Apple doesn’t provide much by way of power savings on the iOS platform apart from the Low Power Mode feature and the use of general common sense with regard to reducing battery drain. Fortunately, those looking for more than what Apple seems willing to provide out of the box might be in luck as of this week.
The Activity Monitor on your Mac is one of those tools that you should become familiar with. You by no means need be an expert on it, but you should know the basics. Why, you ask? Because the Activity Monitors shows all the processes running on your Mac. It’s like a task manager, so you can see how those processes affect your Mac and close any if needed.
Whether you’re new to Mac or simply new to the Activity Monitor, we’ll walk you through the basics you need to know.
A free macOS app called smcFanControl lets you individually control the fans built into every Mac desktop or notebook in order to make your computer run cooler.
If you're annoyed when your MacBook's fans kick into overdrive every time you launch a CPU-intensive task like high-demanding gaming, or macOS simply decides to run the Spotlight or Photos indexing process, you should give an app called Turbo Boost Switcher a try.
Chuck Peddle, the engineer who spearheaded the creation of the microprocessor that powered the Apple II and many other early personal computers, passed away of pancreatic cancer earlier this month, at age 82. His story is recounted in an obituary in The New York Times.
Intel yesterday unveiled its tenth-generation processors code-named "Ice Lake" that while bringing only modest compute improvements accelerate tasks such as machine learning, encryption, video compression, encoding and decoding by a large margin.
Apple this morning announced an iMac refresh with a 2x performance boost in the CPU department for a wide range of computing tasks, as well as new AMD Vega graphics options.
Apple’s MacBook Pro has been my personal computer of choice for almost a decade now, and while I’ve loved every upgrade along the way, I can’t help but feel like Apple could do better.
Given just how expensive a MacBook Pro becomes as you start pegging out the specs on Apple’s website, it seems like Apple could do more to help me justify the price point. With that in mind, I’ll discuss at least ten ways Apple could improve their flagship notebook in this piece.
All new iPhones run Apple's latest A12 Bionic system-on-a-chip and synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench 4 confirm this. According to the CPU, GPU and GPU compute scores for iPhone XR, Apple's colorful phone basically offers identical performance to the premium iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max smartphones, but in a package with a longer battery life that costs $250 less.
Apple's Mac mini was refreshed last week and it's quite a beast, according to the first Geekbench 4 synthetic benchmark scores pertaining to the pricier $1,099 model upgraded to an optional six-core 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 processor, resulting in a $1,299 configuration.
The new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro introduced Tuesday have plenty of CPU and GPU power to make them comparable in terms of processing speed to Apple's nearly $3,000 15-inch 2018 MacBook Pro notebook outfitted with Intel's six-core Core i7 chip.
Late last year, Apple was caught throttling iPhones that had degrading batteries. This lead to class action lawsuits, a discounted battery replacement program, and various meetings with regulators around the world. It also forced Apple to add a battery monitoring tool in iOS 11.3. With the 2018 iPhones now in stores comes word that last year's handsets might eventually be throttled too.
As first discovered by The Verge, the recently released iOS 12.1 update brings Apple’s controversial “performance management feature” to the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus for the first time. With this tool, Apple can dynamically throttle the devices (i.e. slow them down) as the battery degrades in order to stop random shutdowns.
An Apple support page explains:
With a low battery state of charge, a higher chemical age, or colder temperatures, users are more likely to experience unexpected shutdowns. In extreme cases, shutdowns can occur more frequently, thereby rendering the device unreliable or unusable. For iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7, and iPhone 7 Plus, iOS dynamically manages performance peaks to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down so that the iPhone can still be used. This performance management feature is specific to iPhone and does not apply to any other Apple products. Starting with iOS 12.1, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X include this feature, but performance management may be less noticeable due to their more advanced hardware and software design.
No doubt this news will lead to some more criticism against Apple. However, it's probably no longer justified. If you own one of last year's phones, you can turn off the performance management feature.
What do you think? Let us know below.
Image of iPhone X battery courtesy of iFixit