Macworld - USA (2020-04)

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APRIL 2020

GAMING SPECIAL:

20

BEST GAMES

FOR MAC

REVEALED: TOP 10 APPLE ARCADE GAMES

CONTENTS CONTENTS

29

NEWS

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Apple to pay out $500m to iPhone customers affected by ‘Batterygate’ Apple’s 31 March event may bring a few surprises Apple says it will miss Q2 forecasted revenue due to the coronavirus

REVIEWS

11 1Blocker 3 19 JustStream 24 Sensei GAMING SPECIAL

29 20 best games for Mac 51 Top 10 Apple Arcade games

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51 FEATURES

What happens if (and when) Apple cancels WWDC 2020? Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X60 5G modem has an audience of one: Apple Apple News+ stumbled because it’s the service most outside Apple’s control What the AirPods Pro hint about Apple’s wearable AR philosophy 5 Safari alternatives worth trying

63 69 74 81 86

OPINION

Apple’s security and privacy is good, but could be even better 95

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NEWS

Apple to pay out $500m to iPhone customers affected by ‘Batterygate’ Apple has settled a class-action lawsuit over iPhone throttling, agreeing to pay $500m to consumers. David Price reports

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omentous news from the US, where Apple has reportedly agreed to pay between $310m and $500m to millions of customers affected by the so-called Batterygate iPhone problem. Class-action lawsuits in the US accused Apple of deliberately slowing down older models of iPhone with iOS updates, in order to encourage them to

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upgrade to newer versions; Apple countered by saying that it was throttling processor performance to preserve battery life, although it did not originally disclose that it was doing so. (In fairness, the company is far more transparent about this now, and allows you to turn off the euphemistically named ‘performance management’ feature.)

How will this affect you? If you’re from the US and have an affected iPhone, you stand to gain a small amount of money, even if you haven’t previously participated or even expressed any interest in the lawsuits. Affected models are the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE devices (assuming they are running iOS 10.2.1 or later) and the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (running iOS 11.2 or later). In all cases, you need to have run those iOS versions before 21 December 2017 to qualify. The payout is estimated to be $25 per device. It may be a little more or less, depending on how many people put their hands up - there’s a maximum of $500m, remember. You can’t apply for the payout yet, however, because the settlement hasn’t been approved. But contacting the two legal firms representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuits – Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer and Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy – is probably the best starting point. If you’re an iPhone owner in any other part of the world, you’re unfortunately not eligible for the payout, although you may benefit indirectly from the way this influences Apple’s behaviour in the future. April 2020 • Macworld 5

NEWS

Apple’s 31 March event may bring a few surprises We might see over-ear AirPods, Apple TV refresh and an iPod touch. Michael Simon reports

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hile last year’s annual spring Apple event was entirely devoted to services, this year’s show appears to be shaping up to bring a torrent of new hardware. We already knew about the new budget successor to the iPhone SE (which may be called the iPhone 9) and an iPad Pro refresh, but there have been a flurry of rumours that suggest Apple has much more hiding up its sleeve.

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There’s no denying that the AirPods and AirPods Pro are runaway hits, so it only makes sense that Apple would want to build on their success. We’ve heard rumours for a while that Apple is working on a pair of noise-cancelling over-ear headphones, but a cryptic Target listing spotted by Target employees suggests they might be on the way sooner than later. As reported by John Prosser on Twitter, three new SKUs have popped up in US retailer Target’s internal product database for identical Apple AirPods (X Generation), with a price tag of $399. That price point indicates that these are very high-end cans, on par with the Beats Studio 3 (£299), Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 (£399), and Sony’s WH-1000XM3 (£329) and geared toward audiophiles. Rumours have suggested that they will have noise-cancelling, easy setup, and Siri support, as presumably a wireless charging case as well. The same Target database also lists Apple TV Gen X, the first time we’ve heard that a new streaming box could be on the way. The conspicuous lack of rumours suggests that it’s a mere refresh of the existing line, as does the $179 price, but the Apple TV is definitely overdue for a speed bump. We’d love it if this brought remote-free Siri capabilities, but we’re not holding our breath. Oddly enough, Target also lists a new iPod Touch X Generation as well at $399. That’s the current price for the 256GB iPod Touch, and quite frankly we’d be very surprised to see a new model make April 2020 • Macworld 7

NEWS

its way onto shelves so soon after the last refresh, which arrived in May 2019. Instead, we’re thinking that this is a bit of misdirection on Apple’s part and a placeholder for the iPhone 9 or SE 2. Think about it: iPhone 9, iPhone Gen X, iPhone SE Gen X would all raise some serious suspicion, but a new iPod touch not so much. Also on the docket may be an iPad Pro with an iPhone 11-style camera. A leak tweeted out by Ben Geskin shows a square camera array on an iPad Pro case, which suggests Apple’s tablet could finally be picking up a serious camera. Rumour has it that the extra lenses won’t just be for taking pictures, however. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously reported that the iPad Pro would be gaining a time-of-flight camera for advanced AR capabilities that would let users take 3D scans of real-world objects and edit them with the Apple Pencil. It’s unclear whether Apple would be releasing its own CAD software or partnering with Sharpr 3D or some other third-party developer. It’s notable that Adobe does not yet make a version of its Dimension 3D rendering app for the iPad either. We’ll have all the details in next month’s issue. And start saving up your pennies too, because it’s looking like there’s going to be a lot to buy.

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Apple says it will miss Q2 forecasted revenue due to the coronavirus Supply and store closures in China have affected sales. Roman Loyola reports

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pple has announced that it miss its forecasted revenue guidance for the second fiscal quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus epidemic. The company had projected revenue for the quarter April 2020 • Macworld 9

NEWS

between $63 and $67 billion, and gross margin between 38 and 39 percent. Apple did not provide revised Q2 earnings estimates. In a released statement, Apple stated that it is, “experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated. As a result, we do not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter due to two main factors.” In a statement, Apple said it expected the iPhone supply constraint to be temporary. Demand for Apple products in China has been affected as well, with Apple stores closed for a duration, and then reopening at a reduced schedule. “Outside of China, customer demand across our product and service categories has been strong to date and in line with our expectations,” Apple said in the statement. In a note to employees obtained by Bloomberg News, CEO Tim Cook echoes the company’s statement and assured worker that “Our first priority – now and always – is the health and safety of our employees, supply chain partners, customers, and the communities in which we operate.” Apple closed its Q1 2020 with a record $91.8 billion in revenue, with iPhone sales up 7 percent over the previous holiday quarter. Its second quarter closes 30 March, with results likely due in early April.

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1Blocker 3 RATING:

Price: Free (in-app purchases) from fave.co/2PMobm7

A

pple introduced content-blocking Safari extensions in 2015 for iOS and 2016 for macOS, offering third-party developers a way to bring rule-based blocking without requiring users to give up privacy. Extension creators can produce and update unwanted lists of URLs, structural page elements, and a few other kinds of items that are unwanted or outright malicious. These lists are loaded into Safari, which handles blocking. User behaviour isn’t uploaded – it’s a one-way street. April 2020 • Macworld 11

REVIEW

1Blocker was one of the first to enter this market, producing an app that paired with extensions for flexible control. 1Blocker 3 is an overhaul of the macOS app, intended to provide a simpler interface for users who don’t want to dig into rules and to meet new extension requirements set by Apple for the latest release of Safari. The result is a tool that you can essentially set and forget. However, in this initial release, you can’t dig beneath the surface to tweak further, as was possible in the previous version. The company promises more fine-grained control in future updates, including a page-based selector for marking items to block, such as boxes that

The standalone 1Blocker app lets you choose which categories of rules to apply, but is more limited in choosing among rules in each category

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appear and hide content. This feature appeared in earlier releases. Content-blocking tools can be contentious if their entire goal is to prevent sites from receiving revenue from ads shown to visitors. 1Blocker threads that needle by offering switches and customization that let users still see ads they want or load everything at sites they trust while blocking much that’s unneeded, invasive of privacy, or actively risky.

