display • 256GB/512GB PCIe-based SSD
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BUYING GUIDE
• Intel HD Graphics 615 • 8GB of 1,866MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • USB-C port • 3.5mm headphone jack • 480p FaceTime HD camera • 41.4Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.2 • 3.5-13.1x196.5x280.5mm • 920g What is it good for? Since the MacBook is designed with portability in mind, it doesn’t have a fast processor. Its performance is a bit faster than the MacBook Air, but it lags behind the 13in MacBook Pro.
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That said, the MacBook has no problems handling everyday productivity tasks, as well as some basic video editing in iMovie, Keynote presentations, and image editing and photo management in the Photos app. Macworld’s buying advice: If you’re road warrior making presentations to clients and groups, or working at remote locations, the MacBook is capable of handling your workload. And you’ll barely notice it in your bag – your back will thank you.
The best choice for heavy-duty workloads: MacBook Pro The MacBook Pro is Apple’s top-of-the-line laptop. If you want a laptop that can handle any task you throw at it – and you don’t have a constraining budget – the MacBook Pro is the laptop you want. How many models can I choose from? Apple offers seven standard configuration laptops: four 13in models, and three 15in versions. Each model (except for the £1,949 15in MacBook Pro) is available is Silver or Space Grey. What are the MacBook Pro specifications? Here are the specifics on each model. We’ll start with the 13in laptops and then list the 15in ones. • £1,249 model (from fave.co/2t3gPS7): 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Kaby Lake) processor, 8GB of memory, 128GB of flash storage, Intel
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BUYING GUIDE
Iris Graphics 640 integrated graphics, and no Touch Bar. • £1,449 model (from fave.co/2t3eUNg): 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Kaby Lake) processor, 8GB of memory, 246GB of flash storage, Intel Iris Graphics 640 integrated graphics, and no Touch Bar. Both have the following specifications: • 13.3in (2560x1600) LED-backlit display • Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 • 8GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • 2x Thunderbolt USB-C ports • 3.5mm headphone jack • 720p FaceTime HD camera • 54.5Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.2 • 14.9x212.4x304.1mm • 1.37kg Besides having a Touch Bar, Apple offers two 13in MacBook Pro models that have a few different features than the models without a Touch Bar. These Touch Bar laptops have faster processors, faster graphics, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports. The difference between the two 13in Touch Bar models themselves is the SSD. • £1,749 model (from fave.co/2sPiYwE): 3.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Kaby Lake) processor ,
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8GB of memory, 256GB of flash storage, Intel Iris Graphics 650 integrated graphics, and the Touch Bar. • £1,949 model (from fave.co/2sOTLlQ): 3.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Kaby Lake) processor, 8GB of memory, 512GB of flash storage, Intel Iris Graphics 650 integrated graphics, and the Touch Bar. Both have the following specifications: • 13.3in (2560x1600) LED-backlit display • Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 • 8GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • 4x Thunderbolt USB-C ports • 3.5mm headphone jack
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BUYING GUIDE
• 720p FaceTime HD camera • 49.2Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.2 • 14.9x212.4x304.1mm • 1.37kg Apple sells two standard configuration models of the 15in MacBook Pro. Here are the differences between the two: • £2,349 model (from fave.co/2tJybAw): 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Kaby Lake) processor, 16GB of memory, 256GB of flash storage, Intel HD Graphics 630 integrated graphics, 2GB Radeon Pro 555 discrete graphics, and the Touch Bar. • £2,699 model (from fave.co/2tJWXjO): 2.9GHz quad-core Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory,
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512GB flash storage, Intel HD Graphics 630 integrated graphics, 4GB Radeon Pro 560 discrete graphics, and the Touch Bar. Both have the following specifications: • 15.4in (2880x1800) LED-backlit display • Intel HD Graphics 630 • 16GB of 2,133MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • 4x Thunderbolt USB-C ports • 3.5mm headphone jack • 720p FaceTime HD camera • 87Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.2 • 15.5x240.7x349.3mm • 1.83kg Apple sells a laptop that’s fills the need for a more-affordable 15in MacBook Pro. However, this model isn’t new – it was initially released in 2015. It has older components, but it still has a good amount of processing power. Here’s what you get for £1,899 (from fave.co/2xyktoQ): • 15.4in (2880x1800) LED-backlit display • 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 • Intel Iris Pro Graphics • 16GB of 1,600MHz LPDDR3 on-board memory • MagSafe 2 • 2x Thunderbolt 2 • 2x USB 3.0
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BUYING GUIDE
• HDMI • 3.5mm headphone jack • 720p FaceTime HD camera • 85Wh lithium-polymer battery • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.0 • 18x247.1x358.9mm • 2.04kg What is it good for? If you have a heavy workload, the MacBook Pro has the power to handle it, no sweat. Video production, graphics and animation, serious data crunching – you name it, the MacBook Pro is built for it. The MacBook Pro isn’t as powerful as a desktop computer, but it is strong enough to serve as your only computer. All this processing prowess comes at a price – the MacBook Pro is Apple’s priciest laptop. And it’s also its heaviest, with the 15in models just under 2kg. That may not sound like a lot, but imagine yourself on the road, meeting with people, working remotely. The weight wears on you as the day goes on. Macworld’s buying advice: Picking a MacBook Pro is a little complicated, not just because of the size differences, but the differences between the features offered within each size category. If you want power on a budget, consider the £1,749 13in MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. It’s a good combination of speed and price. The 256GB SSD is the major compromise you’re making here.
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If you plan to do a lot of creative work that results in large files, the SSD could fill up quickly. The 15in £2,699 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar is the laptop with all the bells and whistles. It’s the one for the most demanding users, who will like the hefty discrete graphics card. If you really need to keep the price down, consider the $1,499 13in MacBook Pro without the Touch Bar. The 128GB SSD in the £1,249 version is probably too small and most people will fill it up quickly, which is why you should think about the $1,499 model, which has a 256GB SSD. Plus, while the Touch Bar is neat, we wouldn’t consider it a must-have feature. Your milage with it may vary. The £1,899 15in MacBook Pro may seem like an odd choice. And while it has a slower processor, it has other features that aren’t found in the other MacBook Pro models: USB 3 ports, and HDMI port, and an SDXC card slot.
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FEATURE
How the iPhone X’s screen changes everything Apple’s jump to OLED technology could bring several benefits for iPhone users, writes Martyn Williams
T
he OLED display Apple is using in its new iPhone X brings several benefits over current LCD technology, but supplies are likely to be limited at first. Will be benefits of the new screen make it worth the wait? Here’s a quick rundown on OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology
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and how it differs from today’s LCD (liquid crystal display) screens.
