MACMYND

Nineteen years ago, Apple transitioned the Mac from its original (classic) operating system to a more modern, UNIX-based operating system known as Mac OS X (which is pronounced “Mac OS Ten”).

Since then, there have been 15 major releases. The first eight were named for jungle cats from version 10.0 Cheetah through version 10.8 Mountain Lion. The next seven were named for California landmarks starting with version 10.9 Mavericks through version 10.15 Catalina.

Now, after nearly two decades of version X variants, Apple is about to turn the volume up to 11 (sorry about that, Spinal Tap fans) by introducing version 11.0, aka macOS Big Sur.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Read more from Dr. Mac, Bob Levitus

Apple hasn’t announced Big Sur’s release date yet. Still, history indicates it’ll be very soon since version 10.15 Catalina shipped on Oct. 11, 2019, and versions 10.11 El Capitan through 10.14 Mojave were all released in September of their respective years (2015-2018).

So, here’s my advice: Do not install the first release unless you have plenty of time to troubleshoot and research the inevitable issues that always plague the first (or “point-zero”) release of most software.

I’ve been using prerelease versions of Big Sur since June. And, while the latest beta release hasn’t caused me any grief, your Mac and third-party software aren’t the same as mine.

I can’t predict the future. It’s possible version 11.0 Big Sur will ship with zero bugs and that everyone’s upgrade will be quick, easy and painless. While that’s possible, I consider it highly unlikely.

There is one last thing: If you upgrade a disk to Big Sur, there is no easy way to downgrade to Catalina. You’ll almost certainly need to erase the disk, reinstall macOS 10.15 Catalina, and then restore data from a backup. Unless you have a clone of your startup disk (see Dr. Mac 9/27/2020), you’re facing several frustrating hours without your Mac.

Release Notes: Get Dwight Silverman’s weekly tech newsletter in your inbox each Monday

I’ve been doing this for a long, long time, and I can’t recall a single “point-zero” release that was totally bug-free. Each new release of macOS fills my inbox with email messages from readers sorry they ignored my advice.

So, do me a favor this year and follow my advice. When Apple releases Big Sur next month, just say no. Ignore all the annoying notifications, badges, and emails you’re sure to receive, all extolling Big Sur’s virtues and tantalizing you with cool new features.

Remember that those cool new features will still be there in a month or two when you install version 11.1 or 11.2. By then, the most egregious bugs should be exterminated, and third-party developers should have eradicated any Big Sur-related bugs they’ve discovered in the apps upon which you depend.

boblevitus@mac.com

Apple has already announced changes to the Mac hardware with its ambitious move away from Intel to ARM for its processors. That’s not the only change that is being considered, with Apple publishing details on a new keyboard technology that could light up the understated MacBook family. 

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The innovation is the coloured keyboard. Not of the keys themselves – which no doubt will stay black on the laptop and white on the bluetooth ‘Magic’ keyboards – but the lights underneath the keys that help the typography stand out. The details come from a newly published patent titled, deep breath here, “Mixed input lighting using multiple light sources and control circuitry to change a combined white light spectrum based on ambient light data.” Malcolm Owen reports:

 “The backlighting system of MacBook Pro keyboards could be upgraded to include TrueTone capabilities, with Apple examining the use of multiple LEDs per key to make the light seem even despite changes in the local environment.

“Apple’s TrueTone technology has been useful for its customers for a while, with it enabling the colors of the display to seem the same when the user moves the screen through an environment. By monitoring the light in the local area, TrueTone automatically adjusts the color output of the display so the colors seem to be the same to the user at all times, at least relative to their surroundings.”

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The patent builds on a previous patent published in 2020. The first utilised multiple LEDs to create lighting effects, while the second focused on controlling the keyboard lighting’s white point to ensure a consistent brightness in relation to the environment.

Ideas such as multi-coloured keys and specific patterns per app can be seen prominently on gaming laptops. Apple has always pointed out its true tone systems that generate the correct colours. And while the butterfly keyboard was, frankly, an embarrassing mess of implementation, the rationale behind it was the extension of Apple’s design brief.

Apple is refreshing its Mac lineup over the next two years to support the ARM-based architecture. While the first of these machines (which is expected to be announced in mid-November) should look remarkably like the current MacBook laptops, Apple could re-engineer the laptops for this new generation. Adding in new keyboard light (presumably “in a way that only Apple can”) would certainly give the hardware an obvious differentiation between the older Intel-based machines.