A new extensions approach Safari once had a wide-ranging architecture for extensions, and it was an environment where a number of privacy tools thrived. Some of them focused on blocking ads, while others had a broader interest in preventing a range of behaviour. But in Apple’s ongoing effort to limit the surface in which malware can affect users, it opted to shift extensions entirely to the Mac App Store and limit their functionality. (Some argue Apple has other motives, but the company continues to invest in the development of built-in Safari anti-tracking features.) However, 1Blocker didn’t require these extra features. Version 3 upgrades its code, overhauls its interface, and shifts it into a Mac App Store install. But it’s mostly the same app, though it’s easier to use in nearly every respect. Because 1Blocker relies on the content-blocking rules allowed in Safari, its only real limitation is how many rules Apple allows at once – 50,000 April 2020 • Macworld 13

REVIEW

Click the 1Blocker button to see basic information and change settings, such as whitelisting the site to bypass all rules

per extension. To work around this, 1Blocker has split its current 110,000-plus ruleset into multiple extensions, each focused on a specific category, such as ad trackers, ‘annoyances’ (cookie usage pop-up notices), and adult sites. These are set via Safari > Preferences > Extensions. For each extension type, you need to enable the extension in Safari and separately flip a switch in 1Blocker. Two categories that you might consider not enabling include comment loading and ‘social widgets’. Many sites rely on third-party comment systems, like Disqus. If you want to use commenting, then you’ll need to either keep this category turned off or use on/off switches for individual rules in the Block Comments ruleset to enable just the settings you need. Social widget blocking prevents buttons and code loading on a site you visit that’s imported 14 Macworld • April 2020

The drop-down 1Blocker button reveals which items were blocked on a given page and can optionally show the count as a badge

from Facebook, Twitter, and many other sites. If you use social sharing routinely, leaving this category disabled makes sense, but many people prefer to not trust what information leaks about their behaviour to third-party networks. (Some sites build social sharing in such a way that they don’t pass your details along, and would be unaffected.) 1Blocker labels many of its individual rules with the name of the site or service and offers a search option to find them. But it’s cumbersome to use, because the app doesn’t group these rules into something like subcategories. Twitter, for instance, has 1,050 rules in the Block Widgets category, and each rule has to be flipped off one at a time. In the version tested, disabling a rule caused the search selection to disappear showing all rules in the category. It would be a thankless and unappetizing task to proceed. April 2020 • Macworld 15

REVIEW

Advanced rules can be set, though it requires a fairly substantial understanding of HTML and related properties

Each rule can block a URL pattern, cookies sent when loading a given URL pattern, and the display of a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) element, where CSS is used for overlay boxes and similar page elements. When blocking URLs, the rule can also specify whether everything from that location is blocked or a particular kind of item is blocked, like an image or a script. You can click the Custom button in the 1Blocker app in its upper-left corner, choose a category, then click the +New Rule button in the lower-right corner to add rules appropriate for that category. This includes whitelisting, site URLs, cookies, and CSS elements. You can choose to force a site to only load via a secure https URL. Whitelisting is a powerful tool to trust a site fully. It bypasses any rule choices you’ve made, except forcing all-https requests. 16 Macworld • April 2020

When you visit a site, the 1Blocker menu bar button provides useful feedback. You can opt to display a badge that notes how many items were blocked. Click the button and click Blocked Resources, and you can examine which URLs were blocked. Unfortunately, probably due to Apple’s rules about app interaction with extensions, the 1Blocker labels for rules don’t appear in that list, making it less useful in knowing anything but the category of item a URL appears in. The button lets you whitelist sites and set https-only page requests, too. When you visit a whitelisted site, a red heart appears as a badge on the 1Blocker button.

Free and paid tiers of 1Blocker 1Blocker has also overhauled how it charges with its move into the Mac App Store. In this new release, it offers a free version that allows turning on a single category at a time, whitelisting sites, and rule updates, though the updates are less frequent than the paid release. The paid subscription version lets you enable any and all categories, provides twice-weekly rule updates that are automatically downloaded, and offers access to advanced customization features. This includes the future return of the graphical hide elements options. Subscriptions are charged at £2.99 a month, £14.99 a year (with a 14-day free trial), or £37.99 for lifetime use. At this writing, the company has an introductory sales promotion that drops April 2020 • Macworld 17

REVIEW

yearly pricing to £9.99 and lifetime use to £31.99. Existing owners of previous releases of 1Blocker aren’t required to pay for an upgrade, however. They receive access to all new features at no cost except frequent rule updates. That’s an additional £1.99 a month, £4.99 a year, or £12.99 for a permanent licence. A single subscription works across all iOS and macOS devices connected to a single iCloud account.

Verdict 1Blocker provides a powerful way to carve out your web browsing experience in Safari 13 while still working within Apple’s new constraints. The updated version is missing some features and given its new subscription model, should be a bigger step up from previous releases. Its extension lists, simplicity, and effectiveness mean that it’s a worthwhile purchase and I recommend it. For those who want more sophistication, the app is intended to grow to fit their needs, but only time will show if the developers meet that expectation along with their new revenue model. Glenn Fleishman

18 Macworld • April 2020

JustStream RATING:

Price: Free (in-app purchases) from fave.co/2Tr1V3N

A

irPlay 2 provides Apple device owners more ways to stream favourite music, movies, TV shows, and home videos around the house. But for anyone without a HomePod, Apple TV, or other compatible hardware, the experience is actually pretty limited. JustStream is a macOS menu bar app for wirelessly streaming from a Mac to compatible AirPlay or Chromecast devices, including LG, Roku, Samsung, and Sony televisions. This is done two different ways: Mirroring, which essentially live April 2020 • Macworld 19

REVIEW

streams your desktop; or streaming, where one or more media files can be queued up for playback. Running entirely from the menu bar, JustStream automatically detects compatible devices on your local network capable of receiving via AirPlay or Chromecast. Select a target device from the pull-down menu at the bottom of the window – a button that’s hard to see with if you have dark mode enabled – and then click Start Streaming. After a few moments of buffering, your desktop appears on the selected screen. By default, sound is disabled while mirroring, but can be enabled by installing an audio driver and restarting your Mac. Performance isn’t nearly as fluid as direct AirPlay – there was a lag of about five seconds using a mid-2015 iMac Retina 5K – but

JustStream can mirror your Mac desktop to almost any screen, including Chromcastcompatible televisions

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JustStream has the advantage of mirroring the desktop at your current screen resolution rather than simply adapting to the target display. Unlike AirPlay, there are a few mirroring options available. The cursor and mouse clicks can be disabled, while output resolution can be manually adjusted to 1080p or 720p HD.

Streaming video A more compelling JustStream feature is the ability to wirelessly stream video files to another display. This is great for people like me who have a home office at one end of the house and a big, beautiful 75in television in the living room, making wired connectivity less practical. With JustStream, delivering video and audio to any screen in the house is a snap, even with files in non-native formats like AVI or MKV. That’s because the app does all the heavy lifting by transcoding in real time when needed,

The real convenience of JustStream comes in streaming one or more video files to a TV, even if they’re not native Mac formats

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REVIEW

complete with optional subtitles where available in your chosen font, colour and size. You can also import subtitles, as well as play embedded or external audio tracks in sync with the video. Naturally, real-time transcoding tends to be quite processor intensive. While QuickTime-compatible videos (including MP4) start playing immediately with little CPU impact, non-native formats require buffering (referred to as ‘presegmenting media for deployment’), which is entirely dependent upon file size, resolution, and your Mac. A 90-minute,

Transcoding can be adjusted to stream non-native videos in original quality or a wide range of resolutions and bit rates

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standard-definition AVI movie began streaming in under 20 seconds, while a 4K MKV of similar length required several minutes of preparation before playback commenced, including extra time to process embedded subtitles, which can be bypassed when not needed. To be fair, JustStream has a maximum output resolution of 1080p HD, so anything higher is redundant anyway. Finally, while the app is free to download, you’ll be interrupted every 40 minutes unless you decide to purchase a licence code.

Verdict Mirroring offers few advantages over built-in AirPlay, but JustStream redeems itself when it comes to streaming video files to any screen in the house. J.R. Bookwalter

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REVIEW

Sensei RATING:

Price: Free (in-app purchases) from fave.co/332ZKGB

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rior to the arrival of Mac OS X in 2001, software for keeping tabs on CPU usage, managing extensions or even doubling available virtual RAM allowed power users to monitor or tweak system performance. While such hacks are largely unnecessary on modern Macs, a few apps still carry a torch for this bygone era. Mac optimization utility Sensei is the latest, probing deeper than the already comprehensive real-time data of competitor iStat Menus, while

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Sensei is a feast for the visual senses, packing a ton of hardware data inside an attractive, well-organized user interface

also supplying a generous toolbox of disk cleaning skills. The result is an app that manages to pack a ton of information into a gorgeous, well-organized user interface. The main window provides an overview of your Mac hardware, with model-specific details including serial number, manufacture date and identifier across the top. Underneath, sections are grouped by RAM, processor, graphics, and storage; MacBooks also display battery gauge, health, and time remaining. A left-hand sidebar provides one-click access to four built-in Utilities (Optimize, April 2020 • Macworld 25

REVIEW

Thunderbolt storage devices cause Sensei to behave erratically, displaying disk capacity gauges for all connected volumes

Uninstaller, Clean, Trim), along with shortcuts to display more detailed Hardware particulars (Storage, Graphics, Battery, Cooling). Although the Dashboard view is a sight for sore eyes, Thunderbolt-attached Drobo and RAID storage devices made Sensei behave schizophrenically. On the iMac and MacBook Air used for testing, the app rarely displayed every local volume, and even when it did, capacity gauges were empty across the board. This bug extends to the Storage module under Sensei’s Hardware 26 Macworld • April 2020

sidebar, where the Benchmark tool bizarrely prompted us to manually select a writeable volume – despite already having permission – then erratically displayed real-time read/write results.

