Latest Apple News

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional-grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage & protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work-ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple. In this episode of Apple @ Work, I talk with Tom Bridge, Chris Dawe, and Gerard Massey about the 10th Anniversary of the MacAdmins Community as well as the MacAdmins Foundation. more…

Macworld At a glanceExpert's Rating Pros Views, searches, and de-duplicates media across one or more Photos libraries Copies and moves media among libraries Advanced search options for fine-grained queries Bulk editing of title, caption, and keywords, including the use of token replacements Advanced export choices Works with iCloud Photos-stored images and videos Cons Lacks date/time adjustment Our Verdict PowerPhotos 3 provides tools for metadata, searching, and multiple Photos library management that dramatically upgrade how you can work with your organized media. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Price When Reviewed$39.95 new license | $19.95 upgrade from iPLM/PowerPhotos 1/2 Best Prices Today: PowerPhotos 3 Retailer Price Fat Cat Software $40 View Deal Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Since its first appearance in 2015, PowerPhotos continues to offer features Apple doesn’t provide in Photos for macOS, making PowerPhotos a must-have for people who want to get the most from Apple’s app. Photos does improve with every release, but developer Brian Webster continues to update PowerPhotos to make up for what’s missing, improving past features and adding more refinements. Version 3 brings a couple of key upgrades as well as big bumps in performance. The app’s update, priced at $39.95 for new users, includes new and improved capabilities such as bulk editing metadata (like titles and keywords), using templating to apply incremented counters and other placeholders to groups of media, searching and de-duplicating across multiple Photos libraries, and manipulating media and albums within the app as if you were using Photos. Advanced search options exceed Photos’ smart folder options Fills a gap in Photos that Apple still hasn’t bridged Consider Apple’s Photos as a basic package on one end of the media management spectrum and Adobe’s current Lightroom (in two versions) as an advanced option at the other end. (Apple’s Aperture used to compete there.) Photos offers library organization and, with many improvements over the years, photo editing; Lightroom has both, with far more sophisticated ways to modify and shape images, along with more flexibility in how media is organized and stored. For users who don’t need all the advanced features of Lightroom and like the friendliness and deep Apple operating system integration, PowerPhotos 3 provides an affordable set of extras. It works natively with Apple Photos Library format, so you don’t give up what you like within Photos. PowerPhotos has no image-editing tools, leaving that territory to Apple and third-party standalone apps. If you need to merge Photos libraries, PowerPhotos is the only recourse. You can de-duplicate in the process. PowerPhotos fills in Photos’ gaps by letting you work with and around libraries better than Photos works with a single one. Since its launch, PowerPhotos has been the only way to merge libraries and drag-and-drop media from one library to another. If you maintain or want to create multiple Photos libraries to handle your collections or break up a massive library into smaller pieces, PowerPhotos remains the only tool that provides the management features you need. Version 2 added powerful de-duplication so you could remove identical or near-identical images with many options to control how close a match you made, reducing storage use and confusion over which image you wanted. Version 3 extends de-dupe across all the libraries you select. The new version adds to the previous ability to copy albums and media from one library to another the option to move albums or media instead. To prevent media losses while the move is underway, PowerPhotos uses the gold standard of first copying the items to the other library before deleting them from the original. A more powerful search and bulk information editing The keystone features of PowerPhotos 3 are an advanced set of search options and the addition of multi-item (or “bulk”) metadata editing, which lets you change the title or caption associated with your images or photos using tokens (like Year, Height in pixels, or Place Name). You can have fiendishly complicated searches by mixing All and Any with criteria. I took a lot of photos on that 2023 trip. You will recognize the search feature setup from the way Apple structures smart folders, albums, and Finder Spotlight searches. You can set multiple criteria, nest them, and choose whether to make each nested set of criteria all required (like “larger than 1 MB and taken in Italy”) or allow just one to match (like “in the ‘Italy’ album or ‘France’ album or ‘Liechtenstein’ album”). Criteria for these searches include several that aren’t available in Photos, such as file size or the height or width of a photo. Searches can be saved so you can reuse them later. You can also opt to search a single Photos library or across multiple libraries, further leveraging the use of dividing your media among libraries without making it harder to find what you want. Using tokens like Counter lets you rename media within Photos libraries in meaningful ways. The option to bulk edit metadata should not be underestimated. Apple’s Photos offers the Inspector pane, which lets you set title, keywords, and other parameters for a set of images and photos (or one at a time). However, Apple’s tool lacks tokens, which can stand in when renaming the title or reformulating the caption. Even more robustly, PowerPhotos 3 includes a Counter token, which automatically increments by one from the first selected photo or video in your set. (I have previously turned to A Better Finder Attributes for this.) You can use this bulk editing to turn a bunch of files named IMG_1733 with no captions into ones titled with a piece of text, like “Trip to California,” followed by the date or time in any arrangement you like, and even the place name. For captions, you could include a lot of extra detail useful when reviewing photos, including the exact time in seconds or the height and width in pixels. Changes are previewed in the thumbnail view. In this example, I see the preview of adding the Location to the title metadata.Foundry The bulk editor includes keyword editing, allowing you to select from a list of all keywords in the library or add your own. The developer also updated the app so that all metadata work can be done without your hands leaving the keyboard. More minor updates that still prove useful include a more full-featured photo browser and photo viewer within the app. Nearly all operations you can perform in Photos, like managing albums and moving media, can now be done inside PowerPhotos. A new photo viewer lets you see images within the app instead of using macOS’s Quick Look window. The app has had noticeable improvements in speed with loading libraries and viewing images. Should you buy PowerPhotos 3? If you are stymied by limitations in Photos, don’t waste a second before getting PowerPhotos. It’s an app that complements Photos in basic and advanced ways, unlocking otherwise unavailable power without sacrificing compatibility with Apple’s library format. There are other alternatives to Photos to consider, read: Best photo editing apps for Mac: Alternatives to Photos. For more information about using Photos read: How to edit in Photos for Mac