Now read more about the launch of the new macOS on ARM laptops…

Parcel, for iOS and macOS, is the most full-featured, easiest-to-use package tracking app available for Apple devices. It takes only seconds to add tracking numbers in a variety of ways, and the understated design lets you easily see where your deliveries are and when they’ll reach their destination. Push alerts generally come faster than with other tracking apps, and the app syncs across all Apple devices and Parcel’s website. Parcel charges $3 a year if you want to track more than three packages at once, but unlike all of the apps in our test group that don’t charge a fee, Parcel doesn’t comb through your email to collect personal data and sell it to advertisers. We think privacy is worth paying for.

The ability to quickly and easily add a tracking number is the most important feature of any package tracking app, and Parcel offers multiple ways for you to do so, each of which is as simple as (or even simpler than) the corresponding option in any other app. If you’re just receiving packages, the first method you’ll probably use is manually adding a tracking number. You can do so inside the app or with a long press of the app icon on your homescreen. If you have a tracking number already copied, Parcel will automatically recognize it; if not, you can manually type in the number. Or, if you have the shipping-label barcode, you can simply scan it by pressing the barcode icon.

No matter how you add your number, Parcel almost always recognizes the package-carrier service (it supports more than 300) instantly and correctly, automatically filling the name in without your input. In some cases, when two carriers both use the same tracking number, you may need to select the correct one. This three-step number-entry process—tap, enter the number or scan, and confirm—is the simplest of any app we tested. Other apps we tested required us to choose the carrier as well, making the process take just a little longer. In Parcel, you can also choose to add a description to any shipment, such as the name of the item inside or who the package is for, but it’s not required.

In addition to copying and pasting a tracking number or scanning a barcode, Parcel allows you to forward emails with shipment information to a unique address. From there, it automatically adds the tracking number to the app. This isn’t the only app that has such a feature (our runner-up pick, Deliveries, does as well), but Parcel provides clear instructions on how to set up automatic-forwarding rules for Gmail and iCloud accounts, which means less work on your part to look it up or otherwise figure it out. (If you forward emails from Amazon, you can log in to your Amazon account through the Parcel app to have it pull in the name of the item that’s shipping. The developer told us that the app doesn’t store any of the login information itself; rather, the information is stored on-device. In our testing, the app didn’t always keep us logged in.)

Parcel displays all your deliveries in a single list (with rather drab, uniform coloring), and when packages have a known arrival date, it shows a countdown next to each such listing. You can sort the list by when the tracking was last updated, the date items were added, the estimated delivery date, or alphabetically. The app also has a filter to show all deliveries, active deliveries, recent deliveries, or completed deliveries; in testing, we found selecting active deliveries to be particularly helpful, although you may want to see completed deliveries depending on what you’re using the app for. At any time, you can have 50 active shipments being tracked, or 200 total, including completed deliveries. Once you reach the limit, you need to delete old, completed deliveries in order to add new ones.

Tapping on any delivery pulls up its tracking history, as well as a map charting its geographical progress from sender to recipient. The menu in the top right of the screen offers a number of helpful options, including contacting the shipper’s customer service phone line and sharing the shipment information. Parcel allows you to send tracking information to anyone, whether they have the app or not—when you tap the share button, it automatically generates a webpage with the full tracking info. The Deliveries app, on the other hand, requires the recipient to have the app installed to see what you share.

Once we narrowed our finalists to Parcel and Deliveries, we made sure they each had the same set of tracking numbers entered so that we could see how they compared over the course of several deliveries. We discovered that, in almost every case, Parcel would send us push notification updates before Deliveries, which seemed to do periodic checks of all the numbers it was tracking and send a slew of updates at once. It’s true that most updates aren’t very important or time-sensitive—do you really need to know right away that your new iPad has arrived at the FedEx hub in Memphis?—but if Parcel can let you know that a package has made it to your door faster than the competition, that’s a real advantage, especially if you live in an area where packages tend to get snatched. By default, you receive notifications only between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., but you can toggle that setting to get alerts whenever a package has an update.

Parcel is available on every major Apple platform: iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch (alas, there’s no Apple TV app). There’s also a web app that you can pull up from any browser. All of these stay in sync thanks to Parcel’s own cloud service, not iCloud. The app’s developer, Ivan Pavlov, has kept the software well updated and has been quick to add new features, introducing them with each version of iOS. Parcel works with Siri voice-control shortcuts, and it has a widget for iOS 14 that can show the status of a handful of shipments on your homescreen.

Most package tracking apps are free to download, with an annual subscription cost of $5 or less. Parcel costs $3 annually, although if you want to try it out before you buy, you can track up to three packages at a time without paying. Because almost all the apps we considered are inexpensive, price wasn’t a deciding factor for us. The nominal cost is absolutely worth it for what you get.