OLED vs LCD. What’s the difference? LCD screens like those used in previous iPhones and the new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are built on a backlight – a panel as large as the screen itself that produces a constant white light anytime the screen is on. A series of polarizers and filters are layered in front of the backlight to control the light and produce the image you see on screen. It’s been the dominant technology used in flat-panel displays for almost two decades, but keeping that backlight on draws a lot of power – and that’s a big disadvantage in a portable device. An OLED does away with the backlight completely. Each individual pixel has a tiny amount of organic material that fluoresces when current flows, so the pixels produce light directly. It’s also possible to control brightness at a per-pixel level.
What’s the advantage of OLED? The display is typically the most power-hungry component in any phone because of the backlight. By removing it, the iPhone will be more power efficient, which is great for users. It’s not the only reason to applaud OLED. Getting rid of the backlight allows for the entire display module to be thinner, which is an important consideration in a smartphone. Apple could use the extra space to make the phone thinner or add a little more battery capacity.
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Just as important is the image. OLEDs display more vibrant colours, have deeper blacks and brighter whites and a greater contrast ratio so most people find them superior to LCD.
Is Apple the first to use OLED? No. OLED screens began appearing in smartphones several years ago and are used today in phones from Samsung, LG, and other competitors. Several companies also offer OLED monitors and TV screens and flexible OLEDs are increasingly used in smartwatches, fitness bands, and automobile dashboards. Apple is already using an OLED in the Apple Watch.
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What has taken Apple so long to launch an OLED iPhone? In part it’s a problem of production. As the iPhone is the world’s best-selling smartphone, Apple needs to be able to ensure a reliable stream of OLED panels from its display partners, but OLED has proved a difficult technology to master. So when you get to the tens of millions of displays that Apple needs, a small manufacturing glitch can turn into a big problem. To date, most of the world’s smartphone OLEDs are produced by Samsung Display, which leaves Apple at the mercy of a single supplier for a key component – typically a position the company has tried to avoid. While Apple doesn’t comment on its supply chain, the availability of OLED panels is already expected to impact availability of the high-end iPhone with limited supplies being available at launch and back orders being the norm. It will also contribute to the expected record-setting price of the new handset.
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FEATURE
Why the new Apple Watch is a must-have upgrade It’s more than just LTE, argues Michael Simon
A
pple’s smartwatch just got a whole lot smarter. Apple Watch Series 3 has arrived, and while it didn’t get the dramatic redesign we were hoping for, its improvements on the inside more than make up for the sameness of the enclosure. (And if you need people to know
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you have the latest model, there are some cool new colours too, like ceramic grey and a different shade of gold to match the iPhone 8.) But what makes Apple Series 3 such a monumental upgrade isn’t fashion, it’s flexibility. More than ever, Apple Watch is built to fit into your lifestyle, no matter how you spend your free time. Here are the six things we’re most excited about in Apple Watch Series 3:
1. LTE The biggest change to Apple Watch Series 3 is LTE. Where previous Apple Watches needed to have a phone nearby to do most things, Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE is completely independent, letting you get calls, messages, and alerts even when your phone is hundreds of miles away. But what’s most impressive about the new LTE Apple Watch is its size. Thanks to an electronic SIM and engineering that uses the display as an antenna, Apple manufactured Apple Watch with LTE without
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increasing the size of the case. Considering the LTE Android Wear watches we’ve used, that’s no small feat. And what’s more, you can use your existing number with your new Apple Watch.
2. Battery One of Apple Watch’s most underrated feature has always been it’s battery life. Lots of smartwatches claim to deliver all-day battery life, but Apple Watch actually delivers on this promise, sometimes even pushing well into a second day of use. We were sceptical that Apple could keep the same 18-hour battery life with LTE, but thanks to new powerefficient S3 and W2 chips, Apple promises that Apple Watch will last just as long.
3. Siri Apple Watch has always been smart, but it’s learned a whole lot for Series 3. It starts with Siri. We’ve already seen the Siri watch face in watchOS 4, which delivers a steady stream of personalized updates to your wrist, but always-on connectivity with LTE makes it much more useful. And on Apple Watch Series 3, Siri can now talk back. When you ask Siri a question using your Series 3 watch, you won’t have to look at your screen anymore – it will respond to your query using your watch’s speaker.
4. Fitness One of Apple Watch’s main purposes has always been health, and Series 3 only reinforces that mission. Not only is there watchOS 4, which
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brings a new Workout app and the ability to sub your metrics with gym equipment, the heart-rate sensor will now tell you your resting and recovery BPM as well. And the Series 3 watch now also has a barometric altimeter for more accurate elevation readings. And of course, you can still take it swimming.
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Apple Watch Series 3 and AirPods, perfect together
5. Music Apple Watch has always been able to store music, but with just 2GB of available storage, it held fewer songs than the original iPod. But that changed with the LTE chip. Now the entire Apple Music catalogue will be right on your watch, and you won’t have sync playlists to make sure you have the latest Taylor Swift track. It’s like having 40 million songs on your wrist.
6. Performance We don’t usually think about performance when it comes to Apple Watch, but with an LTE chip, it’s going to be more important than ever for apps to
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load quickly. A new dual-core S3 processor brings a 70 percent boost in performance, and the W2 Bluetooth chip brings 85 percent faster Wi-Fi and 50 percent power efficiency, which is necessary because the LTE chip will use lots of battery life.
Price and release date The Apple Watch Series 3 is out now. It’s priced at £399 with GPS and cellular connectivity (not including the extra provider fee – we’ll let you know when we have more info there), and £329 for the non-cellular model. The Nike Plus models won’t ship until 5 October. Additionally, Series 1 watches are still be available, with prices starting at £249.
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FEATURE
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus’s best new features Don’t call them retro, writes Susie Ochs
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f the high price of the iPhone X is more than you want to pay for a phone, Apple is also offering updates to the smaller iPhones, called the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. They still have the Home button and body bezels, they still use Touch ID instead of Face ID, and the LCD screen sizes are the same that you’re used to. But don’t call them retro. The iPhone 8 is available to buy now in silver, space grey, and gold, priced at £699 for the 64GB option, and £849 for the 256GB handset. The 8 Plus is available in silver, space grey, and gold is on sale now. Prices start at £799 for the 64GB phone, with the 256GB option setting you back £949.
Like the iPhone 7, but different The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have the same body size
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and shape as the previous generation. But instead of keeping the aluminium back, these new iPhones have a glass back that might remind you of the classic iPhone 4 design. That’s double the surfaces that could break if you drop it. Yes, it’s true, but Phil Schiller claimed it’s the most durable glass ever used in a smartphone. Plus, a glass back also enables inductive charging, which also comes to the flagship iPhone X. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will support existing Qi inductive charging accessories for the home, office, and car. Phil Schiller pointed out on stage that some cars, restaurants, and even furniture already have Qi charging integrated, and Apple will offer Qi products in its retail stores.
