Indice dei contenuti per August 2021 in MacFormat

You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to all things Apple this issue. We kick off with news of the latest updates to macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS on p6 and p14, and then starting on p74, you’ll discover in-depth reviews of the new iMac 24-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch and Apple TV 4K. In between, you’ll find plenty to surprise and delight you – in our massive 13-page lead feature (p18), you’ll find 57 ways to do more with all of your Apple devices – from tips and tricks to make using them easier, to incredible apps and features, as well as plenty of things to see and do. On p58 we turn our attention to the Apple Watch, which has turned from a nice-to-have luxury to the most…

WE ASKED… What’s your favourite new feature from WWDC 2021? Log on and see next issue’s big question! twitter.com/macformat facebook.com/macformat iPhone 13: 1TB storage and LiDAR scanner According to Daniel Ives at industry analysts Wedbush, the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max could come with up to 1TB of storage. Ives also predicted that all models in the iPhone 13 range would come with LiDAR scanners as standard, a feature that is currently restricted to Apple’s Pro and Pro Max phones. However, reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated in March 2021 that LiDAR would remain a top-end exclusive for the Pro and Pro Max devices. Leaker Jon Prosser, who claims to have obtained CAD files of the iPhone 13 range, also doubted that all iPhone 13 models would gain…

A pple will update the iPad Pro and the iPad mini with new features and designs, says Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The redesigned iPad Pro is due to be released in 2022, while the iPad mini is scheduled for later this year. According to Gurman, the iPad Pro will get a glass back to allow wireless charging, replacing the current aluminium surface and bringing it in line with the glass-backed iPhone. Apple is also testing a MagSafe charger for the iPad Pro, plus a ‘reverse wireless charging’ feature that would let the tablet wirelessly charge an iPhone that is placed onto its surface. It is not clear if either of these features will be ready in time for the next iteration of the iPad Pro. The iPad mini, meanwhile, will get…

1 DJI FPV Combo > £1,249 > dji.com/uk All it takes is a little move of the lens position to turn a camera drone from a serene filming experience into a full-on thrill ride of a flyer; placing the camera on its nose makes DJI’s first-person-view drone the latter. Of course, the idea is you’ll be using the FPV to make a big move rather than a little one, so it’s a camera made to be viewed through goggles at speed: a 150° 4K viewpoint – broadcast at HD resolutions back to DJI’s own headgear at up to 120Hz – gives you a slick experience, essential in a world where low frame rates can cause motion sickness. Every early report says it’s an absolute blast to fly, and while we don’t…

whatever Apple device or services you use, there was a lot packed into Tim Cook’s WWDC 2021 keynote address in June. iOS and iPadOS 15 were previewed, as were watchOS 8 and tvOS 15. For developers, there were a host of new APIs too. One of the fun bits of information that we learn at every WWDC is what the latest version of macOS will be called. Apple has once again decided to continue the theme of naming it after places in California, calling the upcoming iteration ‘Monterey’, and it looks like it’ll be known as macOS 12 too – if the screenshots of the developer beta posted online prove to be accurate. macOS Monterey Productivity is key to macOS Monterey. For instance, it will bring Shortcuts to the Mac,…

Play the drums 17 One of our very favourite features in GarageBand is its smart instruments, which enable you to play guitars, bass and keyboards even if you don’t know how to play them. By far the best of these is Drummer, which effectively puts a human drummer inside your iPad. That’s because Apple has sampled a range of professional drummers playing on a variety of different kits in all kinds of musical styles, and those samples have then been teamed with a very clever bit of software that plays and sounds just like a real drummer. It’s completely customisable, packed with presets and you can even get it to listen to your playing and adjust what it’s doing accordingly. And best of all, it’s free. Draw on your Mac…

