Macworld Waves of extreme heat have already passed across the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world so far this summer. While people are at the greatest risk from high temperatures, your Mac may be even more fragile. (People can be water cooled and no current Mac offers that option—though some have tried.) An iPhone or iPad will warn you when it detects it’s too hot before shutting down, while a Mac may simply suddenly power off. If it doesn’t power down, you may be running it to close to its maximum capability and putting a lot of additional wear in the process on components that might fail later during other seasons. Knowing the temperature is one thing. The other is…

Macworld At the heart of every Apple device is an Apple processor. Apple has been using its own chips in its iPhones and iPads for some time, while the Mac lineup has finally completed its transition away from Intel chips. Every product Apple makes is powered by a home-grown chip. What’s remarkable about Apple silicon is its performance and power efficiency. But all chips aren’t created equally. Understanding the performance differences between each chip will help with your buying decisions, especially when you’re deciding between iPhone 14 or MacBook models. Knowing how each chip performs gives you a better idea of what products to buy and whether or not it’s worth your money to step up to a higher model.…

Macworld Apple currently sells two laptop lines: the MacBook Pro (which comes in 13-inch M2, 14-inch M2 Pro/Max and 16-inch M2 Pro/Max models) and the MacBook Air (which is available in 13.3-inch M1 or 13.6-inch M2 and a, new for 2023, 15-inch M2 MacBook Air). That is a lot of Mac laptops with very different specs. In this article, we are concerned with the Mac laptops that are best suited to average use: home, student and office work. The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M2 Pro or M2 Mac chips are better suited to pro users and have much higher prices, so we won’t be including them here. But if you are wondering whether your needs might extend…

Macworld Apple on Wednesday released macOS Ventura 13.4.1, an update that includes a couple of critical zero-day security patches. The release notes merely state that the update includes “important security fixes and is recommended for all users.” It’s unclear whether this update includes any other fixes, but Apple has recently promised that a fix would be coming to correct a storage issue with the new Mac Pro. According to the security notes, the update includes the same two security patches as the iOS 16.5.1 update: Kernel Impact: An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.Description: An…

If you open up Spotify's desktop app on a Mac or PC today, things should look a lot more "mobile." That's because the company has redesigned the "Your Library" and "Now Playing" interfaces to make them more aligned with Spotify's smartphone app. "Your Library" is now located in the sidebar to let you access saved music and podcasts. Spotify says its research has shown that the new library helps users save time by providing a better overview, while making it easier to switch between playlists. Users can also now move and pin the playlists in the Library, as well as drop songs into the editable listed playlists. Elsewhere, the "Now Playing" view takes up the right-hand side of the app,…

Macworld Of all the features coming to macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS this fall, I might be most excited about widgets. No, seriously. Widgets! Yes, of course, widgets have been around forever. Apple overhauled the widget experience with iOS 14 three years ago, giving us a new widget template, widgets on the home screen, and smart stacks. On the iPad, they were relegated to a sidebar, but iPadOS 15 fixed that a year later, letting us put widgets anywhere on the home screen. In macOS Big Sur we could put iPhone-ish widgets in the notification shade off the right side of the screen. But with the OS updates coming this fall, Apple is making some welcome changes that will take…