Last month, Apple introduced a new iPad Air with a larger 10.9-inch edge-to-edge display, a faster A14 Bionic chip, a USB-C port, and Touch ID built into the power button. The new iPad Air begins arriving to customers on Friday, and ahead of time, reviews of the device have now been shared by various media outlets and YouTube channels.

The new iPad Air via The Verge

Most reviews agree that the new iPad Air is the best tablet for the average customer, as it now has a similar design and features as the iPad Pro, despite starting at a lower price of $599, albeit with only 64GB of storage. iPad Pro models start at $799 with 128GB of storage.

The Verge‘s Dieter Bohn:

If you’re looking to get an iPad right now and can afford it, the new $599 iPad Air is the best tablet for most people. Apple has taken the design from the more expensive iPad Pro and brought it down to a more reasonable price point. It’s $100 more than it was last year, but in return this year’s iPad Air has a bigger, better screen and a faster (and very intriguing) processor.

Engadget‘s Dana Wollman:

With so few differences between the iPad Air and the Pro, I’m forced to reconsider who the Air is for. Last year it was the perfect just-right tablet: it offered more features than the basic entry-level model, but was still more attainable than the premium Pro line. It was the best tablet for most people. This year, I would upgrade Air to the best tablet for almost everyone, and I’d even argue it’s Apple’s best high-end tablet. That is, until Apple upgrades the Pro with a new chip and more advanced display tech, which is almost certainly will.

Six Colors‘s Jason Snell:

The iPad Air is a remarkably capable device that offers many features of more expensive models for a lower price.

Though it’s fair to point out that the price isn’t that much lower. The iPad Air starts at $599, meaning it’s $200 less than the base-model iPad Pro. However, that iPad Air model only has 64 GB of storage. If you choose the only other storage option, a model with 256GB of storage, you’ll pay $749—which is $150 less than a comparably equipped iPad Pro, and only $50 less than the base-model 128GB iPad Pro.

MacStories‘s Federico Viticci:

The iPad Air raises the baseline for what we should expect from iPad as a portable, versatile computer for everyone. If you’re looking for an 11″ tablet and think you can live without ProMotion and larger storage options, this is the iPad I recommend.

The Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen:

The $799-and-up Pro is arguably the “better” tablet. It has Face ID, four speakers versus the Air’s two, its screen is brighter, it has more cameras, plus a Lidar scanner for depth mapping and a higher refresh rate capable of smoother scrolling and gaming. There’s also a thousand-dollar Pro with a bigger 13-inch screen.

But I didn’t find myself missing the Pro’s features. The biggest difference is the price: Starting at $599, the iPad Air is essentially a budget Pro.

For reviewer comments on some of the specific features that are or are not included on the new iPad Air, read on below:

Viticci says the new Touch ID sensor in the power button is “fast and reliable” and easily recognized his fingerprints in nearly any orientation, regardless of how the fingerprint was originally registered. He did have trouble getting it to recognize his index fingerprints with the iPad held upside down, but that may have been an issue with awkward finger placement.

He also says the power button’s longer size, glossy finish, and more prominent bump compared to the power button on the iPad Pro make it easier to find by feel.

From a merely tactile standpoint, the longer shape and bump help in identifying the button by feel: on the 11” iPad Pro, I often find myself sliding my index finger up and down for a second to make sure I’m clicking the top button; on the iPad Air, the different texture, shape, and bump make the button impossible to miss at first touch.

Snell found that the fingerprint registration process requires a little more effort than on Home button Touch ID implementations, due to the narrower sensor.

Apple has done a good job of adapting this technology for this particular device. When training Touch ID to accept a finger, a user needs a bit more finger movement in order to scan the entire finger surface area, and Apple’s software does a good job at encouraging this. Also, once you scan the first finger, Apple’s software encourages you to scan a second finger on the other hand—I scanned both of my index fingers—in order to prevent having to flip the iPad over every time you need to unlock it.

Display

One of the most significant compromises on the iPad Air compared to the iPad Pro is the display, as while they both offer a “Liquid Retina” LCD, the iPad Air lacks 120Hz ProMotion and is a bit dimmer (500 nits vs. 600 nits for the iPad Pro). Still, reviewers found the iPad Air’s display to be quite good, as noted by Wollman:

I don’t have much to complain about after using the tablet for nearly a week. I typed, browsed the web, streamed movies, scrolled through my Photos library. Everything looked sharp and punchy, but never oversaturated. The anti-reflective coating also meant I had some wide viewing angles.