Macworld Say goodbye to ads and hello to peaceful internet browsing with AdGuard. The Family Plan covers nine devices, and right now you can secure a lifetime subscription for just $15.97 (reg. $169.99) with code FAMPLAN through June 1. If you’re tired of dealing with pop-ups, banners, and video ads, it’s time to check out AdGuard. It’s equipped with an ad-blocking module that prevents ads from disrupting your time online, no matter their format. This lifetime family plan covers nine devices (and works with both Android and iOS), so you can permanently share the ad-free wealth. As if blocking ads wasn’t enough, AdGuard also doubles as a security guard. It protects your data privacy by ensuring your personal info is hidden from trackers and activity analyzers, and defends against malware and phishing websites. AdGuard’s shielding doesn’t just stop there. It also includes parental control features. If you have kids at home, you can take advantage of this extra set of eyes and rest easy knowing your children are shielded from inappropriate content as they browse the web. Safeguard your family from ads and online threats with this lifetime subscription to the AdGuard Family Plan, now $15.97 with code FAMPLAN through June 1. StackSocial prices subject to change. AdGuard Family Plan: Lifetime SubscriptionSee Deal

Epic Games submitted Fortnite to the App Store for review on Friday. Now what? The version under review offers both Apple’s in-app purchase system and an external payment option via the Epic Games Store. But despite recent policy changes forced by a federal injunction, Apple isn’t legally required to approve the app. Still, rejecting Fortnite could deal Apple a blow in the court of public opinion, especially as its standing with developers continues to slip. more…

