Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i MacFormat

Whether you’re planning to use Apple Intelligence or not, the arrival of super-powered Macs that can help you make the most of it is always a good thing – and not only because they make it easier to get stuff done faster and in all kinds of new ways. The all-new Mac mini, for one, is just incredible – impossibly small at just 12.7cm (you can see it actual size on this month’s cover), it’s also beautifully designed and well made and plenty powerful too – even if you don’t opt for a model equipped with an M4 Pro chip. You can read our review on p78. The iMac too (tested on p81) also gets new powers and looks even better than before, while the MacBook Pro (reviewed p82) is…

Rumours have been swirling for years that Apple is working on a pair of smart glasses that look just like regular specs. Now, a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple has been surveying its employees to see what they think of rival smart glasses. The idea is to identify areas where Apple could carve out a niche for itself and craft a winning product. At the same time, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has just hired Caitlin Kalinowski, the former chief of Meta’s augmented reality (AR) glasses team and an ex-Apple technical lead, to head up its robotics and hardware division. Given Kalinowski’s experience, it could be a sign that OpenAI is also about to throw its hat into the AR ring. When all these products will actually come to…

Your smart home could get a major Apple-flavoured revamp as soon as early 2025, if a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is to be believed. If it’s accurate, we could see Apple launch a ‘command centre’ device that acts as a central hub for all your smart home accessories. The product comprises a square six-inch screen that can be mounted onto a wall. It will include a battery and internal speakers, plus a camera in the top edge. You’ll use it via a touch interface or with voice commands that will tap into Siri and the new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it has been granted as part of Apple Intelligence. It will also be able to sense how close you are and display different metrics and features as you approach.…

3 > Number of Thunderbolt 5 ports on the MacBook Pro (2024) with M4 Pro or M4 Max, offering up to 120Gbps data transfer speeds in boost mode. 30.8x > Number of times faster the M4 Max MacBook Pro is vs an Intel Core i9 model at processing video. 546GB/sec > The memory bandwidth of a MacBook Pro with M4 Max, or twice that of the M4 Pro version. 128GB > Maximum amount of memory available on an M4 Mac with 16-core GPU or higher. 36GB, 48GB and 64GB of memory are also available. 2.15kg > Maximum weight of the MacBook Pro 16-inch with M4 Max. The M4 Pro version weighs 2.14kg. 3.5x > Number of times faster the M4 Max MacBook Pro is vs the M1 Max model. 40…

One of the best ways to speed your workflow on your Mac is to keep your desktop tidy and organised. 1 Stage Manager A neat way to keep your focus on what you’re doing and not on the mess you’re making on your desktop is Stage Manager. Click on the Control Centre item in the menu bar (it looks like two horizontal switches) and then click the Stage Manager option. Open apps are stacked on the left of the screen, allowing you to focus on what it is you’re working on. 2 Mission Control Another way of dealing with messy desktop windows is with Mission Control. Tap F3 on the keyboard or swipe up on a Trackpad with three fingers, and all open windows are shown without overlapping. Click on…

When you’re emailed a PDF form to fill in and sign, how do you go about it? You can type your information into the necessary fields, but do you then print it out and sign it before scanning it back into digital form and emailing it back to the sender? If so, there’s a better way, and it saves time, paper and printer ink. First, open the document you need to sign in Preview. Click the pen icon from the Markup tools, and then click the icon that looks like a signature. If you haven’t yet saved one, click the Create Signature button in the window that appears. You now have three options, chosen by clicking on one of the tabs at the top of the window. Click Trackpad, and…

There are many handy shortcuts you can use on your iPhone to get things done quicker and easier. Here’s a selection of them. 1 Music You caneasilycontrolmusicfrom Control Centre, without even having to open the Music app. Use the Music widget there to play and pause, skip tracks and tap the AirPlay icon (top right) to pick an output. Tap the widget for more controls. 2 Torch Another Control Centre feature, the iPhone’s torch uses the camera flash LEDs. In iOS 18, you can set the width and strength of the beam. 3 Wallet If you want to use your Wallet app to pay for goods and services, there’s a quick way of opening it. Just press your iPhone’s side button twice. This also works on the Apple Watch. 4…

For years, we’ve become accustomed to using iCloud Drive. Aside from being a great way of backing up your files and making them available across all of your devices, it provides more storage space for you to play around with and, since it’s baked into macOS, it pretty much works seamlessly. So much so that most of the time you’re not even aware you’re using it. But that’s not to say you won’t benefit from better management of the service and it’s worth learning a little more about what makes iCloud Drive tick. Here we’re going to give you an insight into its structure, look at how easy (or hard) it is to back up those files and whether you’re always going to enjoy offline access. We also explain some…

It’s party season so whether you’re holding a Christmas ‘do’, a New Year’s Eve super-party, or a birthday bash, why not use Apple Pages to create invites for all your pals? Easy-to-use and capable of producing professional results, it puts a heap of options at your disposal. It can also tie in with the Contacts or Numbers apps to make light work of some more laborious aspects of creating and sending invitations – although, as you’ll see, there’s a choice to be made. If you want to create personalised invites, you can automatically draw upon info from Contacts or those inputted into a spreadsheet to save you from having to manually tweak each one. Lists made in Contacts can also make light work of sending mass emails. Unfortunately, you can’t do…

The Music app on Mac is a powerful successor to iTunes, featuring a simple interface but provides a wealth of functionality. You can browse Apple Music 1 to see what’s coming up, and you can enable Spatial Audio. Although iTunes is a thing of the past, its interface certainly lives on through the Music app – so if you used its predecessor, you’ll feel at home here. Rather confusingly, the iTunes Music Store name remains for purchasing tracks and albums. The Music app has seen plenty of updates since its debut in 2015, such as adding SharePlay to let you and someone else listen to a track, share a custom station via Messages, and more. If you’re new to using the Music app on Mac, you’ll recognise many of the…

From £1,299 (model tested £2,899) FROM apple.com/uk FEATURES M4 chip, 24in Retina display (4480x2520), 16GB unified memory (24GB/32GB available), 256GB storage (512GB/1TB/2TB available), Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 2x or 4x Thunderbolt 4 When carrying out everyday tasks, the iMac fairly skips along While the Mac mini got a radical overhaul for 2024, the same can’t be said for the iMac. Instead it’s now available in seven colours across the range, with USB-C accessories (instead of Lightning) and has M4 chips inside. Anyone hoping for a bigger-screen version than the 24-inch Retina display on offer here will come away disappointed. However, it remains a great and stylish all-in-one. Available in Blue, Purple, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Green and Silver, the iMac range starts at £1,299 for a model equipped with an 8-core…

£86.99 for three-year licence FROM adobe.com/uk NEEDS macOS 13 or later The app uses the AI-powered Remove Tool to replace unwanted pixels with appropriate details The full version of Adobe Photoshop is the result of over three decades of evolution. Since version 1.0 back in 1990, the app has grown to incorporate the needs of photographers, designers and even motion graphic animators. As a result, it can be a daunting task to sift through menus, submenus and palettes of icons to find photo-fixing tools. Photoshop Elements 2025, on the other hand, is aimed solely at meeting the needs of photographers who want to fix common problems with colour, tone and composition, or go a step further and perform more eye-catching creative edits to boost their follower count on social media.…

BEST BUYS… EXTERNAL DISPLAY Philips 27B1U7903 £1,099 philips.co.uk An excellent monitor that satisfies on every level. It’s expensive, but you do get a lot of quality for your money. MF392 OUR TOP 3 MESH NETWORK DEVICES ASUS ZenWiFi XD5 > £209.99 > MF398 > asus.com/uk TP-Link Deco X55 > £219.99 > MF398 > tp-link.com/uk/ Devolo Magic 2 WiFi 6 Starter Kit > £219.99 > MF398 > devolo.co.uk BLUETOOTH SPEAKER Marshall Middleton £269.99 marshallheadphones.com Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy, the Middleton knows how to rock. MF391 OUR TOP 3 PORTABLE SSDS Crucial X8 > £212 > MF388 > uk.crucial.com SanDisk Extreme > £100 > MF388 > westerndigital.com OWC Envoy Pro SX > £285 > MF388 > owc.com NAS DRIVE Asustor Lockerstor 2 Gen2 AS6702T £469 asustor.com Excellent and versatile mid-range network…

After several iPhones started automatically rebooting while the owners were in police custody, speculation mounted that this was a new security and privacy feature. Now, it looks like that assertion was correct, as researchers have found code in iOS 18.1 that describes a new “inactivity reboot”. This automatically restarts your iPhone when about four days have passed since it was last unlocked. The iPhone then launches in “before first unlock” mode (BFU), which makes your data much harder to access than normal. This may be to keep your info out of the hands of thieves who have stolen your phone and are trying to access its secrets.…

Apple’s latest attempt to capture gamers’ attention could be the introduction of a dedicated gaming app store. News outlet 9to5Mac claims to have seen details of this project, which would see Apple launch an app that “combines functionality from the App Store and Game Center in one place.” There will be multiple sections to explore, including a Play Now tab full of game recommendations and editorial content, a tab for your owned games, one to connect with your friends, and more. You’ll be able to view leaderboards, challenges and achievements, and the app will house games from both the App Store and Apple Arcade. Apple is apparently considering integrating its app with FaceTime and Messages. That could help it compete with apps like Discord and let you chat with friends…

EAT E-Glo II > £7,999 > From europeanaudioteam.com/henleyaudio.co.uk > Now here’s something to make you glow on cold winter nights – the glorious sight of old school valves on European Audio Team’s E-Glo II. Stylish designed in black or silver, the E-Glo II is a dedicated phono stage that sits between your vinyl turntable and your hi-fi amplifier (or any other device that can handle a RCA phono input). Compatible with turntables fitted with either a Moving Magnet (MM) or Moving Coil (MC) cartridge, the E-Glo II adds up to 76 decibels of gain, amplifying the sound from the needle as it traces around your vinyl’s grooves, so they can be picked up and further amplified by your hi-fi. Weighing in at a hefty 5.3kg and and made from premium…

What do Siri, Face ID and Maps have in common? Other than being part and parcel of Apple’s products, these core components of the Apple ecosystem have directly benefited from acquisitions. The same is true of Apple silicon, Apple Music and even macOS. Now Pixelmator is set to join the fold, showing yet again that when Apple doesn’t have the expertise in-house, it will swoop on those who do possess the skills. Apple has made hundreds of acquisitions over the years. You only need to look at Wikipedia to see a list of 130 companies, yet that only scratches the surface. Although there have been some big-name purchases such as Beats Music and Beats Electronics (acquired for a cool $3 billion), Apple has snapped up many smaller, far less well-known companies,…

1 AirDrop The easiest way to share files between yourself and other Apple users is AirDrop. On your Mac, iPhone or iPad, Ctrl-click (Mac)/press and hold (iPhone or iPad) on the file, and choose Share. Click (Mac) or tap (iPhone or iPad) AirDrop, and the nearby Apple devices to which you can transfer it are shown. These devices must be unlocked. Click/tap one to send it to a device. You can customise AirDrop on a Mac in System Settings > General > AirDrop & Handoff, and on a mobile device in Settings > General > AirDrop. 2 iCloud A great way to work on projects across multiple Apple devices is to use your iCloud storage. Apps like Pages and Numbers give you the option of saving to iCloud, but you can…

When working on your Mac, valuable time is often lost due to lack of desktop organisation. When your app windows are in a mess, it takes longer to find the one you need. Thankfully, macOS has a range of built-in tips and tricks to help you keep your desktop in shape. A brand new feature introduced in macOS 15 (Sequoia) is window tiling. This enables you to arrange your open windows into a layout that suits your workflow, a feature previously only available to Mac users through third-party add-ons. With window tiling active, you can drag a window – any window – to the edge of the screen, and have Sequoia give you a suggestion of where to fit it. You then simply drop it into place. You can arrange…

Subscribe online… www.magazinesdirect.com/mac/H23B Or call 0330 333 1113 and quote ‘H23B’ Great reasons to subscribe • NEW! Digital access to 130+ issues when you subscribe to print!**• Enjoy the MacFormat print edition for just £21.09 every six months!• Or enjoy six months of MacFormat digital edition for just £16.87!• Delivered direct to your door and device• For more than 25 years, we’ve been helping Apple fans get the most from their kit Keep your subscription rolling today! DIGITAL ONLY £16.87 every six months PRINT & DIGITAL ACCESS £21.09 every six months Terms and conditions: Offer closes 3 February 2025. Please allow up to six weeks for the delivery of your first subscription issue (up to eight weeks overseas). The full subscription rate includes postage and packaging. *Savings are based on…

Without Apple’s Calendar, our lives would be chaos – but for all its cleverness, Calendar has long had one really frustrating drawback: if you want to add to-do items to your days, it isn’t interested. Until Sequoia, Calendar’s was solely focused on events. But that’s now changed. macOS 15 (Sequoia), iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 have brought Reminders into your Calendar. And as we’ll discover, that’s been done in really useful ways. You can add to-do tasks to any date, provide additional information such as maps, web links and notes, and access everything right there in your Calendar app. Positive triggers It’s a big time saver, and there’s more. The key features from the Reminders app are connected to Calendar too, so you can set reminders to trigger when you’re…

There’s a saying that ‘the best camera is the one you have with you’. This certainly applies to iPhone! Thanks to the addition of a handy new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 range, your ever-present camera just got even better! The new Camera Control button enables you to treat your iPhone more like a conventional camera. This tactile button makes it much quicker to capture a shot. It’s also touch sensitive, so you can press and slide your finger over it to summon camera functions such as Exposure, Depth, Zoom, Cameras, Styles and Tone. You can also swipe the Camera Control button to control the various properties of each setting, such as the strength of the background blur in Depth or the contrast of a shot in Tone. It…

Now that we’ve covered Apple Music on Mac, we’re taking a look at how to use Apple Music on iPhone and iPad. And there are a few key differences that set this version apart. First, Apple Music Sing lets you transform a track into a karaoke version by muting the lyrics, allowing you to sing to the track by using your iPhone or iPad as a microphone. Also, by finding out a track’s name using the music-finding app Shazam, the app will add it to a playlist in Apple Music called My Shazam Tracks. Another big difference to streaming music on iPhone and iPad, is the ability to use the mobile data feature. From the iPad mini 7 to the M4 iPad Pro, you can easily stream your music over…

MacBook (2006) The 12-inch MacBook wasn’t the first MacBook. That honour goes to the 2006, 13.3-inch model that replaced the entry-level iBook. Based on the iBook G4 design with a polycarbonate case it replaced the PowerPC chip with an Intel Core Duo processor. The first version was made of polycarbonate; an aluminium version launched in 2008 and another polycarbonate version launched in 2009. MacBook (early 2015) The early 2015 MacBook came in Space Grey, Silver and Gold with a 2304x1440 pixel Retina display and a choice of 1.1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.3GHz Intel Core M processors with 8GB of memory. All versions had Intel HD Graphics 5300, sharing their memory with the main system memory. Storage was a 256GB SSD in the 1.1GHz model and a 512GB SSD in the 1.2GHz.…

BUYING ADVICE Our authoritative reviews help you make more informed choices Our ratings Our reviews are totally independent; we’re not affiliated with Apple or anyone else, nor are we influenced by advertisers. A truly exceptional product. Award given solely at the discretion of the editor. The best example of its kind when pitted against comparable products. A brilliant thing Strongly recommended Worth considering Notable flaws A waste of your money Contact us Email your queries and your questions to letters@macformat.com…

From £1,599 (model tested £3,349) FROM apple.com/uk FEATURES M4/M4 Pro/M4 Max chip, 16GB unified memory (24GB/32GB/36GB/48GB/64GB/128GB available), 512GB storage (1TB/2TB/4TB/8TB available), Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 The MacBook Pro represents the state of the art in the notebook world Chiefly aimed at creative pros who need of plenty of power to go, the MacBook Pro has long since gone past the point where it’s affordable for most of us, but that’s OK – we have the perfectly brilliant MacBook Air instead. But this year’s MacBook Pro is no less worthy of attention. For a start, it represents the state of the art in the notebook world – being both beautifully made and incredibly powerful – with this year’s model sporting a choice of M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. It’s…

When you’re using a Mac, a good display is essential, and a second screen is a bonus. A stand-alone monitor doesn’t have to cost the earth either, even if it has a 4K resolution. 4K means the display has approximately 4,000 pixels along the long edge. The more pixels, the better the image. A 4K screen has around eight million pixels, which is approximately four times as many as a regular 1080p Full HD monitor. These are serious, sharp and detailed screens. But it’s not all about the pixel resolution. How large are the screens? What’s their contrast ratio and brightness? What about connectivity options? How will you connect them to your Mac? What features do they offer? How versatile are they? And what do they look like? Aesthetics is…

Free (£9.99 IAP) FROM maxinferno.com NEEDS iOS/iPadOS 16 or later This is a puzzle game about sorting things out, and arranging things in order While to some, the thought of tidying up can be stressful – and happy are we that the icons on our home screens organise themselves into a grid without prompting – for others, it can induce a feeling of calm satisfaction. It’s that set of emotions that A Little to the Left is aiming for, though it definitely passes through stressful on its way there. This is a puzzle game about sorting things out, lining them up, and arranging into order. A typical puzzle covers the screen with something, be it pencils, pieces of paper or pictures, and asks you to fit them into a predetermined…

Apple Intelligence, Apple’s flagship artificial intelligence (AI) system, has finally launched on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Apple announced the release alongside iOS 18.1 in late October 2024, which brought a range of new additions to Apple devices. That included the Writing Tools feature, which is now integrated throughout Apple’s operating systems. This lets you select text, then have Apple Intelligence rewrite the copy in a different tone of voice. It can also be used to proofread selected text or format its key points into a list, a table, or bullet points. More useful Apple Intelligence features are on their way… In addition to that, iOS 18.1 also revamped the Mail app with Apple Intelligence, and it can now abridge long emails or message threads into more digestible summaries. And Apple…

[MAC APP] Hazel 6 $42 (about £40) Banish clutter for good with this excellent Mac app Hazel has long been one of our favourite Mac utilities thanks to its ability to tidy up any folder you tell it to, automatically sorting files based on easily customisable rules that you set. It’s just been updated to version 6, which comes with a host of new features that upgrade the app and improve the experience of using it. This latest version introduces text recognition for scanned files, better reading of password-protected PDF files, an improved interface that’s easier to navigate, plus plenty of other tweaks, improvements and fixes. It’s particularly useful if you tend to work with scanned documents on your Mac. Hazel is a brilliant app if you often find yourself…

Everybody needs a time-saving tip or two. Easy ways to get things done on their Apple gear, banking a few precious minutes here and there to spend researching your next project, spending time with the family or watching cat videos on YouTube. Time-saving is what this feature’s all about. Over the next dozen pages, we show you how to get things done, faster and easier. With our help, you can start up your Mac faster, rename files, keep your desktop organised, speed up your workflow with keyboard shortcuts and more. A second display is a great way to make you more productive, as is getting the most from desktop Spaces, Mission Control, and other handy features in macOS. There’s plenty of time-saving tips for your other Apple gear too. These…

You’re probably already au fait with most of Apple’s Magic Trackpad gestures, but here are a few you might not be using. 1 Zoom in and out You can zoom in and out of a document, photo or website by pinching and spreading, but you can also quick-zoom by double-tapping the trackpad with two fingers, and again to zoom out. 2 Desktop & Launchpad To show the desktop, by moving open windows out of the way, place all your fingers on the trackpad and spread them out. To open Launchpad, place all your fingers on the trackpad and move them together. 3 Mission Control To open Mission Control, swipe up with three or four fingers, depending on your version of macOS. To open Mission Control on a Magic Mouse, double-tap…

There are plenty of tips and tricks for iPad users. Take its multitasking capabilities, for example. In Split View mode, you can have two apps open at once on the screen. In Slide Over, a second app sits in a floating window on the edge of the display. You can access these two multitasking modes by tapping the ‘…’ in the centre of the top of the screen, choosing the Split View or Slide Over option then opening another app. In Split View, you can drag the divider separating the two apps to give one more room than the other. Drag it to the edge of the screen to close an app. Choose Slide Over, then another app, and the app you had open originally is in the floating window.…

Menu bar items are really handy things, but over time you can end up with far too many of them. And while macOS 14 (Sonoma) and macOS 15 (Sequoia) make good use of Control Centre to reduce the number of things living in the top of your Mac’s display, the menu bar can still get messy. That’s where Hidden Bar (Free, Mac App Store) can help. It’s designed to eliminate the icons you don’t want so you can focus only on the important ones. If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here, that’s because we looked at a similar app called Bartender back in #MF402. Unfortunately, since then the Bartender app has been sold and its new owners have made some changes that have raised privacy concerns, so many…

The new Audio Mix feature on iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro brings an effective new way to boost sound quality in your home movies, and in this tutorial we’re going to show you how to use it. By using Audio Mix, you can easily switch between four different audio modes - Standard, In-Frame, Studio and Cinematic - to perform operations such as reducing ambient sounds and boosting the sound level of the person speaking. Plus the Audio Mix options are ‘tweakable’, so you can get a balance between reducing unwanted noises (such as traffic, wind or waves) while hearing voices loud and clear. If you don’t have an iPhone 16, we’ll explore alternative ways to improve the audio of your video edits, such as using noise-reduction tools in iMovie…

Some of our readers will be lucky enough to have one of those swanky new Macs with Thunderbolt 5, while some may still be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, it’s just a hardware interface which lets you connect devices to your computer, isn’t it? Well, yes, but it also happens to be a technology that offers lightning-fast transfer speeds which gives it the power to be utterly transformative. Developed by Intel and Apple, Thunderbolt 5 is built on industry standards including USB 4 V2, PCI Express Gen 4 and DisplayPort 2.1. The interface, announced in September 2023, promises to deliver significant improvements in connectivity speed and bandwidth while still being broadly compatible with previous versions of Thunderbolt and USB. Thunderbolt 5 is present in the new Mac…

Although Apple Music looks identical to iTunes at first glance, there’s so much that’s different under the hood. Apple Music doesn’t just offer the ability to play your music — you can discover new artists through Radio, sing tracks by karaoke via the Apple Sing feature, and sync your existing library so your music collection is available across all of your Apple devices. There’s so much on offer we’ve split the Apple Music’s features into sections to take you step-by-step through all of them. Radio Apple has three radio stations. Apple Music 1 broadcasts music from indie, rap and R&B genres. Apple Music Hits showcases the greatest hits from the 80s, 90s and 00s. Finally, Apple Music Country broadcasts the best country music. Playlists With an Apple Music subscription, you can…

