Macworld When Apple unveiled its first-ever smartwatch back in 2014, it’s fair to say that the world wasn’t exactly sure what it was for… and neither was Apple. In those early days, along with the fitness elements which would remain an enduring part of the product’s appeal, the company talked enthusiastically about sharing taps, sketches, and heartbeats with friends, which would not. It took time for users and third-party developers to teach Apple what they wanted from a smartwatch, and for the company to take that on board. Today, the Apple Watch is a mature and versatile product. It’s so versatile, indeed, that you may not be aware of some of its most useful capabilities. In this article, we’re going…

Macworld Near-field communications (NFC) allow very short-range transmission of data from a device that can be battery-free. The field generator by the NFC reader produces the tiny amount of power required to trigger a signal. Starting with AirTag support in the iPhone 6s in 2015, all iPhone models have had some kind of ability to activate and read NFC tags. (Starting with ever earlier iPhones, all Watch models, and many iPads, NFC transmission or encoding is used for Apple Pay.) You might have received certain kinds of NFC tag notifications. The most common are: AirTag: Tapping an AirTag after receiving an alert that one is near you. AirTags that aren’t registered to you will be identified by your iPhone. When brought…

Macworld For a product that isn’t debuting until 2024, Apple has said a lot about the Vision Pro, its mixed reality headset. Apple spent nearly an hour in the WWDC keynote discussing it. It has rolled out developer tools for visionOS, which has given us even more clarity about what visionOS can and can’t do. And yet I remain firmly convinced that Apple hasn’t told us the whole story. The WWDC keynote was the time to make a first impression–but there’s half a year to go before the final story is told. As a result, Apple emphasized the features of the device that it felt would best represent the device. It emphasized the fact that it’s an augmented-reality product that…

Apple Studios has revealed a first-look image from Brad Pitt’s hotly anticipated Formula One feature. The drama is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and seven-time F1 champion Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Dawn Apollo Films banner. Abid Rahman for The Hollywood Reporter: The untitled film, which also features Snowfall star Damson Idris in a lead role, is set in the world of elite motor racing. Pitt stars as a former F1 driver who returns to race for the fictional APXGP team, a middling outfit, alongside Idris’ character. In June 2022, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the deal for Apple’s F1 feature was a potential game-changer in Hollywood. The unique deal, which calls for a wide theatrical release with…

Macworld The words “generative AI” are on everyone’s lips at the moment. These technologies can create text, images, or video clips from simple prompts, and could change the media landscape as we know it. Adobe certainly thinks generative AI is worth further investigation, and is putting its marketing muscle behind Generative Fill, a new Photoshop feature that allows you to edit or manipulate your images in entirely new ways. You can see for yourself how it works in the image below: drag the slider left and right to see the before and after. The blank areas were filled in–which is to say, extrapolated from what’s in the rest of the image–by Photoshop’s artificial intelligence. Thanks to technologies like this it…

Macworld With WWDC behind us and summer in full swing, it won’t be long before the iPhone 15 is upon us. It’s still about two months away, but the rumor mill is already giving us a good idea of what to expect. Just as we have had for the last few years, we expect a standard iPhone 15 in regular and Plus sizes (6.1 and 6.7 inches, though slimmer bezels may make the displays ever-so-slightly larger), and the iPhone 15 Pro in nearly identical standard and Max sizes. At the low end, pricing is expected to be similar to current iPhone 14 models: $799/£849 for the standard iPhone 15 and $899/£949 for the larger Plus model. At the high end,…