Clean and optimize Running Sensei with Thunderbolt drives connected also kicked the fans into high gear. If the extra system noise wasn’t confirmation enough, a quick peek at the app’s Cooling module provided detailed analysis as on-board thermal sensors ramped up. On the plus side, Sensei includes Trim Enabler, previously sold as a standalone utility. This optional feature optimizes and maintains internal SSD performance: turn it on, restart and the Apple-certified driver takes care of the rest. Also included is a comprehensive, three-pronged assault for dealing with accumulated disk clutter. The Optimize utility makes short work of login items and launch agents, while the Uninstaller utility purges installed apps in tandem with their related system files. The Clean utility frees space consumed by larger files and old system cruft. While it’s a shame there are no scheduling options, the available disk cleaning tools are otherwise on par with the popular CleanMyMac X. Although free to download, Sensei requires a one-time purchase of $59 (around £51) or annual subscription ($29, around £25, per year) to use beyond a 14-day trial period. The price is quite reasonable, especially since the licence covers up to three computers, but the app only runs on April 2020 • Macworld 27

REVIEW

Uninstalling old or incompatible apps is a snap and Sensei removes support, preference, and other related files at the same time

macOS Catalina 10.15 or higher – an unfortunate limitation for households with older hardware.

Verdict Sensei provides one of the most eye-pleasing ways to view nearly all the hardware activity taking place inside your Mac along with the tools to keep your system drive clean, but an unfortunate incompatibility with Thunderbolt-connected storage devices make it less useful than it should be. J.R. Bookwalter 28 Macworld • April 2020

20 best games for Mac The Mac may not get the biggest blockbusters, but you can play many of the best indie hits on a Mac. Leif Johnson reports

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f there’s one good thing about the relative scarcity of games on the Mac, it’s that we often get the best games when we do get them. Sure, you’ll find a few stinkers, but the fact remains that many developers don’t even consider porting their creations – and they’re almost always ports – over to Apple’s desktop system unless they think they have a chance of surviving between brushed aluminium and a Retina display. In fact, there are enough quality games on Mac that I April 2020 • Macworld 29

GAMING SPECIAL

could easily rattle out a list with 30 more, but nobody has time for that. For our money (and yours), these are the best. A couple of quick notes: first, most links here go to Steam, but you can find many of the same titles on the Mac App Store. You’ll almost certainly save money on Steam, though, especially since some games are on sale right now. Secondly, a couple or these games haven’t been updated for 64-bit support in macOS Catalina yet, so for now you can only play them on Mojave or earlier. Hopefully the developers will fix that soon, but we advise checking for the warning on the Steam landing page before buying a game.

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1. Portal Price: £7.19 from fave.co/2x7HXCb Portal 2 may be the perfect game. It’s a puzzler at heart, but it injects those puzzles – these involve the best placement of the portals, which you create with a gun – into a masterful concoction of science fiction, memorable characters and catchy song. It’s both memorable and challenging, and those challenges are designed in such a way that you feel triumphant when you finish. It’s also darkly relevant these days, centred as it is on a struggle with a malevolent AI whose passion for her work goes to inhuman extremes. Also a standout: the voice acting of J.K. Simmons as the facility’s founder. April 2020 • Macworld 31

GAMING SPECIAL

2. Divinity: Original Sin 2 Price: £29.99 from fave.co/39v40kL If you only have time for one computer roleplaying game, then make it Divinity: Original Sin 2. There’s the story, which manages to be moving and laughout-loud funny in equal measure. Then there’s the emphasis on choice, which affects everything from the characters you play or the instrument that dominates the soundtrack. And that’s not even mentioning all the other features, such as the co-op mode, PVP or the combat system that encourages environmental interaction. This is one of the best games of all time, and we’re fortunate to have it on the Mac. 32 Macworld • April 2020

3. Undertale Price: £6.99 from fave.co/2TthnfC This indie hit attracted thousands of players with its unique blend of humour, lore and gameplay. Its setting comes off as standard fantasy fare, as you’re a human making your way out of an underworld where all the monsters were sealed away following a bitter war with the humans. Randomly spawning beasties seek to thwart your progress, and you’ll have to work your way past a series of puzzles. And, should you choose, you can even chat your way out of trouble rather than slaying monsters. Note: At the time of writing, Undertale isn’t supported in macOS Catalina. April 2020 • Macworld 33

GAMING SPECIAL

4. BioShock Infinite Price: £19.99 from fave.co/2vHzyFa The first BioShock (2007) was groundbreaking, but this sequel breaks away from the ground entirely and takes us to a floating city founded on the worst excesses of American exceptionalism. Along the way, you’ll meet Elizabeth, who remains one of the most intriguing AI companions ever seen in a game. It’s a darn good shooter, too, but one of the rare ones that’ll also leave you asking uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality and this country once the smoke clears. Its messages remain relevant today. Note: At the time of writing, Undertale isn’t supported in macOS Catalina. 34 Macworld • April 2020

5. Stardew Valley Price: £10.99 from fave.co/2TMks9q Stardew Valley is a game about farming (if you want it to be), but it’s also a game about chatting and possibly dating some of the locals in the sleepy little town you’ve chosen to call home. It’s a game about rival factions and small-town politics. It can also be a game about exploring a mysterious cave if you wish, but first and foremost it’s a relaxing and emotionally rewarding game about the ups and downs of life. Stardew Valley may look like a cousin of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but in practice few games veer so far from fantasy as to capture the quiet delights or tragedies of reality. April 2020 • Macworld 35

GAMING SPECIAL

6. Hollow Knight Price: £10.99 from fave.co/39vvg2j The so-called ‘Metroidvania’ genre has felt hollow for years now, but Hollow Knight fills that void so well that we should probably rename the genre in honour of it. You’ll still do a ton of 2D jumping and slashing and revisiting old areas once you gain new abilities. Hollow Knight absolutely nails these familiar elements, though, to the point that I’m still not tired of jumping and slashing almost 20 hours in. It’s also a game with heart. Our hero is a beetle-sized battler exploring an insect realm called the Hallownest. It’ll make you think games with a lot of bugs aren’t so bad after all. 36 Macworld • April 2020

7. The Return of the Obra Dinn Price: £15.49 from fave.co/2vMpjiS When a long lost trade ship is found with nothing left on board but a few skeletons in a bizarro version of 1807, you have to piece together what happened by using your magical stopwatch to see the few seconds prior to the death of each passenger and crewman. To avoid spoilers, let’s just say it gets significantly weirder than Mutiny on the Bounty. If you enjoy solving mysteries, it doesn’t get much better than this. And in a welcome nod to Mac gaming, you can adjust the already retro graphics so they look as though you’re playing on a 1980s Macintosh. April 2020 • Macworld 37

GAMING SPECIAL

8. Slay the Spire Price: £19.49 from fave.co/3cBcCrX If you’ve wanted to understand the appeal of deck-building games but found yourself perplexed by the abstractions of Hearthstone or Gwent, check out Slay the Spire. This roguelike appeals to the action-oriented among us as it casts you in the role of one of three heroes battling their way up a tower. The top part of the screen resembles a turn-based RPG in the vein of old-school Final Fantasy, but you attack by drawing cards from your deck along the bottom. Victories over bosses award you with the choice of a new card, and you can buy other cards from merchants. Just don’t expect to it be easy. 38 Macworld • April 2020

9. Batman: Arkham City Price: £14.99 from fave.co/2x8DMpI Batman: Arkham City is basically the DC Universe version of the 1981 flick Escape from New York: the powers that be have given up on a huge chunk of Gotham City and turned it into a high-security prison for the nastiest crooks. You can glide and grapple over the roofs of Gotham for the first time in an Arkham game here, and so Arkham City captures the fantasy of being the Dark Knight better than any game before it. Nor is its appeal limited to action. Arkham City is almost a decade old now, but there’s rarely been a better Batman tale told in games, film or print. April 2020 • Macworld 39

GAMING SPECIAL

10. Firewatch Price: £19.99 from fave.co/2VQE1QQ In this quiet indie game, you’re a ranger in a remote forest, keeping an eye out for potential wildfires. You spend a lot of time looking for children who left their junk littered around a scenic swimming hole, and all the while chatting (and sort of flirting) with another ranger in a distant tower. Creepy shenanigans are indeed afoot, but Firewatch is more remarkable for its sense of place and characterization, to say nothing about its gorgeous settings and artwork that straddle the line between realism and impressionism.

