SoundByte 329 – July 2022

ChristopherSoundByte

MacBook Air

Welcome to Soundbyte! In this issue:

July Meeting

Join us next Monday, July 11 at 7:00 pm BST (UTC+1) for our July Meeting. This month’s main topic is Photos! HEIF, JPEG or RAW? What is a DNG and why would you need one? Can we share photos safely and avoid the privacy risks? Should we be using Lightroom or is Photos good enough…all this and more!

This will be a hybrid meeting. Join us upstairs at the Calthorpe Arms Pub, which is just a 10-minute walk from Russell Square underground station on the Picadilly line or from home via Zoom.

Please find the link to Zoom in the SoundByte email.

Don’t forget to follow LMUG on Twitter and in our podcast Brew & Byte.

New MacBooks and the M2

The new MacBook Air

At the WWDC event last month, Apple unveiled two new MacBooks, the most striking being a completely redesigned MacBook Air. Available later this month, the wedge shape is gone, replaced with Apple’s new design language of gentle curves and flat lines. You can see in the photo above that it’s not much thicker than a headphone jack. It’s available in four metallic colours. Apparently the midnight blue colour is a fingerprint magnet and to be avoided but it is undeniably the nicest and coolest colour.

Powering this new notebook is the Apple M2 chip which was also announced at the same time. The Apple M2 includes faster computing power, much faster memory and much more powerful graphics processing at the same low power as the M1.

Alongside, Apple updated the MacBook Pro 13 with the same chip. What is remarkable about the Pro model is that it retains the same design and features that it had since 2016! I guess Apple must consider it to be a design classic…

If buying one of these, something to bear in mind from early reviews is that the base models with 256GB of storage may be slower that the previous models in terms of disk speed. This because the older M1 machines had 2x128GB flash storage chips working in parallel with each other, speeding up disk activities, whereas the new machines have a single 256GB storage chip (which loses the optimisations caused by parallel operations). The people who might notice this may be the professional film makers and 3D and photo artists. They probably should not be buying the base model anyway. The rest of us won’t notice any difference but will enjoy the battery life.

Happy 15th Birthday, iPhone!

The iPhone was announced 15 years ago! Cue a series of retrospectives and memories from the computer industry!

But we know the iPhone didn’t just change the computer industry, it changed the world. Every industry was impacted and changed, not least journalism. The Guardian has collated a series of experiences from Associated Press photographers, have a read of how iPhone impacted them here.

WWDC

Apple held its World Wide Developer’s Confence last month. The first on Apple’s campus for 2 years, 5,000 developers were able to visit Apple’s campus while many multiples more watched all the sessions online. Have a look at this year’s Apple Design Award winners for the best designed applications. For the rest of us, Apple announced the next versions of the operation systems (OS) for all Apple devices.

For the Mac, Apple announced macOS Ventura. Its main new features are an updated graphics system which should be very good for gaming; a new more secure way of logging into websites and Continuity Camera, which lets you use your iPhone as a WebCam (because the built-in cameras on most Macs are pretty bad). It also comes with a brand-new (additional) way of managing windows called Stage Manager…

Stage Manager is also the main new feature in iPad OS (although it is limited to only the latest iPads with the M1 chip). iPadOS will also support more powerful apps. The iPhone will gain new notifications features, allowing you to add them to the lock screen, and letting them update themselves, so there are less of them.

Have a look at how Stage Manager works below:

Back to macOS Ventura, and sadly not all Macs will get it. Some features are preserved for the latest Macs as well. Have a look at this article to check which features your Mac will get. Something we will all get (fingers crossed) are faster security updates through a new feature called Rapid Security Response. Also on the security side, Apple appears to be increasing controls on what can be plugged into your computer without your permission.

Finally, outside of WWDC, Apple has updated the iWork suite. The most notable new feature (wait, it didn’t have this? ED?) is Mail Merge, now available in Apple Pages. See how it works and more here.

Capture One comes to iPad

Speaking of powerful iPad Applications, the developers of the powerful Capture One Pro editor used by photo professionals have released a version of the app for iPad. Have a look at this review below:

Faster fibres!

Fibre Optic cable

Moores Law continues relentless. Storage speed records have been smashed again by researchers into fibre optic technology. Not coming any time soon to a Mac near you, they have breeched 1 petabit per second transfer speed. To understand what this means, have a look at this Tech Spot article.

Apple Music on The Frame

The Frame is a tv made by Samsung. Its special trick is its Art Mode, which displays a variety of classic art when the TV is in standby; on a matte screen; in a beautiful (picture) frame. But that’s not why we’re here. What happens when you pair this extraordinary TV with the latest Apple TV? Have a look below at the audiophile features for music:

Recounting being interviewed by Steve Jobs

Finally, something unusual. What was it like to be interviewed by Steve Jobs? The legends abound of Jobs’ ascerbic personality, extraordinary standards and his clarity and focus. But what was that like in person? Have a look at this recounting from Apple alumni Andy Miller, who’s mobile Adverts company was bought by Apple.

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