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Don’t worry, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus still have a Lightning port for tethered charging and syncing, and using all the same Lightning headphones and accessories you already have. (No headphone jack, though – the iPhone SE is still the only device in the iPhone line-up that has one.) Inductive charging is already used in the Apple Watch, and it’s being marketed as ‘wireless charging’, but the friendly pedants among us will note that the charger itself still has a wire. But dropping your phone on a ‘wireless’ charger is still easier and more convenient than having to plug in a cable.
Three colours and a TrueTone Retina display The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus come in silver, space grey, and a beautiful bronze finish Phil Schiller just
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called ‘gold’. As in the previous generation, the front bezels on the gold and silver models are white, while the space grey model has a black front. The display is a Retina-quality LCD, with resolutions of 1334x750 for the iPhone 8, and 1920x1080 for the iPhone 8 Plus. But the displays now have TrueTone, previously available for the iPad Pro. TrueTone adjusts the colour temperature of the display based on the ambient light in the room, thanks to a new sensor embedded by the FaceTime camera.
One for the 8, two for the Plus Just like the iPhone 7, the iPhone 8 has a single rear-facing camera. It can shoot 12Mp stills, and the dynamic range of colour is wider thanks to bigger pixels, too. The 8 Plus has a two-camera setup with f/1.8 aperture and f/2.8 aperture lenses. It also takes 12Mp stills, naturally including the Portrait mode and optical zoom introduced with the iPhone 7 Plus. But this time, Portrait mode goes a little further.
Next-level Portrait Mode for the iPhone 8 Plus We all take lots of photos of people, so the iPhone 8 Plus has a beta feature called Portrait Lighting. You pose a
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photo, turn on Portrait Mode, and then the camera creates a depth map to pull the subject out of the background, then detects ‘facial landmarks’ like your nose, forehead, and cheekbones, and then adjusts the lighting on all of them. You can even select from multiple lighting effects inside the Camera app, previewing them each in real time. Better yet, you can change the lighting after you’ve taken a photo.
4K video and augmented reality For shooting video, the iPhone 8 can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second. It divides each video into 2 million tiles and then analyses them as you’re shooting to maximize quality and compression. Like shooting slow-mo? You can shoot in 1080p HD in jaw-dropping 240 frames per second, double the rate of the last generation. Of course, the new cameras are tuned for the augmented reality features in iOS 11, too. They’re calibrated in the factory for AR performance, so they’re able to track your motion more accurately with the gyroscope and accelerometer. The fancy lighting features are used in AR apps too, so the virtual objects added on your
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iPhone screen will better match the real-world environment you plopped them down in. One cool application of the new AR tech lets you hold up your iPhone at night to see the stars pointed out in the night sky. Previously, this was a representation of the sky based on your GPS coordinates, but now with augmented reality it’s really a picture of the sky.
New A11 Bionic chip The iPhone 8 has a six-core A11 Bionic chip, with two high-performance cores and four efficiency cores, plus the first-ever Apple-designed GPU. The GPU has three cores. The new image signal processor is designed to focus more quickly in lower light, and the new iPhones have hardware enabled multiband noise reduction. This means everything should look sharper, since the in-camera processing has more power to process your images as you take them.
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Apple TV 4K adds HDR and faster performance The latest Apple TV offers 4K HDR video, better access to live sports, and an iPad Pro CPU, reveals Glenn Fleishman
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he Apple TV, Apple’s flagship streaming media box, just got a major upgrade – which shouldn’t be a surprise, considering Apple’s interest in original programming and being a cordcutting leader. The new Apple TV 4K adds support for 4K video (naturally) as well as HDR, or High Dynamic Range, making for a significant upgrade to a product Apple
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once called a “hobby”. The 4K resolution offers four times the pixels of the current 1080p HD model, while HDR provides a greater range of richer colours with supported titles and TV sets. The new Apple TV 4K is available now and costs £179 with 32GB of RAM and £199 for 64GB. Customers who have purchased HD movies will receive upgrades in their iTunes libraries to corresponding 4K versions at no additional cost, and new titles in 4K will be sold at the same price as HD versions, with one significant holdout: Disney. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the studio responsible for Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar movies has not agreed to Apple’s terms. During the presentation, logos for Fox, Lionsgate, Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros, and Sony appeared on the screen. Apple also said that it’s working with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to bring their 4K libraries to Apple TV. Apple offered no new information on when an Amazon video app would be available for tvOS other than to reiterate that it would be available later this year. The fifth-generation Apple TV 4K also received a significant performance boost with the inclusion of the A10X Fusion processor found in the iPad Pro. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said, “It’s remarkably faster.”
Live sports on Apple TV 4K The updated tvOS, coming to the previous fourthgeneration and these new fifth-generation models,
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expands features in the TV app introduced last year. In addition to live news, the TV app will add live sports later this year, with the ability to mark favourite teams in a Sports tab (US only). The revision is expanding beyond the US, too. In September, Australia and Canada gain access, and by year’s end, Apple said users in France, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the UK will be able to use it. Apple brought thatgamecompany’s president and creative director Jenova Chen on stage to demonstrate Sky, an exclusive game for Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad that’s described as a “romantic social” game for casual gamers.
Apple TV 4K gets HDR for richer colours Not all 4K titles employ HDR, a technique best known for improving the lightest lights and darkest
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darks in photographs. With 4K TVs that support either of the two competing HDR standards – HDR10 (also called HDR Pro) or Dolby Vision – video will have a more cinematic feel by better representing both dark and light tones more distinctly and across a broader range. A built-in scaler will also resize HD content for 4K. One word of warning about HDR, however: not all HDR-capable TV sets support the two-yearold HDMI 2.0a standard required to pass richer video, and which is built into the new Apple TV. Some early HDR TVs had to rely on apps, but not external connections, for HDR content. The revised Apple TV version adds support for AirPlay 2 later this year, which will allow control of multiple speakers using that updated technology. Apple has also slightly redesigned the Siri Remote, adding a white circle around the Menu button. This will help with visual identification of the remote’s orientation, something that’s a frequent object of criticism, although this change still requires looking at the remote rather than by feel. To support 4K streaming, either via the Internet or through AirPlay 2, Apple still includes 802.11ac networking with MIMO, which can handle up several hundred megabits per second (Mb/s) in the right circumstances, but also finally bumped its ethernet interface from 10/100Mb/s to gigabit ethernet. The hardware also now includes Bluetooth 5.0 rather than the previous model’s Bluetooth 4.0. Apple will continue to offer its HD version of the TV at £149 (from fave.co/2wZ05dl) for 32GB.
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New AirPods case offers wireless charging Macworld staff explain how to set up your AirPods, control your music with Siri, plus what happens if you lose one
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aunched last year, Apple’s AirPods have been a success for the firm. Priced £159 they are available at fave.co/2x0opeW. Here’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook said about the AirPods during the company’s third quarter 2017 financial results call with analysts in August: “We’re also seeing incredible enthusiasm for AirPods, with 98 percent customer satisfaction based on Creative Strategies’ survey. We have increased production capacity for AirPods and are working very hard to get them to customers
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as quickly as we can, but we are still not able to meet the strong level of demand.” Over the following pages we reveal how to set up AirPods, use them to control your music, and more.