Wollman did note that it’s a shame Apple hasn’t brought OLED display technology to the iPad yet, and while there are rumors of mini-LED iPad Pro models coming soon that will offer many of the same advantages of OLED, it will undoubtedly be a pricey high-end technology that will take time before it trickles down to more mainstream devices like the iPad Air.

Storage

Bohn lamented that the base iPad Air model comes with just 64GB of storage and that the only other available option is a big step up to 256GB at a $150 price premium.

My biggest complaint is about storage. The base $599 model has 64GB, which is a good enough amount today but may feel cramped over time. That’s not the complaint, though. The complaint is that there’s no 128GB option — to get more storage you have to spend $150 more for 256GB. At $749, you’re just $50 away from the 128GB 11-inch iPad Pro and you may as well just get that one. (Come to think of it, that’s maybe not an accident.)

With the iPad Air starting price already having increased by $100 over the previous generation, the price gap to the iPad Pro certainly closes substantially if you need more than 64GB of onboard storage.

A14 Chip

Even though the iPad Air is a cheaper device than the iPad Pro, it has a newer chip in the form of the A14, compared to the A12Z in the latest iPad Pro. Benchmark testing found that the iPad Air registers faster single-core scores than the iPad Pro, but that multi-core and graphics benchmarks are fairly similar between the two devices, with the iPad Pro pulling ahead on some more intensive tasks thanks to its pro-focused optimizations. According to Bohn:

My advice: if you know exactly why you need a more powerful GPU or CPU on an iPad, wait for the next iPad Pro to get this new A14 chip or something like it.

If all you care about is that the iPad Air is fast and that it will let you do both iPad things and lots of real-work things, then yes: it can do that.

More Reviews

We’ve also rounded up unboxing videos of the new iPad Air.

A strain of malware called GravityRAT, known for spying on Windows machines, has been adapted to infect both Android and macOS devices, according to a new report.

Who’s at risk and how to protect yourself

The backlighting system of MacBook Pro keyboards could be upgraded to include TrueTone capabilities, with Apple examining the use of multiple LEDs per key to make the light seem even despite changes in the local environment.

Amazon has introduced a few discounts on Apple’s 2020 MacBook Air in both 256GB and 512GB storage options. To start, you can get the 256GB MacBook Air for $849.99, down from $999.00. You’ll see this price after a $100 coupon is applied automatically at the checkout screen.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Likewise, the 512GB MacBook Air has an automatic coupon on Amazon this week. It’s priced at $1,149.99, down from $1,299.00, following a $99.01 coupon at checkout (or $49.01, depending on the color you choose). Both models are available in all three colors, and these sales represent the best discounts that we’ve ever tracked for the new 2020 MacBook Air.

$150 OFF

256GB Model For $849.99

These models were updated in March of this year with a new Magic Keyboard with scissor switches, faster processors, more storage space, and a reduced starting price tag of $999.00 for the 256GB model. Both models feature a 13-inch Retina display, slim black bezels, and a Force Touch trackpad. Apple offers the MacBook Air in Space Gray, Silver, and Gold.

$150 OFF

512GB Model For $1,149.99

You can find even more discounts on other MacBooks by visiting our Best Deals guide for MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. In this guide we track the steepest discounts for the newest MacBook models every week, so be sure to bookmark it and check back often if you’re shopping for a new Apple notebook.

New MacBooks powered by Apple’s ARM-based chips look set to debut sometime next month. 

At least, that’s according to reliable leaker Jon Prosser who says another Apple event will take place on November 17 where the company plans to launch new Macs with Apple silicon. 

To confirm, there IS a November ARM Mac event.I’m hearing November 17th. 🗓October 16, 2020

Prosser says the event will likely be announced a week in advance, or on November 10. 

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch of Apple’s first MacBooks with ARM-based processors. The company first revealed its plans to switch from Intel to ARM at WWDC in June, promising to launch the first Mac with Apple silicon before the end of this year. 

Delays caused by the coronavirus put that timeline in doubt, but it now appears Apple is on track to reveal a new MacBook this year. As for what MacBook to expect, some assume a new 12-inch model is coming while other prominent leakers say the MacBook Pro will be the first outfitted with Apple silicon. Leaks claim Apple has several variants of its custom chip, including one with eight cores and another with 12 cores. 

If Apple launches a new MacBook in November, it would be at the third major Apple event of the season. The company debuted the new iPad, iPad Air and Apple Watch in mid-September before all four variants of the iPhone 12 were showcased a few weeks later.