Welcome to Soundbyte! In this issue:
- April Meeting: Annual General Meeting
- 20 years of OS X!
- Intel hits back at the Mac
- Good news for UK developers
- Getting a new Mac?
- Upgrade your broadband router?
- The Royal Mail scam
- Offers for members
April Meeting: Annual General Meeting
LMUG’s Annual General Meeting will be held on April 12 at 7pm. This will be a members only meeting. It is important that as many members as possible attend as we will be electing a new committee after a tumultuous year. There is much to discuss about what our ‘new normal’ should look like. Take part and help us set LMUG’s future direction! We will start the evening with our usual Newsbyte presentation.
AGM Agenda:
- Apologies for absence
- Minutes of 2020 AGM (tabled)
- Chairman’s Report
- Treasurer’s Report
- Election of Committee Members (nominees)
- Secretary: Tina Jacobs
- Chair: Craig Jobbins
- Treasurer: Pietro Falcone
- Membership: Pietro Falcone
- Webmaster: Craig Jobbins
- Technical: Alastair Whitehouse
- Committee Member: Martin Kelly
- Newsletter: Christopher Mahon
Should you wish to volunteer for the committee please forward your name to the secretary. New committee members always welcome. We welcome new ideas and new people.
Please look in the email Soundbyte was delivered in to find the Zoom connection details.
20 years of OSX!
Last month marked the seminal moment 20 years ago when the Mac OS X (pronounced Mac OS ten) was officially released. OSX had been initially released as a public beta (code-named Kodiak) a year earlier at the Apple Expo Paris in 2000. LMUG was there! An LMUG contingent attended the Expo at the invitation of the local Mac User Group. Unfortunately we did not get tickets for Steve Jobs’ keynote where it was unveiled, but we got the beta CD-ROM and installed it eagerly to great…disappointment. Very slow despite it being nicely designed. It took until Mac OS 10.1 for performance to be good enough to even consider using and most waited until 10.2. What a contrast to today’s industry shaking performance of macOS on the Apple Silicon processors! The anniversary was marked by the luminaries of the time, Scott Forstall who later led the development of iOS, Tony Fadell who led the creation of the iPod and John Siracusa, who created canonical, and encyclopaedic reviews of every MacOSX, from Mac OSX 10.0 Cheetah to macOS 10.10 Yosemite.
Intel hits back at the Mac
Speaking of shaking the computer industry, Intel has been rushing to catch-up while taking swipes at Apple’s new laptops running Apple Silicon M1 processors. Remember, Apple is in the middle of switching all of its Macs from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon processors, which are based on the ARM chips used in iPad and iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV, HomePod and AirPods (did I miss anything?!).
If you remember the old Apple adverts from the mid-2000s, you might remember the I’m a Mac, I’m a PC campaign.
The actor who played the Mac (Justin Long) has now been hired by Intel to promote PCs and bash Apple. He never says ‘I’m a Mac’ but the idea is, we know who he’s playing anyway. In a look over the garden fence, this ad compares a new MacBook to a 2-in-1 laptop. 2-in-1 means the laptop can double-over itself and become a touchscreen tablet. If you have used a PC like that and love it, that is great, but when I have tried that, I found the tablet experience terrible. Heavier, uncomfortable to hold and using an iPad with iOS is much nicer than poking at the small buttons in Windows 10 with a stylus. I suspect this is also why Apple has not made touch-screen Macs, despite the grass appearing to be greener over the garden fence.
Good news for UK developers
Apple has stated that the iOS App Store is supporting 330,000 jobs in the UK. Read more from Apple here.
Getting a new Mac?
What are the first things you need to do when you get a new Mac? And in what order? Mac Most has a great tutorial going over the main steps. His channel also has lots of videos on how to get the best from out of the computer. You can hear more from him on the latest Brew and Byte podcast. Remember to subscribe and share with your friends and family!
Upgrade your broadband router?
Did you know that you can replace the free WiFi router that your broadband ISP (internet service provider) gives you with a better model? You might want to do this to get faster, stronger WIFI or more control over your networking. This video from Kip Hakes goes over what you need to do. He upgraded his free Sky router to a powerful TP-Link router. The setup was web-based and fairly simple. One thing he didn’t explain was you will need to find the login details for your router to connect to your ISP. You can Google “manual set up my own router <name of your ISP>“ to find this. Afterwards he had to reset his PC network. Our Technical Editor notes that to reset the network on a Mac, you would need to open system preferences, then click on Network –> Advanced (you may need to click on the padlock on the left first and unlock the settings). Then under the TCP/IP, click on Renew DHCP Lease. This will make your Mac go back to the router to get a fresh IP (network) address. This will ensure your Mac works through the new broadband hub. Have you tried this?
The Royal Mail Scam
More scandal involving the Royals? Not quite. This is a new pernicious scam that could cost you a lot of money if you fall for it. This scam uses a text message asking you to pay for extra postage for a Royal Mail delivery. Beware of these and do not answer any such message if you aren’t sure what the parcel is or you’re not expecting it. Read the sorry tale of what happened when someone fell for this here.
Not as bad a scamming, but perhaps as creepy, did you know that Apple can target you with personalised adverts? Apple has been reported to French regulators over the matter but here is how you can turn it off, via Cult of Mac.
Offers for members
Find below this months special offers for our paying members. Access these offers through the members section of the LMUG website.
- Free Lessons for Apple User Groups from Dan’s Tutorials
- Eve Products: 25% Discount – Updated
- TechTool Pro: 50% Discount
- AgileBits 1Password 7: 25% Discount
- MacCleanse 8 Software: 20% Discount
- EverWeb by RAGE Software: 50% Discount
- Opus ][ Complete Collection: 25% Discount
- Que Publishing Products: 35-45% Discount
- Take Control Books: 30% Discount on All eBooks
- Teams ID, a Password Manager for Teams: 33% Discount
- TidBITS Content Network for Apple professionals: Get a free month of tips and articles!