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11. Baba Is You Price: £11.39 from fave.co/303dGhv This highly unique puzzler is a little hard to explain, so I’ll use the first puzzle to show you around. The rules are always right there in the floor, with each word represented by a movable tile. In this case they’re ‘Flag Is Win, Wall Is Stop and Rock Is Push’. To win this match, you need to move your avatar over the flag because ‘Flag Is Win’. Then it starts getting crazy. Sometimes you’ll start with a puzzle where ‘You Is Flag’, so you’ll have to rearrange the tiles so ‘Baba Is Win’. And so forth, even with new phrases like ‘Lava Is Hot’. It’s a simple concept that requires some complex thinking. April 2020 • Macworld 41

GAMING SPECIAL

12. The Elder Scrolls Online Price: £14.99 from fave.co/2TsOpfR We may not have The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim on Mac, but we have The Elder Scrolls Online. It’s a sprawling MMORPG that’s set in Skyrim’s same universe and features many of the same locations – yes, including Skyrim – and it’s remarkable among modern MMORPGs for its freedom. If you have the proper expansion, you can hop into brand-new content with everyone else right from the start. It’s respectful of your time, too, as far as MMOs go, as it lets you drop in and out at will. ESO also requires no subscription past the initial purchase, and you can simply enjoy the entertaining quests. 42 Macworld • April 2020

13. Life Is Strange Price: £17.89 from fave.co/3czzGqY Life is certainly strange even in the most mundane situations, but that statement especially rings true when you’re a teenager with superpowers, as you are here. The key power in play here is the ability to rewind time, and Life is Strange proves that having the ability to go back and right past wrongs doesn’t always result in a happy ending. In fact, it sometimes makes things worse. But not to worry: it’s possible for things to work out for the best as well. Do you dare risk everything for a second chance? That’s the question Life is Strange constantly asks. April 2020 • Macworld 43

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14. Rocket League Price: £14.99 from fave.co/39ve0KP It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Rocket League so irresistible: Is it the speedy matches, awarding thrills to the victors and quick chances for redemption for the losers? Is it the colourful cars themselves, which range from Mario-themed roadsters to the Batmobile? Or is it the gameplay itself, which sends your car careening through the air and up walls to better bump a ball into a distant goal? I’m still not sure. Join me as I play a few dozen more rounds to figure it out.

44 Macworld • April 2020

15. Civilization VI Price: £54.99 from fave.co/39ylAEo “One more turn,” as the Civilization diehards like to say, and now we have one more game in this beloved strategy series that stretches back for decades. Civilization VI stands out for providing a smoother path to entry for newcomers and a host of new concepts. Some work better than others, no doubt, it’s fun to try out each in the shoes of some of the most celebrated nations and figures of history. You’ll design cities, placing key district next to each other on a gridded play area resembling a board game. You’ll raise armies. And if you do well, you’ll bend other civilizations to your will. April 2020 • Macworld 45

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16. Tomb Raider (2013) Price: £28.99 from fave.co/2TriRqM Lara Croft isn’t as recognizable as Mario in the pantheon of gaming greats, but she comes pretty close. In the past, though, she had little in the way of personality. Tomb Raider remedied that by presenting us with a harrowing origin story where Lara starts out both vulnerable and human, and over the course of several bloody hours we see how she morphs from a humble scholar into the strongwilled fighter we know today. Filled with beautiful locations and elements of survival games (though without the drudgery), it’s one of the more successful reboots in gaming memory. 46 Macworld • April 2020

17. Kerbal Space Program Price: £29.99 from fave.co/3axujqn Even if you think you ‘get’ how difficult space travel is, there’s a good chance you’ve never been hammered by its complexities so forcefully as you’ll be in Kerbal Space Program. Miraculously, this quirky simulation manages to be fun, rewarding, and occasionally hilarious. Your mission? To get the little green kernels to the moon and beyond using real-world physics (more or less), and these concepts are presented in such a way that you’ll likely learn the basic ideas behind space flight here far more clearly than you will from a book. It’s a rare example of educational games being done right. April 2020 • Macworld 47

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18. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Price: Free from fave.co/2xjbZDn StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty takes place in space as well, but it takes a – shall we say – slightly less authentic approach to space travel and exploration. (For now, anyway.) It’s still one of the best real-time strategy games on any system, and the South Koreans loved it so much that it practically defined a generation at its height. Part of  its appeal lies in its memorable cast of characters, no doubt, but the bulk of its reputation rests on the satisfying differences between the Terran, Protoss and Zerg factions, as well as the satisfying juggle of multiple priorities. 48 Macworld • April 2020

19. Diablo III Price: £16.99 from fave.co/2Ivj2Lb Diablo III is an action RPG about kicking butt and collecting loot, and often as quickly as possible. Oh, and there’s a whole bit about going into hell and having a strongly worded conversation with the biggest bad guy himself. Diablo III had a bit of a rough start thanks to a real-money auction house that kind of defeated the whole appeal of the core experience, but Blizzard at last excised that particular blight and replaced it with better classes, a free-form exploration mode, and a phenomenal expansion. It’s now a devilish bit of fun.

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20. Cuphead Price: £14.99 from fave.co/2TtQ8BN I feel uncomfortable including Cuphead in this list because it’s stupidly hard. Even if you think you’re a skilled player, you probably feel like poor Wile E. Coyote at the mercy of the Road Runner after only a couple of hours. You can play it in co-op if you wish, but I wouldn’t expect that to make it much easier. Consider yourself warned. If you can stomach that, though, you’ll be rewarded with some of the most creative boss battles ever seen in a 2D platform. Cuphead is also a triumph of artistic vision: no other game so perfectly makes you feel as though you’re playing in a 1920s Fleischer Studios cartoon. 50 Macworld • April 2020

Top 10 Apple Arcade games In a service filled with great titles, these are the games you should try out first. Leif Johnson reports

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ou’ll find dozens and dozens of games in Apple Arcade, and – wonder of wonders – almost none are bad. Some games are better than others, though, so here’s a list of the 10 games you should start with. These games weren’t necessarily made with the biggest budgets or by the biggest studios, but they’re games that are endlessly replayable and stick in your head.

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1. What The Golf? What the Golf? is hilarious, weird, mildly challenging and stupid. It’s always about golf, but you can get idea of the zany directions in which it takes that foundation in by playing one of the first levels. You’ll find a house on a golf course, and so you pull back your finger to set the angle and force for the ball and, well, that’s when you find out that it’s the house that’s moving. And then you’ll keep putting this ranch house around the screen until it tumbles over the hole, prompting the screen to erupt into big, orange letters that scream, ‘HOME IN ONE’. There are hours of this, and somehow it gets even crazier without losing much momentum. 52 Macworld • April 2020

2. Sayonara Wild Hearts Sayonara Wild Hearts is a psychedelic, musicdriven fever dream. It’s technically a rhythm game, but it says sayonara to that game’s abstractions in favour of a trippy story about a woman saving the world on her motorcycle. She flies through crevasses, collects hearts, carefully times jumps and spatters bullets into towering robot dogs while catchy pop songs thump in the background. Some levels are better than others, and the frequent change in perspective occasionally makes it hard to reorient yourself the first time you play a level. But this is every bit the ‘art house’ type of game Apple Arcade should champion and have more of. April 2020 • Macworld 53

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3. Grindstone Grindstone is a variation on the endless Bejeweled and Candy Crush Saga clones on the regular App Store. So why is it on this list? Because it’s just so fun. It’s deliciously gory, too (in a cartoony way). Grindstone puts you in the boots of a blue-skinned berserker who cuts a path through beasts of the same type with his sword. You’ll decide which path he should take before each turn, press Go and then watch as all the monsters explode as his sword storms through them. It’s fun, it’s challenging and it’s a reminder that these types of games don’t need artificial limitations placed on them in order to retain their appeal. 54 Macworld • April 2020

4. Manifold Garden Designed by artist William Chyr, Manifold Garden is mainly a game about dropping boxes onto switches in order to open doors – with the twist that you can only pick up the boxes while they’re on the floor. It gets much, much crazier. If you flip while on a staircase, you might find yourself sliding off the building’s ‘wall’ and dropping into infinity – until, that is, you land on an identical structure far below. It’s a smart way of making players regard the world differently in order to look for solutions, although I never fully lost the resulting sense of vertigo while playing. I’d say that’s to Manifold Garden’s credit.

