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- Tuesday November 19
- 02:45 pmCreative Aurvana Ace 2 earbuds: A glimpse into portable audio’s future [Review] ★★★☆☆
Our hands-on review of Creative Aurvana Ace 2 earbuds review finds a lot to like in the xMEMS micro speaker, but they're average otherwise. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)02:45 pmCreative Aurvana Ace 2 earbuds: A glimpse into portable audio’s future [Review] ★★★☆☆
Our hands-on review of Creative Aurvana Ace 2 earbuds review finds a lot to like in the xMEMS micro speaker, but they're average otherwise. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)02:30 pmStay powered up on road trips with this high-output car charger
Meets the power demands of your devices on the road. The compact Naztech SpeedMax65 laptop car charger delivers speed and reliability. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)02:28 pmGet ready for the iPhone 17 Air, Apple’s thinnest phone ever
Macworld Apple is expected to launch an extra-thin model when it unveils the iPhone 17 line-up next year. But exactly how thin are we talking? A new report appears to confirm the figure is 6mm, which would make the iPhone 17 Air/Slim the thinnest smartphone Apple has ever released. The analyst Jeff Pu put out a research note Monday supporting a recent rumor about the device’s thickness. “We agreed with the recent chatter of [a] 6mm thickness ultra-slim design of the iPhone 17 Slim model,” he wrote in the note, seen by MacRumors. At 6mm, the Air would easily snatch the record previously held by the 6.9mm iPhone 6; the iPhone 16 is a comparatively chunky 7.8mm thick, while the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are a positively obese 8.25mm. Oddly enough, as MacRumors points out, you can get a thinner iPad: the 13- and 11-inch versions of the latest iPad Pro are just 5.1mm and 5.3mm respectively. And the final iPod nano came in under 6mm too, not that this is a fair comparison against a full smartphone. As ever with rumored Apple products, the iPhone 17 Air has come in for plenty of criticism long before it’s even been announced. There’s a sense among pundits that 6mm wouldn’t be thin enough to warrant an Air or Slim branding or the likely high price tag; MacRumors itself wrote a story earlier this month complaining that the device may not be much thinner than the iPhone 6, as if being thinner than the thinnest ever iPhone, which incidentally had just a 4.7-inch screen and vastly inferior components and cameras, would not be an engineering feat worth celebrating. Conversely, most of the negative discussion on Reddit argues that slimming down to 6mm goes beyond usefulness. In this thread: “Hard no for me. Gimme thicker with big battery.” “Does it really matter when most people will slap a massive case and screen protector on there? Give me a thicker phone with better battery life.” “I don’t think thinness or lightness is a huge priority.” “Why the obsession to go thin?” “I never loved the thinness of my iPhone 6s. It was just too thin.” [Editor’s note: the iPhone 6s was slightly thicker than the iPhone 6, at 7.1mm.] We’re still a long way off the launch of the iPhone 17 series, and Apple may find ways between now and then to further slim down the Air model–perhaps even rivaling the iPad Pro. But with half of the community complaining that it’s too thick and the other half complaining that it’s too thin, it feels like Apple might have got the balance about right. Catch all the latest news and rumors in our regularly updated iPhone 17 superguide. Or, if you don’t want to wait until next fall, pick up a bargain on the current range with our roundup of the best Black Friday iPhone deals.02:19 pmMeta thinks its Orion augmented reality glasses can be the AirPods of AR
It was back in September when Meta first revealed an early prototype of its Orion AR glasses, and while they are a long way from becoming an actual product you can buy, the company does believe it can achieve this. Indeed, Meta’s wearables chief thinks that Orion can in time become the AirPods of augmented reality devices … more…02:18 pmExpand your podcast library from Apple’s list of most popular ones
Discover new podcasts by finding out what other people are listening to with Apple’s list of top podcasts of 2024. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)02:00 pmNew xMEMS micro speaker brings big sound to smartwatches, AR glasses and more
Already making (sound) waves in earbuds and headphones, xMEMS unveils the Sycamore micro speaker for wearables like Apple Watch. (via Cult of Mac - Apple news, rumors, reviews and how-tos)01:58 pmApple offers $100 million to cancel Indonesia’s iPhone 16 ban
Apple has increased its offer to invest in Indonesia by almost tenfold in the company’s latest bid to persuade the government to lift its… The post appeared first on MacDailyNews.01:47 pmSophos Home Premium for Mac Review