Pair your AirPods to an iPhone and Apple Watch Pairing your AirPods to an iPhone or iPad for the first time is ridiculously easy. If your device is running iOS 10, all you have to do is flip open the lid of the AirPods’ charging case, and you’ll see a message on your nearby iPhone asking if you want to connect. (If your phone is locked, you have to unlock it first and then tap the Connect button. And if nothing happens at all, check your iPhone to make sure Bluetooth is turned on. That’s it, you’re done. Your AirPods will stay paired to this iPhone – and a paired Apple Watch, if you have one of those too. If you start playing a song on your iPhone, and then you start another song playing on your Apple Watch, the AirPods will switch to the Apple Watch.
Pair your AirPods with a Mac If you’ve already paired the AirPods to your iPhone, and it’s signed into the same iCloud account as your Mac (running macOS 10.12 Sierra), you don’t have to go through the pairing process again. Just click the Bluetooth icon in your Mac’s menu bar and you’ll see the AirPods there. Mouse down over them and click the word Connect when it comes up. Or you can Alt-click the
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volume icon in the menu bar (System Preferences > Sound > Show volume in menu bar if you don’t see it already) and choose AirPods as your Mac’s output device.
Pair your AirPods to anything else What if you want to use the AirPods with an Android phone, or a Kindle Fire tablet, or even an Apple device that isn’t running the latest and greatest operating system? You can. The AirPods don’t have a pairing button on them, but the charging case does. Stick the AirPods in the charging case, and then look for a round, white, barely visible button on the back of the case. With the case’s lid open, press and hold that button, and you’ll see the teeny-tiny LED inside the case turn white. That means the AirPods are in pairing mode, so you should be able to use the
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menus on the device you’re trying to pair with to get them connected.
Check the AirPods battery There are a couple of ways to check the battery level. You can ask Siri, by double-tapping either AirPod, and then asking, “What’s my battery level?” when you hear the Siri chime. Siri will tell you if any of your devices – iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods – is running low on battery. If both AirPods are in the charging case, you can flip open its lid and you’ll see a pop-up on your paired iPhone that displays the battery life of each AirPod, plus the case. You can also check on your iPhone itself, with the battery widget in Notification Centre’s Today view. (You get to Notification Centre by swiping down from any page, or swiping right from your home screen. If the Batteries widget isn’t active, scroll to the bottom of Notification Centre’s Today view and tap Edit to add it.) Or, swipe up from any page to bring up the Control Centre, and swipe to the pane that shows your Music app. If your AirPods are connected, you’ll see “Now Playing on [Name’s] AirPods” at the bottom of this pane. Tap the downward-facing arrow next to that, as if you were going to change the playback device to your iPhone’s speakers, and you’ll see how much battery each AirPod has left.
Invoke Siri The default way to invoke Siri is to double-tap on either AirPod with your finger. If you hate Siri,
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though, you can change the double-tap behaviour in Settings. Start in Settings > Bluetooth, and then tap the lower-case i icon next to your AirPods in the list of Bluetooth devices. On the next page, in the section labelled Double-tap on AirPods, you can choose Siri, Play/Pause, or Off.
Control playback and volume You can take one AirPod out of your ear to pause the music, and then stick it back in your ear to start it playing again.
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Assuming you keep the default behaviour to double-tap an AirPod to talk to Siri, you’ll need to use Siri for the rest of your playback tasks. Here are a few commands you can use, and these work whether you’re listening to the Music app, or another app like Spotify. • Turn it up • Turn it down • Skip this song If you are listening to the Music app, you can ask for specific songs, albums, artists, and playlists (in your library if you aren’t an Apple Music subscriber, or across the whole Apple Music service if you are), and you get more commands. • Start this song over • Rewind • Play more like this • Add this to my collection • Shuffle on Obviously, using Siri to control playback has some lag. First you have to double-tap the AirPod and wait for the chime that lets you know Siri is listening. Then you have to speak your query and wait for the iPhone to parse it. It’s a lot less convenient than, say, the Beats Solo3 or other wireless headphones that put more controls right on the headphones themselves. But the AirPods are a lot smaller, so it makes
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sense that they wouldn’t have buttons. Apple could perhaps add support for a second gesture (say, a triple-tap to join the double-tap), but what is here is a good start.
Charge the AirPods and their case The AirPods will last about five hours per charge, according to Apple. The case holds a battery too, and you stick the AirPods back in the case to charge them. The little light inside the case glows orange when the AirPods are charging, and magnets keep them snug in the charging case, even if you turn it all the way upside down. Each AirPod fits exactly in one of the two openings, so as long as they’re in there and you can close the lid, they should be properly seated for charging.
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With the original case, just connect a Lightning cable to the port on the bottom. Then connect the other end to an AC power adaptor or a USB port on a Mac. In September, Apple revealed a new AirPods case that works with Apple’s new AirPower charging pad. To charge the new wireless case, you place it on the AirPower. If your AirPods are in the case, you’ll see an orange light if they’re charging, or a green light when they’re nearly fully charged. If no AirPods are in the case, the light still goes on when you open the lid, but it indicates how much battery life is left in the case itself: orange for needs charging and green for good life left. At the time of writing, Apple had not released pricing for the new wireless case, nor has the company said that it will replace the original case with the new one with a new pair of AirPods. The wireless case will be available in 2018.
Will they stay in your ears? They’re staying in our ears just fine. Seriously, check out our video at tinyurl.com/ya6k44v4. I headbang, jog in place, and perform a pretty wild shadow boxing kind of a dance, and they didn’t budget at all. Macworld’s Caitlin McGarry found that the AirPods stay in place during tough workouts. To compare, we’ve been wearing the free EarPods that Apple includes with an iPhone, and those don’t stay so firmly in place as the AirPods do. The EarPods are a little lighter, and we do tend
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to catch the cable on something pretty frequently, say, a few times a week), whether snagging them on a doorknob or the armrest of a chair, or having to adjust the cables under a scarf or hoodie so they don’t tug the EarPods out of my ears. The wire-free AirPods, on the other hand, just perch in out ears perfectly, and don’t move when we do.
What to do if you lose one You’ll be pretty sad. But it’s not the end of the world. Apple has confirmed that it will sell replacement AirPods through what it calls “normal service channels”, meaning Apple stores and authorized service techs. The prices are outlined in this service document, but a lost AirPod will cost £69 to replace, and a lost charging case is £69 as well.
How to locate your AirPods There’s an app for that. Really. The Find My iPhone app can locate your AirPods. But in order for the app to work, your AirPods have to be powered on and connected to your iPhone. If your AirPods aren’t on, or they’re out of range, Find My iPhone won’t be much help.