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5. Sneaky Sasquatch You’re Bigfoot, basically, and you spend your days ransacking campsites for food to sell to a snoozy bear. But you can also masquerade as a human, go fishing, steal golf carts (and play golf), and buy new toys and tools from an enterprising raccoon for other adventures. You’ll also spend a lot of time running from the park ranger – or at least you will if you don’t learn to tiptoe with your massive feet. I’ve heard Sneaky Sasquatch described as a “wholesome Grand Theft Auto”, and I think that’s a good way to put it. There’s a lot of silly fun awaiting you here, and I found myself wishing for more when it was done. 56 Macworld • April 2020

6. Inmost In some still images, Inmost’s pixel art evokes happy 1980s Nintendo games. In action, though, it doesn’t take long to realize you’ll find few smiles here. Seconds in, Inmost warns you that you might find it “emotionally upsetting”. It’s both frightful and moving. It’s also more than a little reminiscent of indie darling Limbo, but Inmost carves out an identity for itself with three playable characters, hidden object hunts, and a story you don’t have to guess at. For that matter, I see its gloom as a welcome break from the infectious, colourful cheer of so much of the rest of Apple Arcade.

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7. Bleak Sword It may look like the love spawn of early 1980s Nintendo and Atari, but Bleak Sword has become my most-played Apple Arcade game. You’re a stick-figure swordsman, and each round you fight off zombies, bats, spiders and other beasts for as many levels as you can. Using a stamina bar, you attack, dodge, parry and counterattack, and you’ll win items as you level that help you survive the most difficult levels. You’ll have to be careful, too. In a Dark Souls-inspired twist, you’ll have one chance to beat a level you died in before you lose the experience and gear you picked up. Be sure to soak in that awesome soundtrack, too. 58 Macworld • April 2020

8. Assemble With Care Assemble with Care is a rare delight: it’s about a young woman named Maria who travels the world fixing things. Superficially, she fixes everything from faulty cassette players to shattered mantlepiece statues, but as the story unfolds, it’s clear she’s repairing broken relationships as well. It’s not a hard game: some of the ‘fixing’ basically amounts to replacing some expired batteries. With a runtime of around two hours, it’s not long, but you’ll think about it more than any of the other story-driven games on Apple Arcade.

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9. Pilgrims Pilgrims is at once a point-and-click adventure and a card game, with a story that’s told largely through music and pictures in thought bubbles rather than with words. You ‘play’ the moustachioed protagonist as a card to get him to show up in the scenes you travel to on the overworld map, and you click on objects like acorns and pots to add them as cards to your deck. Pilgrims is all about finding the right situations in which to use these items. Developer Amanita Design handles this beautifully – so well that you’ll likely be sad when this breezy tale about helping other people finally runs out of cards.

60 Macworld • April 2020

10. Cat Quest II Apple Arcade is a family-friendly gaming service, and that why it’s hardly surprising that one of its best fantasy RPGs is a corny adventure that takes place in a kingdom of cats. Let’s get this out of the way now: if your fur bristles at puns about how cats are being ‘purrsecuted’, then you might want to steer clear of Cat Quest II. The puns get far, far worse. If you’re cool with it, though, you’ll grow to love the gameplay that hinges on switching between the dog and cat under your control. It’s a useful and rewarding setup. It’s a purrfect blend of charm and challenge.

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3 PRODUCTS THAT NEED APPLE’S ATTENTION IN 2020

MARCH 2020

MUST-HAVE PHOTO-EDITING

SOFTWARE FOR MAC

GIVE YOUR SNAPS A POLISH WITH THESE APPS

What happens if (and when) Apple cancels WWDC 2020? How does Apple communicate with its developers if it cancels its developer conference? Jason Snell reports

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acebook, Microsoft and Google have now cancelled major conferences in the face of the spread of the coronavirus. Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, usually takes place in early June – and all eyes will now turn to Apple to see how it will respond. April 2020 • Macworld 63

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Apple has announced WWDC as late as midApril in past years, so the company has some time to watch the spread of the virus and reach a final decision. But it’s becoming clear that we’re entering a period where international travel and large groups of people in small spaces is not advisable. The worldwide spread of a new virus isn’t generally something that burns out in a couple of months, which is why it’s likely that Apple is going to have to find an alternative from an enormous party with thousands of developers (and many key Apple employees) in San Jose. So if WWDC as we know it is unlikely to occur, what happens next?

Why the cancellations matter Let’s lead with the obvious: I’m not a doctor or an epidemiologist. But it’s clear that this virus is spreading around the world rapidly. While media analyst Ben Thompson has suggested that the virus might not be as fatal as was originally feared, it is highly transmissible and it tends to land an awful lot of people in the hospital with serious symptoms. As a result, perhaps the best reason to cancel conferences is not to stop the spread of the virus, but to slow its spread, because our existing health infrastructure will be under intense pressure and if a huge spike of patients happens, the hospitals will be overwhelmed. A lot of people are going to get the virus regardless, but the more we can reduce the speed of the spread, the better our health infrastructure can react and take care of patients. 64 Macworld • April 2020

What Apple can do If you regularly attend WWDC you may not have noticed, but over the past few years Apple really has transformed the event from one that happened behind closed doors to one that occurs live on the Internet. Many or most sessions are live streamed, with archived versions available on the WWDC app for later playback. The session content of WWDC could happen from a few studios at Apple Park, with no need for a large group gathering. In terms of a keynote, Apple has several options. It can invite a small number of guests to a live media event at the Steve Jobs Theater – possibly with health checks for attendees – and make its major WWDC announcements in the same way it unveils the new iPhone every year. I kind of can’t imagine Apple doing a keynote without a live studio audience of some kind, but it’s possible it could limit the guest list even further,

Apple makes WWDC presentations available for viewing in the Developer iOS app

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perhaps just to Apple employees. They’ll certainly provide the applause that’s required. What’s left of WWDC, however, is the connections. With every session streamed online, the value of coming to San Jose is in making connections with other people. Apple offers ‘lab sessions’ that allow developers to connect with key Apple engineers. This is a big deal, by far the most important thing that happens at WWDC. For the rest of the year, as a developer you can file bug reports about that issue that is making your app buggy, but at WWDC you can sit with the Apple engineer who is in charge of that feature and explain why your app is suffering. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard from developers about how important it was to make contact with the people inside Apple who affect the fate of their software. Labs will be a tough thing to replicate, but I think Apple needs to try. Perhaps there could be a way to sign up for ‘office hours’ with Apple employees in certain categories, in which you’d get an appointment for a FaceTime call. Perhaps there could be live Q&A sessions where key members of various Apple teams field questions from an online audience of developers. Creating a way for developers to spend time with Apple people without overwhelming them is going to be hard, but it’s vitally important. And who knows, maybe this event could lead to some cultural change inside Apple. If the company builds a system that allows developers to get time with Apple employees without making the trek to 66 Macworld • April 2020

When you attend WWDC in person, you can make valuable connections with Apple engineers and other developers

San Jose, maybe it could be used in other ways to facilitate the roll-out of new technologies and help developers who can’t attend pricey conferences get the most out of Apple’s stuff.