Macworld At a GlanceExpert's Rating Pros Good speed and performance, runs well in the background. Very good price point, the license allowing protection for up to 10 devices. Caught a respectable amount of test malware and some phishing site activity. Cons Allows AdWind and Adobe Flash Player sample malware to be installed, AdWind having to be removed with a separate utility. Awkward Web-based dashboard interface. Functions such as quicky scanning an external or network volume feel much harder than they have to be. Our Verdict Sophos Home Premium is available for a good price, protects up to 10 devices, and caught a fair amount of test case viral software, but there are too many issues with installation and set up, and certain elements of the program are awkward. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Retailer Price Sophos (first year 25% off) $44.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Price When Reviewed$59.99 first year year, $99.99 for two years, and $139.99 for three years. Best Prices Today: Sophos Home Premium for Mac Retailer Price Sophos (first year 25% off) $44.99 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Sometimes an application doesn’t expand to match its competitors. This is the case with Sophos Home Premium, which we last reviewed in 2021. Since then only nominal changes, outside of supporting the current macOS operating systems, have been made and many of our criticisms made then still apply. Sophos Home Premium functions as a fairly well-rounded anti-piracy/anti-malware suite, its core modules centering around antivirus protection, web protection, ransomeware protection, and malicious traffic detection. The software usually retails for $59.99/£49.95 per year, $99.99/£89.95 for two years, and $139.99/£114.95 for three years, each subscription licensing up to 10 devices. You can currently get 25% off those prices, with the first year starting at $44.99/£37.46. In the past Sophos offered a free version of its Home product with just the antivirus protection and website protection. In late 2021, the company discontinued that version, leaving Sophos Home Premium as the only option for personal use. You can freely and fully use Home Premium for 30 days via an ad-free trial, the free trial protecting up to three devices. Find out how Sophos compares to the Best antivirus software for Mac we have tested. Sophos Home Premium is easy enough to download and requires macOS 10.12 (Monterey) or later to install and run. Installing the software proved to have its own set of issues and requires an online account to be set up. While the installer program functioned correctly, with the current version installing into the Sophos folder in the Applications folder, it didn’t activate the application in the expected way. Instead, everything was essentially controlled via the Menu Bar icon and a web-based interface. Yes, the program guides you through setting up permissions to install network tools, full disk access, and kernel extensions, but everything is based around the macOS menu bar pull-down menu and a web-based dashboard. Once you’ve signed into your Sophos account, it’s easy enough to customize and configure core elements such as actions that occur when malware is found, scan scheduling, and web filtering, and elements such as accessible scan logs, network file scanning, and easy access to creating whitelists and exceptions come in handy. Examining a scan log in Sophos Home Premium for Mac.Foundry Like similar programs, you can choose between quick scans to examine areas of the hard drive that might be infected with questionable software as well as full scans, which can take several hours and cover the full extent of the hard drive. While it takes a little nosing around the dashboard, users can configure the Web Filtering options to allow blocking for categories such as general interests, social networking and computing, and adult and potentially inappropriate categories and hone their filters in from there, excluding traffic that might be centered around adult content, gambling, hate, offensive content, violence, weapons, and other categories. The filters work reasonably well and helped block going to sites from some of my Gmail’s spam folder, and it’s easy enough to create a whitelist to provide exceptions for certain websites as needed. Unfortunately, there’s considerable room for improvement. Although Sophos Home Premium functions well with macOS’s GateKeeper feature and caught and filtered a respectable amount of test malware, it allowed both the AdWind malware and an infected copy of Adobe Flash Player to be installed. While the Adobe Flash Player application later offered an uninstallation option, the AdWind malware had to be removed with another utility, which proved discouraging. Other elements of the program felt awkward, and it felt surreal in that while the scan scheduling feature worked well, it only allows you to set schedule times set to every 30 minutes (11:00 AM, 11:30 AM, 12:00 PM, etc). The Dashboard’s home screen in Sophos Home Premium for Mac.Foundry The fact that the application runs entirely from the macOS Menu Bar and a web-based dashboard takes some getting used to, as nothing appears to be running by the Dock, and outside of a small Menu Bar animation, it can be difficult to gauge whether a scan is running unless the Menu Bar item is clicked on and Sophos Home Premium is opened from there. Finally, specifying and scanning an external volume such as a thumb drive or network volume feels like a harder process than it should be, with these elements included in the overarching Full Scan option, as opposed to being able to specify what you want to scan and doing this quickly and easily without having to wrestle with a web-based dashboard. Should you buy Sophos Home Premium? Sophos Home Premium is available for a good price to protect up to 10 devices, it caught a fair amount of test case viral software, and yes, it runs well in the background of the macOS operating system, but it feels like the elements that made the software feel awkward when we last looked at it three years ago haven’t been remedied and were barely looked into. Granted, there are some powerful customization options to be had within the depths of the Dashboard, but when it comes to ease of use (such as easily scanning an external volume), Sophos Home Premium seems lost in the dark with no hope of finding a flashlight in the near future. The price might be right, but there are other applications that take on these tasks and do them better, and they’re arguably worth looking into once the 30-day trial for this is complete.01:42 pmAre your Instagram recommendations a mess? You can now start from scratch