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FROM IDG
10.5in iPad Pro: Everything you need to know + THE ULTIMATE iPAD BUYING GUIDE
THE iPHONE AT 10: A decade of Apple’s revolutionary handset
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Help Desk Glenn Fleishman answers your most vexing Mac problems
WHEN FONTS WON’T DISPLAY PROPERLY IN SAFARI AND MAIL
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System software is up to date. I use Suitcase Fusion (fave.co/2gZZ14V) and it’s also up to date. I tried booting up without Suitcase but that made no difference. Copying the camouflaged text and pasting into TextEdit reveals the original letters, so the underlying information isn’t lost– just hidden.
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What the ??? is going on? Maybe a font corruption problem or a font missing altogether
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Other people who have experienced the same problem, sometimes in Mail and sometimes in Safari, have solved it by resolving font corruption or duplication. You can use Font Book for both, a font utility found in macOS’s Applications folder and part of Apple’s system software. Open Font Book. First, try validation: 1. Click All Fonts in the sidebar at left. 2. Click in the fonts list to its right. 3. Choose Edit > Select All (or press Command-A). 4. Choose File > Validate Fonts. If you have a lot of fonts installed, the validation can take a while. When it completes, review the list of problems. Font Book shows a yellow yield sign for minor problems and a red stop sign for corruption. On my Mac, I had 15 minor problems out of 452 fonts, and the issue appeared to be duplication, which can sometimes cause the question-mark problem in question. You can select those fonts and right-click on the selection to pick Resolve Duplicates, and then choose whether to resolve manually or automatically. You should quit Mail and launch it again, and if
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If Font Book finds duplicates, you can resolve the problem manually or automatically
it doesn’t solve the problem, restart the Mac just in case there’s a caching issue. If that still doesn’t help, you can use a sort of nuclear weapon: in Font Book, choose File > Restore Standard Fonts. This prompts a warning, as it will move all non-Apple font files into a Fonts (Removed) folder without deleting them, and copy back original versions of fonts, including any that might have been removed unintentionally. Don is using Suitcase, so I’d use Suitcase to disable all non-Apple fonts before performing this operation. Suitcase can reference fonts you have installed in locations others than the system Fonts folders (there are separate ones for all users and for each user), which means disabling those fonts won’t move them to a new location. After restoring fonts in this manner, most people with remaining problems found themselves back to normal.
THE CASE OF THE iMAC SCREEN THAT MYSTERIOUSLY BLACKS OUT Cecil Usher wants to give his granddaughter a 2010-era 27in iMac. However, there’s a problem.
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The screen goes completely black and stays that way for no apparent reason, sometimes shortly after turning the Mac on and sometimes not all. Sometimes the screen simply never turns on and stays completely black. When the screen stays on, it looks perfect. He took the iMac to an Apple-authorized service centre that couldn’t replicate the problem and their diagnostics found nothing wrong. However, he writes that: “We took the machine home and the screen came on at startup and within a minute went blank. This has been happening for over a year.” The iMac works with an external display just fine, whether or not the internal display is blank. Without laying hands on the computer, my guess is this is an electrical fault that has a thermal component. While I haven’t seen this recently, in my youth – when I was more hands on with soldering irons and circuits – it was relatively common to have faults that only materialized under certain circumstances in which heating or cooling caused expansion or contraction that caused a temporary gap in whatever conductive material was passing electricity. (As a child, my family had a
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colour TV set, but when it heated up, it shifted to black and white. We had to bang it to get colour back. Banging the set jarred the discontinuity in the solid-state circuit that did colour decoding. Yes, I’m that old.) With modern manufacture, that sort of nonsense is much less likely, but given that moving the iMac into a different location made the problem impossible to replicate lends credence. In movement, it might have been jarred, or the repair facility might be heavily air conditioned or not at all, while Cecil’s home is the opposite. I suspect the repair shop only ran hardware diagnostics via software, which wouldn’t reveal this, and didn’t open it up. It might cost £100 or more to have someone qualified crack the case and look for signs of failure, at which point unless they’re handy with a soldering iron and it’s something that can be fixed with molten tin and lead, it won’t be worth repairing. Just to on the safe side, I always suggest the following as part of diagnosing video issues: Boot in safe mode. This sometimes reveals problems with video cards that don’t materialize otherwise. That seems unlikely here, but if the iMac runs for hours in safe mode without the screen blanking, there’s a software-related problem. Reinstall macOS over the existing installation. If there’s any system software issue, as bizarre as that might be, this would solve it.
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Boot in Safe Mode
Unfortunately, an external monitor is likely the best way to keep using this iMac if the two above troubleshooting options don’t help further. We also recommend you check the vent holes on the back and bottom of your iMac for dust. You can use a vacuum brush attachment or compressed air. (If you use compressed air, remember to power down the Mac, and place it in a position so that you keep the can of air upright. Otherwise, you can spray liquid out of the can that evaporates so rapidly it causes freezing on surfaces it touches, and can damage the case and the screen.)
TEMPTED TO MUCK ABOUT IN MEDIA LIBRARY FOLDERS FOR APPLE APPS LIKE PHOTOS? DON’T DO IT Ross Millard wrote in with a complaint about Photos for macOS. He notes that he can’t easily find in
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which folders his images live on his computer when using Photos. He’s used to interacting directly with his media via Aperture, and having it directly accessible. iPhoto also made this easy. Photos, like iTunes and iMovie, doesn’t have a great way for you to access the media and other items that it manages, but there are some workarounds. Apple gradually changed its app design to rely on library ’files’, which are a special kind of folder, called a package. To the Finder, and for the purposes of copying and moving items, the library is a single folder. Inside, it contains all the sausagemaking ingredients used by the apps, including original media files, modified ones (in the cases of Photos), project components, and one or more databases that track what’s inside the library. With Photos, when you modify an image, it retains the original and stores a modified version. With the introduction of the HEIF image file format in macOS High Sierra and iOS 11 later this year, it’s possible Apple will take advantage of that file format to incorporate modifications as a separate layer, just including differences or instructions on how to take the original image and produce the modified one. That should make images more portable, as they’ll be containers in themselves. Once you buy into Apple’s model, you don’t need to know where files are, because you’re always working with their interface for manipulating files. That’s not the model Ross wants to use, so Photos is not exactly the right tool. In a pinch or for some
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kinds of backups, you can reach into the Photos library and extract or copy elements. There is a sort of way around this. Photos doesn’t have to import media into the library in order to work with it. This makes your library less portable, and images and video that aren’t imported also don’t get synced with iCloud Photo Library. With referenced images, you switch a preference in Photos, and then your images remain in their original location. They aren’t copied or reorganized. They appear with a special badge in the Photos app. The modified versions are stored within the Photos library, however.
HOW TO SET NETWORK CONNECTION PRIORITY ON A MAC
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I’d like to connect to my grandma’s Wi-Fi connection so that I can use her printer. However, her Internet connection is incredibly slow, so I want to simultaneously use my iPhone’s tethering capability (via USB or Bluetooth, of course) to browse the Internet.
