The M3 MacBook Air models can drive one external display at up to 6K resolution and a second display with up to 5K resolution… as long as you put the MacBook Air in clamshell mode by closing its lid. Of course, once you close the lid, you can no longer use the built-in keyboard and trackpad, so you need to provide those separately.
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Apple also upgraded the MacBook Air models from Bluetooth 5.0 to 5.3, providing better connectivity, security, and audio. As with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3 has slowly been making its way into Apple’s products, and it’s good to see the MacBook Air lineup move on from the older version.
MacBook Air M3 owners will notice the biggest impact of this chip in apps that leverage AI. For example, the Luminar Neo app can sharpen images with amazing before-and-after results via its Supersharp AI feature. It can also minimize or remove motion blur. Other AI features include the ability to easily erase objects, expanding your background and more.
Another interesting AI Mac app is FreeChat, a native macOS app that lets you run a range of AI models and chat with them like ChatGPT or Gemini — right on your Mac. Note that these and other Mac AI apps will run on the M2 and M1 chip. You'll just get faster performance out of the M3.
While the new M3 MacBook Air may look identical to its predecessor, there is one change for the midnight color. Apple says that the midnight M3 MacBook Air features a new anodization seal that aims to reduce fingerprints, similar to the space black M3 MacBook Pro.
Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that a software update for the 14-inch MacBook Pro will gain the ability to drive two external displays with the lid closed. The feature will work identically to how it works with the new M3 MacBook Air.
As has become a tradition, Apple released new colors of some of its cases and Apple Watch bands today. The new Silicone Case colors are Soft Mint, Sunshine, Light Blue, and Pink and come in all iPhone 15 model sizes. No new colors are available for the FineWoven cases.
Apple describes the Tricot Single Tour as "a knitted textile band that comfortably hugs the wrist like a glove." It is available as a single tour band only.
This week brings a pivotal moment. The six gatekeepers — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft — were given until March 7 to show they are obeying the rules.
But even if they can, there is little evidence yet to suggest that the law is having the desired effect. Industry groups representing travel apps such as Airbnb and Booking.com, and entertainment apps like Spotify and Deezer, complain the tech companies are focused on the letter of the law rather than the spirit of it, and it is having no meaningful impact on their businesses.
I get it – saying “Spotify pays Apple nothing” is a much stronger lobbying position than “Spotify pays Apple just $99 a year, the same as every other developer”. But only if it is, you know, true. And Apple makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year from charging that fee to developers as standard, which complicates the narrative that the App Store is only funded by commission on sales.
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I tried asking Apple how they squared this, and a spokesperson repeated the claim that Spotify paid $0 to Apple. When I asked if I could explicitly write that “Apple claimed that Spotify is not charged the developer fee”, though, the company stopped replying to my emails. Spotify had no such bashfulness, and confirmed that they pay the fee like all major developers.
Flying Meat has issued Acorn 7.4.4 with the new Super Resolution ML resizing feature, enabling you to increase the size of an image up to 4x using machine learning.
Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher receive the Layer States feature (already in Affinity Photo) for controlling design variations, enabling you to capture the current layer visibility across your document and create queries to make a selection or toggle the visibility of layers.
Red Sweater Software released FastScripts 3.3 with new Mouse Automation scripting additions for moving, clicking, and dragging the mouse.
Southeast Asia is home to hundreds of thousands of developers behind more than 90,000 apps on the App Store. To support this thriving ecosystem, today Apple opened its first Developer Center in Singapore, offering developers in the region even greater access to Apple experts and support to learn about the latest Apple technologies and resources to take their apps and games to the next level. Located in Singapore’s one-north district, an innovation hub home to numerous startups and leading technology firms, this new facility joins Developer Center locations in Cupertino, Bengaluru, and Shanghai.
I encourage you to confront the simple truth that email’s present and degenerate state could not have been avoided. It’s better to accept that no good end could ever have come of the technology—or that, like nuclear energy, its benefits would have always been weighed down by the risks of ghastly misappropriation. Holding this position frees you from the belief that email has been victimized by someone else’s bad decision making, or that the system can be fixed, gamed, optimized, or perhaps replaced. This is step one of your email exorcism.
In researching keyboard options for the Vision Pro, I ended up building the convertible Apple laptop-tablet that I so desperately want the company to make.
Let me explain how.
For work, I definitely still very much prefer emails to any other forms of communications. I can forward emails, I can file emails, I can search emails, and I can turn emails into to-do items. But I can't do diddly-squat with chats and text messages.
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Thanks for reading.