Make music 49 The Apple Watch isn’t the first device you think of when it comes to making music… But WatchFunk (£3.99) enables you to play piano, drums, synths and even trumpets on your wrist. It’s a fun app that might help inspiration strike and its interface makes great use of the limited screen space. Get angry weather 50 As you’ll see in our group test (p86), CARROT Weather isn’t like other weather apps. As well as info and forecasts, you get a serious side order of snark. There are five modes ranging from fairly pleasant Professional to foul-mouthed Overkill, all of which can appear in face complications. Work out a tip 51 We love this useful feature within the Apple Watch calculator. If you tap in the total of…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to find and delete duplicate files YOU’LL NEED Parallels Toolbox for Mac (£15.99/year), macOS 10.12 or later It doesn’t take long to fill your Mac’s hard drive or solid-state drive with clutter. Old photos or work files can quickly take up hundreds of megabytes of precious storage space – take a look at your folder that contains email attachments, you’ll find that alone is taking up a surprising amount of GB. One common problem is that many of us tend to create duplicate versions of files that people send us – some photos from a friend, or a bunch of PDF files from a work colleague. There’s a tendency to automatically create duplicates of photos and files that we need, say,…

Accessing a Mac without its password Q My late mother’s iMac, from around 2003, won’t start up without her password, which I don’t know. How can I get it going again? by DEBBIE HOLTH A Provided that a Mac doesn’t have a firmware password set, and has neither a T2 or M1 chip, it’s possible to start it up from an external disk, if that disk has a suitable copy of macOS installed. However, the most recent version of Mac OS X that iMac is likely to be able to run is 10.5.8 Leopard, which Apple stopped supporting 10 years ago. Depending on what you want to do with that Mac, you may need to pay a specialist Mac repair shop to help you solve this. If you want to…

Your Apple Watch doesn’t just have a pretty face. From walking to weight training, hiking to high-intensity interval training, swimming to skydiving, your Watch is the perfect companion for every kind of activity. Well, maybe not skydiving. The Series 6 has a gyroscope, an accelerometer, GPS, altimeter, compass, blood O2 sensor and a heart rate sensor, and they can track all kinds of health information from how vigorously you’re exercising to how oxygenated your blood is, how many stairs you’ve climbed today and how much loud noise you’ve been exposed to. That makes it ideal for tracking all kinds of data, which then feeds into the Health and Fitness apps so you can track your progress over time and identify triggers and trends. While your Apple Watch does all the…

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use one of Numbers’ standard templates to make your own personal budget. The template has two tabs: Budget and Transactions. The Transactions tab houses all the details of money spent during the period covered by the budget. These are allocated into categories. In the Budget tab, a table uses functions and formulas to add up the values of all the transactions in a given category and put them in a cell in the Actual column. For example, the Actual column in the Entertainment row looks for all the cells in the Transactions table where the category matches ‘Entertainment’ and sums the value of the transactions. The Budget column in the table in the Budget tab contains manually entered values. These are then compared…

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…

The Apple TV 4K now includes Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0, and supports Thread £189 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES A12 Bionic chip, 32GB/64GB of storage (64GB model tested), Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax Wi-Fi), Bluetooth 5.0, 1x HDMI 2.1 port, 1x Gigabit Ethernet port, Siri remote, Lightning cable Think the new Apple TV 4K looks familiar? That’s because it is, coming in the same shape and size as the previous generation. But this new version has an A12 Bionic chip (replacing the A10X found in its older sibling), and an all-new aluminium Siri Remote, which has been completely redesigned. The rounded-corner TV streaming box retains its compact, yet chunky dimensions, measuring 98x98x35mm and features a matt black top with Apple TV logo, gloss black sides, with an HDMI 2.1 port (upgraded from…

$74 (about £50) FROM Keychron, keychron.com FEATURES Tenkeyless Bluetooth keyboard, choice of Gateron Mechanical or Keychron Optical switches, custom switch options, USB-C port for connection and charging Much as we like Apple’s Magic Keyboard for Mac, the typing experience falls a little flat. That’s, in part, due to the keyboard’s ultraslim profile. But it’s also due to the limited key travel, making it irksome to type on – the Apple Wireless Keyboard (2003-2015) it ain’t. If you miss that old typing feel, then the K3 keyboard from Keychron might just be the solution. It’s a tenkeyless compact Bluetooth keyboard that offers a choice of switches and customisable keys – enabling you to get the feel you want. The K3 is also backlit (unlike the Magic Keyboard) and you can choose…