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macOS does let you prioritize network connections, so you can pick which adaptor gets used first when your system tries to connect to local network and Internet-connected resources.
1. Open the Network system preference pane. 2. Click the settings (gear) icon at the bottom of the adaptor list. 3. Select Set Service Order. 4. Drag the items around in your preferred order. 5. Click OK.
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In the case of the reader’s question, the iPhone tethering item should be placed above the Wi-Fi item. This should retain the ability to access locally available resources, like the printer. In this situation, to achieve the best possible speed without any monkeying around, disable Wi-Fi fully unless the printer is needed. You can use the Wi-Fi system menu and choose Turn Wi-Fi Off until you need to print. Or, you can create a location via the Network preference: 1. Click the Location pop-up menu at the top of the pane. 2. Choose Edit Locations. 3. Click ‘+’ to add a location. 4. Click OK. 5. Choose that new location from the Location menu. 6. Make changes, such as disabling Wi-Fi (select Wi-Fi in adaptors list, click the gear, and choose Make Service Inactive). 7. Click Apply. Repeat for as many different kinds of network setups you want. You might name one ‘Cell Only’ and another ‘Grandma Plus Cell’. You can easily switch between locations from the Command > Locations menu available throughout the system.
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Corel Painter 2018 RATING:
£359 inc VAT from fave.co/2dot8Bl
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rtists of every stripe – fine art, comic art, photo art – rely on Corel Painter to create original works, as its natural media methodology uses tech to mimic paint on canvas. As with many mature products, it’s hard to fathom improvements in historical software that’s already so deep and complete. But each year Corel tries, and with Painter 2018, it has managed to add significant enhancements and new features to the roster – Thick Paint, enhanced Cloning, and 2.5D texture brushes.
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Improved drip and liquid brush technologies let you paint on an empty layer and then blend with underlying brushstrokes. From its better photo art and composite capabilities, new clone-source options, updated interface, and distinctive texture synthesis, Painter 2018 expands and intensifies artistic potential for almost all users.
Thick paint While you can use Painter with a mouse, most digital artists are creating with a pen tablet (like ones from Wacom) to achieve the natural look and feel of pressure sensitive tilt and rotation brush strokes. That functionality especially benefits Painter’s new headliner Thick Paint brushes, which offer the visceral sensibility of loading thick oil and other paints onto a canvas and arranging or mixing them with bristle brushes and palette knives – or piling on the paint so you can scrape it off. The brushes deliver smooth, satisfyingly deep, thick strokes with varying colour and volume that encourage experimentation with shadows, lighting, and transparency. This gives the aura of real brushes on canvas or painting in a sun-filled studio or in the middle of a lush landscape. A choice of paper textures lets you immediately view brush effects on your painting and adjust the amount of paint loaded onto a brush. A Bleed setting lets you easily smear and blend colours around the canvas. A new pull-down menu lets you choose a specific painting technique like Thick, Dry,
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The Thick Paint brush delivers brush smears on all kinds of papers
Soft, and Thin to vary how the brush interacts with the canvas.
2.5D texture brushes While the previous version of Painter featured texture painting, Painter 2018 tweaks the feature to include even more dynamic Texture or 2.5D brushes in the Texture Cover and Texture Source Blending brush categories. Painter’s 2.5D brushes can apply textures, scales, cracks, and other imperfections to a surface. Artists can enhance additional visual interest with directional lighting.
Texture synthesis Art creation often involves applying textures and surfaces to characters or environments, and
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Painting with 2.5D texture brushes builds up textures on the painted canvas
Painter 2018 lets you custom design your own textures from just about any photo or art piece. Start with a small sample of an interesting visual and synthesize it to a larger scale. The texture synthesis process Choose a pattern to turn into a texture randomizes characteristics of the selected area, letting you create a new pattern.
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You can output your new texture to a separate layer or save it in your texture library. Prepare to take some time to generate a usable texture, especially one that doesn’t look tiled or canned.
Cloning The new Painter enhances cloning support and now lets you use transparent and semi-transparent clone sources or textures to create collages or photo art. You can transform or reuse a texture clone source, or save an embedded source in an image, your texture library, or embedded inside a document to retrieve or share later. Interface improvements give you easy access to cloning controls directly from the property bar.
Using textures as a clone source
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Selection brushes This genre of brushes lets you paint a selection that includes both shape and transparency. A colour overlay lets you see where you painted your selection, letting you easily add or subtract from it. This is especially helpful for watercolours, where you can use selections like masks to prevent colour spread. Any stamp-based brush can be used as a selection tool, to mask discrete areas, or paint over or fill with a gradient. Once you select and customize a brush, you can save and reuse it. You can even edit and apply transformations to the texture.
Choose a brush
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Make a selection
Save the selection to a new layer
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Painting with liquid and drip blender brushes
Drip and liquid tech Painter already had popular brushes featuring its drip and liquid technologies, which make strokes look and feel watery. This new version adds more variety to brushes, and for the first time lets you paint on an empty layer and blend with underlying brushstrokes. This imparts increased depth and variety to your paintings and supports Painter’s other natural-media features.
Random grain rotation Nothing screams pixel automation like uniformity, and in a painting that is rarely a good thing. Painter 2018 offers improvements to its grain
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The Random Grain Rotation and Random Grain Position checkboxes provide an easy way to make your paintings look more natural
technology that boosts both brush and paper randomization. The new Random Grain Rotation and Random Grain Position options vary the paper grain a wee tad with each stroke, making your brushstrokes look more random. After choosing a grainy brush, just enable random grain rotation and/or grain position, and Painter will rotate the grain in each individual stroke to achieve a more natural look. The settings can be applied to any brush with a grain setting. No additional skill is needed to perform this operation, but this feature will boost the quality of any artwork more easily than artists could do in the past.
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Natural media brush library If you’re a traditional painter entering unfamiliar digital terrain, Painter 2018 aims to ease that transition with a new brush collection designed to make you feel more at home. The app gathers an assortment of popular brush types Painter has a wide selection of brushes and variations used in real world drawing and painting into this 96-brush library, including brushes that mimic traditional hard, ink, and paint media – pencils, pastels, oils, acrylics, and charcoal.
Macworld’s buying advice Painter 2018 is a rich upgrade to an already established product and I recommend it to users of all versions. The Thick Paint feature and improvements to the liquid and drip technologies are especially welcome. However, if those features don’t get you pumped, then you may be just as happy waiting for the next upgrade, especially if you already have a fairly recent version of Painter.
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ROUND-UP
Latest Mac games Andrew Hayward looks at this month’s best new releases
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utumn is here, but the fun doesn’t have to stop: your Mac can keep you entertained as the nights draw in. Enhanced racing simulation F1 2017 arrived day-and-date with the well-reviewed PC version, while sci-fi story games Tacoma and Subsurface Circular are both worth a look, and Batman: The Enemy Within and Pyre are likewise compelling.