One of the biggest problems with social media is that our feeds are full of things the algorithms think we want to see, rather than what we actually want to see. If your Instagram recommendations seem increasingly removed from your interests, Meta is now offering you the chance to start again from scratch … more…01:39 pmTop Apple Podcast charts for 2024 show what everyone's been listening to
Apple has released a list of the most popular shows listened to via Apple Podcasts in 2024, with "The Daily" taking the top spot for the year in the United States.Image credit: AppleApple regularly publishes year-end charts for its various content services, giving a hint to what the world is listening to on their iPhone and other devices. On Tuesday, Apple issued its 2024 Apple Podcasts lists.Year-end charts are offered in nearly 100 countries and regions, appearing in the Browse tab of Apple Podcasts through to the end of the year. The regional charts provide details of the top overall podcasts, top new shows, most-followed shows, the most shared shows and episodes, and the top free and subscriber channels. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums01:18 pmApple reveals the most popular podcasts of 2024, with nine different Top 10 lists
Apple has put together no fewer than nine different Top 10 lists, revealing the most popular podcasts of 2024. The lists kick off with the top shows of the year, but go on to list the most popular in a number of different categories, from new shows to those with the highest subscriber counts … more…01:00 pmOutdated Risk Management Frameworks Face Growing Criticism
Risk management in many organizations is mired in a framework that can't keep pace with the challenges that most enterprise risk teams face. It needs to be modernized. That's the verdict that senior analysts Cody Scott and Alla Valente handed down in a recent Forrester Research blog that's critical of the Three Lines of Defense (3LOD) approach, which is widely used to assess organizational risk. The post appeared first on TechNewsWorld.12:56 pmThe expensive iPhone 17 Air may have a lot in common with Apple’s cheapest iPhone
The latest iPhone 17 Air report suggests that the expected ultra-slim model could be as thin as 6mm, which would make it the slimmest iPhone ever made. While that would be a challenging metric to hit, and we’ll believe it when there’s supporting evidence, we do seem to have growing clarity on the market Apple is targeting with the device … more…12:03 pmiPhone 16 ban: Apple offers $100M to access 278M customers in Indonesia
Apple has responded to an iPhone 16 ban in Indonesia by offering a ten-fold boost to its manufacturing investments in the country. The Indonesian government responded aggressively when Cupertino company fell a little way short of its promised spend in the country, and Apple seems extremely keen to resolve the matter … more…11:30 amThe coming AI apocalypse could be just the doom Apple ordered
Macworld Shocking technology news this week as… here, let the Macalope just have an AI summarize it. “AI is the coolest and everyone loves it.” What?! No! That’s not… gah. “OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI” (Bloomberg) It appears the wheels might be coming off AI a bit. Which, honestly, is probably the problem right there. The Macalope isn’t a programmer, but even he knows these things shouldn’t run on wheels. They should run on silicon. So if you’re running your AI on wheels, that’s the first thing you should try to fix. You’re welcome, AI companies. According to Bloomberg OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are all finding diminishing returns on their efforts to get “untapped sources of high-quality, human-made training data” at the same time they are faced with high costs associated with running the word-sausage-making machines they’ve already shipped. You may cry the Macalope a river, AI companies. On the first item, these companies have routinely appropriated content without consent and, even when they’ve asked for consent, have done it in the most difficult manner to get out of possible. On the second item, burning the Earth to a crisp in order to get your large language model to tell people to eat rocks and glue… the Macalope guesses we’ll see which kills humanity first, global warming or death by misinformation. It is certainly possible this is just a speed bump on the road to machines that, if they are not really thinking, at least appear to be doing so. However, it’s more than a bit sigh-inducing to see AI start to disappoint in the same way that the previous energy vampire technologies (apologies to Colin Robinson) like crypto did. Way back in June (remember June?), the Macalope wrote: The Macalope doesn’t consider himself someone prone to conspiracy theories, but he would not be surprise to find out years from now that Nvidia has been running a powerful psychological ops campaign that dreams up technologies that require its boards to run and then convinces venture capital firms to invest in them. If it turns out AI is running out of gas and suddenly next year there’s some other processor-intensive