iPhone, Mac, macOS, iOS Fahad X iPhone, Mac, macOS, iOS Fahad X

iPhone Mirroring on a desktop Mac only works well if you have these devices.

To put it simply, you need a Magic Trackpad or a Magic Mouse to get the full iPhone mirroring experience. If you use any other mouse, the experience is not good.

Transitions stutter, and clicking and holding your normal mouse to swipe left and right on your home screen is imprecise. Very often the iPhone triggers “jiggle mode” to edit your home screen when you just wanted to swipe left or right. Scrolling with the click wheel is also not smooth at all.

And yes, I have a very capable wired mouse.

Swiping left, right, up, and down on the Magic Trackpad just feels more natural for operating iOS since it is a touch-based OS. The experience is very similar to my iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard.

I haven’t tested the Magic Mouse, but if you love the Magic Mouse, I am sure it will work just as well since it uses a similar touch interface.

Thankfully, Apple’s Magic Trackpad is worth the cost compared to the Magic Mouse, especially now that it is USB-C.

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Buy the M4 MacBook Pro if you are a true display enthusiast.

The new MacBook Pro has been lauded for its M4 line of chips and increased RAM for the same price as last year.

Now we have even more great news.

It turns out that Apple has updated the displays without mention to a quantum dot display, which provides better motion performance and punchier colors.

Ross Young, who has over 25 years in the display industry, has confirmed the transition to quantum dot display film.

Even the blur busters confirmed the M4’s visual performance vs an M1 MacBook.

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iPhone, Mac, iOS, macOS Fahad X iPhone, Mac, iOS, macOS Fahad X

What features do older iPhones get with iOS18.1?

Great writeup by Chance Miller showing all the features you get even if your iPhone doesn’t support Apple Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence is only supported on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhone 16 models.

If you have an older iPhone, then check out the link to see what features you will get with iOS 18.1.

The best feature in my opinion the ability to drag and drop files from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa:

Making good on its promise from WWDC, iPhone Mirroring now supports the ability to easily drag and drop files between your iPhone and your Mac. This feature requires both iOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Then, when you’re using iPhone Mirroring, you can wirelessly move files back and forth just by dragging and dropping.

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Buying a MacBook this holiday season? Avoid this one!

Now that Apple has made 16GB of RAM the standard for all their Macs, there will be plenty of sales and deals for the 8GB models to get them out of companies’ warehouses.

Amazon has already started discounting the M2 MacBook Air base model which has 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD storage for $699.

Yes $699.

That sounds like a great deal, but it is a trap.

Do not buy this MacBook, even at that price.

The base M2 Air model was crippled with slow hard drive speeds, making them unsuitable for most people who do or plan to do even basic creative workloads. This includes middle schoolers all the way to professionals.

The minute you start doing something demanding, your laptop will noticeably slow down. This problem was known well enough in the tech community that others started writing about it and making videos to show how the previous generation M1 MacBook Air was superior.

Here’s what Dan Seifert said from The Verge:

…slower storage speeds can impact a number of tasks, including file transfers, and can also slow down overall performance since Macs use SSD space as temporary memory (swap memory) when their onboard RAM is used up.

That said, will these particular differences impact you? People the Air is marketed to will likely not see a life-changing contrast between the 256GB and 512GB models when it comes to everyday performance. I ran two 4K YouTube videos over 25 open Chrome tabs for 30 minutes on both machines without either needing to dip into swap memory.

This sounds fast enough for web browsing if that’s all you plan on doing, but Max Tech has shown in multiple videos how the slow SSD hard drive on the base model can slow down a computer while doing one performance task, such as photo editing while browsing the web. 

The slow SSDs were such a problem that Apple fixed the issue when the M3 models came out a year and a half later.

The base M2 MacBook Air finds itself in a weird situation because it doesn’t really have a target market. 

If you just want a cheap laptop that performs well and better than the $699 M2 Air, you can get the M1 Air brand new for $50 cheaper at Walmart at $649. How does it perform better? It has a better heat sink and dual SSD channels allowing faster hard drive speeds. You will get faster data transfers and also better performance when the computer uses the SSD as RAM for multitasking.

If you want a lot of performance out of your laptop, the base M2 Air is not even on your radar.

When you include Apple Intelligence and how much resources it will eventually use up, the base M2 Air will age poorly in performance and will cost you more money in the long run.

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Don’t buy a new MacBook right now..

Rajesh Pandey from Cult of Mac:

In the latest Power On edition, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman claims Apple will release its new M4-powered Macs on November 1. These include a new low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 chip and high-end versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro featuring M4 Pro and Max.

M4 iMac and a revamped Mac mini with a smaller design should also launch on November 1. A new iPad mini with a faster chip will supposedly debut alongside the M4 Macs.

Gurman reports that Apple will release iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence support on October 28. So, the company might officially unveil its new Macs on the same day, presumably via a press release.

The M4 MacBook Pros are not unsurprising, but what I’m really interested to see is what Apple will do with the new desktops. If we are getting an all new design for the Mac mini, then surely we should be getting new USB-C accessories?

Apple’s Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad all still charge via lightning, and that is just not acceptable anymore in 2024.

Just wait till they announce these Macs before buying one now. You can either get the latest and greatest hardware that will last longer, or you can score an even better deal when the M3 hardware goes on deep discounts.

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Apple’s markup is kind of a mess.

Apple’s markup tool is something that I use probably on a daily basis, but there are some inconsistencies that you should be aware of, especially if you are using it cross platform between iOS and macOS. Here are just some scenarios that I tried and discovered how confusing things can get.

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