Macworld With the launch of the iPhone 16e and 11th-gen iPad, Apple has officially phased out all devices with 64GB of storage in favor of 128GB as the entry-level option. That’s great for new buyers, but there are a lot of people who still have 64GB iPhones and iPads that are too new to replace. I know from experience: I own an iPhone 12 mini and a 6th-gen iPad mini, both otherwise great devices, and it’s become a headache to manage the latest versions of iOS with such a small amount of space. If you also have a device with 64GB of storage and have been struggling with constant low storage alerts, I’m here to help. Here’s how I made my devices usable again without having to buy a new one. iOS has a storage management problem The ideal amount of storage varies from person to person. For people who mainly use their phone for messaging and browsing the web, the 64GB entry-level option was usually enough. But over the last several years, iOS itself as well as many apps have required much more space. For example, if you only install Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and YouTube on your phone, you already end up taking up more than 1GB of storage before any caches or downloads. As for iOS itself, the latest version of the operating system takes up more than 10GB and possibly twice that with System Data. Given that you’ll probably want to download more than four apps onto your phone, filling up 64GB of storage doesn’t take long. With just 64GB of storage, older iPhones can run out of space quickly.Foundry While larger system and app sizes are inevitable as we get more advanced features, Apple is partly to blame for not optimizing how iOS and iCloud manage storage. In theory, iCloud automatically decides what to download to your device based on available space, but what happens most of the time is that iCloud tries to download all your files, even when you don’t need them. iMessage can also become a problem, as the system keeps a large cache of all your messages and attachments. (Speaking of Cache, read: How to clear cache on iPhone & iPad.) All of that is to say, when an iPhone or iPad reaches its storage limit, the device becomes virtually unusable. Apps crash, the camera won’t launch, it becomes impossible to install system updates… the situation gets bad. But things aren’t hopeless. If you’re dealing with an iPhone or iPad that has run out of available storage, here are a few things I do to make it usable again. Remove unused apps This might seem obvious, but the first step is to find out what exactly is taking up your iPhone’s storage. To do this, go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage. There you’ll see details of how much space each app is using, as well as the system. If your device has reached the state of crashing due to a lack of free storage, you can start by removing some installed apps. Start by deleting apps you no longer use. You can sort the list by size or last used date, which will make it easy to see any seldom-used apps that are eating into your storage space. If you can’t bring yourself to part with any of your apps, you can also temporarily remove an app from your device without deleting its data. To do this, tap on an app in the iPhone Storage settings and choose the “Offload App” option. This will delete the app itself by storing its data, documents, and settings. That way, when you reinstall the app, everything will be restored as if it were never deleted. Also in the iPhone Storage settings, you may want to enable the option “Offload Unused Apps,” which will automatically remove apps that haven’t been used in a while, but without deleting any data. Delete old iMessage chats If you’re a heavy iMessage user, be aware that your conversations can take up a lot of space on your iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, even though iCloud backs up all your messages in the cloud, it also keeps them downloaded and eats up storage on your phone. You can set your iPhone to automatically delete messages after 30 days or a year.Foundry Until Apple resolves this, we recommend deleting your old chats. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages and look for the option “Keep Messages.” You can set iMessage to automatically delete old messages after 30 days or 1 year, which will continuously free up your iPhone’s storage. However, just remember that changing this will also delete messages from your other Apple devices. It’s an all-or-nothing scenario, however, and there’s no easy way to save individual conversations or back them up to an external drive, so if you want to keep any specific conversations, you’ll need to put in a little work. There are some third-party apps that could help, but for the most part, you need to save each attachment individually and screenshot conversations. Change the iCloud Photos settings Photos and videos are the biggest culprits when it comes to eating up storage space. Similar to iMessage, iCloud Photos also backs up your photos without removing them from your devices, and that can be a problem when you’ve only got 64GB of storage. There are a couple of things you can do. Obviously, the first is to go through and delete old videos, screenshots, or duplicate photos from your camera roll. The Photos app has a tab under Utilities where you can easily find any duplicate photos and videos in your library—you may be surprised by how many you have. Optimizing photo storage can help free up precious space on your 64GB iPhone.Foundry You can also head over Settings > Apps > Photos and check that the “Optimize iPhone Storage” option is on. This will allow your iPhone to remove some of the full-resolution photos from your device and only download them when you want to see them. But in some cases, you may need an even more aggressive solution. On my devices, for example, I have more than 700GB of photos and videos in iCloud. So, even with optimized iPhone storage, there’s still a lot of data that ends up being downloaded to my phone. If you’re in a similar boat, consider turning off iCloud Photos and removing all the photos and videos stored on your device. Instead, you can periodically transfer the photos you snap or save to your Mac or an external drive. Worried about losing the photos on your iPhone? Read: How to delete photos from iPhone but not from iCloud

Apple has a number of exciting products in the pipeline for 2027, per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Despite recent Apple releases feeling somewhat stagnant, Apple has a plan to freshen things up. Gurman describes this product road map as a “product renaissance,” and it’s set to take place around two years from now. more…

According to the latest edition of the Power On newsletter from Mark Gurman, Apple is readying a small, yet helpful new feature for iOS 19. This feature has to do with public Wi-Fi networks, such as one at a hotel or a gym, and it’ll save you a lot of time. more…

Macworld If you’re still handing Microsoft $10 every month for the same Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps you’ve been using all your life, it might be time to stop the subscription spiral. For a limited time, you can score Microsoft Office 2024 Home for a one-time payment of just $129.97 — no monthly fees, no surprise price increases (reg. $149.99). This version includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, all in their latest 2024 editions. It’s the perfect setup for anyone who just wants reliable tools on one Mac or PC without the bloat of cloud storage or required online access that they never use anyway. You’ll still get real-time collaboration, modern AI-powered features, and smart layout tools. And, because this download is tied to your device (not the cloud), you won’t wake up to a completely new Outlook layout that requires you to quickly re-learn the entire app before work. Or, discover that Microsoft is deleting an app altogether — like they are with Publisher… what’s next? Don’t sleep on this deal. Microsoft Office 2024 Home for Mac or Windows is available for $129.97 (reg. $149.99) for a limited time. No coupon needed. Microsoft Office 2024 Home for Mac or PC: One-Time PurchaseSee Deal StackSocial prices subject to change.

Last October, Apple announced the . On the surface, it looks like yet another MacBook Pro spec bump. However, there are a number of key features that make it worth upgrading to, even if you already have an older . more…

At CES 2025, Anker unveiled a . It’s extremely compact, offers up to 25,000mAh of capacity, and has multiple built in cables for ease of use. I’ve utilized this battery bank for many months, and I can confidently say its an easy purchase if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution for all of your Apple devices, MacBooks included. more…