MacBook Pro - page 31

Vincent Belotti, a mechanical engineering student at Farmingdale State College on Long Island, New York, has a colorful setup — and we’re not just talking about his screensaver. He 3D-prints some of the components in it himself, and he can’t get enough decor related to his favorite games.

3D printing as a hobby

As an engineering student, Belotti has made 3D printing into a hobby. He uses his MacBook Pro to model and slice prints that become components to enhance his setup. They include an Apple Watch dock, shown on the right side of his desk in these photos, and 3D figurines on the shelf above his monitor.

Shad Ahmad was a hard-studying freshman majoring in biology and minoring in history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Going home to continue classes for a semester remotely from his parents’ house in Wisconsin may not have been ideal, but Ahmad found a comforting upside. Integrated smart technology makes his life easier, he told Cult of Mac.

Austin, Texas-based photographer Matt Tran initially built his impressive setup to share his pics on Instagram, and you can certainly see a lot of them there. But now he uses his workstation, centered on a MacBook Pro and two monitors of vastly different sizes, to film and edit videos.

“I like having the 38-inch [LG] ultrawide to view the timeline on Final Cut Pro and the smaller, 15.6-inch Desklab portable monitor to review the footage,” he told Cult of Mac.

Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based Edward Wang, Ph.D., is an executive director with Quest Diagnostics. He took some serious time and effort making his setup a clean and powerful tool for health care work and audiovisual play. Once he diagnosed and treated a cable-management malady stemming from several separate pieces of computer and audio equipment, his setup delighted him.

According to Apple, a “very small number” of MacBook Pros sold in 2016 and 2017 have an issue that stops the battery charging beyond 1%.

As a result, Apple has launched a free battery replacement program to swap out these faulty batteries — so that customers can join the rest of us in the exclusive “our batteries charge up to 100%” club.

Gareth Owen is a London-based professional sound designer whose job involves extensive CAD and acoustic modeling, but he also does sound effects work and multitrack mixing.

So he built a setup that functions as both his home office and a basic home studio.

Ed Yoon has a job many music fans and players would covet. He’s chief operating officer of high-end electric guitar maker and distributor Strandberg Guitars USA in Riverside, California. As you might guess from his line of work, he’s a major audiophile. And his office setup makes a lot of noise to that effect.

OK, not “noise.” Beautiful music.

Even before the pandemic, Yoon had been working a lot from home to manage the company’s operations. Then, as COVID-19 spread, remote work became the norm. Unlike most of us, he needed more than just a desk and a computer with decent speakers. He had to have mind-blowing audio.

There’s something strangely nostalgic about Microsoft taking shots at Apple in a commercial. If you were to add in a post-grunge soundtrack, hair with frosted tips, and a supreme overconfidence in the value of any and every .com business, it could be the ’90s again.

Sadly such vintage touches aren’t present in Microsoft’s latest ad — pitting the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 against the MacBook Pro. Guess which one the folks in Redmond, WA think you’re better off buying?

Woot is blowing out new, open-box MacBook units from as little as $789.99. You can pick up various MacBook Air or MacBook Pro models, but note this sale is good for today only, so bag yours before it’s too late!

Apple seeded a macOS Big Sur‌ 11.2 release candidate to developers on Thursday. Among other changes, it promises to improve Bluetooth reliability, which is probably music to the ears of those using the recently released Macs built around Apple’s first-generation M-series processor.

A strange bug plaguing a seemingly large number of M1 Mac owners spontaneously displays a screensaver that cannot be dismissed. But there is an easy way to avoid the problem until Apple rolls out a proper fix.

We’ll show you how.

Apple has quietly extended a free repair program covering faulty 13-inch MacBook Pro models introduced in 2016. The laptops in question suffer from a problem related to the display backlight.

Initially, Apple’s repair program — announced in May 2019 — covered the laptops for up to four years after they were purchased. Now Apple has extended that to five years.

From CES product unveilings to juicy rumors, this week suffered zero shortage of new for Apple fans. You’ll find the cream of the crop in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. As always, it’s free — and it’s ready for consumption on your iOS device of choice.

I don’t want to slow you down on your way to the week’s top news stories. But if you use Safari (and you really should), don’t miss our new series of how-tos on getting the most out of Apple’s web browser. Those Safari Pro Tips are in the mag as well.

Or you can get it all, plus our reviews of the new Apple TV+ seasons of Servant and Dickinson, in your browser at the links below.

Apple’s MagSafe branding technically made a return last year with the iPhone 12. But the MagSafe fans most fondly recall — the neat magnetic charging system for the MacBook — is also gearing up to make a comeback.

According to a Friday report from Bloomberg, Apple is bringing back MagSafe for this year’s MacBook Pro refresh. The connector will reportedly be similar in design to the “elongated pill-shape” original MagSafe. It will provide faster charging for the MacBook.

According to reliable TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the next-gen MacBook Pro will come in 14- and 16-inch sizes, feature more ports and bring back the MagSafe charger in some form (!). And, of course,  the high-end laptops will run on new Apple Silicon chips.

But the first big MacBook Pro redesign in half a decade also do away with the Touch Bar, the controversial — and never entirely successful — innovation Apple debuted back in 2016.

Need an affordable Apple notebook? Check out Woot’s spectacular one-day sale on a range of refurbished MacBook models. Prices start at just $499.99, but stock is selling fast. Don’t miss out!

Apple broke new ground in 2020, and will build on that in many ways in 2021. It should be a really significant year for Mac. And iPad and Apple Watch are expected to get important new features as well.

Plus, this could be the year a product Apple has been quietly developing finally breaks out.

Woot is offering cracking discounts on a whole bunch of new, open-box iPad and MacBook models today only. You can save up to 35% on 2019 and 2020 devices, including the newest iPad Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro.

Stock is selling fast so enjoy this sale while you can!

Allan Hagen is a New York-based professional magician and amateur photographer with a serious setup. His favorite part of the setup is the big, stunning Antoccino Desk by RH Modern, which helps him concentrate.

“A big desk with a fairly minimalist setup really lends itself to focusing on the tasks at hand,” he said.

Andreas Larsson is a Sweden-based security technician who converted a tiny corner of his office into a bonafide workspace. He had limited space to work with so he tried to squeeze every inch out of it. His friend, who works at an office furnishing company, custom-built a desk to span 46 inches — the entire length of his office.

Need to pick up an affordable Mac ahead of the holidays? Check out Woot’s one-day sale on iMac and MacBook refurbs. There are a whole bunch of models to choose from, with prices starting at just $359.99.

They’re selling fast, so bag yours before they’re all gone!

The first M1 Macs just hit desks and laps around the world, but Cupertino’s already hard at work on next-gen Apple Silicon processors, Bloomberg reported Monday.

According to the report, Apple is working on “several successors” to the surprisingly powerful M1 chip. These could “significantly outpace” the performance of the top computers currently running Intel chips — including the first 32-core processor high-end Macs.

A new website could become the go-to guide to which applications are compatible with Macs running on Apple Silicon chips.

IsAppleSiliconReady.com lists apps that have been ported to run on Apple’s new M1 processor. It also tells if apps are compatible with Rosetta 2, the macOS Big Sur feature that allows the M1 Macs to run software compiled for Intel chips.

A newly discovered M1 Mac trick lets you use up to six external displays simultaneously. It is simple to set up, and a YouTube video by an M1 Mac owner suggests performance is decent.

The first Macs running the M1 processor are crazy fast, making lots of MacBook and Mac mini users consider dumping their Intel-based Macs. Before you do, here’s everything you give up when buying a computer powered by Apple Silicon.