£3.99 FROM Sawyer Blatz, nudgetapp.com NEEDS iOS 13 or later Nudget is a beautifully designed way to track your personal spending Tracking and managing personal budgets would seem to be a task well suited to software. But many applications on the market are more business-oriented, with features that a regular user probably doesn’t need. There’s always a Numbers or Excel spreadsheet then, but, well, they’re not exactly fun. Nudget aims to streamline and simplify the tracking of your personal spending. If it’s easy to do, people are more likely to do it. Nudget is slick and Apple-like. There are no sign-ups or logins, and iCloud sync is available across your iOS devices. Face ID can also be used on supported devices for authentication. On first launch you are prompted to…

A pple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote, on 7 June 2021, featured no new hardware, to the disappointment of anyone hoping for a new MacBook Pro or an AirPods redesign. But that doesn’t mean it was totally devoid of interesting news – as we discuss in MacFormat Investigates on page 14, it was full to the brim with new software features. Some of those updates weigh in on what's becoming an age-old question: can you now replace your MacBook with an iPad? Ultimately that depends on how you use both devices, but the new features in iPadOS 15 will certainly have an impact on that. At WWDC, Apple spent a lot of time talking about iPadOS 15’s new multitasking abilities, which are a step up from what was possible before.…

[MAC APP] Carbon Copy Cloner 6 £29.25 Backing up your Mac gets faster and easier When it comes to backups, Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) can be a lifesaver. It goes beyond what Time Machine offers, with fine-grained backup options. Version 6 brings a selection of new features, and its wide-ranging overhaul touches almost every area of the app. The changes combine to make using the app speedier and snappier. For example, CCC’s file copier has been revamped, resulting in backups that complete up to 20 times faster. You can now preview exactly what each backup process will do before you start, too. The result is less time spent backing up and more confidence when you do it. There’s a new menu bar widget for quick tasks and alerts, a Backup…

GIFT WORTH £50 It’s easy to subscribe… SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND SAVE! www.magazinesdirect.com/mac/stm21 Or call: 0330 333 1113 and quote ‘97AK’ Other benefits of subscribing to the UK’s best-selling Apple magazine… ✓ For more than 25 years, we’ve been helping Apple fans get the most from their kit. ✓ Our tutorials and guides empower you with the knowledge to get things done in smarter and faster ways. ✓ MacFormat is for Apple fans of all experience levels. Whether you’ve just bought your first Mac, iPhone or iPad, or have been using one for years, we’ll ensure you don’t miss out on top tips and techniques. Choose your package! DIGITAL ONLY NO GIFT £36 every 12 months 13 issues of MacFormat in digital, and save 44%. Gift not included with a digital subscription…

IT WILL TAKE 5 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to make macOS Big Sur easier to use if you have visual impairments YOU’LL NEED macOS 11 Big Sur or later Apple’s macOS Big Sur is an enormous overhaul of the Mac operating system, with an entirely new look and feel compared to older versions. Not every change has been welcome, though. Apple’s new design includes an awful lot of transparent, low-contrast elements that, while pretty, make using the system harder for anyone with eyesight trouble. Throw in small text and plenty of moving elements that can cause motion sickness and you have a potential accessibility nightmare. If you find Big Sur means big problems for accessibility, there is help at hand… Apple has a range of features that can alleviate…

IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to collaborate remotely using Logic or other apps YOU’LL NEED Splice Studio (free), macOS 10.14 or later If you’ve ever tried to play along with another musician in a Zoom call, you’ll know that the lag in video apps makes real-time collaboration painful. But that doesn’t mean you can’t all work remotely on the same track when you can’t all be in the same room. Simply share your project with your collaborators and it will automatically update and sync when anybody adds to it. For remote music making you need everyone to have three things. One, decent internet access. Two, a music app – ideally the same one you have. And three, an interface they can use to connect their instrument…

YOU WILL LEARN How periscope lenses could enhance iPhone photography Periscope lenses give you longer zoom without requiring an enormous camera assembly According to multiple wellconnected Apple leakers, the iPhone could be getting a new kind of camera in 2022; one that sees further than any existing iPhone camera without any loss of image quality. That’s because Apple is experimenting with periscope lenses. It wouldn’t be the first to do so, either. Samsung’s Galaxy S20 and S21 Ultra both have periscopes, and other Android firms are following suit with their own high-end products. So what is a periscope lens and why would you want it in your phone? Let’s – ahem – look into it. Why periscopes can help you see so much further Periscope lenses enable you to get…

