Mac

Reddit: My MacBook Pro screen died, so I used Catalina Sidecar to physically replace it with my iPad

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[VIDEO] Andrew Kroger, Reddit:

It’s done! Following up on a recent post that I made on this sub, my iPad/Macbook hybrid is complete. The method involved defusing the broken LCD screen and backlight from the upper portion of the MacBook’s clamshell, modifying the retina display driver, attaching a magnetic iPad case in-place of the retina display and putting everything back together. In regards to software, I’m using Catalina’s ’Sidecar’ to wirelessly (bluetooth) mirror the once-existent Retina display and ‘keyboard maestro’ to establish the initial connection to the iPad upon booting up.

Check the results, embedded in the main Loop post.

How Home Sharing works in macOS Catalina

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Use Home Sharing on your Mac to share your media with your home, dorm, or office? Never heard of Home Sharing?

Either way, take a read of the linked article. Kirk McElhearn walks through the new Home Sharing interface coming with macOS Catalina.

iOS App Store links now show a lot more detail when opened on your Mac

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Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple has recently updated its App Store Preview pages for stories to allow users to view the full content of stories from inside their desktop web browser. App Store stories have always been shareable as links, but the web version was just a title and a navigation link to ‘open this story in the App Store’.

Huzzah! Great to see this. I often encounter a link to an app on Mac Safari. A pain (and broken marketing for the app creator) to force me to re-find the link on my iOS device to learn more.

As an example, try opening this iOS link to PCalc on your Mac. Instead of just text telling you to open the link on an iOS device, you’ll see all the images, reviews, etc. Great!

FAA bans recalled MacBook Pros from flights

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Bloomberg:

U.S. airline safety regulators banned select MacBook Pro laptops on flights after Apple Inc. recently said that some units had batteries that posed a fire risk.

In a statement, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it was “aware of the recalled batteries that are used in some Apple MacBook Pro laptops” and stated that it alerted major U.S. airlines about the recall.

I totally get this. A bad battery is a bad battery. But my question is, how will they enforce this ban? Will they be checking model numbers on all MacBook Pros? This going to be an honor system thing?

Apple granted patent for Face ID on Macs, with smart auto-wake feature

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Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

The granted patent could use the Mac’s camera to do two things. First, it would avoid timing-out into sleep mode when there’s someone in front of the machine.

and, after posting a big chunk of “patenteze” from the granted patent:

My reading of that and the accompanying illustrations is that the Mac can automatically wake and log you in, even if it is in sleep mode when you approach it.

Sounds good to me. And, I’d add, it sounds like that “second sensor” mentioned in the patent is your Apple Watch, though could be the iPhone in your pocket, too.

What Apple’s T2 chip does in your new MacBook Air or MacBook Pro

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William Gallagher, AppleInsider:

If you spent any time looking into which Mac desktop or notebook to buy before you paid out for a shiny new machine, you’ll have seen Apple’s website extolling the fact that many of them have T2 security chips. That’s nice. Only, it’s more than nice, it’s more than a way to invisibly secure your Mac, it is a process that has a dramatic and visible effect on just about everything you do.

And:

It sits there to ensure, first of all, that nothing can ever get loaded onto your machine without you explicitly wanting it to. The T2 chip provides a secure boot, which means that the only things that can run at start up is trusted, approved macOS software.

And:

Built into it is a dedicated Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hardware engine. This makes sure the data on your storage drives is encrypted and because it’s done in hardware, there’s no hit to the speed of your Mac as macOS reads and writes data.

And:

There’s one more security feature the T2 chip brings that doesn’t get appreciated because it doesn’t tend to get noticed. If you have a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with a T2 chip and you close the lid, the T2 chip switches off the microphone.

Just a few highlights. Read the whole thing. Terrific stuff.

Old school music video with the Mac as the star

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[VIDEO] This popped up on Reddit this morning. It’s a music video from 2013, a fun tune with the Mac interface front and center. The video is embedded in the main Loop post.

This reminds me of the Emmy winning “Connection Lost” episode of Modern Family, where the entire episode is shown through the lens of a Mac screen via FaceTime, Messages, etc.

Apple’s Touch Bar doesn’t have to be so terrible

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Alex Cranz, Gizmodo:

Around the Gizmodo office, my colleagues groaned when news broke that following a refresh of its laptop line, there would no longer be a standard MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar. Apple, in their eyes, was going all in on the little touch-sensitive OLED strip above the number pad, and it was a travesty.

Someone complained that the only time they used the Touch Bar was when they activated the Siri touch button by accident several times a day.

I don’t see the MacBook Touch Bar as terrible, but I do see it as unfulfilled promise. There are a few use cases where I’m glad to have it:

  • Scrubbing through a video
  • Tapping a difficult to spell word or emoji as I’m typing
  • Adjusting screen volume or brightness
  • Exiting full screen video

That’s about it. Not terrible, but there’s just so much potential here. Now that Touch Bar is on every single MacBook model, perhaps Apple will open the Touch Bar up a bit more, encourage more creative experimentation by developers by relaxing limitations on what is allowed on that bit of real estate.

In the meantime, there’s TouchSwitcher and BetterTouchTool.

Linus tries building a Hackintosh faster than the newly announced Mac Pro

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[VIDEO] Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) continues to pursue his goal of building the fastest Mac in the world (video embedded in the main Loop post). He thought he had it, releasing his mega-Hackintosh on the very day Apple announced the new Mac Pro. Unlucky that.

But he perseveres, bringing on a friend to help up the technology. Entertaining and ubergeeky.

Mac Zoom client vulnerability allows malicious website to access your camera

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I have gotten into the habit of putting a post-it over my Mac camera. Some folks laugh at this, but this is exactly the reason why.

That said, the headline link is a Medium post with all the details. Most damning, though:

Additionally, if you’ve ever installed the Zoom client and then uninstalled it, you still have a localhost web server on your machine that will happily re-install the Zoom client for you, without requiring any user interaction on your behalf besides visiting a webpage. This re-install ‘feature’ continues to work to this day.

If you’ve ever installed Zoom on your Mac and want to check for this local server, go to Terminal (it’s in Applications/Utilities) and type:

lsof -i :19421

If you enter the command and nothing comes back, you’re good. If you do get a result, you’ve got that web server running. If you don’t intentionally want that server running, here’s a tweet with instructions on killing it.

One final note on this. Here’s Zoom’s official response to all of this, posted on their blog as Response to Video-On Concern.

If you are a Zoom user, worth reading the linked Medium post and Zoom’s response. Then stick some post-its on your Mac camera. Just to be safe.

Apple updates MacBook Air and MacBook Pro for back-to-school season, kills off MacBook

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Apple:

Apple today updated MacBook Air, adding True Tone to its Retina display for a more natural viewing experience, and lowering the price to $1,099, with an even lower price of $999 for college students.

And:

In addition, the entry-level $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest 8th-generation quad-core processors, making it two times more powerful than before. It also now features Touch Bar and Touch ID, a True Tone Retina display and the Apple T2 Security Chip, and is available for $1,199 for college students.

Apple will throw in a pair of Beats Studio 3 Wireless headphones with either of these Macs as part of the back to school promo.

I particularly like the tagline on the MacBook Air section of Apple’s official Mac page: Lightness strikes again.

Remind me the difference between a MacBook and a MacBook Air again? Oh, wait, looks like the MacBook has been officially end-of-lifed. On that same Mac page, you’ll see the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as the full laptop lineup. No MacBook. I’m good with that.

Apple tests Face ID and Touch ID sign-in for iCloud․com on iOS 13 and macOS Catalina betas

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Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

For iOS 13, iPadOS 13, and macOS Catalina beta testers, Apple is trying out a new sign-in process for iCloud on the web. When you head to beta.icloud.com on a device running the betas, you can now sign-in to your account using Face ID or Touch ID.

If you log in to beta.icloud.com via a non-beta iOS or macOS, you’ll get the normal login experience, with a 6 digit code appearing that you type in to validate your visit.

If you log in using a beta iOS 13 or MacOS Catalina device, your Face ID or Touch ID verifies you, gives you access, without the code at all. Way better.

Rene Ritchie: How macOS Catalina changes EVERYTHING

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[VIDEO] Earlier today, I posted Jeff Benjamin’s first look at macOS Catalina. Consider that the appetizer. Here’s Rene Ritchie (video embedded in the main Loop post) with the main course, a detailed take on Catalina with all kinds of perspective and backstory.

It’s long, but worth your time.

How to Make Apple’s Mac Pro holes

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For anyone who wants to create a Mac Pro graphic, here’s a detailed walkthrough of how to get the holes just right. Some nerdy reverse engineering.

Hands-on: macOS Catalina top features

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[VIDEO] This is an excellent, easy to absorb first look at macOS Catalina by Jeff Benjamin. The video is embedded in the main Loop post.

A look at plugging in an iOS device into a Mac running macOS Catalina

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This is the new look and feel of the post-iTunes way of showing an iOS device plugged into your Mac. Just as you’d expect if you plugged an external drive into your Mac, your plugged in device will appear in the Finder’s sidebar.

Excellent job by Stephen Hackett laying all this out. This looks like a very clean implementation by Apple, a nice step forward.

Twitter for Mac is coming back!

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From Twitter’s official blog:

Last week, Apple announced Project Catalyst for macOS 10.15 Catalina, which makes it easy for developers to bring their iPad projects to macOS as native Mac apps. We are excited that Project Catalyst will enable us to bring Twitter back to the Mac by leveraging our existing iOS codebase. We’ll also be able to add native Mac features on top of our existing iPad experience, while keeping our maintenance efficient as we continue to improve this shared codebase in the years to come.

As to why Twitter dropped their Mac client in the first place:

Historically, Twitter had a Mac app that shared the same roots as our iPhone app. Over the years, Twitter for Mac and Twitter for iOS diverged as Twitter increasingly focused on its mobile apps. Supporting the two separate codebases was no longer a sustainable option and ultimately we sunset the native Mac app.

And:

The new Twitter for Mac app will use our existing iOS codebase, rather than being built from a separate codebase, following the same successful strategy we’ve used with Web to expand our supported clients. By supporting key Mac-specific behaviors on top of our iOS code, we will be able to maintain feature parity across our iOS and Mac apps with relatively low long term maintenance costs.

Can’t help but wonder if this is an unintended positive consequence of Catalyst, or if bringing apps like Twitter back to the Mac was part of the drive behind Catalyst in the first place.

No matter, glad to have Twitter making its way back to the Mac.

A love letter to an old-school Macintosh

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Ian Bogost, The Atlantic:

Everything about this computer is loud: The groan of the power supply is loud. The hum of the cooling fan is loud. The whir of the hard disk is loud. The clack of the mechanical keyboard is loud. It’s so loud I can barely think, the kind of noise I usually associate with an airline cabin: whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom.

This is the experience a computer user would have had every time she booted up her Macintosh SE, a popular all-in-one computer sold by Apple from 1987 to 1990. By today’s standards the machine is a dinosaur. It boasts a nine-inch black-and-white display. Mine came with a hard disk that offers 20 megabytes of storage, but some lacked even that luxury. And the computer still would have cost a fortune: The version I have retailed for $3,900, or about $8,400 in 2019 dollars.

And:

The original Macintosh was an adorable dwarf of a computer. About the size of a full-grown pug, its small footprint, built-in handle, and light weight made it easy to transport and stow. Perched on a single, wide paw, the machine looks perky and attentive, as if it’s there to serve you, rather than you it.

Though the Macintosh SE was a speed-demon compared to the original 128K Macintosh, compared to any modern computing device, the performance was relatively the same.

This article was written on a Macintosh SE and, if old school is your thing, it’s kind of glorious.

Apple is listening

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Marco Arment:

The “trash can” 2013 Mac Pro addressed only a fraction of the needs solved by the previous “cheese grater” towers, aged quickly without critical upgrade paths, and suffered from high GPU-failure rates from its cooling solution — all because its design prioritized size and appearance over performance and versatility in the one Mac model that should never make that tradeoff.

Over the next few years, it became clear that the Mac Pro was an embarrassing, outdated flop that Apple seemed to have little intention of ever updating, leaving its customers feeling unheard and abandoned. I think Apple learned a small lesson from it, but they learned a much bigger one a few years later.

And:

By the end of 2016, in addition to the generally buggy, neglected state macOS seemed to be perpetually stuck in, Apple had replaced its entire “pro” Mac lineup with controversial, limiting products that seemed optimized to flex Apple’s industrial-design muscles rather than actually addressing their customers’ needs.

This paints a bleak picture, one of an Apple out of touch with their Mac base, and even more so with their vast community of developers.

But:

Then, in April 2017, out of nowhere, Apple held a Mac Pro roundtable discussion with the press to announce that they were in the early stages of completely redesigning the Mac Pro.

Nice writeup by Marco. It is hard to find the right balance between listening to the experts you’ve hired to drive your company forward, but doing that without losing touch with the community that buys your products.

Marzipan: A chance to revitalize the Mac app ecosystem

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John Vorhees, MacStories:

There does seem to be friction holding iOS developers back from making the leap to the Mac. Part of it is that developing for the Mac is just different enough from iOS that it makes adapting an iOS app to the Mac harder than many developers would prefer. Combined with the smaller Mac market, that friction seems to be enough to keep many iOS developers off the Mac.

It’s into this environment that Apple announced Marzipan, its effort to make it easier to build apps for both the Mac and iOS.

And:

Web services are a bigger part of the productivity app market than ever before, and few seem interested in building traditional Mac apps. Exacerbating the problem is the rather thin competition in some app categories and limited migration of iOS apps to the Mac. Instead of letting third parties with little stake in the Mac’s success control the direction of the Mac experience through a patchwork of inferior apps, I’m eager to see a solution from Apple that leverages the strength of iOS.

Of all the technologies to dig into at WWDC, Marzipan seems the most important for the future of the Mac, and the topic I’m most interested in watching unfold.

As Craig Hockenberry explains in his post The Future of Interaction, Marzipan is a big win for developers, helping them support multiple platforms with a much smaller baseline of code to maintain.

If you’re an iMessage developer, you have to think about a product that works on iOS, macOS, and watchOS. You get a pass on tvOS, but that’s small consolation. The same situation exists in various combinations for all of Apple’s major apps: Music, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail, etc.

It’s likely that all of these apps share a common data model, probably supported by an internal framework that can be shared amongst platforms. That leaves the views and the controllers as an area where code can’t be shared.

And:

With this insight, it’s easy to see Marzipan as a way towards views that share code. A UIView can be used on your TV, on your desktop, on your wrist, and in your pocket. That’s a big win for developer productivity.

And a big win for developer productivity is a big win for users and, in the end, for Apple.

My MacBook Pro exploded and burst into flames

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This is a dramatic headline, but read the Reddit post. There’s an embedded video that appears to be taken soon after the fire went out, smoke still pouring out and what appears to be char marks on the floor.

Is this real? Seems like it. Hard to say for sure. But lithium-ion batteries can fail, and can explode, under the right circumstances.

One interesting nugget:

I went inside and was able to remove the computer to the porch using gloves (it was scalding hot). Below is a short video taken when I re-entered the house a few minutes after the explosion. After it cooled for an hour or so, I took it to the local Apple store in a rage. They understood the severity of the situation but said nothing could be done until it spent 24 hours in a fire-proof safe and that they’d call me with a plan/update.

Is there a fire-proof safe in every Apple Store? I remember reading about safes in Apple Stores when the gold Edition Apple Watch first came out. I wonder if this was a use case when they added a safe to the Apple Store designs.

Bottom line, I do see value in being careful with lithium-ion batteries. Recycle them. And do get them checked out if you notice bulging in your Mac.

How Apple protects potential California-themed future macOS names

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Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Following Apple’s shift to California-themed names for its Mac operating systems with OS X Mavericks back in 2013, Apple appeared to take steps to protect a number of other California-related names by filing for trademarks under a series of shell companies intended to mask the true identity of the applicant.

And:

All told, we identified 19 trademarks that were applied for under six different companies that all appeared to be Apple shell companies. Several of these names, including Yosemite, Sierra, and Mojave, have been used by Apple, while others have yet to be put to use.

And:

Of the original 19 names that were included in the trademark applications, all but four of them have been either used by Apple or abandoned, with the remaining live applications being Mammoth, Monterey, Rincon, and Skyline.

This is some terrific detective work.

Of the four names, I like Mammoth and Monterey. Mammoth Mountain is a popular ski area (one of my favorite places to ski, back in the day) and Monterey is a city, county, and bay and, most importantly, home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

My money’s on Monterey, for purely sentimental reasons. Though I’d throw in a wild card vote for this list of the top 10 tallest California peaks.

iFixit and a microscope compare the 2018 and 2019 MacBook butterfly mechanism side-by-side

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[VIDEO] For me, there were three key parts to this video (embedded in the main Loop post):

  • At about 1:32, you’ll see a walkthrough of the stack that makes up an individual butterfly key. Here’s a tweet with all the piece in one place. Makes it a bit easier to see.

  • At about 2:38, there’s a closeup look at the dome switch cover, where the change in materials seems to have been made. The new dome switch cover is nylon, a more “robust” material than what was used before.

  • At about 3:58, you get a closeup of the old and new dome switches.

Not sure you can really draw any conclusions from the video, but I did find the closeup look at the mechanism interesting.

How to tell if your Intel-based Mac is susceptible to this latest Intel vulnerability

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First things first, chances are good that your Mac is not at risk in the first place. Want to check?

  • Go to the Apple menu, select About This Mac
  • Click the System Report… button
  • Click the Hardware title in the sidebar

In the Hardware Overview section (it’s relatively short), look for the term hyper-threading. Don’t see it? You can ignore this issue.

If your Mac does support hyper-threading, you should take a look at this official Apple Support document.

Before you take any action, note:

Testing conducted by Apple in May 2019 showed as much as a 40 percent reduction in performance with tests that include multithreaded workloads and public benchmarks. Performance tests are conducted using specific Mac computers. Actual results will vary based on model, configuration, usage, and other factors.

And:

Although there are no known exploits affecting customers at the time of this writing, customers who believe their computer is at heightened risk of attack can use the Terminal app to enable an additional CPU instruction and disable hyper-threading processing technology, which provides full protection from these security issues.

No known exploits. Just the potential for exploits. Forewarned is forearmed.

A bit of a PR ding for Apple, but a mighty issue for Intel.

UPDATE: There is some question as to whether lack of hyper-threading support puts your Mac in safe harbor from the Intel vulnerability. The issue is, if you disable hyper-threading (and add that extra CPU instruction), you’ll be safe. But the question is, if your Mac doesn’t support hyper-threading in the first place, does that mean your Mac is not susceptible to the issue?

If anyone knows the definitive answer to this, please reach out.

Apple’s cassette from 1984: A Guided Tour of Macintosh and A Guided Tour of MacWrite & MacPaint

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[VIDEO] Every original Mac shipped with this cassette (see the video embedded in the main Loop post). So weird to think about it now, a cassette tape as guided tour, but this is the real deal.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I drove home from the computer store at warp speed, my brand new Macintosh in tow. Unpacked everything, amazed at the novelty of it all, thrilled to get started. MacWrite, MacPaint, the ImageWriter printer, and glacially slow floppy disks.

I was hooked from day one. Changed my life.