Everything else changes WWDC has become the main event on the Apple community’s calendar, a social gathering that includes live podcasts, adjunct conferences and much more. It will be a shame if we lose all that. And I’m not sure anything can replace it. Instead, WWDC will go from feeling like a week-long gathering of a community to feeling like... another Apple media event. The podcasts you listen to will cover it, but from afar. The parties won’t happen. April 2020 • Macworld 67

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But here’s the truth: for most people, it won’t be any different. Most people in the Apple community don’t ever go to WWDC. Sure, they’ll miss experiencing it vicariously, but assuming Apple still announces new versions of its operating systems and maybe some exciting new hardware and all the media still covers it with all their energy, we’ll muddle through. Finally, I have to wonder: there’ve been rumours that Apple will hold a media event in late March to announce a bunch of new products. To me, the big question is if Apple still wants to host a large group of media on the Apple Park at all, while this virus is spreading. Assuming the new products can even be made in time given the disruptions to the supply chain in China, would it be possible that Apple might pull the plug on any media event and just quietly brief some journalists in private and make an announcement via press release, as they did when the 16in MacBook Pro was announced last autumn? The fact is, Apple can get a spotlight whenever it wants it. It can announce via a live stream from deep inside Apple Park without any members of the press there. It can brief select journalists. Apple announcements will still be breaking news, even if it needs to adjust the way it makes its announcements. If WWDC’s in-person event is cancelled, I will be sad not to see my friends in San Jose. But it’s not too great a price to pay to help slow the spread of this virus and spare the stress on our medical infrastructure. And Apple will still be able to get its message out, regardless. 68 Macworld • April 2020

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X60 5G modem has an audience of one: Apple The first modem system that’s good enough for the iPhone. Michael Simon reports

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ualcomm’s latest 5G modem isn’t the leap that the X55 was last year, but it might be more important. While the Snapdragon X60 5G Modem-RF System touts a slew of technical and practical enhancements to take full advantage of the April 2020 • Macworld 69

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next-generation networks’ tremendous speeds, Qualcomm’s new modem isn’t built for phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 that are already on board with 5G, it’s made for the one that isn’t: the iPhone. Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way first. The X60 is the first ‘to support spectrum aggregation across all key 5G bands and combinations’. That means X60 phones will be more future-proof than today’s X55 ones, supporting mmWave and sub-6 using frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) at a wider range of deployment. Plus, it can deliver up to 7.5Gb/s download speeds and 3Gb/s upload speeds, far greater than even the theoretical capabilities of the current 5G networks being built. But while benefits like carrier aggregation and voice-over-NR are certainly important, the greatest improvement the X60 modem offers is in its size. Qualcomm’s new modem is the first to be built using a 5nm process, allowing for higher efficiency on a smaller footprint. That’s a big leap from the 7nm X50 and X55, and it’s unlikely anyone will be able to catch up anytime soon, including Apple. And that’s precisely the message Qualcomm wants to send.

Size over speed It’s no secret that Apple will be climbing on board the 5G train with the upcoming iPhone 12, but what isn’t so certain is which modem it will be using. Apple and Qualcomm have entered into a multi-year agreement to supply chips for the iPhone, which everyone assumes will include a 5G modem, 70 Macworld • April 2020

The X60 modem is expected to make its way into Android phones and iPhones in 2021

especially since Qualcomm is basically the only game in town. But after Apple scooped up Intel’s smartphone modem business scraps, reliance on Qualcomm isn’t part of Apple’s long-term plans. But the X60 shows that Qualcomm doesn’t see that path as an inevitability. By jumping to 5nm with the third-generation of its 5G modem, Qualcomm is delivering a smaller and more efficient modem, which just happens to be the very reasons why Apple would build its own modem in the first place. A smaller, more efficient modem would help Apple keep the iPhone thin without sacrificing battery life. There’s also the issue of the antenna. A recent report from Fast Company detailed Apple’s efforts April 2020 • Macworld 71

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With the X60 modem, Qualcomm is looking to lock up the iPhone for the foreseeable future

to design its own antenna for the iPhone 12 after rejecting the QTM525 5G mmWave antenna module Qualcomm currently makes due to its size. But a new antenna is on the way with the X60 modem, which the report says, “features a more compact design than the previous generation which allows for thinner, sleeker smartphones”. If that’s not a direct response to Apple, I don’t know what is. Qualcomm wouldn’t even divulge exactly how much smaller the QTM535 modem is ‘for competitive reasons’, which basically a professional nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah to Apple. Qualcomm wants Apple to know that its antenna won’t be as good. 72 Macworld • April 2020

So even if the new modem and antenna aren’t ready for the iPhone 12 – Qualcomm was relatively vague about a timeline, only saying “commercial premium smartphones” using the new modem system are “expected in early 2021” – the chipmaker is putting tremendous pressure on Apple to deliver a system that’s better than the X60, lest we have another Antennagate on our hands. So while Apple may be hard at work at a home-grown 5G solution for the iPhone and iPad, Qualcomm isn’t going to let the biggest premium phone maker get away that easily. With the X60 modem, Qualcomm isn’t just cementing its lead as the 5G supplier on Android phones, it’s also looking to lock up the iPhone for the foreseeable future. Sure, Samsung cares about thinness and battery life, but only Apple has the wherewithal to walk away. And Qualcomm doesn’t want that to happen.

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Apple News+ stumbled because it’s the service most outside Apple’s control Apple’s subscription-based news service is its only real stumble in its services push. Leif Johnson reports

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pple’s big push into services this year was doomed for disaster – at least if you considered Apple News+ representative of what was to come back in March 2019. Many of the problems I hated back then remain central to the experience: the mishmash of PDFs

74 Macworld • April 2020

with digital content, the hassle of searching for publications, and the lack of real reasons to give up many direct subscriptions to notable magazines. One year on, the best thing about it is that it’s a relatively cheap way to read The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. With services, Apple News+ suggested last spring, Apple was biting off more than the famous hardware maker could chew. Today, Apple’s trouble with its paid news service looks like an anomaly. Apple TV+ may not yet be as ‘sexy’ as services like Netflix or the brand-new Disney+, but all the same, it’d be a stretch to call any of its launch-week shows ‘duds’. (In fact, I’m surprised to find myself looking slightly more forward to new episodes of See than to those for Disney+’s phenomenal Star Wars epic The Mandalorian.) Apple Arcade is an unqualified success, at least judging from the number of people chatting about it on social media. For almost every Friday since launch, Apple has cranked out one or more fantastic games that often release alongside console counterparts and play well on every screened device in the Apple ecosystem. Aside from some grumbling that Apple Arcade is only available on Apple devices, I’ve seen virtually no outright hate for the service. And then, of course, we have years-old Apple Music, which now boasts over 60 million subscribers and faces lawsuits from rival Spotify aimed at keeping its rapid expansion in check. Along with iTunes, it served as early proof that Apple could dominate in an arena that wasn’t strictly related to hardware. April 2020 • Macworld 75

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None of Apple TV+’s launch shows, including See, could be called duds

Without exception, Apple Music, Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade are all now firmly part of The Conversation. But Apple News+? Hardly. Indeed, the most damning thing about it is that no one seems interested in talking about it at all – not even in the form of random Apple-bashing in the Android subreddit. When we do hear about Apple News+, it’s usually in the form of tepid statements like that from Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch in November (via Variety), when he said the “jury is still out” on the service. CNBC also dropped a report last week saying that Apple has struggled to gain more than 200,000 subscribers in the months since launch. For many, I imagine the main 76 Macworld • April 2020

impact of these reports was to remind them Apple News+ exists at all. It’s hard to determine Apple News+’s success because Apple doesn’t discuss the specifics about it in its earnings calls, and it’s easy to get the feeling that Apple wishes it would just go away. You don’t see ads for it. You don’t see patch notes detailing improvements, aside from a weirdly enthusiastic press release about a new button in May. The best we’ve gotten recently is a rumour from Bloomberg claiming that Apple is thinking about bundling it with services like Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade in 2020 – and while I’ve long been a fan of the idea of an Apple services bundle, this isn’t a good look. It suggests Apple thinks the only way more people will pay for Apple News+ is if it tacks it on to something more popular.

What went wrong? Most of Apple’s seeming trouble with Apple News+ may spring from the fact that it’s the only one of Apple’s large paid services that’s mainly out of its direct control. And as the company best associated with the term ‘walled garden’, Apple clearly loves being in control. It thrives on it. I’ll even go so far as to say that with the right conditions and proper products, this control is a good thing. But journalism is messy, as I can easily attest as a journalist. With Apple News+, Apple finds itself struggling with multiple publications in various stages of the shift from print to digital media. It’s struggling to find the best ways to pay April 2020 • Macworld 77

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It’s always nice to be in good company, though

sites and to make them believe that Apple News+ benefits them, particularly when those sites tend to have vastly different means of generating their own revenue. Apple also has no control over the frequency or quality of the content. This doesn’t matter much with the free version of Apple News, but it’s a clear problem with the premium content of Apple News+. Maybe these issues wouldn’t be so obnoxious if Apple at least seemed interested in making an effort to fix them (as it is with the notoriously buggy iOS 13), but there’s little proof that it is. Maybe, with so many aspects of Apple News+ being out of the company’s control, it just doesn’t know how. Compare all this to how we see Apple flexing its muscles with the paid services it has more direct control over. In November, Apple pulled its planned theatrical screenings of the Apple TV+ Samuel 78 Macworld • April 2020