technology that comes out that just happens to need GPUs, well, let’s just say this is looking less like a conspiracy theory and more like an educated guess. Also, the Macalope should probably put an expiration date on that “AI running on gas” metaphor because the incoming U.S. presidential administration would probably be all too willing to allow it to literally run on gas. AI is a party Apple is probably happy to have arrived to late and maybe leave early, but the company’s not immune to the collective yawn this technology seems to engender. As more people are testing the iOS 18.2 beta, more are experiencing the… “joys” is definitely the wrong word there. “Nightmare fuel” is probably a little strong, but more directionally correct. Ah. More are experiencing the fever dreams produced by Image Playground. Summaries often aren’t much better, apparently going so far as to turn children into husbands which is super awkward. IDG AI was supposed to drive a wave of upgrades to new phones for Apple but it’s a technology that few have asked for that often delivers results no one asked for. Absolutely everyone: [nothing at all] AI: “EAT ROCKS!” Absolutely everyone: “Who said that?!” Apple will, of course, continue to do just fine (thank you, services revenue) and is probably better poised to pivot away from this if it continues to run into a brick wall than many of its competitors. The Macalope started with a joke about summaries but he has to say Apple’s summarize tool did a pretty good job on this column: AI companies face challenges in improving their models due to limited data and high costs. Despite initial excitement, AI’s performance has fallen short of expectations, raising concerns about its future. Apple, while not immune to AI’s limitations, is better positioned to pivot away from it due to its strong services revenue. Still, the Macalope would have highlighted the metaphors used: “AI seems like its wheels are coming off and it’s running out of gas and headed for a brick wall.”11:15 amApple Vision Pro's ultra-wide Mac display mirroring is the killer app spatial computing needs | AppleInsiderApple Vision Pro's ultra-wide Mac display mirroring is the killer app spatial computing needs
With the release of visionOS 2.2, Apple will add support for ultra-wide displays when mirroring a Mac's display. And it might just be the Apple Vision Pro killer app I've been waiting for.Apple Vision Pro needed a killer app and it's finally getting oneAt the time of writing the visionOS 2.2 update is only available to developers willing to install it on the headset they use for app development. But it'll soon be made available to everyone who wants it. And while there are a few new improvements for Apple Vision Pro owners to look forward to, there's one that's particularly exciting — big Mac display mirroring upgrades.The Mac mirroring isn't new of course, but the addition of new wide and ultra-wide options most definitely is. And it makes for a huge improvement for those who want to use their fancy spatial computer as a display for their Mac. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums11:15 amBeware: If you’re buying a new iPhone, porch pirates are smarter than ever
Macworld As Black Friday approaches, two things are certain: Piles of packages arriving on our doorsteps and porch pirates looking to snatch them all. And according to a new report, if you’re buying a new iPhone, you may be at an even higher risk. The Wall Street Journal reports that thieves have begun targeting iPhone deliveries across the U.S. by gaining access to AT&T tracking numbers. Since the carrier doesn’t generally require a signature for delivery, porch pirates can stake out homes and instantly grab the package before the homeowner is even aware it has been dropped off. The Journal says that some thieves are dressing up as delivery drivers themselves to allay any suspicion. For its part, AT&T says it will “work as quickly as possible with the customer to make it right,” but has no plans to change its policy. It only requires a signature in high-theft markets, and if you don’t live in one, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. The company points out that in-store pickup is also an option. Apple requires a signature for purchases through its store, but many other stores, including Amazon, don’t, even on large purchases like a MacBook. So if thieves are able to gain access to AT&T tracking numbers, they can conceivably get other companies’ numbers as well. So if you don’t have a drop box or some other way to secure your deliveries, you’ll definitely want to be a little more vigilant when waiting for packages to arrive this season.11:00 amApple @ Work Podcast: FIDO Alliance’s plan for Passkey migration
Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple. In this episode of Apple @ Work, I talk with Rew Islam from Dashlane about the plans from the FIDO Alliance to allow for Passkey migration between various password managers. more…10:48 amiMac M4 review: Minor changes lead to perfection for Apple's all-in-one Mac
Apple's 2024 iMac M4 got some internal updates to a familiar design, and the bevy of those small changes helped Apple perfect its ever-popular all-in-one.iMac M4 review: The new 2024 M4 iMac in greenThe new wave of colorful iMacs debuted in November 2024, alongside upgraded MacBook Pros and a redesigned Mac mini. We picked one up and have been testing it out in the studio for the past two week or so.Unsurprisingly, we were happy with what Apple delivered here. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums