It has been three years since Apple last updated the Mac mini, and that revision was in many ways a downgrade from its predecessor. Despite that dubious history, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a MacRumors reader via email that Apple plans for the Mac mini to be an “important part of the company’s product lineup in the future.” Given that Apple has ignored the Mac mini for so long, we’re taking Cook’s claim with the proverbial grain of salt, but we’d love to see Apple put a new spin on the idea of a miniature Mac.
Our friends at Take Control are having a 50-percent-off sale this week, so if you’re looking for help with Apple’s latest releases, check it out now.
Before you sell or give away a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (which has a Touch ID sensor), Apple recommends that you boot the Mac into macOS Recovery and execute this Terminal command: xartutil --erase-all. We’re not entirely sure what it does, and Apple doesn’t offer any explanations, but we suspect it acts to clear the Secure Enclave that stores your fingerprint data. Regardless, it would be wise to follow Apple’s advice.
Tony Fadell designed the iPod at Apple and then created the Nest thermostat that was eventually purchased by Google. Now with his new venture, Future Shape, Fadell is going after the concept of Silicon Valley as a tech hub by funding startups from Paris, France. Fadell has taken his fair share of criticism over the years for being overbearing and opinionated (shades of Steve Jobs), but he is also one of the most successful Apple alums and is worth keeping an eye on.
Contact management is boring, and Apple’s Contacts app is terrible. That’s why the new Cardhop app from Flexibits might catch your fancy — it’s easily accessed, attractive, and quick to use via its natural language parser.
Google for some time now has aimed to become a major player in the consumer hardware market, and that inevitably means competing with Apple. Google’s recent press event was crammed with products that are going up against Apple’s.
A security researcher found a fundamental flaw in the WPA2 security specification that underlies all Wi-Fi implementations. It lets an attacker decipher encrypted data between a device and a base station. However, the opportunity to exploit this flaw is limited and closing fast for hardware that can be updated.
Security professionals are fretting over the just-disclosed KRACK flaw, which renders all WPA2-protected Wi-Fi networks vulnerable to attack. Fortunately, MacRumors is reporting that Apple told iMore’s Rene Ritchie that it has already plugged the vulnerability in the next betas of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Once Apple releases the current betas, likely in the next few days, those fixes will protect the data sent and received on devices running those operating systems, even if the Wi-Fi router itself remains vulnerable. The real concern with KRACK will come with older devices for which patches don’t become available.
If you own a mid-2012 or early-2013 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display that qualifies for battery service (check via > About This Mac > System Report > Hardware > Power > Health Information), you can get it for free from Apple if you don’t need it right away. Apple has told Genius Bar employees and Apple Authorized Service Providers to offer a free battery repair if the customer is willing to wait until at least 15 November 2017. If you need a new battery sooner, you’ll have to pay standard out-of-warranty battery repair rates: $199 in the United States, £199 in the United Kingdom, $289 in Australia, and $259 in Canada.
iFixit has spent years compiling repair guides for all of Apple’s products, including the new iPhone 8, which iFixit flew to Australia to obtain in order to publish a guide before most of the rest of the world had woken up. iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens sat down with Adam Minter of Bloomberg for an interview in which he extolled the virtues of repair, including the creation of blue-collar jobs, sales of replacement parts, and reducing overload on the vendor. Wiens points out that Apple has 500 repair shops to service 1 billion iPhones. His best line in the article comes in response to Apple claiming it designs for durability, not repairability: “It seems a little bit detached from reality to say that we design products not to break that have glass on both sides and come out of your pocket 10 times per day.”
Facebook is bigger than ever, but some former employees are despairing about its impact on the world. “Most of the early employees I know are totally overwhelmed by what this thing has become,” an early ex-Facebook employee told Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton. Speaking of Facebook’s potential impact on the 2016 election, one employee told Bilton, “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.” Those close to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are afraid he’s losing touch with reality, becoming a “modern-day Howard Hughes.”
The Disney Movies Anywhere service has now expanded to four more studios, so you can now watch more of your iTunes movie purchases on non-Apple devices. And there’s more.
Bare Bones Software has released the most significant update to the BBEdit text editor since 2014, modernizing much of the app’s underlying code and adding compelling features like the capability to manipulate columnar data and a WebKit inspector in the Preview window.
iOS 11’s Long Exposure effect for Live Photos captured using an iPhone or iPad is impressive. Jeff Carlson compares what you would have to do to get the same shot with the iPhone and a traditional camera.
MacTech has announced that the MacTech Conference keynote will be given by well-known programmer and security researcher Trammell Hudson, who is known for numerous reverse-engineering exploits. Also, Adam and Tonya Engst will be teaching a half-day pre-conference workshop for IT pros and consultants on creating a compelling content strategy.