Psion Series 5 (1997) We loved these little handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants) with their brilliant keyboards. The Series 5 was beautifully made with a sliding clamshell design, a 32-bit ARM7 chip running at 18MHz and nearly 20 hours of power from its two AA batteries. Asus Eee PC (2007) The Eee PC was a tiny, lightweight 7in netbook PC with a price tag of just £219. It boasted it a solid-state drive, 4GB of storage and a 900MHz Intel CPU, and ran Linux with 512MB of RAM. Many pundits said that it was the future of computing. It wasn’t. Samsung Series 5 Chromebook (2011) Chromebooks run Google’s ChromeOS. A stripped-back operating system that relied almost entirely on web-based apps on low-spec, low-cost hardware: here, 2GB of memory, 16GB of…

From £599 (model tested £799) FROM apple.com/uk FEATURES M4/M4 Pro chip, 16GB unified memory (24GB/32GB/64GB available), 256GB storage (512GB/1TB/2TB/4TB/8TB available), Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, 3x Thunderbolt 4 (Thunderbolt 5 on M4 Pro) Inside the Mac mini, more magic awaits… and the mini now supports more external displays than before With a design that makes it looks like a shrunken-down Mac Studio, the all-new Mac mini is a thing of wonder. Measuring just 12.7cm square, it’s not that much bigger than an Apple TV 4K (9.3cm square), yet is taller than before, standing at 5cm high. For comparison, the previous gen Mac mini measured 19.7cm square and was 3.58cm tall. That’s quite a difference. Other changes are plentiful too – the Mac mini (2024) now has two handy USB-C ports on…

£129.99 FROM marshall.com FEATURES Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C charging port, 3.5mm audio input/output, SBC, AAC and LC3 support You get up to 15 hours’ playback on a 15-minute quick charge which is kind of mind blowing Alongside the Emberton III wireless speaker, Marshall has released the Major V, its latest on-ear headphones. Sharing the same iconic design language as the company’s legendary guitar amps they come in black, cream and brown, and while black is the classic colour, the others look amazing too. The headphones have an excellent build quality and finish and fold down when not in use, though they don’t come with a carrying pouch. You get a USB-C cable for charging and a 3.5mm audio cable for wired listening. The USB port doesn’t carry audio – which would…

£20.99 FROM schimgame.com NEEDS macOS 10.13 or later Forklift trucks, wires and signs can lift, spring and catapult you across large distances SCHiM is a game with an interesting wrinkle; you cannot traverse well-lit ground and may only move through the shadows, hopping from one to another with frog-like leaps to reach your objective. Some of its best levels lie at the start of the game, where you follow the human that you – a shadow being known as a SCHiM – are attached to as they grow through life and experience childhood, school, university and love, before it all – literally – falls apart. One day the man trips and falls, severing the link between himself and his shadow. It’s your job to reunite the two. You do this…

iMac From £1,299 In October 2024, Apple updated its 24in iMac with the M4 chip, and the iMac now has the wonders of Apple Intelligence built in. You can choose between an 8-core CPU/8-core GPU at entry-level, or an 10-core CPU/10-core GPU on the mid-range and top-tier versions. The entry model now comes with 16GB of memory as standard, configurable to 24GB; the mid- and top-tier versions are configurable to 24 or 32GB (32GB only available with 512GB or more of storage). The solid-state drive (SSD) storage starts at 256GB on entry-level and mid-range versions, and 512GB on the top-tier iMac, although you can add up to 1TB on the entry-level model and up to 2TB on mid-range and top-tier models. You still get a 4.5K (4480x2520) Retina display, with…

Intrigued by Apple Intelligence and the promise of Genmoji, I’ve just got an iPhone 16 and, while I like to consider myself pretty tech savvy, I have to say, I’m a bit lost. I feel like an old farmer looking out at a brand-new housing estate saying, “I remember when all this was fields”. Basically, Apple has built over all the space that used to be found on the iPhone. For a start, why are there so many buttons on the side? Why does the Control Centre now look like a cluttered icon-flavoured soup? And why doesn’t the iPhone lie flat on a table top anymore? Let’s address all the buttons on the sides first. My last iPhone was an iPhone 12, and things have moved on a bit since then.…