L. Jackson flick The Banker after allegations of sexual abuse were directed at the real-life son of the movie’s subject (via The Hollywood Reporter). For that matter, Apple approves and signs off on all the shows on Apple TV+ (and I’m sorry, but all those Apple product placements on The Morning Show can’t be coincidences). And so it goes with Apple Arcade, a service in which Apple partially funds games and decides whether or not it’ll include them in its carefully curated service. In all of these cases, we’re seeing exactly what Apple wants us to see. Apple can do almost none of that with Apple News+, a service that insists you awkwardly look at PDFs on an iPhone display. Apple News+’s shortcomings result in an experience that feels uncharacteristically ‘scattershot’ and ‘grab-baggy’ for Apple. The iPhone maker doesn’t even seem to know how to make people care about the content, as you don’t really get the kind of careful curation you see on the App Store with Apple News+ stories. Apple Music is probably the service that most resembles Apple News+ because of the diversity of its content, but it doesn’t suffer from the same problems because you access all the content through the subscription and everything shares the same file type. For that matter, it’s usually pleasing to listen to the music regardless of which device you’re on. With Apple News+’s magazines, though, you’re almost certainly going to want to use an iPad or a Mac. I’m not saying I want more control from Apple in this space. If anything – considering Apple’s April 2020 • Macworld 79

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increasingly uncomfortable relationship with the US president and its close ties with the censorshiphappy government of China – a little less control from the people in Cupertino would be preferable. I’ve also long believed that Apple gets too much of the benefit of the content from Apple News+, while the actual content makers get comparatively little. If Apple decided to let Apple News+ go the way of AirPower, I might even be happy. But it’s important to remember that – so far – it looks as though Apple News+ is the only true minus in Apple’s big metamorphosis into a parttime services company. I believe it’s safe to say that it was always considered the least important of Apple’s new services (there was plenty of headscratching when Apple bought Texture, which Apple News+ is based on). Apple is a services company now, and for the most part, it’s a good one. It just needs to stick to services where it has more control. Maybe Apple News+ will get better: Apple Music, which also had a slightly rough start, proves that’s a possibility. But for now, one half-baked new service out of three ain’t bad.

80 Macworld • April 2020

What the AirPods Pro hint about Apple’s wearable AR philosophy The AirPods Pro may point to how Apple thinks about other wearable devices, like an AR headset. Dan Moren reports

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‘ve spent the past week wearing Apple’s new AirPods Pro. Not a week straight, I mean, but pretty consistently in all the places where I would usually use one of my other myriad sets of headphones. In looking at the AirPods Pro as April 2020 • Macworld 81

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a product, I think there are important things to be gleaned from the choices Apple made in their design – the kind of design choices that may lend insight into the way Apple is thinking about the wearables market. Wearables, of course, was the market that was sharply up in the company’s most recent quarterly results, and thus is clearly a place that Apple is likely to be focusing some attention in the future. And with rumours of Apple’s AR goggles/glasses starting to coalesce around later this year, the AirPods Pro might key us into how Apple is thinking about entering the still nascent (or perhaps nonexistent) market for augmented reality headsets.

Holistic Area Network As I walked up the street the other day, listening to music on the AirPods Pro, they alerted me that my iPhone was ringing. Without breaking my stride, I glanced at my Apple Watch, saw it was from an unknown number, and tapped the button to dismiss the call. All without pulling out my iPhone. It’s not the first time I’ve thought of Apple’s wearable devices as part of a ‘personal area network’, but the reality really hit home in that moment: a wrist-mounted display and sensor package in the form of the Apple Watch marries strikingly with the AirPods Pro, which deliver not only audio for entertainment purposes, but notifications as well. An augmented reality heads-up display would seem to enhance this even further, helping 82 Macworld • April 2020

Apple AR goggles could take its cues from Microsoft HoloLens

complete this constellation of devices that provides a variety of ways to interact with your technology. By treating this device more like an external display rather than a piece of self-sufficient hardware, à la Microsoft’s HoloLens, it frees up the company to design a much lighter, simpler gadget – and if there’s one thing that we can all agree that Apple likes, it’s light, thin hardware.

Talk to me, Siri With iOS 13.2, Apple enabled a feature for AirPods that features distinctly like an augmented reality capability: namely, the ability for Siri to read messages to you as they arrive. Rather than just providing an audible alert chime, Siri will lower the volume of whatever audio is playing and then April 2020 • Macworld 83

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read the entire message. The virtual assistant will even describe emoji sent in messages, or relate the action from a tap back in iMessage (“John laughed at your text”, for example). This kind of seamless integration could be a preview of what a pair of augmented reality glasses from Apple provides. Sure, such a device could simply barrage you with notifications like your Apple Watch, but does anybody really want that? Instead, it will almost certainly allow you to choose specifically which apps are allowed to provide you with information – and, in truest Apple fashion, it may not even let that many apps take advantage of your attention in its earliest versions. And if you’re wondering how Siri would work in a visual environment, look no further than the Siri watch face on the Apple Watch. Granted, it’s an interface that’s still in need of improvement, but there’s something to be said for using machine learning to surface only the notifications and data that you need when you need them.

Outside in One of the most interesting features of

Siri has an important role in the evolution of Apple’s wearables

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the AirPods Pro is its spectrum of isolation technologies, from noise-cancelling mode to its Transparency feature. Apple’s certainly not the first company to implement such capabilities, but by designing them to be quickly toggled between, there’s a strong indication that the company expects these modes to be used – and switched between – frequently. The Transparency mode, which essentially pipes in outside sound from the AirPods Pro’s mics, provides a way for users to interact with the world without having to remove the AirPods. Think of it like an augmented reality mode, where the noise cancelling feature is more like a virtual reality that insulates you in a world where your audio is the more important factor. I found it handy, for example, when waiting for my name to be called at the coffee shop. Could a similar set of features find their way into whatever heads-up display hardware Apple might be developing? I don’t find it hard to imagine an ability to toggle between an AR mode where you are getting information about the world around you and a ‘transparent’ mode where the glasses focus more on the world itself. That’ll be particularly important if you’re ever expected to wear these devices while doing a task like, say, driving a car; some sort of Do Not Disturb mode would seem to be a must-have. Because in investing in a wearable heads-up display, Apple will have to walk a very fine line between ‘augmented’ and ‘reality’.

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5 Safari alternatives worth trying Safari is a great web browser, but it may not be the best right one for your needs. Jason Cross reports

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f you have a Mac, you have Safari – it’s the built-in default. Apple’s browser is very fast, respects your privacy, and works seamlessly with Safari on iPhone or iPad through iCloud syncing features. But it’s not the only game in town. Unlike on iOS and iPadOS, Apple is quite permissive about running full web browsers on macOS. Mac browsers can use their own technologies to render web pages and set

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Chrome’s advantages are its ubiquity, Google integration, and extensive library of extensions

themselves to be the default web browser. On iPhone or iPad, they can’t do either of those things. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to Safari, but depending on your own particular needs, it might not be the best browser. Some services, like YouTube TV, won’t run on Safari at all. And some features, like YouTube’s support for 4K video, don’t work with Safari. So you’ll need to try another browser. Here are five other Mac browsers worth trying out.

1. Chrome By far the most popular browser in the world, Google’s Chrome is fast and offers a lot of flexibility through its many powerful extensions. If April 2020 • Macworld 87

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there’s a ‘standard’ for web browsers, Chrome is it. On the plus side, you get a powerful and flexible browser that, due to its popularity, is likely to be supported by whatever web app or service you care to use. If you use your Mac alongside non-Apple platforms such as Android or Windows, you can sync bookmarks and history between them with your Google account. Chrome is available for iPhone and iPad as well, though like all browsers on those platforms, it uses Apple’s own WebKit rendering engine. Still, you can use it to take advantage of synced bookmarks and tight integration with services such as Google Search or Translate. If there’s a downside, it’s that Chrome isn’t very privacy-focused. Google wants to suck up your data and use it to make better services and personalize ads – if you want better privacy, you’ll have to run extensions that block scripts and web tracking. Chrome is often derided for being a bit of a resource hog and not as battery-efficient on MacBooks, too.