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1. F1 (2017) Price: £44.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/y889L78z) The Mac versions of Codemasters’ F1 racing series have typically followed their PC counterparts, but with F1 2017, both platforms got the new release at the very same time. And that’s good news this time around, since reviews point to F1 2017 being perhaps the best entry to date in the popular simulation franchise. F1 2017 lets you sit behind the wheel of a Formula One speedster and zip around the track in realistic competition, with all of the current licensed cars, drivers, and courses included. But this edition offers a deeper career mode than before, including more extensive car management needs, as well as more variety with the new Championships mode.
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2. Tacoma Price: £14.99 from (tinyurl.com/ycgmwxdx) If you enjoyed Gone Home on Mac, then you’ll probably dig Tacoma as well. Hailing from the same studio, Tacoma drops you into an abandoned space station to find out what happened and retrieve a powerful AI. However, unlike most stories that feature decrepit space stations, this one’s a relative calm and quiet one: you’ll restore and view digital recordings of the former crew and try to piece together their last days on the vessel. Like Gone Home, Tacoma isn’t hugely interactive: you’ll wander around the environment and soak in the storyline bit by bit. But it’s still powerful, and the relationships between the former crew mates feel real.
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3. Batman: The Enemy Within – The Telltale Series Price: £18.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/ydhgcd4k) We enjoyed the episodic Batman: The Telltale Series on iOS, but it was never released on Mac. And now follow-up season Batman: The Enemy Within is out on Mac, but at the time of writing it hasn’t made its way over to iOS , though it’s coming. While that’s hardly ideal for Mac players, at least you can jump into Telltale’s take on The Dark Knight now. The first episode of The Enemy Within is currently available, with the other four rolling out in the coming months, and it begins a new story in which The Riddler toys with Gotham City – and Bruce Wayne faces the darkness within himself. The purchase covers the entire season ahead.
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4. Pyre Price: £14.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/mylntvw) If you played Bastion or Transistor, then you know the impeccable pedigree of Supergiant Games, which means you probably ought to go ahead and grab Pyre, the studio’s latest creation. It’s a roleplaying game that puts you in control of a group of exiles, who must battle in specialized rituals to try and reclaim their glory. From there, Pyre seems unique. The battles play out like a combatcentric team sport, almost like a tweak on football, and if you lose, there’s no restarting the match. Instead, the story branches and their journey continues beyond that disappointment. Pair in the kind of dazzling presentation we expect from the studio, and Pyre looks like another winner.
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ROUND-UP
5. The Long Dark Price: £26.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/k6kozx7) Can you survive in the cold, dark wilderness with only your wits and whatever you can scavenge from your surroundings? That’s the task put in front of you in The Long Dark, which recently emerged from Steam Early Access in a more finished format. And yet it’s still not quite finished: you’ll get the first two episodes now, encompassing about 15 hours of gameplay, with three more instalments still coming. The game takes place following a geomagnetic disaster, and you’ll have to fend for yourself by hunting, managing your health, finding supplies, and more. As the game’s description makes clear, “There are no zombies – only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.”
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6. Subsurface Circular Price: £4.79 from Steam (tinyurl.com/ycjscues) Pairing up well with Tacoma this month, Bithell Games’ Subsurface Circular is another storyfocused experience with a cool, sci-fi aesthetic, but this one is even more compact, and is designed as a single-sitting game. Here, you’ll ride the underground transit system as a robot detective and talk with the other robotic workers, attempting to sort out a mystery that can affect the entire world up top. Sound odd? Maybe, but the visual style is delightful, and the dialogue looks entertaining. That’s no surprise, given that Subsurface Circular comes from the same team behind the wonderful Thomas Was Alone. It looks short and sweet, and Steam user reviews are strongly positive thus far.
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7. The Escapists 2 Price: £19.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/y9g8vpbr) The original Escapists game was a rather huge indie smash, and now The Escapists 2 is here to ratchet up the premise to new heights. As before, you’ll take the role of an inmate who isn’t content with serving out his/her time, and devise a plot to break free by crafting items, using disguises, fighting guards, and finding a way out of the heavily-guarded structure. The Escapists 2 offers up much larger locales to find your way out of, not to mention a more diverse array of them, including a prisoner train, and even a space prison
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ROUND-UP
8. Alphabear: Hardcover Edition Price: £6.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/ycsajtwd) We’re big fans of Alphabear on iOS, but if you ever wanted to play it on Mac – or you just couldn’t come to grips with its freemium design – then the new Alphabear: Hardcover Edition should grab your attention. It’s essentially the same game at its core, albeit now with a fully premium, pay-once model, as well as fresh daily boards and other perks. Alphabear is one of the most compelling word puzzlers of the past few years, challenging you to create words using the Scrabble-like tiles on the board. As you clear tiles, they turn into cute, increasingly-large bears that award big point bounties, but if you leave tiles unused for too long, they turn to stone and impede progress.
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9. BioShock Remastered Price: £9.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/ybzhzc3x) BioShock is one of the all-time greatest first-person shooters, and this month marked 10 years since its original release. To celebrate the occasion, 2K Games and Feral Interactive have released BioShock Remastered, which spruces up the original game to make it run better than ever on modern hardware. It’s the same core game as ever, with its dazzling underwater dystopia of Rapture and memorable story and characters, but now with higher-resolution textures, models, and interface elements, as well as 4K resolution support overall. It also has new challenge rooms, commentary, and other perks.
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10. Nidhogg 2 Price: £10.99 from Steam (tinyurl.com/ycn5juz4) The original Nidhogg was beloved for its fastpaced, gruesome sword-fighting duels, albeit with an ultra lo-fi aesthetic that looked Atari-esque in origin. Now Nidhogg 2 is here, keeping the same kind of one-on-one premise while swapping in a grotesque, Claymation-esque look that’s equally unsettling and hilarious at the same time. Yet the action remains fast and fun. You’ll start at opposite sides of a 2D plain and try to get to the other end by any means possible, whether it’s slashing your opponent with a sword, filling your foe with arrows, or stomping his head in the ground. And you can battle either locally or online, with an eight-player tournament mode added as well.
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HOW-TO
How to: Open Word documents in Pages If you use Word on a Mac, you can save the documents you create and open them in Pages. Roman Loyola shows how
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very Mac comes with Apple’s iWork apps: Pages (word processor), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (presentations). And these apps can import Office documents. In this tutorial we explain how to open Word documents in Pages and export Pages documents for use in Word.
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HOW TO
Import Word documents into Pages This procedure works with .docx and .doc file formats. You can also import .rtf and .txt files. 1. Launch Pages (it’s in the Applications folder of your Mac). 2. In the window that automatically opens when you launch the app, navigate to the location of your Word file. For example, if it’s in Documents, click on the Documents folder in the left sidebar. (You can also click on the File menu and select Open, then navigate to your document.)