Using templates is a great way to get to grips with Numbers, but very soon you’ll find yourself wanting to hack them to work with your own data sets, or to create spreadsheets yourself from scratch. To do that, you’ll need to create your own formulas using the functions Numbers understands. There are hundreds of these and they range from the very basic, such as adding up a column of numbers or calculating an average, to complex statements with conditions and boolean operators. Thankfully, Numbers provides detailed descriptions and examples of how each function works so you know which ones to opt for. To see them, click in an empty cell in a table, press the Insert button in the toolbar and choose New Formula. You will see the Functions…

£1,649 FROM Apple, apple.com/uk FEATURES Apple M1 chip (8-core CPU, 8-core GPU), 512GB storage, 8GB of unified memory, 24-inch 4.5K Retina display (4480x2520 pixels), 2x Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, 2x USB 3 ports, 1x Gigabit Ethernet port, Magic Keyboard with Touch ID This is the Mac we’ve been waiting for. Measuring just 11.5mm thin and available in a choice of up to seven different colours, the 24-inch iMac feels instantly familiar and all-new at the same time. It clearly shares a familial familiarity with what’s gone before – an all-in-one computer with a gorgeous (now 4.5K) Retina display, perched on top of an aluminium stand with a tell-tale iMac chin. The changes though are massive – gone is the slightly bulbous shape of old in favour of an 11.5mm thin body…

£549 FROM ViewSonic, viewsonic.com/uk FEATURES 1080p projector, HDMI, USB-C, USB-A, MicroSD, dual-band Wi-Fi and AirPlay The M2e supports AirPlay screen-mirroring to stream video from your Apple devices Projectors are primarily aimed at business users for presentations, or home cinema buffs who aren’t satisfied with a mere TV screen for watching Hollywood blockbusters. However, ViewSonic’s new M2e is a feature-packed, compact projector that is well suited for use at home, while still being affordable enough to provide an alternative to a conventional TV. The compact projector measures just 184mm wide and deep, and stands 54mm high, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a convenient spot for it on a coffee table or stand. It’s light too, weighing in at just 1kg and, as well as running off mains power, it’s…

ON TEST… CARROT Weather Dark Sky Hello Weather (Not Boring) Weather Weather by Tomorrow.io Weather Underground: Local Map There’s a line of thinking that weather forecasts are redundant. Just look out of the window! But that only works for about 10 minutes into the future. As everyone who’s marched out of the door wearing a T-shirt and subsequently been drenched will attest, longer-term forecasts are handy things. These days, you needn’t rely on newspapers or the TV to help you plan: you can put a meteorologist in your pocket. Not literally, obviously… we’re referring to weather apps. Apple provides one in the form of the imaginatively named Weather, but search the App Store and you’ll find a range of third-party alternatives. This round-up explores why you might look further afield.…

£8.99 (IAPs) FROM Ginger Labs, gingerlabs.com NEEDS macOS 10.15 or later Notability is one of our favourite note-taking apps for iOS and iPadOS. The Mac app interface is organised into four sections, including the main editing window. The Library is a Finder-style sidebar that shows note categories; to its right are the thumbnails of the notes in that category. There’s a main edit panel, and a note navigator with thumbnails of the current note at the right. If you hide all the other panels, the editing panel automatically resizes and rescales. We found that quite annoying – hiding the panels made the text jump from 11pt to 20pt, and switching into full-screen mode took it to 48pt. One of the things we like best about Notability on iOS is its…

£3.99 FROM Charles Games, attentat1942.com NEEDS macOS 10.15 or later The story was written by historians, giving it a grounded authenticity The premise of Attentat 1942 seems simple – you interview survivors of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia to discover information about your grandfather. The more you play, though, the more it reveals the complexity and ambiguities of trying to survive amidst such brutal repression. Why was your grandfather arrested by the Gestapo? How did your grandmother survive the war? These are surface questions, but they reveal deeper uncertainties – by agitating against Resistance activities, are you a collaborator or a survivor? Should you fight back even if it triggers violent retaliation against innocent people? The characters react in different ways; the past is complex, the truth hard to discern.…