2. Firefox Firefox is one of the oldest browsers still kicking around and has experienced something of a resurgence lately thanks rapid updates and a renewed focus on improving speed and reliability. Recent updates have improved battery life on Mac laptops (often a sore spot for non-Safari browsers). Firefox is also greatly concerned about privacy – it’s got pretty good built-in tracker blocking, and it’s password syncing relies on 88 Macworld • April 2020

Firefox is focused on blocking trackers and providing privacy features

locally-encrypted files. Firefox enjoys a large collection of extensions, though not nearly as many as Chrome. They’re less about ‘turn your browser into its own OS’ and more about just customizing your web experience. Firefox has an iOS version that works well if you want to sync bookmarks and saved login information. Of course it can’t use the Gecko rendering engine that the desktop client uses (due to Apple’s rules), but it’s a good mobile experience that supports Dark Mode and gives you all the tracking prevention and privacy of the desktop version. April 2020 • Macworld 89

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Among Opera’s unique features is a built-in messaging sidebar

3. Opera Another ancient browser still getting regular updates, Opera has gone through a lot of changes over the years. While it once ran its own web rendering engine (called Presto), it transitioned to the Chromium engine years ago and never looked back. Opera’s biggest claim to fame is its free built-in VPN. While not everyone needs such a thing, it’s probably good to have on public networks like coffee shops. There are no data limits but performance can vary widely, so while it may reduce your vulnerability to snoops on public Wi-Fi 90 Macworld • April 2020

networks, it’s not necessarily a great tool for, say, watching Netflix selections from other countries. That’s not the only trick up Opera’s sleeve, though. It can pop out videos from web pages, has a built-in ad blocker, and there are integrated messaging clients that can connect to Facebook Messenger, VKontakte and WhatsApp. There’s a nice battery saver feature that reduces background tab activity and pauses some plug-ins and animations, too. Opera has a respectable list of extensions, but being based on Chromium, many of the Chrome extensions work just fine, too. If you want to sync bookmarks and tabs with your iPhone or iPad, there’s Opera Touch, which like all iOS browsers, uses Apple’s own WebKit rendering engine. It has a built-in ad blocker like the desktop app, but no longer includes a free VPN.

4. Edge After years of going its own way, Microsoft switched its Edge browser to the Chromium engine and joined the open-source consortium that develops it. Along with the change comes a version for Mac. There aren’t a lot of unique features, but not everybody needs that. One of Edge’s best features is its tracking prevention, which has three settings: Basic, Balanced and Strict. It’s nice to see an approach that isn’t just all-or-nothing. The web page ‘collections’ feature is perhaps its most unique, and makes it easier to use web content in Microsoft Office documents. The new Edge works with most Chrome extensions, which is a big step up from the old Edge April 2020 • Macworld 91

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Edge lets you set the degree of tracking you want to allow or block – it’s not all or nothing

browser’s paltry selection. And there’s an iOS version that can sync your bookmarks (Microsoft calls them “favourites”) and saved passwords, but your browser history and open tabs yet sync between devices. That is said to be on the way later in 2020. There’s nothing wrong with Edge, but there’s little reason to go out of your way to use it unless you regularly work on a Windows PC and have to use the Edge browser there. Something like Chrome or Firefox is probably a better cross-platform choice for most users. 92 Macworld • April 2020

5. Brave Brave is an interesting experiment in browser technology. It’s based on Chromium and really looks and feels more like Chrome than most browsers. If you’re used to Chrome, you’ll feel at home with Brave, and you can use almost any Chrome extension. But Brave is especially focused on privacy and security. It has rather extensive built-in ad blocking and tracker blocking. This greatly speeds up page loading, but it can sometimes break websites and, of course, it robs them of revenue. It’s easy to turn ‘shields down’ for a site if you need to. Brave can show you its own ads as notification pop-ups, for which you’ll earn a currency called BAT (Basic Attention Tokens). You’ll also earn them at a lower rate just for browsing the web. These tokens are then used to pay out participating sites and to pay you, the user. You can turn them in for real money, or to tip websites or content creators. It’s a novel idea, but it’s a little annoying to sign up for the whole Brave Rewards programme, and even more annoying to link the account with the third-party Uphold service in order to actually turn BAT into money. And it’s useless to any website or creator that doesn’t similarly sign up to be a part of the revolution. Brave has an iOS app loaded with privacy features (HTTPS everywhere, script and tracker blocking, pop-up blocking...). And there’s a nice bookmarks syncing feature that doesn’t even require you to make an account and log in. April 2020 • Macworld 93

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Brave aggressively blocks ads and trackers, and builds its own ad-based web economy instead

Unfortunately, the sync function only currently supports bookmarks – not open tabs, history, passwords, autofill or your BAT earnings. Even if you don’t care about BAT, you’ll find Brave to be a very fast Chrome-like browser with that puts a very high priority on privacy and security. It just needs a more robust sync system.

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Apple’s security and privacy is good, but could be even better Apple should double down on its privacy. Dan Moren reports

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uckle up, because we’re poised for another battle on digital security. The FBI has reputedly asked for Apple’s help unlocking phones belonging of the alleged shooter from the Pensacola air base incident last year. Apple, for its part, claims it has already turned over to law enforcement all the information it has access to. April 2020 • Macworld 95

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If you feel like we’ve been here before, it’s because we have. Back in 2016, the FBI wanted Apple to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter; Apple declined to help, as doing so would have potentially compromised the security of all of its devices. Eventually, the bureau sought help from an Israeli-based cybersecurity firm who was able to hack into phone in question. Leaving aside the dangers inherent in the creation of back doors into the technology we all rely upon, I think this is as good a time as any for Apple to double down on its (already pretty solid) security focus. Because when it comes to digital information and our devices, what we need is not less security, but more.

It’s MIME time Apple has long touted the end-to-end encryption of its iMessage and FaceTime systems, but when it comes to email, the company hasn’t made any commensurate moves. Apple’s iCloud security overview states that though traffic between your Apple devices and the iCloud Mail system is encrypted, the data stored on the mail server is not encrypted, which the company describes as “consistent with standard industry practice”. And, of course, when your email message goes out to a recipient, the security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. With social media, Slack, and other messaging apps, we might feel like we’re over email, but the fact remains that so much of our online lives still 96 Macworld • April 2020

Apple’s iCloud security overview states that though traffic between your Apple devices and the iCloud Mail system is encrypted

rely on it. Beyond just communicating with people, tools like password resets, user accounts, and other means of proving one’s identity continue to depend on the infrastructure of email. As it happens, Apple does support an email encryption standard called S/MIME on iOS and macOS, but it’s not enabled by default – and setting it up requires some technical know-how involving certificate generation and installing profiles that’s frankly beyond the capabilities or interests of most average users. It seems, though, that if Apple really wanted to push for more secure email, it certainly has the clout to do so – at least between users of its mail service and perhaps even, with some cooperation, between big mail providers such as April 2020 • Macworld 97

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Google and Microsoft too. The basics of the tools are already there; they just need to be implemented.

Two factor awakens For those intent upon securing their data, twofactor authentication (2FA) has become a musthave. Apple has done a pretty solid job of both implementing 2FA for its own systems and of making it easier to use the system in its most common form, via SMS text message, by providing an autofill feature. However, it’s become increasingly apparent that SMS isn’t the most secure of vectors for authentication, thanks to the relative ease of spoofing phone numbers. Instead, users are better off taking advantage of authentication apps that can generate such codes locally on a device, such as Authy or 1Password. The downside with this method is that it’s definitely less convenient than SMS, especially with the autofill feature. So perhaps it’s time for Apple to expand its own 2FA system to third parties, perhaps even a system where authenticator apps can hand off a code when prompted, à la the SMS autofill. This feature already exists to some extent: Authy, for example, can, in some cases, bring up a 2FA code when requested. (I’ve only seen it for my Twitch account, which apparently uses Authy’s own API.) Apple seems well positioned to improve the 2FA experience for its users, thus hitting that rare balance of improved security and convenience.

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Stick to its guns But security’s not just about technology: it’s also about policy. It’s great that Apple has made security and privacy a priority, but going forward, it needs to reinforce that not only by sticking to its guns – such as making sure that governments can’t force it to unlock devices – but also by espousing such practices the world over. And that’s going to be a challenge for the company, because one of its biggest markets – and the home of the majority of its manufacturing – is China. Apple has already found itself in hot water by removing apps at the behest of the Chinese government; moreover, its iCloud service on the Chinese mainland is run by an in-country company, rather than by Apple itself, an attempt to thread the needle that looks more like trying to wash its hands of dealing with the situation. Make no mistake: Apple has put a lot of its eggs in the basket that is China, and that makes it particularly vulnerable to demands from that country’s government. While it’s not financially practical for Apple to take a principled stand – even if it wants to – the company had best be looking at ways to untangle itself from China over the long term if it wants to continue making privacy and security one of its competitive advantages. Otherwise it starts to look like the company can talk the talk, but not walk the walk.

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