3. Once you’ve located your file, select it and click Open.
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4. A window may appear, explaining any changes that were made during the import process. The more complicate your Word document (formatting, tables, image placement, and so on), the higher the possibility that a change had to be made. The simpler the document, the more your file will resemble what you created in Word. 5. That’s it. The Word file should open in Pages. Before you start working on your document, look it over carefully. Formatting may have changed and you may have to fix it. There’s always a chance that so much happened during the import that you can’t use your document.
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HOW TO
Export Apple Pages files as Word documents If you’ve been working in Pages and will eventually return to Word, you can export your document as a Word file. Here’s how. 1. In Pages, click on the File menu and move your cursor to ‘Export to’. 2. A pop-up menu will appear. Select Word.
3. In the Export Your Document window that appears next, you can opt to include a summary worksheet and require a password. Click on the Advanced Options, and you can select between .docx and .doc file formats. Click Next when you have finished selecting your options. 4. Choose where you want to save the file and name it. 5. When you click Export, this will save the file.
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How to: Open Excel spreadsheets in Numbers Roman Loyola reveals how to access Excel files in Numbers
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f you use Excel on a Mac, you’ll be pleased to hear that you can save the spreadsheets you create and open them in Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet app. It’s a handy feature to use in case you can’t access Microsoft’s apps.
Import Excel spreadsheets into Numbers This procedure works with .xlsx and .xls file formats. You can also import .csv and tab-delimited files.
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1. Launch Numbers (it’s in the Applications folder of your Mac). 2. In the window that automatically opens when you launch the app, navigate to the location of your Excel file. For example, if it’s in Documents, click on the Documents folder in the left sidebar. (You can also click on the File menu and select Open, then navigate to your spreadsheet.)
3. Once you’ve located your file, select it and click Open. A progress window will appear.
4. A window may appear, explaining any changes that were made during the import process. The
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more complicate your Excel spreadsheet (lots of formulas, charts, and so on), the higher the possibility that a change had to be made. The simpler the spreadsheet, the more your file will resemble what you created in Excel. 5. That’s it. The Excel file should open in Numbers. Before you start working on your spreadsheet, look it over carefully. Formatting may have changed, especially with charts. Check to make sure the formulas you are using are intact. There’s always a chance that so much happened during the import that you can’t use your spreadsheet.
Export Numbers files as Excel spreadsheets If you’ve been working in Numbers and will eventually return to Excel, you can export your spreadsheet as an Excel file. Here’s how. 1. In Numbers, click on the File menu and move your cursor to ‘Export to’. 2. A pop-up menu will appear. Select Excel.
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HOW TO
3. In the Export Your Spreadsheet window that appears next, you can opt to include a summary worksheet and require a password. Click on the Advanced Options, and you can select between .xlsx and .xls file formats. Click Next when you have finished selecting your options.
4. Choose where you want to save the file and name it. 5. When you click Export, this will save the file.
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OPINION
In Apple’s next ecosystem, Siri is the glue Every tech ecosystem needs one key feature to tie it together, and it looks like Siri is Apple’s next priority, argues Dan Moren
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t’s always been about the ecosystem for Apple. The company started out making its own hardware and software, and – with brief exceptions like the late, not-terribly-lamented clone program in the ’90s – it’s only aimed to bring more and more of what it does under its direct control. As the company moves into its fifth decade, its eyes are firmly planted on the future of that
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ecosystem. If the ’70s and ’80s were about the PC, the ‘90s about the rise of the Internet, and the 2000s and 2010s about consumer technology and the mobile revolution, then the 2020s are poised to be less about the devices we use and more about the seamless ecosystem that pervades every part of our lives. Apple will, of course, still be bringing its particular mix of hardware, software, and services to bear on this next phase of technology, but there’s one element in particular that stands to be the glue bringing all of it together. Something that can potentially turn a disjointed gaggle of devices into something that’s more than just the sum of its parts. And that is Siri.
Siri everywhere, but not everything Siri’s already positioned to take on this most important of roles. The virtual assistant is one of the few pieces technology that cuts across all of Apple’s devices: iPhone/iPad, Macs, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and, pretty soon, the HomePod. Even Apple’s popular AirPods work as a conduit to Siri. More to the point, Siri isn’t just, well, Siri anymore. In addition to the agent you talk to – and who talks back to you – Siri has become Apple’s catch-all for a variety of intelligent technologies designed to predict how you want to use your device: what apps you want to launch, what things you want to search for, even what you want to say. It’s all part of Apple’s very assistant-like attempt to help you figure out what you need before you know
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you need it. Perhaps the most prominent example of that is the Siri watch face in the upcoming watchOS 4, which displays contextual information and controls depending on your time and location. So, Siri is available to us via pretty much all of our devices, and it reaches deep into the operating systems that run them. But it’s not yet taken the step that will turn it from a feature into a gamechanging way for us to interact with technology. In order for that to happen, there are still a few steps along the way. Chief among them: Even now, almost six years after Siri’s appearance on the iPhone, I
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still sometimes feel as though I’m dealing with a handful of different Siris, rather than one single virtual assistant. And, weirder yet, each of these Siris seems to have no idea that the others exist. I can’t ask Siri on my iPhone to pull something up on my Apple TV. I can’t ask Siri at my Mac to send something to my iPhone. (There have been some improvements over the years: Hey Siri, for example, mainly only seems to trigger on one device these days.) Apple’s made an end-run around some of these features by enabling smarter syncing between devices. For example, directions you search for in Maps on your Mac might show up in the Maps app on your iPhone. Or a show you start watching on your iPhone may be marked as half-watched on your Apple TV. These types of interconnections are becoming more and more prevalent, but Siri often remains blissfully unaware.
Future talk In this future ecosystem, Siri may very well evolve into the ultimate Apple product, a sort of universal OS that doesn’t care what kind of device or interface you’re using. It’s no surprise, then, that a recent freshening up of Apple’s executive bio pages revealed that Siri is now under the purview of Craig Federighi’s software team rather than Eddy Cue’s Services division. In the lead-up to iOS 11 release, Siri’s also gotten a bit of attention – but not necessarily because of what it can do. Yes, there are some new tricks that
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the virtual assistant can trot out in the upcoming version of iOS – for example, it can now handle translations between languages – but Apple’s clearly been focusing on the improvements it’s made to make Siri’s voice more natural. That might seem less exciting than broadening Siri’s featureset or offering integration with more apps, but it’s still important in its own way: the more that talking to Siri is like talking to a real person, the more likely people are to use it. When you don’t have to carefully formulate exactly what you’re going to say, it makes the virtual assistant that much more effective. And that’s one step closer to making Siri an asset – a true assistant that you can rely on to do the tasks that you used to have to turn to a device for. Siri, in the end, will be the face to the nameless assortment of gadgets and technologies that make up your everyday ecosystem
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