Soundbyte 323 – January 2022

ChristopherNews, SoundByte

Apple Car Speculation

Welcome to Soundbyte and Happy New Year!

In this issue

  • January Meeting
  • Broken resolutions! Apple woes.
  • Silly season: The Apple Car
  • Tourbox Elite – controls for pros
  • Yet another folding phone
  • Is your password compromised?
  • Offers for members.

January meeting

Join LMUG on Monday, January 11 at 7pm for our January meeting. With Covid still around we will meet again in Zoom. Details will be in the email that this Soundbyte came with.

What was your tech highlight of 2021. We will be reviewing the best of 2021 and we want to hear from you what special finds, breakthroughs or time-savers you discovered last year. We also want to hear and try to answer any problems you want to solve in 2022, and learn the lessons from what went wrong in 2021. So come prepared with your stories and lets have a great evening discussing it!

Last month was our Christmas party and quiz. Although we were all at home, its was a great time had by all. Congratutions to our raffle winner: John Covey!

Finally, did you know that the iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007? So its 15 years old this month!

By ArnoldReinhold – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69603043

Broken resolutions! Apple Woes…

Sometimes you have to wait for nice things and occasionally they never come. A number of features unveiled by Apple last summer for the new version of macOS Monterey, are delayed or yet to appear. The most significant is the magical feature that lets your iPad become an extension of your Mac’s screen. Check out what else we are waiting for in in this MacWord article.

Speaking of broken promises, whatever happened to the PowerPC version of Snow Leopard? (How old are you?? – ED). MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard famously eschewed features for under-the-hood performance and stability improvements, greatly improving on the 10.5 Leopard release. Unless you had a PowerPC, in which case your Snow Leopard never arrived, cancelled in the rush to transition to Intel processors back in the day. But that’s history (for most of us – ED)! Despite that, somehow, that Snow Leopard code from the cancelled PowerPC update has been uncaged into a new version for PowerPC Macs (why? – ED). See what’s going on, below.

Silly Season: the Apple car

The imagined Apple Car by Vanarama

Silly season is meant to happen in the summer, but that has not stopped Vanarama from making a mountain from the molehills of perennial rumours that Apple is building a car. Have a look at what they have come up with here.

More silliness from the Icon Factory but in good spirits. It’s now past time for Christmas decorations, but if you have a MacBook Pro with a notch that you can’t not see, try to embrace it and spice it up with some pizzazz! Check out Noitchmeister!

Tourbox Elite – controls for pros

Are you a professional developer, image/3D or photo editor? If so you might already have a controller to supplement your keyboard to adjust levels, scroll or conduct complex instructions. Have a look at a new controller below that might help improve your productivity.

Yet another folding phone!

We have seen a number of folding phones the last year or two, notably from Motorola and Samsung. Android phone makers are continuing to experiment over the garden fence (and no doubt also in a hidden bunker under Apple Park). We we can expect triple folding monstrosities this year, but have a look below at what Marques Browlees thinks is the best of the bunch right now.

Is your password compromised?

Has you password been pwned (stolen and compromised?)

Some good news to start the year with. The UK’s national crime agency has given over 200 million stolen passwords, that they have recovered from criminals, to the password crack awareness website Have I Been Pwned. Read about it on BBC news. Make it a resolution to check your passwords on Have I Been Pwned, and to change them, if they are found to have been compromised. Keep safe in 2022!

Offers for members

Find below the special offers available to our paying members. Access these from our website in the members section.

  • Eve Products: 25% Discount
  • 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!