Apple on Wednesday increased the RAM in the base model M2 and M3 MacBook Air from 8GB to 16GB. And the enhancement comes without a price increase.
Seems like Apple’s days of being stingy with RAM are over. The Apple store no longer sells a Mac with only 8GB.
Apple took the wraps off M4-powered MacBook Pros on Wednesday. While the new laptops sport the same design as their predecessors, they deliver faster performance and a staggering 24 hours of battery life, the company said in a press release announcing the M4 MacBook Pro launch.
“MacBook Pro is an incredibly powerful tool that millions of people use to do their life’s best work, and today we’re making it even better,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.
The new M4 Pro and M4 Max chips Apple unveiled Wednesday for new, higher-end MacBook Pro models will bring more than enough power to handle Apple Intelligence and plenty of other complex computing tasks, Apple said. M4 Pro actually made its debut Tuesday with the redesigned M4 Pro Mac mini. The new chips may find their way into other machines, like Mac Studio, next year.
“Apple silicon has taken the Mac to unprecedented heights, and the rapid pace of innovation continues with M4 Pro and M4 Max,” said Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies. “With the world’s fastest CPU core, immensely more powerful GPUs, and the fastest Neural Engine ever, the power-efficient performance and capabilities of the M4 family extend its lead as the most advanced lineup of chips in the industry.”
Apple gave the Mac mini a long-overdue redesign Tuesday, making the pint-size desktop computer smaller than ever. The M4 chip and the new M4 Pro processor also bring a massive bump in performance. And perhaps surprisingly, the new Mac mini packs almost all the ports you can ask for.
Given these improvements, should you upgrade to the M4 Mac mini from the M2 or even the M1 Mac mini? Find out in this comparison.
As we’ve pointed out in product news coverage and reviews, Edifier is one of those smaller companies that always seem to come across with great value. Its audio gear is solid and sounds great, but it’s on the inexpensive side of things. And that’s the case for the Edifier powered speakers in today’s MacBook Air setup. The workstation features a penguin plush toy that doesn’t just use an Edifier box as a chair, according to the user. The stuffed animal apparently rocks out, too.
October 30, 2009: Two years after launching in the United States, the iPhone finally goes on sale in China, giving Apple a chance to reach the world’s largest market.
A number of regulatory hurdles previously blocked Apple’s access to China, including restrictions on Wi-Fi functionality. With those problems solved, Apple offers the iPhone 3GS to the country’s 1.3 billion people, most of whom do not yet own smartphones.
Not every piece of hardware is Bluetooth-compatible. Older gear like TVs, gaming consoles and some in-flight entertainment systems just can’t connect on their own. But a Bluetooth adapter can easily change that. The BlueSnap wireless transmitter and receiver can transform any device with a 3.5mm audio jack into a Bluetooth-ready one.
Whether you’re trying to connect wireless headphones to your aging TV or stream music from your laptop to a speaker, BlueSnap makes the switch seamless, and it’s on sale for just $16.99 (regularly $31.99).
Apple added the ability to capture HDR photos with the iPhone 13 Pro back in 2021. Google introduced its own take, Ultra HDR, starting with Android 14 in 2023. Despite this, HDR photos from iPhones typically open as SDR images on Android phones and vice versa.
Thankfully, Apple and Google are working to resolve this issue by supporting a common standard for HDR gain map metadata.
Google Chrome is famous for slowing Macs down, but new performance controls aim to deliver a better browsing experience. The changes include a new “Performance issue alert” and improvements to the Memory Saver mode.
These enhancements should allow users to quickly free resources from heavy tabs that bog down overall system performance.
In a surprising development, Presumed Innocent — Apple TV+’s most-watched drama — will return with a fresh narrative unrelated to Scott Turow’s novel as well as a new female lead replacing star Jake Gyllenhaal for its second season, according to a report Tuesday. These Presumed Innocent season 2 changes spring the adoption of a first-time novelist’s upcoming legal thriller as source material.
Skip the hassle of manually sending your family all the vacation photos — enable a shared iCloud Photo library instead. Everyone in your family automatically gets all the family photos as if the images were in their own camera roll — in full quality.
Your iPhone will identify faces in photos (securely and privately), and any pictures of people who are in the family will be added to the shared library. If all of your phones are in the same place while you’re taking a lot of pictures, even if you aren’t in them (like at an aquarium or a museum), those pictures will be added automatically, too. As you’re shooting in the camera, you can easily toggle between the shared library for everyone and the private photo library on your own devices.
Starting a Shared Photo Library with your family is the best way to organize family photos. Continue reading to see how to turn it on.
★★★★☆
Rolling Square’s inCharge XS is a finger-size iPhone or Mac charging cable that squeezes in enough connectors and built-in adapters to ensure you can juice up virtually any Apple device.
Despite its diminutive size, the cable handles up to 240W of power. And it provides fairly quick data transfers, too.
I attached the inCharge XS to my keychain so I could put it to the test.
You can find blazing-fast, high-bandwidth, high-wattage Thunderbolt 5 cables on the market, but as of Tuesday you also buy one straight from Apple. (And you’ll probably pay more, but hey, at least you know it’s high quality.) The iPhone giant unveiled a fancy new Thunderbolt 5 cable, its first one, to go along with its first Thunderbolt 5-capable computer, the top M4 Pro Mac mini. If you’re looking for a seamless wired network solution, an ethernet usb c adapter can help—don’t miss this deal on the Plugable USBC-E5000.
The M4 iMac that Apple launched Monday looks the same as its predecessor but brings some big changes internally. So, how does the M4 iMac compare to the M3 iMac, which arrived less than a year ago? Our M4 iMac versus M3 iMac comparison will show you how the 2024 model ups the ante on performance.
Apple unveiled the radically redesigned Mac mini on Tuesday, with versions powered by the M4 chip and a new M4 Pro chip. The smaller-than-ever desktop computer features a new design with convenient ports on the front and back, faster processing speeds and, for the first time, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity and a carbon neutral guarantee.
“The new Mac mini delivers gigantic performance in an unbelievably small design thanks to the power efficiency of Apple silicon and an innovative new thermal architecture,” said John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, in a press release.
The faster Mac mini is available for preorder now, with a release date of November 8.
October 29, 2012: Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software, is fired from the company after the disastrous Apple Maps launch. After Forstall is ousted, Apple divvies up the roles he previously handled among other high-level execs.
Jony Ive assumes leadership of the Human Interface team. Craig Federighi becomes head of iOS software. Eddy Cue takes control of Maps and Siri. And Bob Mansfield “unretires” to lead a new technology group.
Apple Intelligence brings the long-awaited new Siri … but not quite yet. The Siri improvements so far include extensive knowledge of Apple products, integration with ChatGPT, a brand-new design and the ability to text Siri your questions rather than speaking them aloud.
The even-more-powerful Siri that will be able to see your screen and take actions on your behalf inside apps has been delayed to iOS 19 — with a fully conversational LLM-powered Siri likely another year further.
But there are quite a few neat things you can try out now, if you’re willing to board the Apple Intelligence train. Here’s what the new Siri can do.
Apple is expanding the iPhone’s Tap to Pay functionality to five additional European countries. The feature is now available in Austria, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Romania, and Sweden.
Tap to Pay debuted in 2022, with Apple gradually expanding it to more markets.
A product-comparison chart published Monday on Amazon.com accidentally leaked the redesigned Mac mini, which will feature an all-new design and Apple’s M4 chip. After the M4 Mac mini leak, the machine could go official as early as Tuesday.
According to an image in the chart, the new Mac mini looks like a smaller Mac Studio and sports two USB-C ports on the front.
UDATED: M4 Mac mini is out!
Apple launched its AI-powered Apple Intelligence features in the EU on Monday, despite warning earlier that it might not.
In the European Union, the rollout began for Macs, while iPhone and iPad users will have to wait. That’s not true elsewhere. But there’s a significant language limitation for all.
Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad finally ditched the Lightning connector to become USB input devices Monday when they rolled out alongside color-matched versions for the new iMac, the first in this week’s M4 Mac announcements. The input devices, expected to ship October 31, are among the last of the iPhone giant’s accessories to make the change to USB-C.
When it comes to new tech, the focus understandably falls on what’s changed, not what stayed the same.
That’s absolutely the case for the new M4 iMac, which Apple unveiled on Monday. Plenty of attention is (rightly) being lavished on the iMac’s guts. The M4 chip is a screamer, and the machine now comes with 16GB of unified memory as standard, a welcome change. And the new colors look great.
However, one thing that drives Apple customers bonkers has stayed the same. That one thing is Apple’s terrible mouse — or, more specifically, the ridiculous location of the charging port on the Magic Mouse.
Apple developed its groundbreaking Hearing Health experience for AirPods Pro 2 in its state-of-the-art Audio Lab in Cupertino. The innovative features, available in a free software update, turn AirPods Pro 2 into hearing aids and offer advanced tools for testing and protecting the hearing of people who wear the earbuds.
As one Apple engineer put it, with the new Hearing Health features, AirPods Pro 2 become “truly the interface to the ear.”
These days so many people run external displays that operate as USB-C hubs that it’s getting rare to see a charger in the middle of a computer setup. But today’s MacBook Pro and Studio Display outfit features a powerful charger right in the mix — an Anker Prime Charging Station. It blasts up to 250 watts of power, works in Wi-Fi mode and features one very interesting and unusual feature.
A new pair of bookshelf speakers from Edifier should catch the attention of Apple users who love clear sound from a compact package — the Edifier MR3 2.0 Monitor Speaker System. And the near-field monitor system brings studio-quality audio to your desktop at a surprisingly accessible price point of $120.
The wired or wireless MR3 speakers earned the coveted Hi-Res Audio certification, making them an ideal companion for Apple Music’s lossless audio streaming. With a flat frequency response in a wide range, from 52Hz to 40kHz, these speakers deliver the kind of neutral, transparent sound reproduction that audio professionals and discerning listeners demand.