Summer is finally upon us, and if a wet Spring has stopped you from making the most out of your garden, now is the time to get out there and put your green fingers to work. While gardening may seem like a very traditional pastime, it can really benefit from a touch of digital assistance. Whether you want to grow your own veg or nurture a field of beautiful flowers, there are plenty of apps to help you. We’ve rounded up six gardening apps that do everything from identifying plants and offering growing tips to planning your dream garden in minute detail. Best of all, they’re all completely free to get started. iScape Free (IAPs) NEEDS iOS 12.2 or later To have a thriving garden, you need to plan it…

AirTag, Apple’s device-tracking product that can clip to a keyring or be stashed in a bag, has been updated to better protect users against tracking efforts by bad actors. When AirTag was released at Apple’s Spring Loaded event in April, the company said it had designed privacy into the product. Yet concerns were raised that someone with bad intentions could conceal an AirTag in your belongings and use it to track you. This issue was compounded because AirTag would only buzz three days after being separated from its owner, making it much easier to hide one without it being noticed. Apple has now issued a software update that makes AirTag play a sound between eight and 24 hours after being separated, making it easier to detect an unwanted AirTag. In…

After rumours persisted for months, Apple released its first miniLED display at its Spring Loaded event in April 2021. This screen was outfitted into the iPad Pro, upgrading it from an LCD panel and giving it superb colours and contrast, making it the best display in any Apple tablet. According to South Korea’s ETNews, other iPads will also move on from LCD panels, with OLED the most likely replacement tech. The report from ETNews does not go into too many specifics, and instead says only that “some” iPad models will get OLED displays starting in 2022. While the report is a little vague, there are a few substantial reasons to suspect the iPad Air will be the first to make the leap to an OLED display. One is that reliable…

Whether you work with vector projects or digital painting and pixel editing, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2021 is a superb option. As we said in MF365, it is “an excellent choice for almost any graphic design work.” This issue, two lucky winners will each receive a one-year subscription to the suite. The Graphics Suite comes with several bundled apps, with one of the best being CorelDRAW. This vector drawing tool is perfect for all manner of graphic design tasks, from preparing marketing materials to creating detailed architectural blueprints to making beautiful artwork and illustrations. It is full of new features, including perspective and progressive image-editing tools, plus a more flexible design space. It even lets you collaborate and comment in real time on almost any device. If pixel painting is more…

See your music 1 In the Music app (or iTunes on older macOS versions), you can display a psychedelic light show which reacts to the music as it plays. Press +T to start and the +/ key to display the keyboard controls: M changes display mode, A and S add and subtract bits to or from the light show and I shows or hides the track info. If you want to keep it old-school, select Window > Visualiser Settings > Classic Visualiser and you can see the visualiser from the original iTunes. It’s the same menu option to go back to the modern visualiser, but this time just choose Visualiser. Want to see it on your smart TV? If it has AirPlay you can mirror your Mac display and see…

Banish hotel boredom 43 You can use your Apple TV with your hotel room TV, streaming TV and movies from your iPhone or iPad. Hotel Wi-Fi isn’t great, but if your iPhone or iPad has a strong 4G/5G connection, create a Personal Hotspot and connect to that. Don’t miss mumbles 44 Missed a bit of dialogue because of a mumbling actor or noisy kids? Hold down the Siri button on the Siri Remote and say “what did he/she say?” Siri will rewind a few seconds, turn the volume up and temporarily enable closed captioning to help you too. Learn anything anytime 45 In addition to education apps you can mirror over AirPlay from your iPhone, such as the free Kahn Academy or the useful Udemy, there are dedicated Apple TV…

IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU WILL LEARN How to grab usable text from anything YOU’LL NEED TextSniper (£9.99), macOS 10.15 or later TextSniper is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) app that scans what’s on your screen Have you ever encountered a web page that won’t let you copy text from it? A recipe that puts all the ingredients in the video but not on the actual page? An image you want to quote, or a fact-packed presentation slide that you need to copy from quickly? TextSniper can help with all of these things. It’s an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) app but instead of scanning printed documents it scans what’s on your screen – so you can grab a block of text from that digital magazine, that PDF, that video…

Starting two M1 Macs from the same disk Q When my M1 iMac arrives, can I start both it and my M1 MacBook Air from the same external drive? by EDDIEC HANDLER A Yes, once you’ve set your external drive to work with both Macs, and provided that they and the drive are running the same version of macOS. Format it as APFS and run the current Big Sur installer app from the App Store, or in Recovery Mode if you prefer. When you’re invited to create and migrate the existing user, agree, and authorise the drive for startup from that Mac. Using the Startup Disk pane, restart that Mac from your external drive and check that it’s properly set up, which will require you to sign it into your…

When it comes to spreadsheets and data-crunching applications, the Mac is still relatively poorly served. If you don’t want to use Microsoft’s behemoth Excel (an application that began life on the Mac a full two years before the first Windows version), and would rather avoid web-browser based tools like Google Sheets, then Numbers is by far the best option. Thankfully, Numbers is very good indeed when it comes to tasks like personal budgets, planners, invoicing and pretty much anything that doesn’t involve macros code or the kind of enterprise-level automation at which Excel, well, excels. Numbers’ great strength is in its ease of use and its templates. While basic, the templates are an excellent jumping off point for creating your own spreadsheets, customising them and, in the process, learning how…

IN PRINT ON iPAD & iPHONE ISSUE 366 JULY 2021 Say hello to the new iMac! Meet the all-new M1 iPad Pro PLUS: iPadOS 14 tips and tricks AirTag: Apple’s new tracker on test ISSUE 365 JUNE 2021 Big Sur secrets revealed! Our predictions for Apple kit Ultimate guide: make music on Mac How to improve AirPods audio ISSUE 364 MAY 2021 Go further with iCloud Improve your online security Top tips for Notification Centre Use a thumb drive with your iPad To order back issues of the print magazine, go to bit.ly/macformat_backissues or phone +44 (0)330 333 1113 and we’ll post them out to you. Download back issues onto your iOS device at any time and keep them forever in your personal library. bit.ly/macformatipad NEVER MISS AN ISSUE! SUBSCRIBE…

£249 FROM wearfauna.com FEATURES Glasses with 2-way sound system (USound MEMS microspeakers, electrodynamic woofers), 250Hz-20kHz, Bluetooth 5.0, IP52 dust and water resistance The audio is clear with impressive stereo separation When it comes to the latest audio gadget, the future’s so bright we gotta wear shades! Designer shades that belt out our musical needs, that is. We’re talking about Fauna’s designer audio glasses. We’ve seen ‘open audio’ gadgets before and felt the addition of speakers has either ruined the look of a pair of perfectly good glasses or, more importantly, not impressed in terms of audio ability. The Fauna glasses look and sound great. Fauna do both clear glasses and sunglasses, and the Fabula Crystal Brown sunglasses we reviewed are neat, light, and fashionable. We were expecting a weight penalty…

Free (IAPs) FROM Electronic Team, ftp-mac.com NEEDS macOS 10.12 or later Despite Finder’s advances, there are still Mac owners who feel it doesn’t go far enough. Commander One 3.0 is a versatile dual-pane solution with support for unlimited tabs, hotkey shortcuts, built-in Command Line bar, and FTP client that speeds up everyday tasks, and eliminates the need for third-party utilities. It also now directly accesses cloud storage services Google Drive, OneDrive, Mega, and pCloud, as well as Dropbox and Box. There’s now full support for Big Sur. The app remains Intel, although it installed and ran fine on our M1 MacBook Pro. Despite the claims of faster data transfer rates, we found the Apple silicon-enhanced Finder copied an 80GB Parallels VM to a USB 3-connected external SSD in just under…

DESKTOP SPEAKER Ruark MR1 £329.99 ruarkaudio.com Winner of MF357’s head to head, the MR1 speaker set looks and sounds the business. The dome tweeter and longthrow woofer can handle a variety of audio styles with aplomb. You get a good variety of connectivity options, and we love the chunky function/volume dial too. THUNDERBOLT 3 HUB Brydge Stone Pro Hub £229.99 brydge.co.uk If you’re looking for a hub that offers multiple connectivity and impressive power delivery, this could be the one for you. You can power up your MacBook, thanks to over 87W of power from the wall power supply, and you can also charge up to four extra USB devices at once (three USB-A and one USB-C). You also get a dual-purpose audio and mic mini jack port. PORTABLE SPEAKER…