Happy New Year and welcome to SoundByte!
In this issue:
- January’s meeting
- The King visits Apple with Cook in tow
- Time for some spring cleaning?
- Let’s find it together!
- A social get together might be coming
- AI carumba Apple, what a mess!
- Is Google jumping the gun?
- How we got to the Airport on time!
January’s Meeting
Join LMUG this Monday, January 13, to discuss how to use artificial intelligence services, which are not from Apple, on your Mac and iOS devices. We will be joined by an expert who uses AI tools for his day job and Mac tutorial business. This will be your chance to ask questions and share insights so we can all learn together.
Check the email this newsletter came in for the Zoom link to the meeting. You can also find the link in our Slack General Channel.
Follow can now follow the London Mac User Group on Bluesky! Come and say hello 👋 over there 👉🏾 https://bsky.app/profile/lmug.bsky.social. Read more about it here.
The King Visits Apple with Cook in tow
His Majesty King Charles III has visited Apple’s London headquarters in Battersea Power Station. He met Apple employees, British creatives and students from the King’s Trust (formerly the Prince’s), learning how to code with Apple’s support. You can read more details from Apple here.
Time for some spring cleaning?
It’s the time for resolutions and fresh starts. Perhaps it’s also a good time to clean up your Mac? Here are some ideas:
- Over time you might accrue many duplicate files across your Mac? One popular utility to deal with these is DiskDedupe. Take a look here!
- Storage is getting cheaper. As a result, the simplest solution may be to get a bigger hard drive. Seagate has heard this as they have unveiled the biggest hard drive yet: 32 terabytes! Read more on Techradar.
- If you are a heavy external drive user, beware! Changes in the macOS have made swapping boot drives problematic. Our Tech Officer Alastair summarises the situation: “so, there’s no more bootable back-ups possible on Macs with M-series chips (M1, M2, 3 and 4). Instead, this means you have to install macOS first and then restore it using the migration assistant.” Read more on Tidbits.
- If you’re the type on the look out for bargains, you might have picked up the coupon app, Honey. Buyer beware, Honey makes money picking favourable discounts to them, which might mean hiding the best ones from you! Time to uninstall it? Watch Marques Brownlee’s explanation below:
- Do you know how easy it is to recycle electronic waste? You can just take your old tech, cables or dongles to Curry’s. But someone has found a use for old dongles, specifically Firewire. This means the original iPod remains usable today. Read about this extraordinary re-use feat on MacWorld.
Let’s find it together!
A new feature has come to AirPods with iOS 18.2. You can now share the location of your (lost?) device. Read more details on how to use this on 9to5 Mac.
A social get together might be coming
Twitter exodus; Mastodon; Threads; BlueSky oh my! Your head might be spinning with all the different social media networks that have sprung up last year and your follows may have dispersed to different platforms complicating how you can follow them. Well, Flipboard, which is a social magazine that combines stories from different publishers (a bit like Apple News) think they can do the same for social media. They are working on a new app called Surf to do just that for users, hashtags and social feeds. Read more on their website about what’s coming.
AI carumba, what a mess!
It’s not just Microsoft and Google having AI missteps. Apple has been asked by the BBC (no less) to remove their new summarisation tools immediately. They report serious errors in Apple’s summarised new articles. The rest of Apple Intelligence so far has been slightly underwhelming and it’s a good thing Apple didn’t focus all the marketing for the latest iPhone on it. Oh wait. Read Mark Eliis’ review here. Let’s hope (but don’t hold your breath) that lessons are learned for the rest of Apple’s AI features.
But is there a way to make Apple Intelligence work better? Maybe. Usually the output quality corresponds to the level of detail you input into the AI. CNET below has taken a look at working Genmoji and Playgrounds to get better results.
Is Google jumping the gun?
How we got to the Airport on time!
If you type Airport into settings on your Mac, WiFi comes up. Do you know why that is? If you’re a long time user you will know it’s the name for Apple’s late, innovative WiFi cards and routers. In fact Apple was deeply involved in the development of WiFI itself. Actually, Apple was the main player! How so, have a look at this interesting history of what happened below: