Monday, June 3, 2019

Apple : Mac Pro 2019 – first look: Apple's desktop designed to never leave you wanting

Apple : Mac Pro 2019 – first look: Apple's desktop designed to never leave you wanting

Mac Pro 2019 – first look: Apple's desktop designed to never leave you wanting

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 01:45 PM PDT

The Mac Pro 2019 is the Apple computer that's designed to never leave you wanting. Unless, of course, you're at Apple WWDC 2019 and yearn to actually touch it.

We hand a first look at the new Mac desktop replacement for the Mac Pro 2013, and this revision allows for modular upgrades, just in case having up to a 28-core Xeon processor isn't enough for you down the line.

The Mac Pro 2019 is built for the future and looks like it came from the future. lt has a shrunken stainless steel space frame that brings it back to form as a Mac tower.

There's a new Pro Display XDR with a matching design, but it's a separate purchase, as are the tweaked keyboard, mouse and trackpad – that's always been the case with Mac Pro configurations.

The power and design come together when you open up the computer from the top. You can lift off the aluminum housing for 360-degree access to every component.

Mac Pro 2019 specs and performance

When it comes to specifications, Apple is taking a no-holds barred approach, and has crammed in some seriously impressive hardware into the body of the new Mac Pro.

The base model comes with a new 8-core Intel Xeon processor, which should give plenty of oomph for multitasking. The Xeon line of CPUs are designed for professional workstations – and this can be configured to a Xeon processor with an astounding 28 cores. The more cores, the better it can handle multiple tasks at once – so processor powering the new Mac Pro will undoubtedly take even the most strenuous creative tasks in its stride.

As with Apple’s other prosumer computer – the iMac Pro –  the Mac Pro features AMD graphics card – starting with the Radeon Pro 580X and up to the Radeon Pro Vega II, which features 32GB of high-bandwidth memory – 1TB/s to be precise. That makes it the highest memory bandwidth of any GPU.

If that’s not enough, you can also kit it out with the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo – which features two Vega II GPUs for a total of 64GB of memory – making it the world’s most powerful memory card.

These GPUs are fitted into the Apple MPX Module, which easily slots into the Mac Pro , offering quiet operation while being kept cool by the Mac Pro’s own cooling system. Impressively, the Mac Pro can have two MPX Modules installed at once, so if you have the need  – and the budget – you can install two Vega II Duos for a crazy 128GB of video memory and 56 teraflops of graphics performance.

This kind of graphical grunt will crush most video encoding and rendering tasks – even at resolutions of 8K and above. While we’d love to image what the gaming performance of this level of firepower is like, this is going to be purely of interest to video professionals that need to render ultra-high resolution footage quickly.

Memory-wise the Mac Pro supports six-channel memory and comes with 12 slots, which allows you to install up to 1.5TB of RAM. Again, this makes it a workstation that’s designed to excel at multitasking. PCI Express slots also make a comeback, with eight in total, which will offer plenty of options to expand the Mac Pro’s capabilities in the future.

These specs certainly sound impressive on paper (if, perhaps, a little overkill for most people), and we look forward to seeing how the Mac Pro really performs in our full review.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

WWDC 2019 live blog: everything that happened at Apple's keynote event

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 01:37 PM PDT

Apple's WWDC 2019 did not disappoint with a number of high-profile announcements and launches made during the two and a bit hour keynote - and as well as a load of new software, we also got a smattering of hardware as well.

Oh, and if you missed it, Apple also killed off iTunes in the process.

To relive the full WWDC 2019 keynote, you can scroll back through our live blog below, but for those of you who just want to cut to the chase, hit the links below.

  • The new features coming to iPhones with iOS 13
  • Apple's tablets now have their own operating system: iPadOS
  • Mac will welcome macOS Catalina 10.15 later this year
  • Meet the Mac Pro: Apple's most powerful computer ever
  • Apple Watch will get its own App Store thanks to watchOS 6
  • Apple TV is gearing up for Apple Arcade gaming with tvOS 13

WWDC 2019 keynote: as it happened

All times in Pacific Daylight Time 

12:15 - He's summing up - all the platforms are going to be available from today as a beta, and the public beta in July. And as ever, the new software, like the iOS 13 update, will be launched around September (when the iPhone 11 will appear).

AND THAT IS IT, WE ARE DONE. That was intense, thanks so much for sticking with me. Now to write all this up...

12:13 - SwiftUI is definitely getting the biggest cheer - shocking in this room full of developers. 

Federighi is back - and the same native framework is going to be available for creating Watch apps as well. It'll work across all the platforms... and that looks like it for today. Please let that be it.

Tim is back. Bring me salvation, sweet CEO. Let me go.

12:10 - Seeing a demo of the new way of working with SwiftUI - the devs in the room are loving this. It's rather easy to drag and drop modules into the app when creating it, and has Dark Mode support built right in.

Every time something changes in the code, it's showing nicely in real time.

12:07 - There's a new framework coming, called SwiftUI. It's built in the platform, making it even easier to make better apps with less code. Could this help people coming into the app world?

Federighi is showing how much less code needs to be made, and someone just gasped and shouted 'WHAT?'.

It's true, there's a lot less in there, so these things will be a little neater.

12:06 - Craig is back, and is really talking up AR. Says it's going to be a 'huge year'... before talking about Swift.

450,000 apps on the Store are using Swift at the moment, apparently.


12:05 - Got to say - I'm not really into Minecraft but this looks really sweet. I'm not sold on AR just yet, as I've never managed to sell the idea to small people, but when this comes to glasses... then we're going stratospheric.

12:03 - This is a cool new feature. You can create Minecraft structures in real life, on a flat surface, and it can show people IN Minecraft at the same time. And that means that users can even interface with the small people in there. 

There's some weird fringing around her feet, admittedly, but come on, this is some futuristic shiz right here.


11:59 - COME ON GARETH, LOOK ALIVE. THIS IS WHY YOU TRAIN. OK, OK... onto VR and AR, with a RealityKit update. What's happening Craig? That's coming into the ARKIt, and Reality Composer is a new app - a drag and drop interface making it easy for developers to make new apps, and it works across Xcode and iOS.

ARKit 3 is the latest update to the platform - people occulusion and motion capture is happening natively, so you'll be able to interface virtually with people better than ever before.

Oh, more on Minecraft now, with Lydia and Saxs from Mojang coming to demo gameplay.


11:58 - The Mac Store updates are coming this Fall / Autumn. 

11:57 - We're getting a demo on the new apps being ported from phone to Mac... guys, I'm starting to flag here. I've been typing for over two hours straight and I've not been to the restroom. My legs hurt as much as the tips of my fingers. PLEASE SEND HELP.

11:55 - Apps are getting access to the Xcode portal, meaning you can make a single apps that can span across iPhone, to iPad, to Mac, bringing Catalyst technology to Macs.

Gameloft are stating that it was simple to code the game onto the Mac, and Twitter is back as a static Mac app as it was 'so easy' to do, including native Mac features.

Apple is going hard on making the App Store on the Mac a real thing - could this be a watershed moment?


11:53 - Screentime is coming to the Mac, as well as an overhaul for a suite of stuff for the apps - Notes, for instance, is getting a bit of a switch up, but again Federighi has zoomed by that.

11:52 - Find My is coming to the Mac, and while it's been there for a while, when things are getting dicey and you can't find your device, it will send out an encrypted message to nearby Apple devices through Bluetooth, so you can get an idea where it is if turned off.


Activation lock is there too, and you're able to lock it down and make it useless to thieves.

11:51 - Voice control is coming to the macOS platform, allowing users to control all manner of things with their voice. Up the volume? Start a mail message? Dictate the text? That's all coming - seems pretty big, but Apple has glossed over it quickly.

11:48 - Sidecar is announced! What is that? Well, you can use the iPad as a second display for your Mac. We've been using Duet for the same thing - this will be so much easier.

And with Sidecar, you don't need to do it with a wire - you can use your tablet with the Apple Pencil as an input device.


11:45 - With the Apple Podcasts app, Apple is able to index the words on each podcast and can search for what was spoken on each, so you can find them more easily.

The Apple TV app has Dolby Atmos, and 4K HDR. This is being rattled through quickly.

11:44 - Craig is being funny - he's saying that iTunes isn't complex enough - so they should add calendar, Safari and a dock into it.

Wait, Apple had a better idea. How about splitting iTunes into Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV?

11:43 - Tim is back so we can talk about macOS. There's a new version coming, and Craig Federighi is coming to talk about it. What's it going to be called? That's the big question.

It's MacOS Catalina.

Usually we get a lot more of a build up to that.


11:39 - Oooh, portrait mode is coming with the new mount. And for the pro that needs to mount on the go, there's a new quick-release-and-attach adjustment to make it work easily.

The base mode of the Mac Pro is an 8 core Xeon, 32GB memory and that will start at $5,999, and will be available this FAll, and the Mac Pro can be rack mounted too.

The Pro Display base version will cost $4,999, the connector $199 and the pro base mount a dizzying $999. That got a gasp in the room... it's a MOUNT.


11:36 - Now talking HDR, something that's big news in the industry these days. The Mac Pro monitor has a mass of blue LEDs and each is calibrated, and there's a modulator, custom lenses and reflectors to make sure that the picture quality is as accurate as possible.

The display can show 1000 nits of full screen brightness indefinitely thanks to the rear the the monitor acting as a heat sink. That explains why it has that weird design.

Apple is calling this Extreme Dynamic Range, or XDR, and that's why Apple is calling this the 'Pro Display XDR'.

You can connect up to 6 displays to once to the Mac Pro, with these XDR playback, allowing 120 million pixels.

11:33 - Oh, the monitor seems to be different. Talking about the new monitor - something that will work for all designers, to offer something that's as good as a $43,000 professional monitor.

It's a 32-inch display, as a 6K Retina display. Making it 40% larger than the iMac 5K display. It's go P3 wide color for colro accuracy, and a wider viewing angle, with an anti-reflective coating.

You just know Apple is going to say 'and looooook how cheap it is!'.

11:31 - Currently seeing how powerful the Mac Pro can be when rendering a music score, with SO MANY tracks being able to run together. We're putting this into Final Cut Pro now (well, we is a loose term... I'm watching it) and it's rendering the score and the 8K stream at once.

11:28 - The Maxon Redshift render engine is being brought along too, and Otoy are bringing a version of Octane for the new Mac Pro. Loads of developers are apparently getting on board - including Pixar, Adobe and Unreal engine.

11:27 - There's the option to put this on wheels - and that got the biggest cheer so far. [Insert laughing and crying emoji].


11:25 - For the video editing, there's the new Afterburner card, which can process 6 billion pixels per second. That is many.

This works for ProRes and ProRes RAW, and with this card it can playback three streams of 8K, or 12 streams of 4K ProRes footage. 

This will need so much power... and here we go on that. 1.4KW power supply. WHAT? WATT? (Geddit).

There's a major fan in there, but Apple says that it will be nice and quiet - no louder than the last Mac Pro.


11:22 - And more: there are two 10Gbps ethernet ports. Good if you want it, with more Thunderbolt ports on top.

There's another module to slot on, the MPX module (Mac Pro expansion module), with a fanless design. You can add in the Radeon Pro Vega II card in the MPX, and you can upgrade it further too if you're so inclined.

They're connected by the Infinity Fabric Link, if you're interested in that.

You can also add TWO of these modules, so  that's 56 teraflops in one work station.


11:21 - Let's start with the processor, there's a new Intel Xeon processor, with up to 28 cores. And it's getting 300W of power and a large heat sink to let it run fully all the time.

There are 6 channels of memory, that allow up to 1.5TB of system memory. These stats are coming too fast to type...

There's PCI expansion coming back to the Mac. The new Mac Pro has 8 PCI slots, four double wide, and three single length slots.

11:20 - It's the most powerful Mac ever created... what are the odds? Oh man, I missed who this was on stage again. I'm sorry dude, whoever you are.

11:18 - Watching a video that's showing us something new in the world of Mac. Come on, we know it's going to be the Mac Pro. Show us the Mac Pro.

Aaaaaand, there it is. The Mac Pro. AND IT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A GARBAGE CAN.

11:17 - Tim is back on stage. Still got an hour to go - think we're going to go big on Mac. Oh, and right on cue, Tim says 'Right, let's turn to Mac!'.

Should I use my predictive powers for good or evil?


11:14 - Gestures being shown off now, single to copy, double to cut, three to paste it back in, and to undo your gestures you can three-finger swipe to the left. They'll work in any application that supports cut, copy, paste, undo and redo. So no more shaking your iPad dangerously.

The Apple Pencil pane at the bottom has been rubbish for a long time, too hard to use - it looks a lot slicker than it used to. But can a four year old use it? That will be the test.

That's something that happened to me recently, when doing some drawing with a child. Not because that's my metric for everything.

11:12 - Apple Pencil is getting latency of 9ms - that will make it feel more like a pen to most people. There's a PencilKit API coming too, so other apps can use it, and the Pencil can be used to mark more things by dragging up from the side of the screen.

Toby Patterson from the iPad experience team is coming on to demo this.


11:11 - You can grab the scroll indicator anywhere when editing text, use multi-finger touches to undo text creation and making everything a little easier to use.

What about mouse support though?

11:10 - Safari on the iPad is getting a desktop browser, rather than being stuck on the mobile version. That means you can manage downloads from within it, see more information from each web page and more keyboard shortcuts.

Apple's launch of iPadOS is to make it more of a Windows competitor... could mouse support land?

11:07 - Column view is coming in the File System - I'm wondering if something has happened to Craig's presentation. It juddered when iPadOS was showing, and Federighi keeps pausing then getting back to his flow.

Either way, he's still talking. And this is bigger: you can now plug in thumb drives and SD Cards which show in the Files app. You'll need a dongle for that, unless it's USB-C... assume this will work on Lightning, but the iPad Pro, with the USB-C connector is being shown on stage.

Apple is also allowing direct file management from cameras in the system as well.


11:04 - The first thing: you can pin widgets to your home screen without needing to slide away. Slideover is getting improved, and with a slide up, you can get all your apps - much like you can on the iPhone already.

Split view is getting upgraded: two apps side by side will be more powerful. You can have two Word documents next to one another - it's good to be able to have the same app side by side.


11:02 - Loads more is coming from iOS 13 - we'll round them up properly in our iOS 13 hub - but we're now focused on iPad. Federighi admitted that the iPad's base on iOS 13 was splitting too far from the iPhone, so we're now seeing something new: iPadOS. Yay, another thing to delve into...


11:00 - Here's something good - Siri will now sound better. With Neural Text to Speech, Siri's whole voice will now be created by software. Rather than small clips of actor's voices, which sound stunted. With iOS 13, things will sound a lot slicker.

We've just heard a demo, and while iOS 12 sounded really stunted, we feel that Apple chose something really hard for Siri to say to show the difference. Siri in iOS 13 sounds normal, to be honest.


10:58 - Goshdarnit, I missed who this was coming on stage - but we're seeing more about how there's more coming from HomeKit and CarPlay.

Let's start: Handoff is coming to HomePod. Bring your iPhone close to hand off music, podcast or phone call. Works in reverse as well.

Live Radio is coming to HomePod – ask Siri to play 100,000 stations from all around the world.

HomePod can now recognize who in your family is talking, and personalize the response. Great with Apple Music – based on your taste and history. Goes beyond music, messages, notes, reminders... and more. (Added suspense).

CarPlay is coming along too - with greater imagery and an easier way to swipe through.


10:55 - iOS back on the headlines from Craig again.

10:52 - The way we look through Photos is changing - with days options, so you can group things by more granular dates, and Live Photos will play automatically to help you feel more 'connected' to your memories.

Months can then be selected and each set of events and moments will be grouped together, with videos and Live Photos again autoplaying.

The Years section will show things like all the WWDC events one after the other - or your child's birthday each year, seeing how it changes every year. I'm not sure how it would know to group these, other than the same thing happening on the same date.


10:50 - Right, some big changes coming to photo editing. You can change the way Potrait photos look in terms of saturation, brilliance and more - and use the same thing on videos as well.

In fact, the iPhone is now powerful enough to allow you to rotate video as well - this is native, as you've been able to do this through apps already.

Justin is on stage to demo these new features

10:48 - Memoji stickers are coming to the keyboard, so your face can be used in different apps to show how you're feeling about such things. Now, onto Camera and Photos.

10:46 - More is coming from Memoji, where your face is created as an Animoji. We have beauty influencers telling us which make up is going to be added to these animated emoji... I'm so old. I don't know who they are. They have 8 million subscribers.

There's a variety of colors, piercings, hairstyles, glasses, hats... and even AIIIIIRPPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODS!*


*Werid emphasis that of the influencers on the screen. They screamed it. Airpods on Animoji.

10:45 - HomeKit coming to routers too for additional security. God, this is rapid fire info... and we've got 90 minutes to go. Stick with me guys, stick with me.

10:43 - HomeKit is up next. Security cameras recording your life and being uploaded to the cloud? Apple has created HomeKit Secure Video - it's analysed on the AppleTV, iPad or iPhone and then encrypted and sent to the cloud and that's how you're alerted.

10 days of clips' storage will be saved on your account, and won't take more from your data allowance. Which is good, as we're already paying 99 cents a month that we could use for other frippery.


10:40 - What about logins? Those pesky Facebook or Google logins? Well, now you can Sign in with Apple. It's going to be another button next to FB or Google, allowing you to sign in with your app, logged in with a new account and Face ID to get in, and no personal information needed.

Some apps that want a name or email, and Apple can allow them to request that - and you can hide your email from the developers and a random address is created that forwards to your real address.

The room has gone bonkers for that - and for good reason. That's really, really helpful for privacy - and each app has its own random address, so you can disable them one by one.


10:39 - Once again, privacy is coming to the fore. Being able to share your location to an app just once, and then it has to ask every other time, for instance.

If you do allow it to continually monitor your location in the background - Apple will then tell you what they're doing with reports. Even Bluetooth scanning to locate you is being turned off. Privacy is pretty massive here.

10:38 - There's a Streetview competitor coming to Apple Maps too, with labels on the shops as you scroll past. It looks pretty fluid in both landscape and portrait on the iPhone. 

10:35 - Some of the apps are getting thoroughly re-written. Messages has been retooled to allow you to do things like tag people in reminders from the Messages app itself.

Maps is also getting totally retooled - planes and cars have been travelling 4 million miles to bring a much more rich and detailed Maps app. It does look miles better (arf).

It's coming to the US later this year, presumably because Apple hasn't gone everywhere.

Trying to eradicate the memory of this:


10:34 - In iOS 13, Apple Music will get lyrics that sync alongside too. Just in case you like to sing to your phone.

10:33 - There's swiping coming to typing on the default Apple keyboard - that's something I've been waiting for for so long. It came in Swiftkey years ago and it's so useful.

10:29 - Some of the big changes to iOS: 60% smaller app updates, 30% faster Face ID unlock and apps launching twice as fast. Craig is jazzed too - maybe there's something powerful in the coffee backstage.

Watching a video that's demoing something... oh, it's only dark mode! And we're going to see it live... dear god, someone just screamed.

Everything just looks a bit... darker.


10:26 -Final thing from Kevin: there's a new Pride Watch face coming to the Apple Watch. That's good.

Tim Cook is back on stage - he's prepping us to learn about the new iOS. Who reckons it'll be called iOS 13? We do. WE DO.

As always, he's chatting adoption rate: 85% of iOS customers are on the latest release. iOS 12 is the most-installed ever... is that in terms of percentage or numbers? Because if it's the latter, that makes sense as there are more devices out there.

Another dig at Google: Android 9 only on 10% of devices. This has been going for a while.

Craig Federighi is on stage and he's getting rock star status with the WHOOP WHOOP WHOOPS.

10:24 - We're seeing a live demo of the new watchOS 6 now - cheering to show the decibel tracking in the new Noise app worked live... so how is that only periodically checking for sound? It was pretty rapid.

The new Watch App Store is being shown - it's card-based, and you can scroll across to see ratings and screen shots, then scroll back to the top to get.

Really feels like the Watch is going to go standalone... could Android users be able to use one of the best wearables out there soon?

10:21 - Cycle tracking is coming to the Watch and the health app if you've not got an Apple wearable - that's something we've been waiting for, and will really help people know something that's crucial information. 

10:19 - Oh, this is good: there's a decibel meter inside the Watch, telling uou if things get too loud and could hurt your hearing health.

Apple is making it clear that it does not record all the time, and does not save anything to the Watch or any Apple account.


10:16 - There's an independent Watch app store coming for the watch - so you can buy apps directly to your device. Is the Watch losing the need for an iPhone?

There will be standalone apps from Colgate, Kalms and a multitude of others. The new watchOS 6 will also bring Activity Trends, with nine metrics to compare the progress over the last 90 days over the last year.

The info will show you how to do better if the trend is going downwards, like how to get a big fitter or some tips on how to stay active.

Oh, and Watch is getting voice memos and a calculator, with a tip splitter on there too.


10:12 - We're now listening about Apple Watch - watchOS is getting an upgrade (shocker) and Kevin Lynch is on stage to talk about it.

When Apple Watch was first launched, Lynch was so nervous talking about the new hardware. Fast forward a few years, he's so much calmer and engaged with what he's saying. 

Oh, he's saying stuff. There are new faces that include solar features, and you'll be getting a notification on the hour - either silently with a tap or birdsong. 'From robins captures on Apple Park... wait, no, RECORDED at Apple Park.'


10:11 - Whoa, this is big: AppleTV will now support the Xbox One and PS4 DualShock controllers for gaming on the screen. If Apple was trying to make that platform a console, this is a big move.


10:09 - AppleTV is going to get a profile function, so family members can switch between their favorite shows. Not to brag but I totally suggested this a fortnight ago when having a demo - I can only assume the developers worked for 14 days straight to get that feature in from my feedback.

Lyrics also coming to Apple Music on the TV as well.


10:05 - Currently watching a new promo for the new Star Trek show on Apple TV Plus... Tim seems to love that too. He's watched the whole season already - alright, show off.

10:02 - Tim Cook is on stage, welcoming the throngs of developers and fans. He's really jazzed up. It's nice when people are happy, isn't it?

He's talking up the new services from the recent TV event - Apple Arcade, Apple TV Plus and Apple News Plus.

10:01 - We're currently watching a black and white video of people using a Mac to do all lovely things that humans like to do when they're tired. A developer's build just failed and he's angry. There's a baby crying. A man is drinking from a milk jug and thinking he should go back to bed, but he gets back on the Mac and he solves it. 

I see what Apple is saying there.

'While the world sleeps, you dream'.*


*OK that was on screen, I didn't make that up.

10:00 - And we're a go! It's all dark. It'sa reallyy hardt o type.

09:57 - The lights have gone down a little early - the screen has changed to a more dynamic look at neon emoji. An Apple hype worker just skipping in front of me clapping.

I imagine Tim Cook is shadow boxing into a mirror at this very second.

09:50 - Proof of said chanting from our very own @mattswider, who will tweeting all kinds of key insights throughout the two hours plus we'll be liveblogging.


09:45 - You know that feeling just before Christmas where you spend all the time wishing, wishing, wishing that the Wi-Fi holds up and Santa comes on stage to tell you all about new software updates? That's pretty much our #mood right now.

They're letting in developers in little batches, and there's a weird tribal thing that's started... they're chanting 'DUB DUB... DEE SEE!' like it's some kind of Haka.

09:15 - Anndddd..... we're in! 45 minutes to go.

09:10 - We're in the second queue now - oh yes, it really is this exciting - and we've got eyes on the doors to the auditorium. We reckon we can get the jump on a couple of these chumps in front, when they open.

08:45 - No, Gareth. Well, not literally anyway. Apple's tagline for this year's WWDC is "Write Code. Blow Minds" hence the selection of head-busting graphics we're seeing plastered around everywhere. 🤯

08:40 - While Apple is expected to announced A LOT today, it's worth remembering it does like to take its time with particular announcements. A volley of launches is no guarantee.

08:30 - Ever thought to yourself, 'do many people attend WWDC?' Well here's your answer. We're still an hour and half from the WWDC 2019 keynote kicking off and the crowds are already building outside the McEnery Convention Center.

08:15 - The passes at WWDC 2019 are understated (at least, the media one is), with a simple silver shade and black text. It did look good next to our breakfast, though.

07:30 - One of the best ways of understanding what we may be in for today is to look back on last year's WWDC keynote. We got plenty of demos, especially around iOS 12 and AR Kits, and Apple hit all its key areas; iPhone, Macs, Watch and TV.

Today's keynote is expected to last two hours, so there's plenty of time for Apple to give us an in-depth look at a host of new platforms.

06:30 - You'll be able to watch the WWDC 2019 keynote as well, and we've made you a handy guide to show you how. 

Make sure you stick with us here as well though, as we'll be cutting through the jargon to bring you our expert analysis on everything Apple has to say.

06:00 - DO YOU WANT MORE WWDC 2019 SPECULATION? Of course you do, as we hit the four-hours-til-keynote milestone.

Well how's this for size? Something else we may get is our first look at TV OS 13, along with more details of Apple's new streaming service, which it announced back in March.

Apple TV Plus will offer exclusive shows, movies and documentaries from acclaimed filmmakers, including JJ Abrams, Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan when it arrives later this year, but more information may be revealed today - especially how it plays nicely with Apple TV hardware.

05:48 - Sunrise in San Jose, and as the sunlight creeps through the crack in the curtains and dances its way across Tim Cook's face, the sleepy CEO slowly opens his eyes.

He picks up his iPhone, peers at the screen for a few seconds as his eyes adjust their focus as his fingers accidentally slips down the side and onto a volume key.

A rye smile creeps across his face as, instead of a large icon appearing in the middle of the screen, a volume indicator pops up in the top-right corner.

"It's ready," he murmurs, before rolling over for another five minutes.

05:00 - We've touched on iOS 13 and Mac OS 10.15, but there's more software goodies in store for us today, with the Apple Watch also in line for some new tricks thanks to the rumored Watch OS 6 update.

One of the more interesting Watch OS 6 rumors we've seen suggests it will get its own App Store, which means you won't have to download the app on your phone as well, as is currently the case.

04:30 - Is it time to say goodbye to iTunes? 

Multiple rumors appear to suggest so, with reports that Apple will replace the iconic (but not always loved) iTunes by rolling its features into Apple Music.

For now it's still just a rumor, but it's one we will be keeping a close eye on, and you should too.

04:00 - Another big announcement we expect to see today is the arrival of Mac OS 10.15, along with a new geographical name (it will be following on from High Sierra and Mojave).

A headline-grabbing feature of Mac OS 10.15 will be its ability to support iOS apps, which will open up a whole range of new options for users on their computer. There are set to be plenty more talking points too.

03:30 - A change we may see in iOS 13 is an update to Apple's volume graphic, which pops up in the middle of your display when you adjust the volume. It takes up a lot of space, and gets in the way if you're playing a game or watching a video. 

A leak less than 24 hours ahead of the WWDC 2019 keynote, however, suggests we'll see a smaller indicator located in the top corner of the screen, which would be much less intrusive.

03:00 - The biggest launch out of WWDC 2019 will likely be iOS 13, as this will be our first look at the next-generation operating system for iPhones, iPads and yes, even the new iPod.

Apple is likely to launch the first beta of iOS 13 today, but it'll likely only be available to developers. A public beta will probably follow in the coming weeks.

While iOS 13 will be available on the iPhone 11 and co. when they launch later this year, today all eyes will be focused on its backwards compatibility.

Last year, iOS 12 launched with the promise it would come to the iPhone 5S, iPad Air and iPad Mini 2 - and these are the devices in line to potentially miss out on the iOS 13 update as Apple moves away from older hardware.

02:00 - An iPhone SE 2 has been long rumored, but for anyone hoping Apple's compact form factor will make a return at WWDC 2019 today, we have some bad news. Sorry.

01:20 - iPad owners with an affinity for numbers, rejoice! A last-minute rumor suggests iOS 13 will, for the first time, bring a native calculator app to the slate. 

01:00 - We'll have two members of the superb TechRadar team coming at you live from the WWDC 2019 keynote, with Gareth Beavis and Matt Swider bringing you everything you need to know about all of Apple's announcements today - but right now they're fast asleep, dreaming of new features, device compatibility and release dates.

June 2: We got into San Jose, California a day early to soak up the pre-WWDC 2019 atmosphere and we stopped by the McEnery Convention Center to see what Apple has in store for us. 

It's fair to say Apple has gone all-out with its branding for this year's event, and it's going big on the slang name for its iconic developer's conference, 'Dub dub'.

1. iOS 13 at Apple WWDC 2019

The iOS 13 beta is poised to be the chief news story out of Apple's WWDC 2019 keynote simply because it affects every iPhone and iPad user in the world.

We fully expect Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi to talk up the fact that iOS 13 is going to be faster than last year's update. To make the speed increase percentage even more Apple-dramatic, we may see Federighi cite the overall speed increase since iOS 11 (as iOS 12 offered a speed increase, too).

iOS 13 is going to launch the long-rumored Dark Mode, according to the latest leaks. It'll turn your white-and-light-gray UI backgrounds into black-and-dark-gray colors that are infinitely easier on the eyes at night.

Reminders, Health, iMessage, Screen Time Books, and Find My (a combination of Find My iPhone and Find My Friends) will be tweaked in iOS 13, says Bloomberg.

Important for iPad users, we're allegedly going to see a native functionality using the iPad as a secondary display (akin to Duet and Luna Display), a revamped home screen design, stackable app windows for easier multi-tasking and maybe even mouse support. Apple is trying to make the iPad running iOS 13 more like a computer.

We have a full list of changes, a rumored device compatibility list, the expected beta release date schedule in our iOS 13 explainer page.

2. macOS 10.15

We loved macOS 10.14 (aka Mojave) for finally introducing system-wide Dark Mode and additional creative tools, but we haven't heard much at all about macOS 10.15 – which doesn't even have a cool nature-themed codename yet (in keeping with recent releases, it will likely reference a California biome).

We don't know much about what's officially coming, but macOS 10.15 could include iOS features like Siri Shortcuts (and potentially the Shortcuts app), Screen Time, improved Apple ID management and special iMessage effects. We've also seen rumors that iTunes will be split into four different apps: Music, Books, TV, and Podcasts. 

There's also the possibility that macOS 10.15 enables Mac users to link up their iPads as secondary displays.

On the other hand, it's also possible that we'll only see incremental improvements, as happened with the move from 10.13 Sierra to 10.14 High Sierra. If that's the case, perhaps we'll see that minimal upgrade in the name – Dry Mojave, maybe?

Apple ruffled feathers when it raised minimum system requirements for macOS Mojave and locked out older machines, so we don't expect those thresholds to change this time around. To be specific: we expect anything newer than a 2015 MacBook, mid-2012 MacBook Pro, any late 2012 MacBook Air/Mac mini/iMac, late 2013 Mac Pro or 2017 iMac Pro to be able to run the next macOS.

Assuming Apple runs its usual schedule, it will introduce macOS 10.15 and release it in late September.

3. watchOS 6

We haven't heard anything about watchOS 6, but we're assuming that update will be announced at WWDC 2019 for owners of the newer Apple Watches. Perhaps it will be the long-awaited sleep tracker feature (Apple did buy sleep tracking company Beddit two years ago), though that's rumored to be coming to Apple's wearables in 2020.

But sources told Bloomberg that Apple plans to sever its wearable's close dependency on iPhone by adding an App Store directly to Watch (and ergo, watchOS). This opens the door to third-party developers (finally!) but Apple reportedly also plans to toss in some basic apps that have been on iOS for years, liek Calculator, Voice Memos, and the ability to send Animoji and Memoji stickers. There will also be two new health apps: one called 'Dose' to monitor pill reminders and the other 'Cycles' to track menstrual cycles.

watchOS 6 will almost certainly be compatible with the latest Apple Watch 4 and previous Apple Watch 3, while support for Apple Watch 2 is likely. We don't have high hopes for the original Apple Watch, however, as it stopped getting updates with watchOS 4.

We expect Apple to follow precedent and launch a watchOS 6 beta shortly after WWDC 2019, then release a final public version in September.

4. tvOS 13

If you thought we hadn't heard much about Apple's other probable software updates, we know even less about tvOS 13, which we expect to be announced at WWDC 2019. 

But Apple TV devices will certainly support the company's new streaming services. Apple TV Plus will have exclusive shows from big names like Oprah, Steven Spielberg, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and M. Night Shyamalan, and is expected to launch in later 2019. That's around when Apple Arcade is set to launch, which will have a host of games you can play across iOS, macOS and tvOS devices.

At last year's WWDC, Apple mentioned very little about the then-upcoming tvOS 12, which brought Dolby Atmos overhead surround sound, Dolby Vision HDR standard and zero sign-on that auto-filled passwords from your home Wi-Fi network (for US users, at least).

We don't know about any features coming with the supposed tvOS 13, but if it follows precedent, it will arrive in mid-September.

5. Mac Pro...and more

Apple is reportedly considering introducing a new version of the Mac Pro, according to Bloomberg. While we didn't get any details of how the desktop machine might be revamped, but there's plenty to update, given the second and last generation Mac Pro came out in 2013.

This fits last year's news that Apple was aiming for a 2019 release of a wholly revisioned Mac Pro, per a lengthy TechCrunch report. Gone is the 'trash can' design, as the company is allegedly considering a ground-up revision.

Apple is also preparing its own brand of external monitor (going by the codename J290) that will pack HDR support, per Bloomberg. Other rumors suggest a 31.6-inch 6K screen with mini-LED backlighting, according to Pocket Lint.

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Borderlands 3: release date, news and trailers for the next Borderlands game

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 01:34 PM PDT

More than six years after Borderlands 2 burst into our lives, Borderlands 3 has finally been announced and given a firm release date that we can count down to. 

After so long waiting, it hardly feels real that the release date of Borderlands 3 is so close; we've even spent some hands-on time with the game now!

With larger-than-life characters, a lively and colorful alien planet to explore, tons of absurd weapons, and a wisecracking sense of humor, Borderlands has managed to blow some fresh air into an FPS genre that often sticks to 'gritty' visuals and dull urban environments.

Here's everything we know so far about the game, and when it's finally going to be landing on PC and consoles.

[Update: E3 2019 is fast approaching and Borderlands 3 is expected to be there in force. Read on to find out what kinds of things we might see from Gearbox at this year's show.]

Borderlands 3

Image Credit: Gearbox

Cut to the chase

  • What is it? The third numbered game in the first-person shoot and loot franchise
  • When can I play it? September 13, 2019
  • What can I play it on? PS4, Xbox One and PC 

Borderlands 3 release date

Gearbox has now confirmed a release date of September 13, 2019.

Image Credit: Gearbox

Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 trailers and preview

While we wait for the game to land, we do have a number of new trailers to pore over. Gearbox took to the stage at PAX East (March 28-30) to show off  the formal announcement trailer below. You get a good look at the new villains of the series (a brother and sister?), new shiny cities and creaking scrapyards, and series-favorite robot Claptrap doing some breakdancing.

It looks... pretty much the same as any Borderlands game before it, which is both reassuring for fans and a bit disappointing for those looking for a new spin on the series. It's too early to judge before we've seen more, though. 

What we know for sure is that there'll be a lot of guns (over one billion, and even one with little machine legs) and a whole lot of looting in expansive sandbox environments. Oh, and a saxophone solo – because why not?

There's also a separate announcement trailer for the release date, which also names the four vault hunters and the name of the villains: the Calypso Twins...

The official announcement came only days after a 'Mask of Mayhem' teaser you can see below. It's packed with little clues and hints of the game to come, including everything from a morse code to braille, and what seems to be a broken-up redeem code (C35TB - WS6ST - TXBRK - JJH6H - TTTJT) that we imagine will be usable for some sort of DLC reward or exclusive skin for eagle-eyed viewers.

What's more, we've been able to spend some time with the game thanks to a hands-on gameplay reveal event that TechRadar attended. The gameplay loop, at least, is familiar, with your job to take down enemies, look their corpses, and level up. It looks like Gearbox is putting plenty of detail and imagination into the weaponry this time around.

Borderlands 3


What's new is a focus on movement that's more fluid, and improvements to multiplayer, including the option for allies to revive each other. There's also "loot instancing", designed to level the playing field a little for groups of friends who've spend different amounts of time in the game. Borderlands 3 also gives you your very own spaceship, the Sanctuary 3.

For a full rundown of everything we saw in our time with the game, check out our hands-on preview in full.

Borderlands 3 news and rumors

E3 Expectations

E3 2019 is now a matter of days away and given its release date is only a few months off now, it's not surprising that Gearbox and Borderlands 3 are expected to have a significant presence. 

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has been tweeting ahead of the show to let fans know that they have plenty to look forward to. We're talking new gameplay and new vault hunter and new planet reveals for everyone watching the show and a playable demo of the game on the show floor for those in attendance. Pitchford has also said there may be "a surprise or two" to look forward to as well. 

A new vault hunter and a new planet are pretty significant for Borderlands fans so what these surprises will be is hard to imagine - could they involve those Borderlands 2 DLC rumors we've discussed below? TechRadar will be present at the show and will be updating here with the latest Borderlands 3 announcements as they happen. 

Reports of Borderlands 2 DLC

It's not long until Borderlands 3's release date but there are reports that Borderlands 2 could soon receive a DLC which will bridge the gap between the titles. The rumors point to an E3 2019 announcement, but nothing has been confirmed just yet. With E3 just around the corner, we don't have long to wait. 

Details, details, details

We managed to have a chat with Amanda Christensen, a concept artist at Gearbox and a key character designer on Borderlands 3. She told us that "the most obvious jump is in terms of our level of detail" in the upcoming game, and that there are a "bunch of cool little details" spread throughout. It's a revealing chat and you can read everything Christensen had to say about Borderlands 3 here.

DLCs: quality over quantity

The DLC future of Borderlands 3 looks bright enough, after Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford intimated on Twitter that future DLCs would focus on quality over quantity: it seems as though Borderlands 3 might focus on fleshing out the capabilities of the game's starting classes instead of asking players to start building new ones from scratch, and that's fine with us.

Epic Games Store exclusive – to start

While Borderlands 3 will launch on PS4, Xbox One and PC, the PC version will start as an Epic Games Store exclusive, before joining the Steam Store six months on.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford hinted at this back in December, when he voiced his support for the new marketplace. Epic has been courting various exclusives for its store, including Metro Exodus and The Division 2, so we're not overly surprised.

Cross-platform co-op could be included

A listing page for Borderlands 3 on the Microsoft store gave a hint to a very-cool potential new feature landing with the game – cross-platform multiplayer. Though the page in question has since been pulled, it showed the game's feature set to include play across consoles not limited to Microsoft's own. With the game initially an Epic Games Store exclusive, and that platform's biggest title, Fortnite, being cross-platform in many console scenarios, there's certainly the genesis of the infrastructure to support the feature if true.

A representative for the game's publisher, 2K Games, told IGN that “Cross play is something we’re looking at closely, but don’t have anything to confirm or announce at this time.”

Vault Hunter names

The release date trailer also gave us the names of the four vault hunters, which offer their own spins on the traditional four classes. We have a Gunner weapons expert (Moze), a Siren with floating fists at the ready (Amara), an android Beastmaster (Fl4x), and a suave, stealthy Operative (Zane). We also got the names of the entry's villains: the very evil-looking Calypso Twins (not identical).

Borderlands 3 confirmed – as well as a board-game

Gearbox gave us the announcement we wanted on March 28, at PAX East in Boston. The showcase was hit with technical difficulties – like a lot – and for some reason included a really long magic trick. But we got our first look at the anticipated title, as well as a tie-in board-game called Borderlands: Tiny Tina’s Robot Tea Party. 

Borderlands 3

Image Credit: Gearbox

4K remasters (for free!)

Good news for anyone with a copy of Borderlands 1, 2, or the Pre-Sequel: Gearbox is releasing enhanced 4K remasters of the previous games, and anyone who already owns them will get to download the remastered version for free. You'll need a 4K ready console or PC to make the most of it, but it's wonderful fan service for those who do.

Hints, lots of hints

At PAX West 2017, Pitchford announced during a panel that 90% of the Gearbox team is “working on the thing I think most of you guys want us to be working on.”

Pitchford also took part in an IGN Unfiltered interview around the same time, when he said that if another Borderlands game were to be made, it would be more of a true sequel as opposed to another Pre-Sequel spin-off. 

Caught in the act

And in April 2017, Pitchford took to Twitter to post a picture of himself wearing a motion capture suit with the caption “Doing a shoot... I may or may not be a psycho bandit in a video game we may or may not be working on. Also, happy Bulletstorm launch day!” 

Given that Psychos are a Borderlands enemy we’d say this tweet can be read with a fairly large nudge and wink.

The GDC presentation

Before all of this Pitchford took to the stage during Epic Games’ Unreal presentation at GDC in March 2017, where he showed off new rendering tech that “may be used in a future Gearbox game.” He explicitly said the footage shown was not from a video game but what was shown was highly reminiscent of Borderlands. 

He also revealed that this new tech is capable of simulating different physics depending on a planet’s properties. Specifically he said “there might be different physics and the sun and the moons might be in different positions than what we’re used to on Pandora.”

That seems to have been pretty prophetic – as we know Borderlands 3 will be making use of some new environments beyond what we saw on Pandora in the previous games.

Some changes

Borderlands regular Mikey Neumann won't be writing on the new game, as he was unfortunately forced to resign from the project due to health complications. The lead writer on Borderlands 2, Anthony Burch, has also since left the company. There’s been no hint with regards to who’ll be taking up the pen after their departures. 

Another change is that the voice behind Claptrap, David Eddings, has left Gearbox for Rooster Teeth so it’s unlikely he’ll be taking up the role again. 

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iPhone SE 2 release date, news, price and leaks

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 01:23 PM PDT

Update: We were expecting - or perhaps hoping, as the chances were low - of seeing the iPhone SE 2 at WWDC 2019, Apple's yearly celebration of its software (and sometimes hardware too). 

With another year gone without seeing the rumored device, chances of it actually materializing are growing increasingly unlikely. Perhaps we're just going to have to come to terms with the fact it's just not going to happen.


The iPhone SE 2 is one of the tech world's great 'will it, won't it' sagas. Rumored to be on, then off, then on and then off again, there's now plenty to suggest that the iPhone SE line is dead altogether now.

While it's not been confirmed dead by Apple, during the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR reveal Apple pulled all mention of the iPhone SE from its website, suggesting that (with the XR now populating its 'affordable' slot), suggesting we'll never see a new SE in Apple stores ever again.

Instead, what we'll probably get is an iPhone XR 2 - a phone with a budget (by Apple standards) price, but a much bigger screen than the iPhone SE. In other words, we might just have to accept that the days of premium compact phones are over.

We'll still continue to monitor iPhone SE 2 leaks, as we have for years, just in case the rumor mill continues to churn out small nuggets of hope. For the time being however, take all the tidbits of info below now with a huge pinch of salt.

iPhone SE 2 release date

WWDC 2019 is the next Apple event that we could possibly see the iPhone SE 2 launch, but we're not holding out any hope of it, or any other compact-iPhone getting launched at the conference, or in the future.

Meanwhile, prominent industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo didn't believe Apple had the capacity to make an iPhone SE 2 in 2018.

At the time Kuo said, "with three new models in the pipeline for the second half of 2018, we believe Apple may have used up its development resources."

It doesn't sound like he's ruling out an iPhone SE 2 in future, but for now there's no immediate sign of one. We will however likely get an iPhone XR 2, which will probably land in September 2019, roughly a year after the first model.

iPhone SE 2 price

In terms of pricing, if we do see an iPhone SE 2 launch, it will likely remain Apple's most affordable iPhone. 

The only iPhone SE 2 price rumor so far points to roughly $450 (which will likely translate to £450, AU$700 given how Apple prices its products worldwide), which seems believable.

The original iPhone SE launched at $399 (£379, AU$679) for the 16GB variant. We'd expect the iPhone SE 2 to cost at least as much, and a price rise is likely, but it should still be cheap relative to the rest of Apple's range, undercutting even the $749 / £749 / AU$1229 iPhone XR.

iPhone SE 2

The iPhone SE 2 could boast a brand new look

iPhone SE 2 or iPhone XR 2?

We'll get to iPhone SE 2 rumors below, but first, it's worth taking a closer look at the phone we're more likely to see - the iPhone XR 2.

We wouldn't imagine Apple will run two budget phone ranges at once, so now that the iPhone XR is here we reckon an iPhone XR 2 is far more likely than an iPhone SE 2.

And while these both slot in at the lower end of Apple's range, they're quite different. The iPhone SE has a 4-inch screen and an older fashioned form factor, complete with a home button and large bezels.

The iPhone XR on the other hand has a big 6.1-inch screen, slim bezels, a notch, no home button and a generally curvier, more modern design. It's also more colorful.

Of those things the main feature that fans of the iPhone SE are unlikely to be happy about is the big screen. There isn't much in the way of iPhone XR 2 rumors yet, but we wouldn't expect the screen to get much if any smaller, so it's not going to please fans of compact phones.

iPhone SE 2 design

In terms of how the new iPhone is going to look, well - we've got two theories rolling around, and both are possible.

The most popular theory is that the new smaller iPhone will have an iPhone X-like screen, complete with notch at the top:

If the iPhone SE 2 does exist, this is how it may look

...but that was before Apple's 2018 phones were announced, and with the iPhone XR taking that style for its own, it appears that the rumor mill has crossed its wires and been sharing information on the now-real handset, as opposed to the still-theoretical SE 2.

The rear of the phone was said to pack the same dual cameras as the iPhone X, with a video of a purportedly leaked of the new iPhone SE 2. We'll leave it here for your pleasure, but the above notes mean its validity is now truly called into question:

BGR was also sent some sketches of the phone in this configuration from a 'reliable source', so it's got some grains of truth in there, with the notch at the top, no home button and no headphone port (the latter a regular rumor).

A new screen protector has also been shown off by regular leaker Sonny Dickson, which also shows off a notch at the top for a smaller phone.

iPhone SE 2

A screen protector apparently for the iPhone SE 2 (left) and iPhone X (right). (credit: Sonny Dickson)

There's something sketchy here though. In this form, the iPhone SE 2 is more of an 'iPhone X Mini'.

Dual cameras and the new screen would mean it would cost a lot more, which is against the point of the iPhone SE range, for people that want a smaller, cheaper iPhone. It all adds up to the rumors being sourced at the iPhone XR development center.

That said, we wouldn't completely rule out Apple following its current design style for an iPhone SE 2, especially as this would allow it to fit a larger screen in a smaller body, due to lack of bezels.

We also have the image below, which shows a design a lot like the original iPhone SE and with the headphone port intact. Could this be closer to any perhaps-planned iPhone SE 2 design?

iPhone SE 2

This looks a lot like the original iPhone SE. (credit: Weibo)

It's a design that another leak seems to echo, adding that the iPhone SE 2 will have a glass back and support wireless charging, so with two distinct designs doing the rounds we're not sure what's accurate at this point.

That's if any are. Again though, the chances of us seeing an iPhone SE 2 at all at this point are looking rather low.

More iPhone SE 2 rumors, news and leaks

In other news, we've heard that the iPhone SE 2 could have a quad-core A10 chipset, 2GB of RAM, a 12MP rear camera, a 5MP front-facing one, a 4-inch screen and that it could come in 32GB and 128GB sizes.

That would be an upgrade in some areas from the iPhone SE, but not much of one, putting it roughly in line with the iPhone 7, albeit with a smaller screen.

What's most confusing about the new phone is this: how would you get into it? Face ID has been rumored to not be available, in order to save money... so if the all-screen version is to be believed, how would you open the phone?

With that in mind, the more traditional, static design with the fingerprint scanner seems to have more weight... so let's see what appears.

iPhone SE 2: what we want to see 

We’ve come up with a wish list, filled with features that we want to see in the new iPhone SE 2. 

Some of them are pleas to Apple to not remove key specs, while others dare the company to try something new. 

A headphone jack

First things first: the iPhone SE has a headphone jack and we'd very much like it if Apple kept things in place for the iPhone SE 2.

If Apple doesn't mess with the design of the next iteration, there's little reason to see it removed. However, rumors point to a new look, so fingers are crossed that the 3.5mm headphone jack doesn't get left on the cutting room floor.

A better battery

From a value perspective, the iPhone SE is high on the charts if you're looking for a phone that will last you through the day. As we discovered in our in-depth battery test, the SE swept the floor of the other popular iPhone models of the time, like the iPhone 7 and iPhone 6.

Its prowess at saving power makes sense. The screen is smaller and its boxy design doesn’t force Apple to slim down on the battery in the way that it might for a slimmer, sleeker chassis used with its core iPhone products.

While we're short on complaints about the SE's battery performance, it can only get better, right? We'd like to see Apple pushing some boundaries with its next phone with numbers that take it even higher.

Improved performance

One of the more impressive things about the SE is that it fits in a similar set of specs found in the iPhone 6S. A punchy palm-sized smartphone that could handle everything that its fancier iPhone brethren could for a more digestible price.

That's 2016 power though, and in 2019 we're hoping Apple gives the iPhone SE 2 the latest chipset and a bump in RAM.

A refreshed design

There's no arguing that reviving the iPhone 5 design for use with the iPhone SE was a good idea. After all, it's a winning design, first debuted on the iPhone 4, that set Apple far ahead of its competition in terms of build quality.

However, there comes a time when even the best design ideas need to be left to the side. And when looking toward the release of the iPhone SE 2, that time is now. 

We'd love to see something drastically different, all while sticking to the ergonomic four-inch size that SE fans are accustomed to.

Of course, if the design changes at all it will probably now take the form of a shrunk-down iPhone XR, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

A chance

That's right, we want Apple to give the iPhone SE 2 a chance. There's still a market out there for people who want an iPhone that sits comfortably in the palm, can be used one-handed without inducing a drop risk, and doesn't take up every square inch of a pocket.

The iPhone SE form factor is loved by its fans, and while the iPhone SE 2 won't be a best-seller for Apple it will show that the Cupertino firm is listening to some of its most loyal fans.

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iPadOS: iPads get their own operating system

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 01:20 PM PDT

During the WWDC 2019 keynote, Apple confirmed that iPads will be ditching iOS for a distinct operating system. They're calling it...iPadOS.

While the name isn't too surprising, it's clear Apple wants to distinguish the tablet experience from mobile phone, which should be exciting to both developers and iPad owners. It "builds on the same foundation as iOS," per Apple's announcement post, but expect it to grow more into its own OS in time.

iPadOS brings small but critical improvements in the tablet UI, both in making better use of screen real estate and by introducing new gesture controls. In short: iPad users won't just run an upsized iOS anymore.

The first new change is pretty representative: a new layout that shows more apps on each page. Gone is the era of excessive dead space between all your app icons. 

That makes room for Today View, which can be added to the Home screen for quick access to widgets. Swipe to the side and you'll pull up an app widget, which you can switch out with another app from the dock. 

Multitasking also gets an upgrade: you can Split View to see two app windows at a time from the same app. Slide Over lets users quickly view all their open apps with a natural finder swipe to the side.

Files now has a Column View to take better advantage of the iPad's wide screen. iCloud Drive allows folder sharing, and will show content from a USB drive or SD card if they're plugged in.

Safari is also improved...because it's no longer purely iOS. That's right, you're no longer just viewing mobile sites, as iPadOS views websites in a modified desktop view that's a bit cleaner and supports touch. This should make web apps like Google Docs and Wordpress work a bit better.

Apple's browser also has a few new additions like a download manager, 30 keyboard shortcuts and improved tab management.

Gestures, gestures, gestures

One of the bigger features across the OS are new gestures. The ones we've seen are pretty simple: three-finger pinch to cut, three-finger splay to paste, three-finger swipe to 'undo.' Easy.

In some apps, you'll also be able to two-finger pinch the keyboard to shrink it to iOS mobile-size and move it around. Plunk it next to the side of the screen and boom, you can type on it with one thumb. 

Markup and more

Markup also gets an update, which now lets you mark up entire webpages, documents and emails. A simple swipe up from the corner with an Apple Pencil launches markup and brings up the newly-redesigned tool palette, which can be dragged around to reposition. (Speaking of the Pencil, Apple has shrunk latency from 20ms to 9ms.)

Plenty of new features that are coming to iOS 13 are also headed to iPadOS, like Dark Mode, custom Fonts, the new Photos organized by machine learning, and the SwiftKey-like slide-and-type QuickPath keyboard feature. 

Performance has been streamlined, too, with faster Face ID unlocking and smaller app storage footprints that reduce downloads by up to 50% and updates by up to 60%. Apps launch twice as fast, too

Leaked...just before WWDC

Funny enough, news of iPadOS was kept a secret...until minutes before WWDC 2019. Updates to developer language on Apple's website revealed a new OS was on deck.

Developing...

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Apple drops two generations of iPhone from its iOS 13 compatibility

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:40 PM PDT

The next generation of software for your iPhone has been announced at WWDC 2019, but those still clutching onto older devices may be out of luck when it comes to snagging an iOS 13 update.

Apple has confirmed that iOS 13 will be compatible with the iPhone 6S and above, which means two generations of handsets which got iOS 12 won't be in line for the next upgrade later this year, spelling the end of their core support from the technology giant.

That means if you have an iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, you won't be able to take advantage of iOS 13 and all its new features, including Dark Mode, improved performance and re-vamped Maps app.

It may be time to upgrade your handset, but if you're not in a rush you may want to hold off a purchase until September, to see what the iPhone 11 has in store for us.

Is you iPhone compatible with iOS 13?

The following iPhones will get the iOS 13 software update later this year.

Will your iPad get the iPad OS update?

Apple has confirmed that the "iPad Air 2 and later, all iPad Pro models, iPad 5th generation and later, and iPad mini 4 and later" will all get the iPad OS update when it releases later this year.

So which iPads are missing out this year, after getting iOS 12 in 2018? Well it's the end of the update road for the original iPad Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPad Mini 3.

The following iPads will get an update to iPad OS later this year.

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watchOS 6 update release date, compatibility, news and features

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:31 PM PDT

Apple has just confirmed that watchOS 6 is the next version of the company's wearable software – and it will likely be coming to your Apple Watch by the end of 2019.

The biggest upgrade announced so far is that the App Store is coming direct to your Apple Watch, so you'll be able to cycle through apps to download on your wrist, rather than having to install them on your iPhone.

Below we'll talk you through all of the other main features Apple has introduced on stage at WWDC 2019...

Cut to the chase

  • What is it? The next version of Apple's smartwatch operating system
  • When is it out? It's now official, likely coming in September
  • What will it cost? Nothing!

watchOS 6 release date and compatibility

As expected, watchOS 6 was unveiled at WWDC 2019, and we've heard that the developer beta will be made available later today (June 3). Apple has yet to announce a public beta for watchOS, which suggests to us that it won't be offering one.

All we know for the actual release is that Apple will be rolling it out in the "Fall", which matches our previous assumption that it'll be coming in September alongside iOS 13.

It will be free to download, and will be compatible with the Apple Watch 4, Apple Watch 3, Apple Watch 2 and the Apple Watch Series 1. Like watchOS 5, the original Apple Watch won't be compatible with the software.

That means if your Apple Watch has received watchOS 5, it will still receive this update too. It'll likely be the software featured on the inevitable Apple Watch 5 (which will probably land alongside the finished watchOS 6 software).

watchOS 6 App Store

watchos 6

Image Credit: Apple

The biggest upgrade coming to your Apple Watch will be the inclusion of an App Store. Previously you've had to download apps to your iPhone in order to be able to use them on your wearable, but that's all set to change with watchOS 6.

You'll be able to search the App Store directly from your wrist using your voice, with Scribble or via Siri. It'll show you a variety of details for apps you're thinking of installing, such as screenshots on the watch's display, and you'll be able to install them there and then. 

It should mean you're able to download and install apps directly onto your wrist on devices like the LTE version of the Apple Watch 4, without having to have your iPhone with you. 

It'll also free up space on your iPhone, as you'll be able to limit the services you only use on your wrist to your Watch, rather than duplicating apps across two devices.

This will likely be a major boon for app developers too, as it'll be easier to download titles directly to your watch. Whether that means we'll see more apps on your Apple Watch... only time will tell.

watchos 6

Image Credit: Apple 

watchOS 6 will introduce at least three new apps to your wrist. The first of those is Apple Books, which will allow you to listen to audiobooks using Bluetooth headphones rather than you reading a hefty tome on your wrist.

Voice Memos will also be coming to your wrist, so you'll be able to speak into your wrist to make notes rather than whipping out your iPhone.

There's also a Calculator app coming to watchOS for the very first time. There have always been third-party options on Apple Watch, but this is the first time the official Apple application has been included.

Another new feature in the Apple Watch app will be a tool that enables you to calculate tips or your share of the bill easily.

watchOS 6 streaming audio

A new API is coming with watchOS 6, that will allow your Apple Watch to directly stream audio away from your iPhone.

We don't currently know what apps will include this feature, but it may allow for more audio-based apps to be introduced on the Apple Watch that will work without you having to keep your iPhone with you – think radio, podcasts or your favorite music streaming platform.

watchOS 6 hearing health

Ever worry about your hearing when you're in loud environments? watchOS 6 will debut a feature that can listen to what you're hearing and let you know if the decibel levels are getting too high.

The World Health Organization says four hours a week of more than 90 decibels can impact hearing over time. This new feature will monitor the sound in your environment and let you know when you're nearing a level that is bad for your health.

Apple has said that it won't record the exact sounds it can hear, and instead will just monitor the decibels so it won't be a concern for your privacy.


watchOS 6 watch faces

The update is confirmed to bring new watch faces to your Apple Watch too. These are called Modular Compact, Solar Dial, California, Gradient and Numerals face, plus you can see a collection of them above.

A new complication for watch faces also allows you to monitor the volume level in a room you're in, so you'll be able to check if there's any risk of damaging your hearing.

Another update includes a feature called taptic chimes, which can be included on all watch faces. This will silently tap your wrist every hour on the hour to help you keep track of the time, and if the sound is on you’ll hear an audible chime.

watchOS 6 health

watchos 6

An example of how Activity Trends looks. Image Credit: Apple 

In terms of new health features, there's something called Activity Trends. It's a way to show you your historic fitness data, and give you a picture of how your last 90 days compares to the previous year. 

Apple says this will enable you to monitor "nine key metrics", although it wasn't specific about what those are. If your activity levels begin to fall over time, the watch will be able to give you advice on what you can do to get back on track.

watchos 6

How Cycle Tracking will look on watchOS 6. Image Credit: TechRadar

Cycle Tracking will allow women to track their menstrual cycle on their watch, and the same functionality is coming to the Health app on iPhone.

It's a big feature on products from the likes of Fitbit and Garmin, and will likely be welcomed by women around the world. It'll give you notifications when fertility windows are about to begin or your period is likely to start.

GymKit compatibility is also extending to Woodway, Octane Fitness and TRUE Fitness equipment in the near future too.

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The best cheap 4K TV deals and sale prices in the US - June 2019

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:30 PM PDT

We've gone through top retailers such as Amazon and Walmart to find the best cheap TV sales and deals that are currently going on (we've also got a roundup of UK retailers). You can find Black Friday like prices on a variety of best-selling 4K TVs from brands such as Samsung, Sony, LG and more. You'll find discounts on 4K TVs, smart TVs, different model sizes, and a variety of prices that will fit any all TV viewing needs.

You will find all of our curated deals below. We've divided them into three different size categories as well as our pick for the best cheap TV deal of the week. These days you really don't have to pay much more to get a Ultra HD 4K set instead of an older-style HD one. If you're after the hottest tech in TV though, you may want to take a look at the cheapest OLED TV prices.

Whether you want a small TV with a price tag to match or something to show all the colors of the rainbow (and a few million more) with HDR, we've found plenty of options. Read on to find the TV you want at a great price!

cheap 75-inch TV deals prices sales Sceptre

TechRadar's cheap TV deal of the week

Cheap TV deals (40-49 inch)

Cheap TV deals (50-59 inch):

Cheap TV deals (60-85 inch):

More cheap TV sales:

Not found the right cheap TV for you today? Or maybe you'd prefer to directly browse the TVs at your favourite retailers instead of our highlights of the best cheap TV deals? We're updating this page on a regular basis, so you may have better look another day. If you want to take a look for yourself now though, here are the direct links to a the full collection of TV deals at multiple stores. 

Learn more about Prime Day with our guide on Amazon Prime Day 2019: everything you need to know for the July deals event.

Shop more deals with our roundup of the best Memorial Day sales of 2019.

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iOS 13 release date, features and beta: how your iPhone is going to change

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:26 PM PDT

iOS 13 is the newly announced update for your iPhone, and it's going to be bigger in so many ways according to Apple at its WWDC 2019 keynote today. 

We're compiling an iOS 13 features list, reporting live from the developer conference, waiting for Apple to give us confirmation of an iOS 13 beta (hopefully launching today).

Among the biggest iOS 13 changes will be Dark Mode, which is the long-awaited way to change up the color scheme. It's a new feature that's coming to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and it's what people seem to be looking forward to the most. 

What's different in 2019 is that iOS 13 won't be coming to the iPad, which is getting a platform update all of its own called iPadOS. The iPad will still get many of the iOS 13 features we look at below, but it'll also have perks of its own, including a home screen redesign. 

iOS 13 timeline

  • Today, Monday, June 3: iOS 13 beta 1 and first look at WWDC 2019
  • July: iOS 13 public beta will launch for adventurous testers
  • Early September 2019: iOS 13 Golden Master (final dev beta)
  • Mid-September 2019: iOS 13 likely to launch with new 2019 iPhones

We've mapped out an iOS 13 beta timeline, from beta 1 to the final version of the software, and it all begins with a first look at the update today, Monday, June 3. We had this date pinned down months ago, long before we got our WWDC invite.

1. iOS 13 developer beta: The first iOS 13 beta is available today, as the WWDC keynote ends, but it's going to be restricted to paid Apple developers. You should probably wait for the public beta, which is always more stable, or upgrade to the beta on a non-primary device.

2. iOS 13 public beta: This is Apple's way of testing features on a larger scale, and that will roll out in July – last year the iOS public beta release date was June 25, so it's a bit later in 2019. It's worth the wait. It's typically a more refined version of the iOS developer beta, although it can still be rough, and never includes all of the features implemented in the final version of the software.

3. iOS 13 golden master: This will be the final version of the iOS 13 software, released one week before the final release, meant for developers and public beta testers. At this point it's very stable and gives app makers seven days to adapt to the final software.

4. The official iOS 13 release date: We'll get the new iOS 13 software in its final, stable form about one week after the next iPhone launch event, what we're calling iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Max and iPhone 11 XR at the moment. The date? Probably mid-September (last year it was September 17).

iOS 13 compatibility list

  • iOS 13 requires iPhone 6S or later, iPad Air 2 or later, the new iPad mini 4 and iPhone SE
  • It won't be coming to several older devices: iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2 and mini 3

iOS 13 compatibility requires an iPhone or iPad from the last four years (depending on the device category). That means phones like the iPhone 6 and iPhone SE won't be getting iOS 13 – if you've got one of those devices you'll be stuck with iOS 12.

Which devices will iOS 13 be compatible with? (Image credit: Apple)

You'll need an iPhone 6S or later, the iPad Air 2 or later, and the new iPad mini 4 or iPod touch 7th generation.

iOS 13 is really iPadOS on the iPad

As we expected, the next update to your iPad is going to let you stray from the grid of icons with a customizable home screen redesign. Swipe left to right, and have widgets pinned on the home screen.

You can go into multiple apps with a new Slide Over function. Drag and drop into the slide over bar, giving you a quick look at one app on top of another. Drag up from bottom to move between apps in slide over.

App Expose on iPad too. Works with third party apps as well. USB drives and SD card support, and the files show up in the Files app, like you'd want. Import directly from external camera to apps such as Adobe Lightroom.

Safari is going for desktop-class browsing when it comes to the iPad. You’ll see the desktop site, sized for the iPad display and optimized for touch display – and it works with the likes of Google Docs, which is important for millions of users. Download manager is coming to Safari on iPad too, and 30 new keyboard shortcuts are along for the ride.

Again, this technically won't be iOS 13, but a dedicated iPadOS update.

iOS 13 debuts new Find My app

Apple introduced this new iOS 13 feature as part of the Mac software update, but it's also coming to iOS 13. It allows you to find your device (and likely Friends). 

The iOS 13 Find My app is a union of of Find My Friends and Find My iPhone. It'll even send an encrypted Bluetooth signal beacon from your Mac when it's closed, since your computer is likely to be in sleep mode when you lose it.

iOS 13 will make your old iPhone twice as fast

More people are holding onto their iPhones for longer, and that's something Apple seems to recognize – and it's speeding up iOS 13 to accommodate.

The most important iOS 13 stat: app launch speed is up to twice as fast, according to Apple. iOS 12 gave us a faster update, and iOS 13 looks to build upon that.

iOS 13 Dark Mode confirmed

  • Overdue Dark Mode is coming to iOS 13
  • We saw macOS get a system-wide Dark Mode in 2018
  • Shortcut to black-and-dark-gray UI will live in Control Center

Dark Mode in iOS 13 is going to be system-wide, meaning it'll change the hues from bright white and light grey to black and dark gray. That's going to be a nice feature when you're using your iPhone at night.

Memoji makeup comes to iOS 13

Memoji is being enhanced for iOS 13 with makeup teeth with braces, earrings, eye shadow, and so forth – and, of course, an assortment of new glasses. There are even AirPods.

You'll be able to share your personalized Memoji with contacts through iMessages. Your contacts can see your Memoji, but only when you grant access.

Memoji sticker packs are coming to the system keyboard, so you can send them to friends without acting like a puppet. Best of all, if you don't have a newer iPhone with a 3D TrueDepth camera, you can still customize and send Memoji stickers.

New video effects and Photos app

You'll be able to rotate video for the first time with the default Photos app. These filters, which you may or may not use on photos, are also coming to videos.

Apple wants to create a diary of your life, with a brand-new Photos tab design that documents your life by year. You have more pinch controls to zoom in and zoom out of the Photos gallery. 

New HomePod features

You might not know this, but the HomePod is part of the iOS family, and it's getting updates too.

First, you'll be able to transfer songs from your iPhone by simply holding your phone closer to the HomePod speaker. Before iOS 13, you had to tell Siri to do this, but now this hand-off feature is a bit easier, and you don't have to talk to do it.

The HomePod will also introduce Live Radio – ask Siri to play 100,000 stations from all around the world. And HomePod will allow you to recognize who in your family is talking, and personalize the response. Great with Apple Music – based on your taste and history. It goes beyond Music, Messages, Notes, Reminders, and more. 

Sign-in with Apple

Apple is taking on Facebook Connect, Google and other platforms that allow you to conveniently sign in to third-party accounts. Sign-in with Apple is poised to protect your privacy more than Facebook and Google do.

What's neat is that if you don't want to fork over your email to an app developer or website, Apple will actually create a unique random email for you, and the email will be unique to that site or app.

Reminders and Maps get revamped

Apple has redesigned Reminders from the ground up. Just type what you want and Reminders will know when and where to notify you. Smart lists help you keep track of your most important items.

iOS 13 Maps looks better, even if everyone likes to hate on it. Will it ever be better than Google Maps? No, probably not. But for people who want Apple's pre-loaded maps app on iOS 13, it'll be much better.

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Best free file recovery software 2019

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:15 PM PDT

At some point most people learn the hard way the importance of backups. Chances are you already have something set up, perhaps using a cloud-based program such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft's OneDrive. You might have everything routinely saved to a USB stick or to an external hard drive as well. You might even have all three in play.

However, while syncing files and folders across multiple devices makes it easy to save them, it unfortunately also makes it easy to delete them by accident. Trying to organize and rearrange folders is a great way to accidentally misplace an important file, only to realize what happened too late.

This is where file recovery software can come into their own, and while there are some expensive paid plans, we're going to list the best of the free file recovery software here. However, the caveat is that these are never going to be as powerful as the more expensive versions and are intended for situations which only require an easy recovery.

Even still, they still have their place and it's definitely a good idea to have something like any of these in place, just in case - so that the moment you realize you've make a mistake and misplaced something, you can recover it quickly and easily enough, preventing you from need the big paid-for guns in the first place.

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minitool

Image credit: MiniTool

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free is the only program in this round up which provides you with essential advice during the installation: do not install the software to the drive you want to recover data from, as you may overwrite files.  

Editor's choice: MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free

This version is free, but there are paid-for editions available as well, so you will realise that there are a few restrictions.

You can only recover 1GB of data, you don’t have the option of saving scan results to work with later, and a few other options are missing – but there's absolutely nothing that stops this from being a great free recovery utility, aside from the occasional ad here and there.

You can limit scans to specific files types, and MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free is capable of getting files back from partitions you are not even able to see, and there's support for removable drives including optical media.

Scans are pleasingly fast, and results are searchable to make it easier to find exactly what you're looking for. A superb piece of software that worth of your attention.

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Disk Drill

Image credit: 508 Software LLC

Featuring a delightful simple interface, Disk Drill make file recovery very simple. There's no need to fiddle with complex options, and the program can be used to scan local as well as removable drives and memory cards. Performance a scan of your chosen drive and you're presented with a list of recoverable files, grouped by type, and you have the option of previewing image files in advance. It's a simple, effective tool with a high success rate.

What seems like a nice touch for anyone who is a little nervous about data recovery, is the inclusion of a quick tutorial the first time the program is run – but it is simplistic in the extreme and of little real value, and ultimately serves as an ad to upgrade to the Pro version.

Disk Drill is available for both macOS and Windows. Upgrading to Pro increases the number of computers the software can be used on, and opens up more options such as advanced scanning and wider file system support. For most people, however, the free version should cover all the usual eventualities.

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EaseUS

Image credit: EaseUS

Keeping things nice and simple, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Free is the friendly, accessible face of recovering lost files. Fire up the program and you're presented with a screen asking which drive you would like to scan for recoverable data – you then just need to hit the Scan button. There are no options to configure, but if you know exactly where a file has gone missing from, you can specify a folder to scan to speed things up.

Results are presented in an Explorer-style view which is easy to navigate, but unfortunately there is no indication of the quality of files that have been found – although a preview option is available. You can then select the files you're interested in, and restore them.

It's worth noting that the free version of the program only lets you recover up to 2GB of data (500MB by default, but this can be increased from within the program) before you have to upgrade to the paid-for version. While this is not enough for a complete hard drive recovery, it should be enough to help you to get back your most important files when you need to.

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recuva.jpg

Image credit: Piriform

Something of a stalwart of the data recovery genre, Recuva has managed to build up a dedicated following – and it's not hard to see why. The program can recover data not only from hard drives and memory cards, but also your iPod.

While some data recovery tools make this easy by having a simple interface, Recuva takes things further and guides you through the entire process with a wizard. You can perform a lengthy deep scan to track down all recoverable data, or you can limit the search if you're looking for something specific – and it's nice to have this flexibility.

As an added bonus, there is a secure deletion option which does the exact reverse of the main feature of the program – it deletes files you are sure you no longer need and renders them unrecoverable.

A downside to the program is the heavy promotion of the Pro version of the app, but if you can turn a blind eye to this, you have a powerful tool on your hands – and you can probably live without support for virtual hard drives anyway!

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UnDeleteMyFiles Pro

Image credit: seriousbit.com

Despite the inclusion of the word "pro" in the name, this program is still free; there is, in fact, no non-pro version.

The look of UnDeleteMyFiles Pro may not be particularly appealing, but don’t let that put you off too much as there are multiple tools included here, not just data recovery. Recovery can be a little hit and miss as there is no indication of the quality (or recoverability) of files – you just have to hope that the file that are found are in a reasonable state.

When it comes to data recovery, there aren't really all that many options other than the ability to search for particular types of files to reduce the size of the list you have to sort through.

In terms of extras you also get a disk snapshot tool which basically backs up your drive so you can recover data at your leisure, a secure file deletion tool, and email recovery. Worth checking out, even if this is not necessarily the best of the bunch.

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PayPal expands access to its ecommerce platform to SMBs

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 12:01 PM PDT

Small businesses will soon be able to take advantage of the same online shopping infrastructure used by Instagram and Facebook as PayPal has announced that it is rolling out a new ecommerce platform.

The new platform will combine exiting parts of the company's payments business such as allowing merchants to accept money online and shoppers to check out through PayPal. However, small businesses will also get access to PayPal's backend systems like fraud protection, compliance and authenticating an account.

Small startups would have difficulties building these systems by themselves due to the cost which is why the company is opening up its e-commerce platform to small businesses.

Currently both Instagram Checkout and Facebook Marketplace are already running on PayPal's platform and small businesses will soon be able to leverage the same backend tools and services.

PayPal's expansion

PayPal's business is already comprised of partners and online marketplaces and the company has expanded well beyond online checkout since being spun off from eBay in 2015.

During its last earnings call, the company's COO Bill Ready said PayPal's top 20 marketplaces grew by 40 percent year over year and almost reached $90bn in volume last year alone.

The new commerce platform will also include other backend processes such as onboarding, payouts and disputes management, AI and machine learning-powered fraud protection.

Ready explained why PayPal decided to open up its ecommerce platform to small businesses, saying:

“We are bringing our vision of open commerce and partnership to life with the PayPal Commerce Platform - to power commerce in a way that allows more businesses and more people to participate in the benefits of the digital economy. When I think about the world I want to wake up to in a decade, I don’t want there to be only one place to buy online. I want to wake up in a world where there is a thriving, vibrant, and diverse ecosystem of merchants, sellers, entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes. We want to help more businesses get started, grow and thrive in today’s complex digital world.” 

PayPal's ecommerce platform will be available first across the US, UK and Europe but the company plans to eventually expand to all other markets where it operates.

Via CNBC

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iTunes is dead, long live Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:58 AM PDT

iTunes' time is up. At WWDC 2019, Apple revealed that it will be winding down the iconic music platform after 18 years of music downloads, storage, and streaming, in favor of its newer apps Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts.

Going by what was revealed at the WWDC 2019 keynote, it appears that iTunes will be phased out with the introduction of the new version of MacOS, Catalina, with the above trio of apps taking over all of its existing functionality.

We've been expecting this day to come for a while now, but the closure of the long-running music platform was confirmed by Craig Federighi at Apple's WWDC keynote in San Jose, California.

The music side of the service is being shut in favor of Apple Music, while iTunes' other content like movies and TV shows will be moved to an Apple TV app, just in time for the launch of Apple TV Plus. Podcasts will go to live in, you guessed it, the Apple Podcasts app.

A bloated service

It's little wonder that Apple is shutting down iTunes after all these years; as of 2019, 50 million people use Apple Music. That may be a lot less than the 75 million subscribers on Spotify Premium, but for a service that's only been around for three years, that's impressive.

It also makes sense that iTunes' visual content is moving over to a dedicated Apple TV area. Set for release in Autumn 2019 (September – November), the Apple TV Plus streaming platform is set to rival competitors like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and the yet-to-be-released Disney Plus.  

However, the closure of iTunes could prove problematic for iPhone users, as Apple's smartphones use iTunes to manage backups and store data; where this function will be moved to remains unclear. 

Still, it's a smart move considering how bloated iTunes has become in recent years; as the data backbone of iPhones and iPads, its original purpose as a place to listen to and store music has been all but forgotten, especially with the rise of music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple's own Apple Music.

Apple Music (Image credit: Apple)

Greg Harwood, pricing specialist and director at marketing consultants Simon-Kurcher & Partners explains that "iTunes has become out-dated and less relevant, especially the use of downloads which has become old-fashioned following competitors such as Spotify introducing successful streaming models".

“Apple, under Apple Music, has tried to respond to this quickly changing landscape," he continues. 

"The move to a unified app strategy will allow Apple to closely bundle the app with the Apple Music streaming service, with Apple now positioned as an entertainment services provider".

How the transition will work is still to be confirmed in regards to your existing iTunes content, but moving downloaded media from iTunes to Apple Music or the Apple TV  app shouldn't prove too difficult – that should in theory be the benefit of Apple working within its own closed ecosystem, of course.

For the last two years Apple has used Music in lieu of iTunes on iOS, and – incessant offers to sign up for a monthly subscription aside – the change was barely noticeable.

So long iTunes – you changed the world, but now it's time to change you, too.

  • iOS 13 - here's what's coming to your iPhone and iPad

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Amazon Prime Day 2019: everything you need to know for the July deals event

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:47 AM PDT

Get ready to mark your calendar because Amazon Prime Day 2019 is only a couple of months away. The tech giant hasn't officially announced the date, but based on previous years we know the big shopping event will be held in mid-July. 

Prime Day first launched in 2015 and has grown into the biggest shopping day of the year with Prime Day 2018 even surpassing Cyber Monday and Black Friday. Last year's Prime Day had 89 million visitors that logged on to the site with 100 million products purchased during the sale event. Globally it was the biggest day of sales in Amazon’s history, and we expect Amazon Prime Day 2019 to be even bigger.

It didn't just increase in terms of territories or numbers, but the sale itself lasted longer too. Where 2017's Prime Day ran for only one day (well, 30 hours), 2018 ran for a day and a half (36 hours). We expect this year's sale to last even longer, so Prime members will have even more time snag the hottest deals of the year.

Last year's Prime Day was also the first year that discounts were extended to local Whole Foods Market stores. Prime members were able to save on popular grocery items and earned rewards and cash back through Amazon's site.

Read on to learn what we can expect for this year's Prime Day and everything we've learned from last year's Prime Day.

When is Amazon Prime Day 2019?

Even though Amazon hasn't announced the exact date of the big day, we can take a pretty good guess based on previous years. Last year Prime Day went live on Monday, July 16 at 3 PM ET and lasted for 36 hours. Past years the event only lasted for 24  or 30 hours and happened between July 10 and 12. Thanks to the World Cup, Prime Day started later in the month last year. We predict this year they'll stick to last year's event date and start Prime Day on Monday, July 15. The big question is whether the sale will be extended beyond past years. Each year the sale has been lengthened so we're placing bets that Amazon Prime Day 2019 could be a record 48-hour event.

Last year Amazon didn't formally announce the dates of Prime Day till only a few weeks before the big event. Thanks to some snooping from the TechRadar team, we were able to figure out the date a full month before it was announced.

Top Amazon Deals You Can Buy Now

Even though Prime Day 2019 is still a couple months away, that doesn't mean you can't find stellar deals now from the tech giant. We've scoured Amazon's site to find the best discounts that you can take advantage of today. We'll be updating this page regularly, so check back to shop the best deals up until the big shopping day.

Image credit: Amazon

What were the best-selling items from Prime Day 2018?

Prime members around the world purchased more than 100 million products during the 2018 Prime Day event. The top-selling items from last year's Prime Day included a mixture of home goods, electronics, and Amazon devices. In fact, it was the biggest event ever for Amazon devices with the Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot leading the pack of best-selling items worldwide. The top selling products in the US from Prime Day 2018 consisted of the 6-Qt Instant Pot, Fire TV stick, Echo Dot, 23andMe DNA Test, and the LifeStraw personal water filter.

Image credit: Shutterstock

How can I sign up for Amazon Prime?

To participate in the big shopping event, you must be an Amazon Prime Member. Your membership will not only let you partake in Prime Day, but you'll also have access to Amazon Prime movies, books, music, photos, and more. You can sign up here for a 30-day trial and cancel at any time. All you need is an Amazon account with a valid credit card tied to the account. Once you sign up for your free trial, you'll have access to all the Prime benefits, receive free two-day shipping and partake in the biggest shopping event of the year.

other stores amazon prime day deals

Image credit: Amazon

What other retailers participate in Prime Day?

Every year more and more retailers are trying to compete with the tech giant by participating in their own version of Prime Day. You'll find discounts on clothing, tech, home goods and more from a variety of online and local retailers. Last year Walmart joined in on Prime Day by offering free two-day shipping without membership fees and free same-day pickup on qualifying items. They also discounted a wide array of products that included TVs, Google Home devices, kitchen appliances, laptops and much more. Other big retailers like Target, Best Buy, Macy's and eBay also promoted their own one-day sale with discounts on best-selling items throughout their site.

We expect this year that more retailers will participate in the July event and will even extend the one-day sale to a weeks worth of discounts.

Amazon Prime 1-day delivery

Amazon just recently announced plans to offer free one-day shipping for Prime members on most orders. Amazon's CFO Brian Olsavky revealed the ambitious project during Amazon's first-quarter earnings call. To achieve this, the tech giant says they plan to invest $800 million in the second quarter of 2019 and continue its expansion of their fulfillment and logistics network.

Amazon currently offers free 2-day shipping for all Prime members and offers free one-day and same-day delivery on certain items in eligible zip codes. Amazon's future plans include increasing the locations and available items so free one-day delivery replaces the standard two-day Prime delivery window.

While we don't think the new one-day delivery will be rolled out in time for Prime Day, we do believe there will be more items available for one-day and same-day delivery in eligible zip codes for the big shopping day.


Image credit: Shutterstock

Prime Day and Whole Foods

Last year Prime Day extended its sale from devices and electronics to discounts on groceries at the Whole Foods Market chain. Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017 and Prime Day 2018 was the first time they promoted the big sale event at the grocery store. Savings included price cuts on popular food items and discounts for first time users of the grocery delivery service Prime Now. Amazon also offered $10 back in Amazon credits to use on Prime Day for members that spent $10 at Whole Foods. Amazon credit card users also received double the rewards when they used their card at Whole Foods during the week leading up to Prime Day.

We expect this year to be more discounts on groceries in-store as well as promotions with the Amazon Rewards Card and Prime Now.

Image credit: Amazon

How much money did Amazon make on Prime Day?

Amazon was predicted to gross $3.4 billion on Prime Day last year, although we don’t know if that prediction is accurate as Amazon doesn’t release such information. However, it did announce that third party sellers shifted a billion dollars of product in just one day. As for its own sales, Amazon was content to say that “sales this Prime Day surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day, when comparing 36-hour periods, making this once again the biggest shopping event in Amazon history.” That’s a little sneaky, mind you: last Prime Day only ran for 24 hours, not 36.

What were the best deals on Prime Day?

As ever, some of the best deals on Prime Day were on Amazon’s own devices. The Echo Show dropped from $229.99 to $129.99, the Echo Spot from $129.99 to $99, the Echo Dot from $49.99 to $29.99, the Echo from $99.99 to $69.99 and the Echo Plus from $164.98 to $99. There was a big drop on the Amazon-owned Ring video doorbell pro too, which went from $249 to $174, and on the Echo Look camera: that went from $199.99 to $99.99.

Kindles and Fire ranges got deep discounts. The Fire Stick went from $39.99 to $19.99 and the Fire TV Cube from $119.99 to $89.99 (we told you it was worth waiting a few weeks before Prime Day) while Fire Tablets dropped significantly: the Fire 7 went from $49.99 to an incredible $29.99, the Fire 10 from $149.99 to $99.99 and the Fire 7 Kids from $99.99 to $69.99. 

There were good deals on TVs too. In the US, the excellent TCL TVs were massively discounted and better known brands such as Hisense were chopped too: for example Hisense’s 43-inch 4K TV dropped from $349.99 to $239.99. 

The best phone deal we spotted in the US was a big drop on the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which went from $799 to a much more affordable $549.

amazon site down on prime day. Dogs of amazon

Image credit: Amazon

Why did Amazon crash on Prime Day? Did the crash cost it money?

Amazon struggled to cope with traffic on Prime Day, an issue that affected not just the Amazon site but services such as Prime Video and Twitch. Customers found their shopping carts would suddenly empty, or links simply wouldn’t work, or they couldn’t access Amazon at all. The issues were largely confined to the US website and customers, although problems with Prime Video lasted well into the evening in the UK.

Some sites got their calculators out and concluded that the worst outage, which lasted for 63 minutes, cost Amazon just under $100 million in lost sales. Amazon disagrees, saying that the effect on sales was “minimal”. 

CNBC has seen internal documents that describe what happened. First, it didn’t secure enough servers to cope with the demand; secondly, that shortage caused a “cascading series of failures” that knocked out key services; and thirdly, Amazon temporarily killed all international traffic to reduce the load. All of those things happened within the first 15 minutes of Prime Day. 

The outage wasn’t the only issue Amazon faced on Prime Day. There were also strikes in protest at the way it treats its workers.

Image credit: Amazon

Why were workers striking and supporters urging Amazon boycotts on Prime Day?

Prime Day wasn’t the first time Amazon has been accused of terrible working practices, but it was a great day to get the issue into the papers. Workers in Spain and Germany went on strike over working hours and conditions while activists urged people to send Amazon a message on Prime Day by boycotting it altogether over its treatment of workers and its tax arrangements. It was also marked by a surge in health and safety complaints from UK workers. 

As you’d expect, Amazon denies the allegations, with a spokesperson telling us: These allegations and the data are just not accurate — safety incidents in our fulfillment centers did not increase around Prime Day, they actually decreased from the previous week. We’re proud of our team and our workplace, and invite anyone to come see for themselves – we offer public tours of our buildings and you can learn more at amazonfctours.com."  

Amazon also told Wired that the Organise campaign behind the publicity was indulging in fake news. “To our knowledge, Organise doesn’t verify that respondents actually work for the company they claim to work for.”

Amazon delivery

Image credit: Amazon

What could Amazon have done better on Prime Day?

It should have anticipated and been able to cope with the load not just on its ecommerce site but on its cloud services too: we weren’t the only ones irritated because we couldn’t get our Preacher fix on Amazon Prime Video. It’s all the more embarrassing when you remember that Amazon provides the cloud infrastructure for many high-profile sites and services: Prime Day wasn’t a great ad for that side of its business.

Our main criticisms aren’t technological, though. Navigating the deals was hopeless and many of the deals were laughable, especially in gaming: we frequently found much better console bundles on AO.com’s eBay page than we did on Amazon. 

Here’s a great example. On Prime Day, one of the flagship deals we identified was $50 off a set of Bose QuietComfort 25 headphones. That brought the price down from $299 to $249. Just three weeks later, Amazon US was listing the same headphones for $169.

Image credit: Amazon

Will Amazon Prime Day 2019 do things differently?

Yes. CNBC reports that Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of worldwide retail, has already demanded improvements to prevent a repeat the previous Prime Day’s capacity problems: “tech teams are already working to improve our architecture”. 

We’d like to think that Amazon will also improve the navigation and discoverability of its deals for Prime Day 2019, although we aren’t holding our collective breath: both factors’ general rubbishness didn’t stop Prime Day breaking all records, so there’s not much incentive for Amazon to change it unless it decides better navigation will drive significantly higher sales. But that's why we're here to show you the best Prime Day deals!

It’s a safe bet that Prime Day 2019 will be longer. It’s already grown from one day to one and a half; further inflation seems inevitable.

Image credit: Amazon

What does all this mean for Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

It’s clear that Amazon is prioritising Prime Day over Super Black Friday Deals Month or whatever convoluted name it’s going to give its Black Friday sales period in 2019: according to Digitalcommerce360.com, 67% of this year's Prime Day deals were lower than comparable deals on the preceding Black Friday. 

That’s not to say Amazon won’t take part in Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It will, and it’ll offer the same kind of discounting that we’ve seen in recent years. But Prime Day is more important to the firm, and we’d expect its discounts to be deeper, especially on its own devices.

Image credit: Amazon

Prime Day: why does it matter more to Amazon?

There are some crucial differences between Prime Day and Black Friday. The first is that Prime Day is Amazon’s own day. It’s right there in the name, which of course refers to Amazon’s Prime membership programme and associated services. Amazon doesn’t own Black Friday, and that means ultimately it’s just another retailer shouting for attention – a massive retailer with a really loud voice, of course, but Black Friday is a sales event for the entire retail sector. It’s much harder for rivals to muscle in on something that Amazon has effectively created from thin air.

The second and more important difference is that Black Friday doesn’t create new spending. It just moves it slightly. As we’ve discovered in recent years, the money people spend over the Black Friday period is money they were probably going to spend anyway: all Black Friday really does is concentrates pre-Christmas shopping in the last week of November. 

Prime Day spending is different in two ways. First of all, people aren’t spending the money they’d already planned to spend on Christmas presents. And secondly, they’re buying mainly for themselves, not for others. If you go back to the list of bestsellers there’s an awful lot of impulse buying in there: Instant Pots and Hue Lightstrips, frying pans and dishwasher tablets. This is new spending, not merely moving pre-planned spending. 

There’s another key benefit for Amazon. Its best-sellers on Prime Day weren’t just Amazon devices; they were Amazon devices that connect to Amazon services. Fire TVs, Kindle Fires, Echo devices, Alexa remotes. Each one of them connecting to Amazon Prime, and each one of them requiring a Prime membership to buy in the first place. So when Black Friday rolls around, Amazon will have a whole bunch of Prime members for whom shopping on Prime is the default, and who might want to enhance their Amazon-powered smart homes with Amazon-branded Black Friday deals.

Prime Day means that for Amazon, Christmas now comes twice a year.

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Apple HomePod now has voice recognition for multiple users

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:46 AM PDT

Starting soon, Apple HomePod will be able to pick up on who's speaking and give them personalized recommendations and notifications for Apple Music, Messages, Notes, Reminders and more, all part of Apple HomePod's new multi-user feature.

The feature was announced during the WWDC 2019 keynote and is just one of many updates coming to the smart speaker later this year. 

Some other features coming our way are Handoff, the feature that allows you to share an audio stream from an iOS device just by holding it close to the speaker. HomePod will also be getting live radio support for over 100,000 stations from all around the world.

Many of these features were also announced for the new version of iOS (iOS 13) and the new version of tvOS (tvOS 13). 

A HomePod for everyone in the house

Apple made a big deal out of personalized results at this year's WWDC keynote - in fact, it's a cornerstone of both iOS and tvOS. The HomePod features are really an extension of that - i.e. while it makes a ton of sense to see personalized TV show recommendations, it also makes sense for the HomePod to be able to know who's talking and tailor results to that person.

It's also the kind of thing Google Assistant has been able to do for the last year, so it's high-time that Apple catches up.

So when can we expect our HomePods to be a bit more personal? Expect to see these new features land with the full release of iOS 13 which, based on previous launches, is likely to land in September 2019. 

  • Catch all the announcements from the event in our WWDC 2019 news hub

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macOS Catalina release date, news and features

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:45 AM PDT

Apple has revealed that the name for macOS 10.15 is officially macOS Catalina. The company made the news via its live keynote address at its WWDC 2019 conference in San Jose, California.

The company's head of software Craig Federighi showed off the new name and look for macOS during the keynote, confirming that this version will kill off iTunes in lieu of new apps for Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV. Each of these new macOS versions of the apps gain enhanced features that aren't available in the existing versions running on other devices. 

This new version of Apple's Mac operating system (OS) also brings forth Sidecar, a new built-in tool for using an iPad as a secondary display for your Mac or MacBook device. This feature works both wired and wirelessly.

Apple has also introduced a new feature solely for developers known as "Project Catalyst," which will allow them to seamlessly port their iOS 13 and iPadOS apps to the macOS environment.

Here's every major change coming to Apple's OS for Macs and MacBooks in 2019 with macOS Catalina.

Cut to the chase

  • What is it? macOS 10.15, the successor to macOS 10.14 Mojave.
  • When is it out? Apple says "this fall," so in Q3 2019.
  • How much will it cost? Nothing. Apple software updates are always free.

macOS Catalina

Image Credit: Apple

macOS Catalina release date

For anyone that isn't an app developer, macOS Catalina will release "this fall," as Apple promised on stage at WWDC 2019. For those folks not on the northern hemisphere, that means some time in Q3 2019, likely late September based upon previous macOS releases.

However, Apple will be issuing a public beta of the OS later this month, which will be available for anyone to try out at this link. If you're feeling particularly adventurous and have 100 bucks or quid to blow, you can try out the special developer preview beta right now.

For more detailed information regarding just that, check out our guide for how to download the macOS Catalina beta test right now.

Goodbye, iTunes – hello, Apple Music, Podcasts and TV

WWDC 2019 and macOS Catalina make it official: iTunes is no more ... it has ceased to be. The new apps for macOS that rise from its ashes are Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts – enhanced versions of those that appear on iOS.

Apple Music will allow macOS users access to their entire libraries of music regardless of whether the tracks have been downloaded via streaming. This is also where music ripped from CDs will live, incorporated into the same libraries.

Apple TV will feature the app's channels and more than 100,000 iTunes movies and TV shows to browse, buy or rent. All of this content will be available in 4K HDR video and Dolby Atmos audio wherever it's offered. Finally, Apple TV+ will be available through this app once the service launches later this year.

Apple Podcasts brings the service's more than 700,00 podcasts as well as new episode updates to the Mac in a new interface. This version of the app features enhanced search functions that can pull up episodes by hosts, guests or even discussion topics.

macOS Catalina

Apple Sidecar at work in macOS Catalina. (Image Credit: Apple)

Sidecar turns your iPad into another display

This is probably the most exciting update to macOS with Catalina 10.15: the ability to extend your Mac's display to a nearby iPad wired or wirelessly. Since a fair amount of MacBook users are likely iPad owners, this means that a sizable amount of mobile workers just received a secondary display.

Perhaps even more importantly, this connected iPad can also be used as a drawing tablet with various specifically supported apps. Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Illustrator and iWork are the first apps mentioned to support this feature.

It's currently unknown which iPad models will work with Macs using the Sidecar feature, but it's likely that those models will have to run the new iPadOS releasing later this year.

macOS Catalina

Screen Time for macOS has a special "One more minute" feature. (Image Credit: Apple)

Screen Time comes to macOS

One of Apple's most impactful changes to iOS 12 was Screen Time, an app that tracks your iPhone or iPad usage time and offers insights into the trends. This functionality will come to macOS with Catalina with a new “One more minute” feature, which gives you more time to save your work or finish up a game.

This information will be synced across your iPhone and and iPad, giving you a complete profile of how often you stare at your collective screens and guidance on what to do with that information. The feature will also include parental controls on time spent using a Mac as well as with whom children are able to communicate with.

macOS Catalina

Twitter's return to macOS was made possible by Project Catalyst. (Image Credit: Apple)

Project Catalyst – is this Marzipan?

It appears that what was formerly referred to in rumors and leaks as "Project Marzipan," Apple's master plan for bringing more apps from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac, is now known as Project Catalyst. For developers, it all seems to start with simply checking off a box within the Xcode app in macOS Catalina.

Once that is done, a series of new features and protocols become available to the app in the development phase, from which the developer can choose to add to their apps – presumably with additional coding. However, it appears to be rather seamless and speedy, with even Twitter using the tool to quickly bring its native app back to macOS from iOS.

Other fun improvements

Safari browser will have a new startup page that uses Siri Suggestions to surface commonly visited websites, bookmarks, iCloud tabs and more.

Mail will soon allow users to block messages from senders, mute message threads from issuing push notifications and send unsubscribe requests from within the app to mailing list providers.

Reminders will soon receive an overhaul in visual interface designed to let users more easily generate, track and organize their reminders.

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Best Apple Watch apps we've used in 2019

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:43 AM PDT

It’s been an interesting year for even the best Apple Watch apps. In the spring it seemed as if the Watch had lost its sparkle, with many big-name apps either languishing or being pulled from the Watch altogether. The problem wasn’t that Apple Watch apps are a bad idea, though. 

Far from it, as our selection here demonstrates. It was that sometimes, apps were designed to answer the wrong question: “could we make a Watch app?” but not “should we?”

Now, watchOS 6 is set to bring an App Store to your Apple Watch for the very first time. That may encourage app developers to take the Apple Watch more seriously, so 2019 may be a big year for great new apps on your wrist.

The Apple Watch 4 is proving pretty popular too, and that's why you're probably here checking out the new apps. In fact, it's one of the best smartwatch options out there, and now we're at the fourth generation it's becoming a particularly accomplished smart option for your wrist.

Our favourite apps, the apps that are still here after a bumpy year, both should and could have been made. They exist because they’re useful, or because they’re entertaining, or because they make your life that little bit better. 

In this round-up you’ll find apps for podcasting and procrastinating, for getting fit and getting stuff done, for messing around and for sorting stuff out. 

Before you get into our list remember to head into the Apple Watch main app on your iPhone - that's where you'll see a list of the apps already installed on your phone that can also be transferred to your Watch. If you see any you like the look of here, you'll need to download them to your iPhone first.

And make sure to check this article weekly, as we'll add a new app each week, highlighted below.

Apple Watch app of the week: Dashlane Password Manager

Dashlane is one of the most popular and most highly rated password managers on iPhone and iPad, and it works on Apple Watch too. It doesn’t give you passwords, though. It uses your Apple Watch as an authenticator for two-factor authentication for your desktop or mobile device.

When you want to access a site or get a stored password, you’ll be asked to enter the six-digit code that appears on your Apple Watch. Codes automatically expire after 30 seconds and only display if you’re logged into Dashlane on your phone. If someone tries to access Dashlane without the correct code, they won’t be able to get in.

The app is free for a limited number of passwords: once you get beyond 50 logins you’ll need to shell out for a subscription. 50 might sound like a lot but if you use a lot of websites you’ll soon blast through that number. The paid version also provides a secure VPN service on your phone or tablet.

It’s hardly the most exciting Apple Watch app, we know, but it is useful: it’s a great example of using the Apple Watch sensibly instead of trying to cram in apps that don’t work on its limited screen real estate.

Best Apple Watch apps for fitness and running

There's no denying that the main thrust of the Apple Watch since the second model is for fitness: it's packing GPS, heart rate, water resistance and improved sensors to make the most of the fact people like to work out with this thing - it even connects to gym equipment.

This list of Apple Watch fitness, running, wellbeing and health apps are nearly all must-have - if you're going to do one thing with your new Watch, use it to become a healthier you in mind and body.

Tag Heuer Golf

You may know Tag Heuer for its reassuringly expensive timepieces, but you might not know about its prowess in making smartwatches for golfers. With the new Golf app, the company brings its golfing talents to your Apple Watch.

The main iPhone app is free, but the Apple Watch companion is only available to subscribers. If you subscribe, you get most of the features of the firm’s smartwatch: maps of nearly 40,000 courses worldwide that tell you where the hazards are, shot distance measurement and real-time statistics. You can track not just your own scores but those of up to three friends too.

As you’d expect, the companion iPhone app is well designed and makes good use of the information from your Watch: it can show you not just how well you performed today, but how well you performed in your last 20 rounds or all time. It’s packed with stats: the best score to par, the longest shot, the putts per hole… there’s probably a section rating the garishness of your trousers too.

The price might seem steep but golf doesn’t come cheap – and when you consider that you’re getting much the same feature set as a watch that can cost four figures, it does represent comparatively good value for money.

Fabulous - Daily Motivation

We were going to write about this ages ago but we couldn’t be bothered. Boom boom! If you’re struggling to get stuff done, Fabulous hopes to help.

It’s an odd little app that does a little of everything: health tracking, yoga, exercise advice, mindfulness, dieting and psychology. It’s based around making little but significant changes to your life: helping you clear your head or work your abs, tracking your health or fitness goals and reminding you to stay hydrated.

If you’re watching your weight the app also has a weight loss program inspired by the Atkins and HCG diets. The app claims to be based on “major scientific studies” but of course you should always seek medical advice before embarking on any diet.

The bulk of the work happens on the iPhone app, with the Watch app as a simple companion reminding you what to do and enabling you to tick off the items on your daily schedule. As is often the case with fitness apps, the main features are reserved for subscribers: to access the personal coaching feature you’ll need to pay a monthly or yearly subscription.

Attain by Aetna

Would you be willing to share your fitness data with your healthcare provider in exchange for the odd reward? That’s what Attain appears to be about. We say “appears to be” because in order to get it you need to be an Aetna customer and sign up for the app via its Attain By Aetna website.

The app is designed to make health recommendations, such as telling you when it’s time to get flu shots or refill your prescriptions, and to help you live a fitter, healthier life. Data will be encrypted and shared with both Aetna and Apple, but it isn’t currently used to make decisions about your coverage or the cost of your coverage.

The app provides a range of fitness targets based on your age, sex and weight, and it enables you to score points by achieving those goals. You can achieve goals based not just on steps taken but on activities such as swimming or yoga too.

As anyone who’s watched dreadful game shows knows, points mean prizes – and in this case those prizes include “gift cards from popular retailers” and even a brand new Apple Watch. We’re willing to bet it will take more than a quick run around the block to qualify for that one.

ActivityTracker Pedometer

We’ve covered ActivityTracker before, and it’s had some significant updates since we last looked. In addition to support for the Apple Watch 4, the latest iPhones, iOS 12 and watchOS 5, it boasts four new complications for the new Infograph watch face and an updated engine to more accurately record activity times.

As before, the main app is designed to track your activity without using your phone or watch’s GPS features, so it’s less demanding on battery life. It uses your device’s motion processor to record and calculate steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burned, distance traveled and active time, and you can see how well you’re doing on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis.

You can also import your historical data from Apple’s Health app so you’re not starting from a clean slate of data.

If you subscribe to the Pro version for a modest $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$7.99 it offers complications for instant stats on your Apple Watch and synchronization of steps between iPhone, Watch and the Health app. Pro users can also move data from one iPhone to another. Whether you subscribe or not the Watch app gives you an overview of the last hour, day and week in the form of attractive and effective graphs.

Slopes

Late in 2018, Apple introduced improved snowboarding and skiing tracking for the Apple Watch Series 3 and later. That’s been a boon for snow apps such as Slopes, which can use the improved APIs to gather more useful information than ever before.

With Slopes you can track your speed, vertical, distance, lift vs trail time and more, getting the information you need right now on your wrist and sharing that data with the iPhone so you can analyze it later.

Slopes is very clever. It automatically detects runs and lifts, it can replay your runs in 3D with heat maps showing your speed on each bit of the run, and it even integrates with your photo library to automatically display photos you took on your skiing or snowboarding trips. The app also integrates with the Apple Health app, recording details of your workouts and the calories you’ve burned.

As with many sport apps the core version of Slopes is free but there’s also a premium subscription that introduces extra features. Here that means live run-by-run breakdowns, unlimited run and lift stat breakdowns, premium maps and even virtual 3D mountains to show you where you’ve been. An annual pass is a very reasonable $19.99/£12.49/AU$17.99.

Strava

Strava is one of the most popular running and cycling apps around, but it’s always required you to have your phone or a non-Apple smartwatch to track your travels and record your vital statistics. Not anymore.

If you have an Apple Watch 2, the Strava Apple Watch app can use its GPS to record your run without requiring you to strap a phone to anything. The interface isn’t as pretty as the iPhone app’s interface, but when you’re running or cycling that doesn’t matter: the information you need is presented cleanly enough and the app is simple and straightforward to use.

The main app is free and offers essential features including distance, pace, speed, elevation and burned calories, and there’s a premium service for $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99 per month or $59.99/£54.99/AU$89.99 per year that offers more detailed post-exercise analysis, live performance feedback and personalized coaching - although not through the Watch.

However, if you’re someone who uses the premium features like Beacon on the main app, you might not find Strava on the Apple Watch to your liking compared to using it on the phone.

Nike Run Club

The ongoing love-fest between Nike and Apple continues to bear fruit: the latest iteration of the Nike Run Club app introduces some welcome improvements. 

It now integrates with Siri Suggestions, which means the app can now suggest good times for a run based on your previous runs (the feature is off by default so it won’t nag you if you don’t want it to), and there are new Apple Watch complications including one for the Infograph face that shows how far you’ve run this month.

There’s hardly a shortage of running apps in the App Store but Nike’s budget is a bit higher than most, so the app feels a lot more premium than many others. It tracks and stores all your runs thanks to your Watch’s built-in GPS, enables you to listen to audio guides as you run, offers a range of challenges to keep you motivated and has good social sharing features, so you can turn your friends into cheerleaders. 

It’s very well designed and the Watch app doesn’t sacrifice substance for style: while visually it’s very attractive it also shows all the information you actually need as you’re pounding the pavements. It’s a really good running app.

ECG

  • Pre-installed
  • Free

Apple’s much-heralded ECG app has finally arrived. It’s available for free to Apple Watch users and should automatically appear in your list of available apps as part of the watchOS 5.1.2 update, but you’ll only get it in a select few territories: the US, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and Guam.

If you really, really want the app and you don’t live in any of those places you can get around it by changing the system region to one of the countries where it is available, although of course that will affect the other apps on your Watch too. For users in the UK it may be the only way to get the ECG app for the foreseeable future.

The app itself is simple and potentially life-saving. You simply put a finger on the Digital Crown, wait 30 seconds and the app analyzes the electrical impulses in your body; this enable it to detect some cases of atrial fibrillation. The emphasis here is on ‘some’: the app can generate false positive results, and it’s no substitute for a real doctor. However, by detecting issues that may otherwise go unnoticed it’s a useful thing for your Apple Watch to offer.

Cardiogram

We’ve written about Cardiogram before: it’s a very valuable health tracker that enables you to see how your heart is working over time, and which enables you to look for spikes related to what you eat, how you exercise and whether you’re particularly stressed at work. All you need to do is wear your Apple Watch, which checks your heart rate every five minutes. Cardiogram then crunches that data to give you an insight into what your body’s doing.

What’s interesting about Cardiogram now isn’t the app itself, but the partnerships that are starting to emerge.

In the US, Amica Life and Greenhouse Health Insurance are offering life insurance for Cardiogram users with any version of the Apple Watch: simply use the Cardiogram app and you can be eligible for up to $1,000 (around £775/AU$1,400) in accidental death cover for 12 months, with the option to purchase up to $50,000 (roughly £39,000/AU$70,000) more from within the app. $1,000 isn’t a lot in the great scheme of things, especially in America, but it’s a lot for free.

You don’t have to share data either, the insurers bet that people who use Cardiogram are more likely to take steps to improve their health than people who don’t.

As with most health things, such partnerships are subject to regulatory approval, and the Cardiogram partnership is currently available in Wisconsin, Arizona, Indiana and Georgia. Expect more states and more partnerships soon.

MySwimPro

This is a tale of two apps, depending on which version of Apple Watch you have. If yours is a first-generation model then it’s a useful but limited way to track your swimming stats: the first-gen watch shouldn’t be submerged, so you shouldn’t wear it while swimming.

However, if you have a second-generation Apple Watch (Apple calls it the Apple Watch Series 2) then you can take it into the pool - and that makes MySwimPro a much more useful application. You can log your workouts while you’re still in the water, and you can also follow the app’s workouts to set goals and monitor your heart rate during your swim.

Once you’ve dried off you can pick up the iPhone or iPad app, which syncs data from your Watch and enables you to see your progress in much more detail: miles swum, hours spent swimming, top times for specific distances and so on.

You can share your triumphs online, or you can just watch videos showing how other swimmers do particular types of workout. It’s probably overkill if you only do the odd couple of laps at the gym swimming pool, but if you’re serious about swimming it's worth wearing on your wrist.

Nike Training Club

Nike and Apple are best friends forever, so it’s not a huge surprise to see Nike unveil another Watch app. This one’s really good, too. Describing itself as “your ultimate personal trainer”, Nike Training Club has more than 180 workouts covering strength, endurance, mobility and yoga, and they’re all free. There are daily personalized picks based on your previous activity, flexible training plans to help you achieve your fitness goals, and tips from top trainers.

The app splits jobs between phone and Watch. The former is where you do the planning and tracking; the latter is what you wear while you’re actually working out. By necessity as well as design that means focusing only on the information you really need right now, such as your heart rate and how many reps you still have to do before you can undo all your efforts with some cake and beer.

The app is by no means unique in its combination of Watch and workout tracking, although it does have Nike’s immediately recognizable and individual visual style. But what’s significant about this app is that none of its many workouts are hidden behind in-app purchases or pricey subscriptions. Everything in the app is free.

Round Health

The longer we’ve had our Apple Watches, the more we’ve come to appreciate simplicity: while the App Store is full of apps that offer all kinds of features, the ones we actually use every day tend to do one thing very well. Round Health is that kind of app: it’s designed to make sure you take your medicine, and it does so with the minimum of fuss. You can also have it as a complication, so you know exactly what you need to take next.

Whether it’s vitamins or medication, most of us have had that “did I take it today?” thing. That’s no big deal if you’re just topping up your vitamin D in winter, but for people taking birth control or who have serious and/or chronic conditions it’s often very important to take certain medicine at certain times.

With Round Health you can set simple but persistent reminders that make sure you take what you need to take, and it supports more complex medical regimes involving multiple medications and schedules as well as tracking when you need to renew your prescription.

The term ‘life-changing’ is bandied around a lot to describe rather ordinary apps, but Round Health is a great way of helping you stay on top of your health.

Lifesum

Like many health-related apps, Lifesum really wants you to take out a subscription: that’s $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year, though it sometimes runs a 30% off promotion. The core app is free, though. Its goal is to help you think about what you eat and what activity you do and to make positive changes to make yourself healthier.

On the iPhone, Lifesum enables you to count calories and track your meals, discover healthy recipes and track your progress towards your goals. It works with other apps too, so for example if you’ve got a Fitbit or use Runkeeper it can get data from them.

On the Watch it’s a much simpler affair, urging you to stay hydrated, showing your progress towards your resting, moving and stretching goals and doing everything through a kind of little Tamagotchi character.

It pulls data from the Apple Health app as well as the Lifesum app to ensure you get the widest possible picture of your intake and activity, and you can add data as well as view it: for example, you can take a note of what you’re eating via the Watch app and then enter more details on the iPhone later. Unusually there isn’t a Watch complication, but the app does tie in with the Watch’s notification system to keep you updated.

Headspace

If you’ve ever felt that life is just that bit too busy or stressful, Headspace could help. It’s based around mindfulness, which is all about getting you to feel calmer without too much effort. In fact, it’s the opposite of effort: mindfulness is about taking a break from the rush.

The Apple Watch app is part of a wider offering for iPhone and iPad: it acts as a reminder and a coach, urging you to pick an exercise and focus on it for the allotted time. It also has an SOS mode for when things feel too much and you need help instantly. But it’s the main app that does most of the work, with daily mindfulness exercises and sessions designed to help with everything from workplace stress to sleep problems.

It’s very well done but one thing that might raise your stress levels is the cost: while the app is free to try it really needs a subscription to unlock its most useful features, and that subscription is $12.99/£9.99/AU$19.99 per month or $94.99/£74.99/AU$149.99 per year. That’s an auto-renewing subscription too, so you need to disable that in iTunes if you don’t want it to recur automatically.

WebMD

Medical apps don’t just exist to persuade you that your mild headache is terminal brain cancer. They can help keep you healthy too. While WebMD does indeed let you compare your symptoms with various illnesses and conditions to scare yourself silly, that’s not the most interesting thing about it or its Watch companion app.

WebMD enables you to detail your medication schedules, with dosage information and the option to be reminded of what you need to take and when you need to take it. This can be in the form of a notification, or you can have it as a Watch face Complication so it’s right there in the middle of the display.

It can also remind you of any prerequisites, such as whether you need to take your medicine with food or on an empty stomach. It’s the sort of simple but very useful thing the Apple Watch does well.

Over on the main iPhone app there’s plenty more to discover. You can read up on the side effects and precautions of specific pills or patches, find out if you need to go hiding from the flu or just catch up on the latest health and wellbeing news from various credible sources.

HeartWatch

How’s your heart? If you don’t know the answer, this app can shed some light. It might even save your life, as it did for James Green: the app alerted him about an unusual spike in his heart rate, and it turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. If it weren’t for the alert, Green might well have died.

You don’t really need more of a sales pitch to justify spending three dollars on staying alive, but HeartWatch isn’t a one-trick app. It pulls information from the Watch’s heart rate sensor to track what it’s doing when you wake, when you sleep, when you work out and when you just go about your day.

The reason for the different types of activity is simple: you don’t want your app warning you about elevated heart rate if you’re doing something designed to elevate your heart rate, an issue that used to drive us daft when exercising with our Apple Watch set to the defaults.

It won’t work without the Health app installed - that’s the route by which it gets its data - but you can also import data from other health apps if you use other kinds of connected health monitors.

One Drop Diabetes Management

We’re increasingly intrigued about HealthKit, Apple’s framework for health monitoring apps: we’ve already seen apps that can warn of rare but potentially lethal heart conditions, and now we’re seeing a whole host of specialist apps that can integrate with specific monitoring hardware to help with particular conditions. As the name suggests, this one’s for people with diabetes.

One Drop makes Chrome, a Bluetooth blood glucose meter that’s sold as a package with testing strips. If you have the meter the app gets information from each test, but if you don’t it’s still a useful app to help monitor your diabetes.

The app enables you to log your activity, your food intake and your medication and to share that information with HealthKit and the Health app (if that’s what you want to do). As ever the main iPhone app is where all the detail is, with the Watch app taking care of quick data recording and progress notifications.

The iPhone app builds on the basics with a database of foods’ nutritional information, historical data, insulin pump data and the ability to schedule reminders for your medication.

WorkOutDoors

If your idea of good exercise involves going far from the madding crowds, you’ll like WorkOutDoors. It’s a workout app that’s based around vector maps that you can easily rotate and zoom, tracking your location and your progress.

It uses the Watch’s GPS (if you have a GPS-enabled Watch) so there’s no need to take your phone on a hike, cycle or snowboard run, and features such as breadcrumb tracking, custom points of interest and customizable stats displays enable you to make the app truly your own.

In a nice touch you can export your workouts from the iPhone app in GPX format, which can be imported into many other workout apps and sites.

It’s very, very well thought out. For example, something as simple as the stats display is available in a variety of sizes to suit different kinds of activity (not to mention different levels of eyesight).

It makes good use of color-coding to make routes crystal clear, waypoints can provide extra information such as directions, and the map automatically rotates as you move so you’re always sure of the right direction. It’s a brilliant app for pretty much any outdoor activity.

Streaks

The trick to living better isn’t to damn near kill yourself on a treadmill and then give up after a few weeks. It’s to make smaller, lasting changes to your life, changes that you can and will actually stick to. And that’s what Streaks offers.

Whether you’re trying to eat more healthily, exercise more or break a smoking habit, Streaks enables you to track positive and negative habits. It offers a range of reporting tools so you can see exactly how well you’re doing, and you can track up to 12 different tasks at once.

They needn’t be exercise or eating tasks: you can remind yourself to walk the dog, study, take vitamins or practice a musical instrument. It’s good to see wheelchair users included in the default tasks list too.

Where Streaks really shines is in its integration with the Health app, which enables it to pull data to use for monitoring suitable targets you’ve set. That reduces a lot of the form-filling of similar apps, and it’s particularly effective if you’re trying to work on good healthy habits or eliminate unhealthy ones, or both.

There’s a Complication too, so that you don’t forget your goals, and the whole thing is customizable so that you can get it just-so.

Elevate Dash - Brain Training and Games

We’re not convinced by the supposed science of brain training - it’s a sector that makes bold claims based on very flimsy evidence - but there’s no doubt that spending time learning or practicing useful things is better for you than mindlessly swiping through trivia on Twitter.

Elevate claims that its brain training app will “improve critical cognitive skills that are proven to boost productivity, earning power, and self-confidence”, and it does so by setting little tasks for you: choosing the correct meaning of words, calculating percentages and so on.

Correct answers earn points, and you can track your progress on the main iPhone/iPad app as well as on your Watch. The Watch’s small screen means the games you get are very simple ones, but that works well when you’re on the move.

The app is free and lets you play 4 mini-games. If you want to access the full selection of 40+ Elevate games you’ll need your iPhone or iPad and a subscription to the premium membership package, which is $4.99/£3.99/AU$7.99 per month or $44.99/£34.99/AU$69.99 per year.

If you could do with a boost to specific skills - working out restaurant tips, perhaps, or improving your vocabulary - then you might feel that’s well worth the money.

Peak - Brain Training

From a team of developers, psychologists and neuroscientists, Peak is a great app for keeping your brain active. The Watch version offers three games, ideal for the smaller screen. Some of these seem simple at first, but they quickly become more challenging.

There are workouts to test memory, focus and problem solving – all of them fun, engaging, and the ideal to while away the daily commute. 

Runtastic Six Pack Abs Workout

If you've been meaning to get that six-pack tummy but just don't have time to go to the gym, this iPhone app has high-quality videos of avatars performing crunches, situps, stretches and core twists that you can do in your own time on your bedroom floor, say.

Initial workouts with Runtastic are free, more come as in-app purchases. And if squinting at your precariously perched iPhone isn't doing it for you, the Watch app means you can see an animation on your watch, with vibrations on your wrist to start and end a set. It's easy to use and works well. Now you'll have to find another excuse not to work out.

MyFitnessPal

Information is power and if you're trying to lose weight, calorie tracking is a good way to stay focused. MyFitnessPal works out a daily calorie allowance based on how much weight you want to shed. Eat a meal and your allowance is spent, take exercise and you earn credit.

The Watch gives you a running total of remaining calories and how that breaks down into protein, carbohydrates and more. It can integrate with your steps total so you don't have to add those manually. It's simple but convenient and helpful.

Walkmeter GPS Pedometer

If walking's your thing, Walkmeter helps track your every step, showing your perambulations on a map and generating detailed graphs. The Watch app has clear data reporting and you can start and stop a walk from your wrist using the Watch's Force Touch actions.

Apple's own Workout app does a lot, but this app has more detail and the mapping detail on the iPhone is great. The app is free but for full Watch performance you need to upgrade to the Elite version for $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99. There's a lot here, including training plans and announcements as you hit targets or distances.

CARROT Fit

You may know CARROT from its weather app, which combines Dark Sky-style weather forecasting with sarcasm and lies. But CARROT wants to make you unhappy in many other ways - and what’s better for a sadistic AI than being in control of a fitness app?

Enter CARROT Fit, which takes a somewhat unusual approach to motivating you to get healthier and lose weight.

CARROT promises to “get you fit - or else”. To achieve that it offers a dozen punishing exercises (more are available via in-app purchases) accompanied by threats, ridicule, bribes and the occasional compliment.

It’s rude, crude and much more entertaining than trying to complete the rings on Apple’s own activity tracker, and we’re pretty sure it’s the only fitness app that rewards progress with cat facts. But there’s a proper fitness tracker in here too: it’ll track your steps and weight loss, remember your workouts and add data to Apple’s health app.

Most of the personality is in the main iPhone app, but the Watch alerts include such cheery prospects as “seven minutes in hell”. If you find getting fit or losing weight a little bit tedious, CARROT might be the, ahem, carrot that you need to get motivated.

Lose It!

If your Watch strap is feeling a little more snug than it used to, this app may be the answer: it’s designed to help you achieve your weight loss goals “without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.”

It tracks the calories you’ve consumed and the goals you’ve set, focuses on nutrition as well as overall calorie intake, works happily with other fitness apps and trackers and provides an online peer group where everybody encourages each other to achieve their ideal weight.

It also enables you to set exercise goals and focus on general wellness, so it’s not just about losing weight.

The Apple Watch app doesn’t replace the phone app completely - for example, you’ll need your phone handy if you want to use the barcode scanner to automatically record what you’re eating, and the team-based features such as group challenges are phone-based - but it’s a great way to focus on your goals, monitor your progress and keep your motivation no matter how sorely tempted you may be.

The program is $39.99/£29.99/AU$62.99 per year but you can explore the app for free without signing up.

Mount Burnmore

Fitness fanatics look away now: for those that find exercise really boring, and their get up and go often gets up and goes while they stay sedentary. Mount Burnmore could be the answer to that lethargy: it turns fitness into a game.

The concept is quite clever. Mount Burnmore depends on “active energy”, which it pulls from the Health app: the more calories you’ve burned, the more active energy you have in the game.

When you have sufficient energy you can attempt to solve the game’s puzzles, which involve finding routes around the titular mountain, collecting in-game items and smashing things with a pickaxe.

There’s a Complication that enables you to see your progress without launching the full game, and the app makes good use of the Digital Crown to help you navigate around larger levels later in the game. There are also leaderboards to compare with other players and in-game challenges to win freebies.

It’s bright, breezy and a bit brash, and we suspect it’s best suited to older children rather than grown-ups - although if you do give this one to the kids you might want to disable in-app purchases, as they can be used to buy in-game items.

Happier

Mindfulness, the art of focusing on being present and aware in the world instead of being constantly distracted by things and thoughts that don’t matter, isn’t something you’d associate with the Apple Watch. If you aren’t careful with your notification settings your Watch pings away merrily all day, interrupting countless trains of thought.

But the Happier app hopes to use the Watch to make you feel better, not more harassed.

The app itself is free, but it’s designed as a gateway to paid-for mindfulness courses. If you don’t go for them you can still take advantage of the app, though. You can tell the app how you’re feeling - we suspect “meh” is the most-used option - and it then responds with uplifting quotes to help you feel a bit more optimistic.

It can pop up to remind you to take a meditation break, and you can dictate a positive thought to a private journal or to the Happier community. That’s not as daft as it sounds: there’s some evidence that keeping a journal of positive things can boost your mood over time.

Just be careful what and how you share: one iTunes reviewer says that they were able to locate their private journal with Google.

Best Apple Watch sleep apps

It's worth noting that there aren't a lot of apps for sleep tracking, as the Apple Watch can't really last overnight on battery.

That said, there are some clever apps to do it, and many people are now on their sequel Apple Watch and can even have one for the day and one for the night - so sleep tracking with your 'Night Watch' is possible.

AutoSleep Tracker

There are plenty of sleep tracking apps in the App Store, but AutoSleep is among the best. Now in version 6 it delivers more information than you could ever ask for, with good use of color-coding to prioritize information. 

AutoSleep presents its analysis in three key areas: Sleep, which as you’d expect tells you how long you slept for; Quality, which tells you how restless you were; and Readiness, which is an attempt to predict how well you’re going to cope with the day’s demands based on your recent sleep history. The interface is strongly and deliberately reminiscent of Apple’s own activity tracking, with the same use of colored rings to show what you’ve achieved.

The Watch app even works if you don’t wear your Apple Watch to bed: simply touch the Watch in the morning and AutoSleep knows you’re up. If you do wear it to bed, though, the app will analyze sleep quality based on restlessness, time awake and heart rate – and you can adjust the sensitivity if you’re a very restless sleeper. It integrates with Apple Health and Siri Shortcuts, and it also works as a complication for your chosen watch face.

Best Apple Watch apps for music, podcasts and audiobooks

SoundHound

Music discovery, you say? Isn’t that what Shazam is for? The answer to that is yes, but also no – because while Shazam does a brilliant job of finding songs based on listening to the currently playing music, it doesn’t attempt to recognize your humming and singing.

That’s SoundHound’s speciality. It promises to identify that song that’s driving you crazy: all you have to do is hum or sing a reasonably accurate version of it and SoundHound will do the rest. As you’d expect, it’s extremely hit and miss.

That’s not all SoundHound offers, though. It brings up the lyrics of the song it has matched, which is helpful if you fancy singing along, and if your Watch is the cellular version you can recognize songs and grab lyrics without needing a connection to your phone.

On your iPhone the app also offers a few features that Shazam doesn’t. You can bookmark songs and add them to Spotify playlists, and there are some useful voice-controlled features such as “okay Hound, show me lyrics for…” or “okay Hound, play today’s top songs.” 

It’s that voice control that really elevates SoundHound over rival apps, as it turns the app into a voice-controlled hub for pretty much any musical task.

Pandora

  • Pandora
  • Free (requires Plus or Premium subscription)

Spotify isn’t the only streaming music giant to bring offline listening to the Apple Watch. If you’re in the US (the service isn’t currently available to international listeners) Pandora does it too. It has released a brand new app that enables you to listen offline, and rate and control your music without having to reach for your phone.

The app itself is free, but you’ll need a paid-for Plus or Premium subscription to use it: like Spotify, the free tier doesn’t support offline music. Offline listening requires watchOS 5 or later. Plus subscriptions are currently $4.99 per month and Premium subscriptions are $12.99.

The updated iPhone app brings support for Siri Shortcuts, and it also integrates with the Messages app so that you can send and receive songs without leaving the Messages app. There’s even an Apple TV app that uses the same subscription.

Pandora is a good way to get hold of not just music but podcasts too. Discovering new content, whether music or podcasts, is simple thanks to a good selection of recommendations and playlists, and if you go for the Plus subscription you can create unlimited personalized stations as well as up to four stations for offline listening.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts is a firm favorite among podcast users, with 8 years of constant improvements under its belt. Now in its seventh incarnation, it’s one of the best ways to stay on top of your podcast pile. It’s also eminently sociable with support not just for the Apple Watch but for Chromecast, Sonos, CarPlay and AirPlay.

Although the app is perfect for beginners, there’s a lot here for serious listeners, including excellent filters, automatic downloads, listening history and extensive notifications.

Version 7 enables you to listen to individual episodes without subscribing, streamlines the user interface, has excellent archiving that retains your playback history and supports Siri Shortcuts. There’s been a big effort to improve discovery, so the app makes it much easier to find new podcasts it thinks you’ll like as well as the podcasts you’ve found for yourself.

As with other apps of this ilk most of the heavy lifting is done by the iPhone app, with the Watch app there to provide access to the features that make sense on your wrist: playback control, of course, but also speeding the podcast up or down, trimming silence and boosting the volume. You can see what’s next, browse new releases and scroll through the podcast charts too.

Spotify Music

At last! Spotify finally makes its way to the Apple Watch with an app that does everything you might expect it to do. It plays music! It pauses music! It connects to other devices via the magic of Spotify Connect! It gives you playlists! It has a shuffle button!

The one thing it doesn’t do, though, is stream: the music you hear via your Watch is coming from your iPhone, not directly to the Apple Watch. We’d expect that to change in future versions of the app. It hasn’t been optimized for the larger display of the Apple Watch 4 either, so it looks a bit odd on the most recent models.

We’re big fans of and subscribers to Spotify: its catalog is enormous and it’s enormously sociable too, with apps for every conceivable platform. Being able to pay once for an ad-free subscription that works on your phone, tablet, Watch, TV, console and in the car is a fantastic thing.

While the ad-funded version isn’t too annoying we think the higher quality and convenient offline listening features (already available on iPhone but coming soon to the Watch app too) of the paid-for Premium version are well worth the money.

Overcast

If you love to listen to podcasts and you don’t already have Overcast, you’re in for a nice surprise: it’s a superb app, and its Watch integration is particularly well thought out.

In addition to the usual controls and lists of shows and episodes, it gives you quick access to two really useful features: Smart Speed, which can make the podcast play more quickly without turning into Alvin and the Chipmunks; and Voice Boost, which can make indistinct speech noticeably clearer and compensate for podcasters who can’t pick a single spot in front of the mic.

If you’ve ever strained to hear something only for the host to move closer to the mic and nearly blow your eardrums out, you should be rushing to the App Store already

Overcast is free, or $9.99/£8.99/AU$12.99 without the ads. We’d recommend going for the ad-free version, because while the advertising isn’t too invasive this is an app that’s been put together by people who really care about the end user experience, and paying for the full app is a great way to ensure that they’ll keep on caring. 

Castro Podcasts

The Castro podcast app has been around for a while and has developed a loyal fanbase, and it’s just been given a major overhaul as well as an Apple Watch companion app.

On your wrist it’s really very simple: it enables you to move around the audio, change the volume or move between episodes.

On the iPhone the main app has been completely rebuilt with a brand-new playback engine to significantly boost speed and responsiveness, and the player screen now incorporates AirPlay controls for easier streaming to compatible hardware.

It’s a very good app, and there are extra features if you go for the optional Castro Plus subscription, including getting rid of silent sections, mixing stereo down to mono, episode limits to prevent your device from downloading entire volumes of podcasts, and automatic start positions to skip past standard intros and other pre-content content.

You can set these preferences on a per-podcast basis, which is a really useful option for power podcast users. You can try Castro Plus for a week before deciding whether to get it, and it’s available as a quarterly or yearly sub.

Audible

You may know Audible already: it’s the Amazon-owned audiobook service that enables you to devour books on the move, in bed or anywhere else you can get comfortable. The catalog is vast, books are often narrated by very big names and the overall quality is very high. And now, you can use it without taking your phone with you thanks to its Apple Watch app.

The app is compatible with every Apple Watch made so far and enables you to transfer audiobooks to your Watch, provided of course that you have enough available storage.

It’s important to note that Audible doesn’t stream to your watch: you need to sync your audiobook(s) from your iPhone, which can take a while over the Watch’s desperately slow connection. But once the book has been transferred you can play, pause, fast forward and rewind. You could listen via the Watch’s speaker but we wouldn’t recommend it; Audible is best experienced on a decent pair of wireless headphones.

We think the Audible Watch app is best suited to environments where you don’t want to have your phone: the gym is the one that springs immediately to mind: we can’t be the only people who’d rather listen to a book than pumping techno on a treadmill.

Best Apple Watch apps for photo and video

Lens for IG

Here’s good news for Instagram fans mourning the discontinued official Watch app: Lens for IG is designed just for you. It’s a wrist-based Instagram client that enables you to do pretty much everything bar upload photos to the service, and because Apple Watches have bigger screens now it’s actually nicer to look at than the original official app was - at least if you have one of the larger models.

The app starts on your iPhone, but sensibly enough it doesn’t try to compete with the iPhone Instagram app: it’s there purely to connect your Watch app to the Instagram service so you can still get your Insta fix when your phone isn’t in your hand.

There are seven sections to the app – Home, Stories, Activity, Explore, Messages, Profile and Search – and they all do what you’d expect. Home is where your timeline lives, and if you tap the comments button you can use Scribble, emoji or the built-in, gesture-based keyboard to write a message.

It’s fun, but it’s also very new and like many version 1 apps it suffers a little from bugs such as crashing. But then, it’s free so you can forgive the odd issue and the version history shows a pattern of regular updates to squash bugs and solve problems.

GoPro

  • GoPro
  • Free + in-app purchases

The GoPro app used to be called Capture, but its new name suits it better: after all, what else would you call the companion app for GoPro cameras? Like most camera apps for the Apple Watch, the bits you can do on your wrist are fairly limited. It’s really just a viewfinder and remote control, which is perfectly useful if hardly revolutionary.

The main iPhone app is more ambitious. It features Quikstories, which automatically turns your GoPro footage into a finished video complete with effects and background music. You can view the images and video you’ve captured on your camera, trim videos down and share to social media or via text or email.

One nice feature is the ability to overlay data such as GPS paths and locations on top of your footage. You can even detail the G-force you felt when you were doing whatever extreme thing you’ve been recording. There’s also video stabilization for Fusion cameras and the ability to turn 360-degree photos into videos.

It’s pretty good, but make sure your camera is compatible. The app is currently limited to Fusion, HERO6, HERO5, HERO4, HERO Session, HERO+ LCD and HERO+ cameras.

Camera Plus

While using Apple’s Watch as a remote control or viewfinder can be handy - we can’t be the only ones who use it to see what’s on top of cupboards or to read the meters when there’s loads of stuff between them and us - the app has always felt as if it could do more. That’s where Camera Plus comes in.

As an iPhone/iPad app it’s an interesting and fun alternative to the iOS 11 default, with a useful feature that enables you to control the camera on one iOS device with the Camera Plus app on another. It adds an extra function to the Watch too.

The Apple Watch bit is obviously a lot less ambitious, but it’s still useful. As with the Apple app, you can remote control the iPhone or iPad camera, turn the flash on or off, use a countdown timer and switch between the front and rear cameras. But where the Apple app offers the ability to turn Live Photos on or off, Camera Plus gives you the option to switch between photo and video.

The main iOS app is clearly the driver here, with some fun and useful features including flexible flash levels for better exposure and the aforementioned iOS-to-iOS remote control. But the Watch app is a handy, or perhaps wristy, companion.

HomeCam for HomeKit

You can probably guess what this one does from the title: it’s an app for cameras that use Apple’s HomeKit. The app is a remote viewer that enables you to check multiple cameras simultaneously, and if your hardware supports features such as temperature and air quality monitoring you can then take action by invoking other HomeKit devices such as connected air conditioners or heating.

It can also combine data from multiple devices together, so for example you could overlay temperature data over a live camera feed, and it’s fully compatible with the new Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12, which enables you to create automated actions. You can also use it to control HomeKit features such as the lighting in a room, and you can add a Today widget for even faster access from your lock screen.

The main action happens in the iPhone and iPad app, largely because of screen real estate: the Watch has many good features, but a giant screen isn’t one of them. That means the Watch app shows a single-camera view. 

It can use your Watch’s microphone and speaker as an intercom (again, if your camera hardware supports audio), but it’s best suited for quick camera checking when your iPhone isn’t handy.

FiLMiC Pro

  • FiLMiC Pro
  • $14.99/£14.99/AU$22.99 plus in-app purchases

Here’s an odd one: FiLMiC Pro has a distinctly average App Store rating of 2.3 out of 5 at time of writing, and yet the developers’ shelves are groaning under the weight of the app’s many awards from reputable websites and publications who say that for video, it’s the best thing since bread came sliced. What’s going on?

The short answer is that when you have hardly any reviews, one or two disgruntled users can send your rating down the drain. That’s clearly what’s happening here.

Negatives first. FiLMiC Pro costs more money than many apps, and it can kill your phone battery in prolonged use. But it’s an incredibly powerful iOS camera app used by film-makers, journalists and hobbyists alike. Pair it with a decent editor and your iPhone is a pro-level film studio.

The Watch app is really just a remote for the main event. You can record, pause and resume your recording and see what the phone camera’s pointing at, and you can play back what you’ve just recorded. It’s not really different from Apple’s own camera Watch app. 

But the app it connects to is a powerhouse: people complaining about the price tag should really be marveling that it’s possible to get something so good for so little money.

Best Apple Watch apps for notes, passwords and making life easier

Voice Record Pro

You want to record something, but your iPhone isn’t handy. No Voice Memos for you! But that’s okay, because Voice Record Pro enables you to record on your Apple Watch instead.

It’s the companion to a fully-featured iPhone app with support for Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box and iCloud Drive for audio import and export, and with a good range of features including adjusting the volume, gain, pitch and speed; adding effects such as echo, reverb and distortion; converting files between different formats and editing ID3v2 tags to label MP3 files.

The Apple Watch bit is considerably simpler but still useful for capturing ideas or even conversations, although of course you’re limited by the little microphone in the Watch: while it’s perfectly fine for audio notes, don’t expect to be recording studio-quality sound.

You can play, record or trigger recording on the iPhone app, and when you’re recording on your wrist there’s a good simulation of a traditional VU meter to help you see if you’re being too loud or too quiet. It’s easy to navigate around your recordings and you can delete any ones that you don’t want to keep.

The app is free, with an in-app purchase option to remove ads from the iPhone version.

Google Keep

You may remember in 2017, when Google pulled its various Apple Watch apps. But now, it seems Google is back in the wristy business. This month the Google Keep app was updated with a new feature: support for the Apple Watch.

Google Keep is essentially Apple’s Reminders for people who prefer Google’s way of doing things, and like Reminders it uses the cloud to sync with desktop and online versions of the app. You can use it to create, edit and share notes and to-do lists, to include photos and audio in notes and in a clever touch, to record voice memos and have Google automatically turn those memos into editable, searchable text.

That feature is included in the Apple Watch app, but you can’t use your Watch to edit existing notes – although you can create new ones either via your voice, via scribbling or by entering emoji. You can also archive or prioritize notes by using Force Touch.

The app keeps things simple by showing you the ten most recent notes, and while you can do dictation there’s no Siri integration. There isn’t a Watch face complication either. Here’s hoping that Google adds such features in later versions – assuming, of course, it doesn’t decide to stop supporting the Apple Watch in the future.

OmniFocus 3

The Omni Group is well-known and well-loved for its productivity apps, and version 3 of OmniFocus is available not just for iPhone and iPad but for the Apple Watch too. It’s an extraordinarily useful project and task management app, but while it’s very powerful it’s also very easy to use.

It also manages to pack a lot of information into the screen of your Apple Watch with good use of icons, numbers and bulleted lists. You can display a quick overview as a complication in the Utility Watch face, or call up the app directly to get an instant picture of what you need to care about now and in the immediate future.

The standard and pro versions of the app are free trials, and you can then unlock Standard for $39.99/£38.99/AU$62.99. That gives you almost everything OmniFocus can do, but if you want to add customization options you can go Pro for $59.99/$54.99/AU$89.99 (if you go for Standard first and want to upgrade later, that’s $19.99/£19.99/AU$30.99).

The customization enables you to create custom filters to create a custom perspective on your project, and you can reorder the Today’s Forecast to give you the information you want exactly as you want it.

Calendars 5

You may know Readdle already: it’s the developer behind the superb Spark email app, as well as the popular and useful PDF Expert. Calendars 5 has been around for a while, but the Apple Watch support only arrived in December 2018. As we’ve come to expect from Readdle apps it’s well-designed and useful without unnecessary gimmicks or eye candy.

The app works as a Watch face complication and as a dedicated app. It also supports Siri, so you can ask it to tell you what you’ve got scheduled or create a new item with just your voice. The app works with both iCloud and Google calendars for easy syncing, and it works both online and offline.

The iPhone app is great too, with natural language input and support for the kinds of things you need a calendar app to do such as complex recurring events (for example, a class that runs every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday), custom alerts and event invitations.

The app also includes a good task manager that enables you to track and clear your various to-do and task lists. It’s good on the iPad, too, where it takes full advantage of the big screen to give you a birds-eye view of your week or month.

HomeRun for HomeKit

HomeRun doesn’t do much, but what it does do it does very well. It’s a companion for Apple’s HomeKit framework, which enables you to control various smart home devices, and it addresses one of the key problems with Apple’s own Home app: Home is a bit of a mess, cramming lots of stuff on screen and making what should be really quite simple rather confusing.

HomeRun takes a different approach. Its interface uses icons rather than text, so for example if you want to change a smart thermostat you could choose to have buttons showing a thermometer: a blue one for colder and an orange one for warmer. And it focuses solely on scenes, with up to 12 scene icons shown on your Watch at once. Effectively it’s a bunch of toggles: turn this on or off, turn that up or down, make that louder or quieter.

It’s simple to use and just as simple to configure, with the iPhone app making it easy to create the scenes you want on your wrist. You can also create Apple Watch complications, so for example you might put an on/off toggle in the corner of one of your Watch faces for quick control of something.

Fantastical 2

Getting Fantastical 2 up and running on your watch can be time consuming, but it’s worth it: one of the very best iPhone calendar apps around develops even more powers when you add its app to your watch.

You can also add it as a complication, which means you’ll see details of your schedule right there in the watch face.

To actually make it work you’ll need to install Fantastical to your watch and then open the iPhone app, not the Apple Watch one. This is where you specify what information should be sent to the watch, and the options are extensive.

You can choose from events, calendars, reminders and lists, include a map of the event location, show end times and specify how reminders should appear, and you can even specify what should happen if you tap on the Fantastical 2 complication on your watch face.

It’s that kind of thought and attention to detail that makes us love the app so much.

The best thing about Fantastical 2, though, is that it understands you. Force Touch the app, tap on Add Event and Siri starts listening.

It knows what you mean by “lunch with Dave”, automatically putting the appointment at 12 noon, and it knows that if you say “to-do get dinner on the way home” you’re adding an item to a to-do list. Siri’s voice recognition performs brilliantly when it’s limited to such a specific set of instructions.

SimpleCommands

This is an intriguing one. SimpleCommands enables you to connect your Apple Watch to various other devices – LIFX lights, TP-link switches, Wink doors, Nest thermometers, Netatmo home automation and so on – and soon, services such as Spotify, Lyft, IFTTT, Todoist and Twitter.

Once you’ve established a connection, you can then control that connection via your iPhone or Watch (you need to set them up in the iPhone app first). Your Watch then becomes what the developer calls a listener.

All you then need to do to make something happen is tell the listener what to do. The main benefit is that to paraphrase Radiohead, everything’s in its right place: whether it’s your aircon or your lighting system, it’s all done from a single app on your wrist.

Brilliant, right? Well, potentially. The list of coming soon connections is longer than the list of currently supported ones, and early adopters say it’s a bit flaky: we’re still in version one-point-something territory, so you should expect bugs.

But if you’re fed up having to use different apps to control every different digital thing in your life, this could be the thing to make your digital life much more comfortable.

IFTTT

If This Then That, IFTTT for short, may be one of the most useful things on the internet. As the name suggests, it enables you to create scenarios where if this happens, it does that. And the ‘that’ can include all kinds of things, with a selection of connectors for software and hardware alike.

For example, you can automatically change your thermostat based on the weather forecast, or send someone a message when you’re near the shops, or backup your photo collection to a cloud storage site at a particular time or when a particular event occurs. It’s absolutely brilliant, and the main iPhone app enables you control more than 600 different apps as well as smart home devices such as Hue lights and Nest thermostats.

As you’d expect the Watch app doesn’t do everything. What it does do is provide quick access to IFTTT functions you’ve already installed or created on your phone, so for example you might post a quick tweet or turn your smart lights on or off.

That simplicity is no bad thing, because of course the whole ethos of IFTTT is to reduce the amount of effort you use to communicate with your various bits of technology.

1Password

  • 1Password
  • $3.99/£3.49/AU$5.99 monthly subscription

A reliable and secure password manager is a must-have in these days of security breaches and hacks, and 1Password is one of the best. And it turns out that it’s also one of the best password managers you can use on your Apple Watch.

Our favorite apps don’t just port entire iPhone apps across. They think about what you’re actually likely to need on your wrist, and do that instead. In the case of 1Password that means you choose the pieces of information you want available on your Watch, so for example you might want details of a few logins, one credit card and a couple of notes, or perhaps the PIN codes for everyday locks.

If you’ve ever frantically scrolled through an iPhone app or contacts list to try and find the PIN for a bank card you don’t use very often, the appeal should be obvious.

Where 1Password gets particularly clever is in its support for team and family accounts, so you can share sets of information with everybody who needs it. And if a site you use has been compromised, 1Password will alert you to change your password. It’s great stuff, and comes with a glowing recommendation from Apple.

Drafts

On the face of it, and by face we mean Apple Watch face, Drafts doesn’t seem to offer much for six quidbucks: it enables you to dictate text and save it for later. But it turns out that it does an awful lot...it just does it in a really simple way.

On the iPhone, Drafts is designed to make it easy to capture ideas, thoughts, to-dos or anything else.

It has an email-style interface for easy navigation and it enables you to send your Drafts to a whole bunch of other apps and services: email, message, apps in your Share sheet, social media and so on.

It supports Markdown for easy formatting, and it hooks into the iMessage app to provide stored “snippets” of text and/or emoji for instant replies.

Bringing Drafts to the Watch makes it even faster. Tap on the microphone icon to capture and it does just that - but it also enables you to add to existing drafts using either your voice or the Scribble input, which means it’s brilliant for those moments when you think of something really clever to write or something you’d missed from your to-do list. It’s the kind of app you’ll quickly learn to love.

Hours

  • Hours
  • Free / in-app purchases

Many of us need to track the time we spend on specific tasks, but the team behind Hours rightly point out the three big pitfalls of time tracking: we forget to start tracking in the first place, forget to stop when we change tasks, or just forget to stop the timer(s) altogether. Hours hopes to address that by making it really, really easy to start and stop and switch.

The iPhone app is a very beautiful thing, with a visual timeline that makes it easy to see what you’ve been up to. The Watch interface is much simpler, but just as effective: you can see the list of tasks with a timer icon for each, and if you tap on a task you can add a verbal note as well as starting or stopping the timer.

There’s a Complication for instant access, and the app will prompt you from time to time to see if you want to keep the selected timer running.

The standard version is free and ideal for self-employed or freelance types, but the $7.99/£5.99/AU$12.99 upgrade to Pro adds multi-device synchronization, web access, reporting and data visualizations, team creation and management, and online backup, which means it’s a great team tool too.

Just Press Record

One of the most useful things about the Apple Watch is that it enables you to do things without having to take your phone out of your pocket or bag. Just Press Record brings that handiness to voice recording, enabling you to capture bright ideas, rambling monologues or memos when you’re out and about.

The interface is just a big red button with a picture of a microphone on it, and as you might expect you tap it to start recording. The phone app can transcribe your recording to turn it into text - which means your recordings become searchable by keyword - and it recognises formatting commands such as “new paragraph” and “comma”.

To use it is to feel like you’re living in the future: we remember when dictation and transcription required a powerful PC and endless patience, and now you get much better results with a watch. Isn’t technology brilliant?

In addition to its recording and transcription features, the app syncs automatically via iCloud, so you can access it on all your devices - including macOS, for which there’s a separate app - and it uses the Watch’s own local storage so that you can record even if your phone isn’t currently connected.

Evernote

Organize your life better with Evernote, the brilliant note-taking app which saves photos, text, recipes, bookmarks, voice notes and more. On Apple Watch you can set reminders and check off tasks easily enough.

You can dictate new notes for those brilliant ideas you mustn't forget just by tapping the Plus button or Force Touching the screen. The Watch app can search existing notes using voice – though this wasn't as reliable as I'd have liked. Even so, if you're an Evernote fan it brings an extra level of convenience.

OneNote

If there’s one thing the App Store isn’t short of, it’s note-taking apps. But it’s worth taking a look at OneNote, especially if you work across a range of Mac and PC devices, because as it syncs via Microsoft’s cloud, it’s a very good cross-platform app with particularly well-designed iPhone, iPad and Mac apps to organize pretty much everything.

We use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, random scribbled ideas in the wee small hours and anything else we think we might need to refer to later, and unlike some rival cross-platform services it’s completely free. Microsoft hopes you’ll like it so much you’ll embrace Office, which is available for a very low price as part of a premium OneDrive plan.

Microsoft has become rather good at keeping its Watch apps simple, and OneNote is no exception: tap the cross icon to dictate a new note, or tap a notebook or note to see its contents.

And that’s pretty much all it does - and that’s all it needs to do, because any watch screen is poorly suited to complex tasks. We’d much rather have speed and simplicity than any ill-conceived bells and whistles.

Knock

  • Knock
  • $5.99/£5.99/AU$9.99

Passwords are essential, but they’re also rubbish. The ones you can remember are easy to guess, the ones that are hard to guess are equally hard to remember, and if you do passwords properly it can be a pain to enter complicated strings of text and characters when you’re in a hurry.

Wouldn’t it be better if you could prove your identity to your Mac with your Watch? That’s exactly what Knock does.

Knock is a simple idea brilliantly executed. Provided your Mac is of relatively recent vintage - an Air from 2011 or better, a MacBook Pro or iMac from late 2012, a 2013 or later Mac Pro and so on - you can use Knock to automatically unlock your Mac or Macs by tapping the Apple Watch app.

It’s connecting via Bluetooth Low Energy - hence the reliance on relatively recent Macs; older ones don’t have Bluetooth LE - which uses tiny amounts of energy, so you don’t need to worry about the app killing your Watch’s battery any more than usual, and it works instantly if your Mac isn’t in sleep mode.

It may seem quite pricey for such a simple app, but think about how much time you spend locking and unlocking your Macs in a year.

Note that you may not need this if you have a recent Mac running macOS Sierra, as there’s a similar feature built in, but Knock is compatible with slightly older Macs too.

Find Near Me

Guess what this does. Go on, guess. Yep: it finds things near you. Sadly that doesn’t mean the TV remote, your keys or the gaming controller – whoever finds a way of doing that which doesn’t involve sticking Bluetooth tags to everything will become a trillionaire – but it does mean cash machines, bars and coffee shops. The only in-app purchase is $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 to remove adverts from the iPhone app.

It works exactly like you’d expect. First, you choose the category of thing you want to find. Then, you scroll through the results. And to finish, you tap the one you want to find out more about. From there you can then be guided on foot, in the car or on your bike.

The app makes extensive use of Google Maps, and that means it’s only as good as the Google Maps data: some users report inaccuracies such as long-shut businesses. If you’re wondering why you can’t just use Google Maps and cut out the middleman, it’s because Google canned its Apple Watch app last year: if you want Google Maps on your wrist, you need a third-party app that hooks into it. Like this one.

Deliveries

Is there anything more annoying than missing a delivery of something you’re really excited about? Yes: there’s missing a delivery of something that you really need to have in a hurry. Deliveries can help ensure that neither of those things happen to you.

It supports stacks of services including UPS, FedEx, US Postal Service, DHL, TNT, Canada Post, City Link and Royal Mail, can track packages, can add delivery dates to your calendar and can record past deliveries in case you need to refer to them later.

It’s unnecessary for the odd package, but it’s useful if you do a lot of online shopping or if you’re in the middle of a project, such as furnishing a flat.

On the Watch the app acts as a ready reminder of what’s in and what’s incoming, so for example it’ll show you if an item has just been delivered as well as the ETA of any other outstanding deliveries.

There’s a Complication too, which works particularly well on the Utility watch face and shows you the most recent delivery. If you have the macOS version of the app too you can automatically sync between Mac and mobile via iCloud or the developer’s own cloud sync service.

Clicker

We’ve described the iPhone as the Very Hungry Caterpillar of tech, munching its way through entire product categories as stand-alone devices become iOS apps. We’re often delighted by the simplest things, and Clicker is one of those things. 

It’s a replacement for those hand-held clickers people use to count things, and it’s appropriate for counting people, days, laps, drinks or anything else you might want to quantify. 

To use it, just tap on the screen and tap again when you want another click. Haptic feedback means you don’t need to look at the watch, and you don’t need to have the clicker display all day: when you’re ready for a new click you can pull it up from its Complication. You can record up to 2,147,483,647 taps.

And that’s pretty much it: there are only two other options: subtract, to remove a mistaken click, and reset, to start again.

It’s hardly a must-have but it’s actually very handy, so for example we’ve seen users tracking how often they smoke during the day or how many glasses of water they’ve had. We wouldn’t recommend using it for counting sheep, though - or at least, not on the first-generation Apple Watch, whose battery isn’t really up to working nights.

Stocard

One of the things we hoped Apple’s Wallet/Passbook app would deliver was an end to purses and wallets full of loyalty cards: our purse is so packed with the damn things that if we sit down with it in a back pocket one of our buttocks is a good six inches higher than the other. Wallet hasn’t quite changed that yet, but Stocard has a pretty good try.

Stocard enables you to scan and store your loyalty cards (and some other cards such as some membership cards; generally speaking if it has a barcode or QR code on it, Stocard can probably digitize it), and then access them from your iPhone or Apple Watch when you’re at the checkout.

Whether it works or not depends on the store infrastructure: until recently the self-scanners in Tesco didn’t like it, but now that they’ve been upgraded they scan happily. The cards are automatically added to your Apple Wallet as well as kept inside the Stocard app.

The main benefit for you is convenience, as not only does Stocard reduce the amount of cards you have to carry without forcing you to miss out on loyalty points, but it also provides you with details of relevant special offers as you shop.

Best Apple Watch apps for email, chat and messaging

Shift Keyboard

If you think putting a normal keyboard on such a small screen is a step back, developer Adam Foot hopes to prove you wrong. The keys are sized for easy, accurate typing and compared to voice recognition or Scribble handwriting recognition there’s less risk of errors: what you tap is what you get.

It’s worth noting that while Shift Keyboard can replace the keyboard on your iPhone, Apple doesn’t let apps do that on the Apple Watch: on your wrist, Shift Keyboard runs as a stand-alone app. It does provide a complication for your Apple Watch face so that you can quickly access it, though.

The main attraction here isn’t so much the keys as the ability to add multiple emoji to your messages, something the Apple Watch isn’t brilliant at. All you need to do is create your emoji-packed message in the app and send it to Messages. If you tend to send messages that rely on a lot of visuals then Shift Keyboard will pay for itself quickly in terms of time saved, but if like us you tend to be more about plain text then it might be a harder sell.

FlickType Keyboard

FlickType wants to make your Apple Watch text input faster and more accessible, promising up to three times faster input than using dictation or Scribble handwriting recognition. It uses the standard QWERTY layout but can read your letters aloud, enabling you to type eyes-free, which is particularly useful for blind or partially sighted users.

The app uses an algorithm to try and guess what you’re trying to write based on the pattern of your taps – so it should get the right result even if you make a typo or two. If it does get things wrong or your typos are too hard to comprehend you can edit with a quick flick of the finger. The app also supports emoji and text shortcuts for even faster input. And it is very, very fast, with impressive accuracy.

In an interesting reversal of the usual pricing model, the Apple Watch version of FlickType is free – but if you want to use the app on your iPhone or iPad you’ll need to subscribe. That’s presumably because Apple doesn’t let third-party keyboard apps replace the default Scribble service, so the app isn’t quite as flexible on your wrist as it is on your phone: you have to copy your text from FlickType into the app you’re using.

Chirp for Twitter

You’d think Twitter’s brevity and the Apple Watch’s usefulness would be a match made in Heaven, but Twitter isn’t interested in maintaining an official Watch app and our favourite iPhone Twitter app, Tweetbot, is very limited on the Apple Watch. Enter Chirp, which promises to bring all the features you need to your Watch - and unusually, it does so without playing second fiddle to an iPhone app. Chirp was designed purely as a Watch app.

Chirp delivers on its promises: it does an excellent job of bringing Twitter to your wrist, with the ability to see tweets as well as their popularity in terms of likes and retweets. You can browse Twitter trends, see embedded photos, retweet or like other people’s posts, and you can actually interact with others.

You can post your own thoughts or reply to other people’s tweets, and the most recent update added support for sending Direct Messages and for viewing lists. Some of these features are restricted to the paid-for Pro version, but it’s a very cheap in-app purchase and the main app is free to use so you can try it before you decide whether you need the pro features.

Telegram

Oh, the drama: Telegram 5 initially dropped its Apple Watch companion app, but now it’s back! Back! BACK!

The reason for this is that Telegram 5 has been rebuilt from the ground up to make it faster and more efficient; the Watch update simply wasn’t ready in time.

Telegram is a secure instant messaging service that works on iPhone, iPad and once again, Apple Watch. It enables you to group chat with up to 30,000 people, which is more than enough for most of us, and unlike other messaging services it’s really good at sharing things like documents, zip files and other useful things.

It’s both free and ad-free, and if you’re worried about privacy you can take part in Secret Chats where messages self-destruct after a specified time. As with all private apps that doesn’t stop somebody taking a screenshot, taking a photo or duplicating content in some other way, but the end-to-end encryption does mean you can be confident that others aren’t listening in.

Telegram’s main selling point is its efficiency. It’s designed to do its job with the minimum amount of data transfer necessary, something that’s important in places with poor network coverage or for people with metered data connections, and it’s also designed to operate with the minimum load on your battery.

Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger on Apple Watch got a late start, but it finally lets you respond to those pressing messages to friends and family without opening up the sioled-off app on your phone or website on a computer.

You can initiate and reply with a thumbs up (which I see as kind of curt and rude) or dictate a reply. Sending Facebook's ugly smiley face or your current location can be done with the press of one or two taps too. No, there's still no WhatsApps for Apple Watch, but this is the next best thing from Facebook.

Tweetbot 4

If you aren’t already familiar with Tweetbot 4, it’s the best Mac and iOS Twitter client bar none. This is why it can charge $4.99/£4.99/AU$7.99 for an iOS app and people gladly pay it, and it’s worth checking out on the Apple Watch too.

Tweetbot doesn’t unleash the Twitter firehose onto your wrist - we can’t think of anything guaranteed to kill your battery more quickly - but it does give you exactly the information you need when you aren’t looking at your phone.

The developers have rightly assumed that if you have your phone to hand you won’t be using the watch instead, so they’ve concentrated on making an app for when you can’t or don’t want to pull your phone out of your pocket or purse. And that’s clever.

Its Activity pane shows you what’s happening in your feed, so if somebody’s followed you or replied to you or tweeted you then you’ll see it in Activity. Tapping on the item opens the appropriate tweet or user page, and with tweets you’ll see icons for a quick reply, a retweet or a like.

If you push into the screen using Force Touch you get an offer to create a new tweet, and both it and the reply option use Siri for dictation, because on-watch typing would be frankly horrible - and you can dictate a direct message or follow/unfollow accounts from the app too.

Outlook

Microsoft earned well-deserved death stares from many Watch users when it bought and retired the excellent Sunrise Calendar iOS app, but its Outlook app is worth adding to your wrist.

It’s from the new, interesting Microsoft, not the staid bore of old: it works well, looks great and won’t crash your watch.

Outlook is a combined email and calendar app that connects to Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN, Gmail, Yahoo and iCloud, and its main claim to fame is the focused inbox: instead of showing you everything emailed, it shows the most important stuff only and learns by watching your swipes.

It’s particularly good in a corporate environment, where its talents cope admirably with endless meeting requests, time changes and backside-covering email traffic, enabling you to prioritize things that matter and forget about things that don’t.

That doesn’t mean it’s only for corporate types, though. Outlook is a really, really good email app and boasts a useful Complication that enables you to see what’s next on your schedule from the main Apple Watch display. If you have a busy life, a busy inbox or both it’s a very useful app to have on your arm.

Spark

There’s no shortage of apps promising to make email fun again, and Spark is one of our favorites: on our Mac and on our iPhone it does a superb job of showing us what we want and hiding what we don’t.

The Apple Watch app is as well thought-out as its siblings, with the ability to use Messages-style quick replies as well as emoji and dictation. It’s quite possible to reply to most everyday emails without reaching for your iPhone, although the option to Handoff is there if a message is too long to bother scrolling through on your wrist.

The main selling point for Spark is its Smart Inbox, which groups messages from multiple accounts into personal, notification and newsletter categories. It then displays how many unread messages you have for each category in the Watch app’s home screen.

You can pin messages for quick access, and you can snooze them to hide them for a specified period of time. We find ourselves using that last one a lot: messages we can’t process properly on our wrists are quickly snoozed so they’ll resurface when we’re back at our Macs. If you have to handle a lot of email Spark is a massive time saver.

Twitterrific

There are lots of reasons to love Twitter, but there are lots of reasons to find it annoying too. Promoted tweets filling your timeline, people talking about subjects you couldn’t care less about, people retweeting people you couldn’t care less about, Piers Morgan… wouldn’t it be great if you could have a Twitter without all of those things? Don’t look to the official app for that any time soon. Go for Twitterrific instead.

Now in its fifth incarnation, Twitterrific on iOS is a superb Twitter tool. The Watch features require a $2.99/£2.99/AU$4.49 in-app purchase to work fully, and they’re worth paying for: you can track your stats, be notified about direct messages, favorites, new followers and other action, use Handoff to start replies on your phone, compose tweets via dictation and block idiots instantly.

We’d recommend keeping notifications to an absolute minimum unless you only follow a few people - Twitter can be incredibly noisy when you follow and/or are followed by lots of people - but the Watch app is a great way of staying on top of Twitter while you’re out and about. It also reduces the risk of picking up your phone and thinking “while I’m here I’ll just check…” and losing hours to trivia.

Canary Mail

Canary Mail is a first: it’s the first third-party email app to use the Apple Watch 3’s 4G/LTE connection so you can access your email without lugging your iPhone around.

The feature is officially in beta but if you’re in the market for a new email app it’s a compelling reason to consider Canary over other iPhone email clients. The Watch support delivers short extracts of emails and the ability to quickly reply via scribbling or voice dictation.

The main iPhone app is very good indeed, supporting all the main email providers (including iCloud and, if IMAP’s enabled on the server, Exchange) and enabling you to use PGP, to use natural language search and to bulk-delete irrelevant or spammy emails. It offers email templates for frequently used messages, easy unsubscribing and integration with cloud storage, to-do and calendar services, and the none-more-black interface looks particularly good on the iPhone X’s OLED display.

It’s worth keeping an eye on the price if you’re considering Canary: it’s gone from being offered as a free trial for a few days with in-app purchases to $4.99/£4.99, and then to the current price of $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99.

Best Apple Watch games

Pokemon Go

Pokémon Go isn’t a new app, and its Apple Watch companion app isn’t exactly brilliant, as it needs the iPhone to be nearby in order to be useful. But that’s about to change with a new future called Adventure Sync. It’s a way of earning candy and hatching eggs in the Pokémon Go app without actually using the iPhone app.

Adventure Sync works by taking the Apple Health data your phone and watch generate and using that in the game. That means if you just go for a walk or a run wearing your Apple Watch, the distance you travel is recorded and then the Pokémon Go app can get that information to hatch more eggs and earn more candy. Nintendo promises a weekly activity summary, rewards for achieving specific milestones and ongoing progress monitoring, and you can opt in at any time.

The Watch app remains a companion app rather than an alternative to the iPhone app – it’s more of an information app than something you play – but it’s good to see a bit of lateral thinking when it comes to smartwatches. Using their data is much more interesting than trying to cram an entire iPhone app into a watch.

Tamagotchi Classic

Readers of a certain age will remember Tamagotchi, the infuriatingly addictive electronic pets that took over the world in the late 1990s with their incessant demands for care and attention.

And now they’re back! Back! BACK! And this time, they’re on your wrist - which is fitting, because Tamagotchi is apparently a portmanteau of the Japanese words for egg and watch. If you’ve never used your watch to raise a virtual pet, here’s your chance.

This app is the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e Gen1, and it uses the Apple Watch in several ways: when your Tamagotchi wants your attention it’ll pop up on your wrist, you can monitor your Tamagotchi’s health, and you can carry out care actions - such as feeding it a meal or making it go to the toilet.

There are two modes to choose from: toy mode, which recreates the originals, and App Mode, which adds special colors. The app also enables you to put multiple Tamagotchi into a gallery, where you can then take pictures of them, and save said digital snaps to your Camera Roll.

It’s spectacularly pointless, of course, but it’s also pretty cute and faithful to the original toys - so it’s an app for rose-tinted spectacle wearers as well as for people who’ve never encountered Tamagotchi before.

Best Apple Watch apps for education and learning

Daily Dictionary

Daily Dictionary is a great example of the kind of apps that really work on your wrist: rather than blast you with notifications or try to cram tons of things into that relatively tiny screen, it delivers a little nugget of information that you might otherwise miss.

That nugget, of course, is a word. Every day, Daily Dictionary comes up with a new word. That can appear in your Apple Watch face’s complication, or as a push notification, or you can call the app directly. The complication is well designed, as it also includes today’s date, so you don’t need to have as separate date complication, enabling you to use your limited complication space for something else.

The word selection is practical rather than esoteric. The aim is to provide you with words you’ll actually use, so there’s no jargon or scientific terms you’re unlikely to use in your everyday conversations or writing. And the app enables you to see recent updates to catch up on any words you might have missed.

The core app is free, although a small purchase of just £2.99/$2.99/AU$4.49 a year unlocks the ability to customize the Apple Watch display.

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone is one of the big brands in language learning, and its various apps have won shelves full of awards for its combination of effective teaching and user-friendly app design. The Apple Watch counterpart to its main iPhone app is a good example of how the Watch can be used to supplement more fully featured apps: it’s tailored to the kinds of environments where the Apple Watch is the perfect device for a quick practice.

Rosetta Stone is all about real-life situations: ordering in restaurants, choosing things in shops, saying hello to people and so on. The Watch is ideally placed to practice that, and it’s set out with sensible categories and simple and fast navigation to get you to the bit you need, with audio examples of how to do it.

The main thing to watch out for here is the price: while the app itself is free, it’s useless without a language subscription. There are 24 languages to choose from and they start at $109.99/£93.99/AU$159.99 per year per language, with bundles for languages such as Spanish and French offering 5 levels for $199.99/£199.99/AU$319.99. Think of the app as a demo for the Rosetta Stone service rather than a stand-alone app.

Best Apple Watch apps for news and sports

BBC News

Of course, bigger screens such as phones and, you know, TVs are best for expansive looks at the news, so the Watch's little face is reserved for headlines and photos with BBC News. These appear in Glances and tapping on one takes you to a very slightly fuller version, and lets you access the other headlines.

You can create a personalised news list on the iPhone and these show up in the Watch app, too. Ideal for snacking on headlines and letting you follow up with the main story elsewhere. 

NHL

  • NHL
  • Free (in-app purchases)

NHL isn’t just for American hockey fans, its app is one of the few legal ways to watch NHL games in the rest of the world.

The official NHL app has been given an extensive update for the 2018/2019 season, including the addition of Apple Watch support to display scoreboards and summaries and to notify you of the most exciting happenings. Sensibly there’s also an option to turn off notifications if you can’t tune in live and don’t want to spoil your viewing later.

The main iPhone/iPad app is very comprehensive, offering highlights, radio broadcasts and video streams as well as tons of in-game information. For US fans actually visiting the games, it even shows you where to get food and drink in the arena. In a nice touch you can also customize the app to reflect your favorite team’s colors.

High quality sports apps don’t tend to come cheap, and NHL is no exception: if you want to access the NHL.tv video you’ll pay £17.99/AU$27.49 per month to access the content from outside the US or $24.99 if you’re a US customer. We’re hoping the latest update crushes some of the bugs that seem to have plagued earlier versions of the app. There’s nothing worse than an app that freezes just before something really exciting happens.

Best Apple Watch apps for math and money

Calzy 3

We’ve raved about the excellent PCalc calculator app, but Calzy is a worthy rival. The latest version, version 3, is a significant redesign that’s been optimized for iOS 11.

The most obvious difference is that the operators – plus, minus and so on – are on the same screen as the numbers, and that means it’s much faster to carry out multiple calculations, provided your fingers are fairly accurate: more buttons means a smaller tap area for each one.

It also shows you the running total as you go along, so for example if you’re doing a calculation where it’s this plus that times whatever you’ll see the results as you tap. It’s not as comprehensive as PCalc, but if all you need is a straightforward calculator on your wrist it’s a good bit cheaper.

The main iPhone app, as you might expect, does a lot more than the Watch app. It has light and dark themes, a customizable keypad, Handoff support and even a searchable history of every calculation you’ve made. It also offers currency rounding to keep numbers to two decimal places, and you can tap and hold to edit part of a formula if you realize you’ve made a mistake halfway through.

PCalc

  • PCalc
  • $9.99/£9.99/AU$14.99

The apps we tend to love the most are the ones that solve real-world problems, and PCalc falls into that category. Yes, it's a fantastically useful calculator and scientific calculator, but much more importantly it prevents fisticuffs in restaurants.

That's because of its handy bill splitter. Simply tell it how much the bill comes to, how many people are paying and how big a tip you want to leave, and the Watch app calculates how much each person should hand over. It supports watchOS 3's Scribble feature too, so you don't need to dictate or tap on a tiny keypad if you've downed that second bottle of wine. Alternatively you can use the Digital Crown to enter the figure in the tip calculator.

That's not all the Watch app can do, though. It includes a converter for distances and other measurements, and if you Force Touch the app you'll see a Send To iPhone icon as well as the clear and undo buttons.

And on the iPhone the main app is a great tool for serious calculating (and quick sums: there's a mini-calculator if you Force Touch the app icon). It's not the cheapest calculator app, but it's worth the money.

Pennies

Pennies was a recent Apple Editor’s Choice, for good reason: it’s a very simple and effective budgeting app that allows you to get on top of your spending without having to spend too much time doing so.

You can set weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, bi-monthly, one-off and custom budgets, track in multiple currencies - great for holidays or business travel - and on the Watch, all you need to do is record how much you’ve spent against a particular budget, so for example if you have a shopping budget you’d tap it, tap Spend, and then enter the total.

The app then recalculates the amount you’ve got left, and if you wish you can have it displayed as a permanent Complication on the Watch face.

Pennies isn’t interested in what you’ve bought; just what budget it should be allocated to. As the developer puts it, “it’s all about keeping things easy and flexible so you can get on with having fun, spending what you want, and saving money at the end of the month.”

If like us you find personal finance a mix of tedium and terror, Pennies might be the app that helps you take control of your cash.

XE Currency

Currency converters abound on the iPhone and XE Currency is one of the best. While the Watch version doesn't have the calculator feature found on the phone, it's a clear chart of how many euros, Argentine pesos or Australian dollars a British pound buys.

You can add more currencies on the phone version – whatever's there is replicated on the Watch. A button at the base of the screen lets the iPhone app control the refresh rates, so you can avoid roaming charges.

Best Apple Watch apps for travel, weather and going out

Citymapper

Citymapper is the pre-eminent public transport app, so no wonder it's an Apple Watch essential. It tells you how to get around selected cities including London, Manchester, Paris, Barcelona and New York.

As well as bus, train and subway times and directions, the Watch app even offers cycling routes and bike hire details such as London's rentable bikes. Once you've set up the journey on the phone, step-by-step notifications will appear on the Watch screen.

You can start journeys to home or previously saved destinations right from the Watch, and it will even help you find your way to nearby bus stops and train stations. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Transit

Transit is mainly for American users, but its city coverage extends to more than 50 non-US cities including London and Paris too. It’s a public transport app, and it works on a simple and largely accurate assumption: when you use the app, you’re in a hurry.

That means instant information for departures on nearby routes and a Take Me Home button that tells you how to get home as quickly and simply as possible. In a single screen it offers directions, details of the station, the next three departures and the number of the service.

Public transport tends to bring out the best in designers - think the simple genius of the London Underground map or the colorful signage on the New York subway - and that’s definitely the case here.

Transit makes excellent use of color and typography to provide all the information you need in a very effective way.

It may only shave a few seconds off your travel time, but if you’ve ever harbored dark thoughts when someone at the gate in front of you is wasting time you’ll know that for commuters, every single second counts. If you spend a lot of time traveling, you’ll save a lot of time with Transit.

Microsoft Translator

You know you’re living in interesting times when one of the best apps for an Apple device comes from Microsoft. But Translator is superb.

We refer to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy in another entry, and Microsoft Translator is the closest we’ve come to its Babel Fish - a fish you stuck in your ear to translate the universe’s many languages.

Translator sits on your wrist rather than in your ear canal, but it does much the same thing. Speak into your watch and you’ll see the translation, and it remembers recent translations on Watch or phone so you can find them again easily. You can also pin translations for instant access to essential words or phrases.

It gets even better if you use it on your phone, because it can translate in real time as you message somebody. You’ll see your typing with the translation in the same bubble, and it can even handle simplified Chinese and Arabic script.

The amount of thought that’s gone into Translator is obvious. Want to translate a sign? Point your camera at it. Want to have a conversation in a language you don’t speak? The phone display splits with your words facing you and the translation facing them.

Night Sky

Night Sky is one of those gee-whiz apps that you use to show off your iPhone, and the introduction of a complication to let you know if the International Space Station was overhead was cute in a geeky way.

But the arrival of watchOS 4 has given the developers plenty of new toys to play with, and that means Night Sky is now one of those gee-whiz apps you use to show off your Apple Watch.

With this version of the app, your Watch now gets the same Sky Tracking features as the iPhone app has: you can now raise your wrist and identify the stars, planets and constellations around you.

There’s a time travel feature too, so you can track how the various heavenly bodies will move. It’s enormously clever and very impressive, and the main iPhone app isn’t bad either, as its Sky View knows of 115,000 celestial objects and enables you to increase or decrease light pollution, explore animated 3D models and customize notifications.

If you sign up for the $1.99/£1.99/AU$2.99 monthly premium subscription you get access to worldwide sky tours that you can save for future use - for example if you’re planning to visit a particular location in the near future.

Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare’s mission has changed somewhat over the years: what started off based around location check-ins and “king of the castle” bragging had to change when Facebook promptly copied the idea.

Robbed of its raison d’être, these days Foursquare has separated the check-ins from the venue recommendations. Foursquare City Guide’s job is to find decent bars and restaurants wherever you are in the world (if you still want to be the mayor of wherever, that’s the companion app, Foursquare Swarm).

The main interface of City Guide has five tappable areas: Search, Favorites, Food, Coffee and Nightlife.

Tapping on the appropriate option takes you to a list of venues, but instead of just filtering by distance the app also filters by Foursquare user ratings - so a rating of 9.5 that’s 500m away will appear below a 9.7 that’s 100m further.

The list gives you the name, price bracket, average rating and distance for each venue, and if you tap on a venue you’ll see reviews, photos, maps and other key information. The big selling point here is Foursquare’s global reach: it’s a really good app for travellers who don’t want to spend their time in the hotel bar or eating in faceless chain restaurants.

ETA - Arrive on time

Like Citymapper, ETA will help you get somewhere. The title refers to its front-and-centre information. You add a location on the iPhone and save it. Then it'll give you timings for driving, walking or taking public transport.

Some watch faces allow it as a complication, where it'll show the time it'll take to your top saved route. It knows what traffic is like so allows extra time for a drive in rush hour, say. On the Watch app you tap the chosen saved destination and it'll take you through to Maps for directions.

Similarly, for public transport directions in select cities Maps will provide the directions.

iTranslate

This powerful translation app works in 90 languages. It's free but for full Watch use you'll need the $6.99/£6.99/AU$10.99 in-app purchase which offers voice recognition and unlimited translations.

A Watch complication means you can tap on the screen to start translating straight away and if you'll let it, iTranslate will use your location to figure out what language it should be translating to or from.

It also responds to Time Travel so by winding the Digital Crown you can see phrases which change such as "Good afternoon" which is replaced by "Good evening" as you scroll forward.

Dark Sky Weather

Dark Sky is the first app we put on any new Apple device, and the Apple Watch is no exception. In fact, we think Dark Sky is at its most useful when you’re wearing it on your wrist.

What Dark Sky does seems very simple, but is actually very clever. It tells you what the weather’s going to do - not in a vague sense, but as in telling you that it’s going to bucket down in ten minutes and that the storm won’t stop for an hour.

That means it’s the perfect app for anybody who’s thinking about going outside for any reason, or who’s already outside and really ought to be getting inside in a big hurry.

In more dramatic climates it alerts of dangerous weather such as storms, and you can set it to notify you of specific kinds of weather that you select in the companion iPhone app.

We use it to decide if now is a good time to walk the dog, if it’s time to get the kids back to the car or if we really shouldn’t be going out dressed like that; you might use it when you’re hiking or biking, or doing any other activity that could be affected by changes in the weather.

If you used Dark Sky in the early days of the Apple Watch and found it painfully slow and unresponsive, give it another go: the current version runs on the watch, not on the phone, and the difference in performance really is dramatic.

Yahoo Weather

Dark Sky and CARROT Weather get all the reviews, but Yahoo’s weather app is a lovely thing on the Apple Watch.

It takes the same colorful, minimalist approach as the iPhone/iPad app, with screens showing trend lines for temperature, precipitation and wind speed, along with sunrise and sunset times and where the sun is right now, whether it’s going to rain and what the temperature highs and lows will be.

You don’t get the right-now weather warnings of Dark Sky or the sass of CARROT, just a clear, easy to understand and really well-presented set of predictions.

It’s not all sunshine and flowers, though. The host app is pretty big - 137MB, which is on the large side for a weather app, given that the UK Met Office app is 80MB and Dark Sky 20.8MB - and the accuracy of the weather forecasts seems to depend on where you live.

US users seem very happy with it, but UK users say it’s a little pessimistic: while it rains a lot in Britain, it doesn’t rain quite as often as Yahoo Weather says it will.

Then again, it’s better to warn of rain and be pleasantly surprised than to predict good weather when the skies are about to open.

Circa

  • Circa
  • $3.99/£3.99/AU$5.99

It’s not a surprise that the Apple Watch attracts a lot of apps built around the idea of time, but few of them are as simple and as useful as Circa. It’s designed for global travellers or people whose life involves communicating with people around the world, and answers a simple and important question: is this a good time?

It may be a simple question, but it’s often a tough question to answer. If you’ve ever tried to find a time for a virtual meeting that works not just for you and your local colleagues but for colleagues halfway across the world you’ll know how much of a pain in the neck it can be.

Are they EST or PST? Are they behind us or ahead of us? Circa remembers these things so you don’t have to, offering crystal clear guides to when people are going to be available and when they should be in their bed.

It’s a niche app, but many of the very best Apple Watch apps are: it’s simple, beautifully designed and does exactly what it sets out to do. If you need this kind of thing, this is exactly what you need.

TripIt - Travel Organizer

Whether you’re a road warrior or an occasional holidayer, keeping track of the various aspects of your trip can be a pain. TripIt solves that by pulling all your travel-related documentation together.

All you need to do is send your travel confirmation emails - flights, hotels, car hire - to TripIt and the app will automatically organize them and tell you the information you need when you need it.

If you use Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo mail you can get TripIt to monitor your mailbox automatically, which makes things even easier. If you’re in the US, it even tells you when it’s time to head for the airport.

The phone app stores your itinerary and key documents, and the Watch app lets you know what’s important right now - so if you’re about to board a flight you’ll see the flight number and departure time, if you’re checking in you’ll see a booking reference and so on.

Things get really clever with the Pro subscription ($48.99/£38.99/AU$77.99), which adds live flight notifications, seat tracking and alternative flight finding should your plans change.

That’s probably unnecessary for most people, though: the free version of the app includes all the essentials you need for any kind of travel.

CARROT Weather

We’ve mentioned CARROT Weather before: it’s our go-to app when we want the weather forecast delivered by a hyper-intelligent artificial entity that wishes we were dead. In this massive update the app becomes even more horrible, and we mean that in a good way.

There are complications for your Apple Watch face as well as a completely misanthropic Watch app with all the weather information you could possibly need, displayed silently or spoken aloud depending on your preferences.

We particularly like the way you can specify just how horrible CARROT is to you, along with its political leanings. And on the accompanying iPhone app there’s a really fun feature that uses Apple’s ARKit to bring the forecast into augmented reality.

The developers are upfront about their pricing: if you want to use Weather Underground data instead of the default Dark Sky and take advantage of its radar pictures too, those features cost the devs extra money so you’ll need to pay another $9.99/£8.99/AU$14.49 per year for the Ultrapremium Club in-app purchase.

There’s also a cheaper Premium Club ($3.99/£3.49/AU$5.49pa) that enables you to customize the complications, to receive weather alerts and to have background data updates. It’s worth it.

Best Apple Watch apps for food and drink

Grocery - Smart Grocery List

It’s hard to get excited about grocery shopping, we know, but we’re all in favor of any app that makes it easier to ensure we actually get the things we need when we go shopping. Now in version 2, Grocery does just that.

As you’d expect from the name it’s a grocery list app, but this particular app is built around Apple’s own Reminders, so it’s easy to access your lists and to share them online with others. It features Siri support so you can say things such as “Add eggs to my grocery list”, and you can create Siri shortcuts for groups of items – which is handy if there are specific ingredients you tend to buy together for particular meals.

One of the cleverest features is the way Grocery analyses your shopping: as you tick off items it remembers the order in which you did them, so the next time you hit the shops your list will be in an order that reflects where things actually are in the shop rather than the order in which you remembered them. It does this on a per-store basis, and the different stores can be geofenced so that your Watch knows exactly where it is and where to find what you need.

Just Eat

Proving that you should never underestimate our basic laziness, Just Eat created an app for people who couldn’t be bothered using the telephone to call for a takeaway. Now, it’s added an app for people who can’t be bothered reaching for their iPhone to open the Just Eat app.

One day historians may look back on this as one of the key steps in the downfall of western civilisation. Then again, easy pizza!

The Just Eat app is UK-only - if you’re in the US, try the Domino’s Apple Watch app instead - and it enables you to choose, order and pay for takeaways from the comfort of your wrist thanks to Apple Pay integration.

You can also choose to collect instead of having the meal delivered, but let’s be honest: if you can’t be bothered getting your phone you’re hardly going to want to go outside to collect your food - although if you’re driving it’s handy to order a pickup with a few taps.

The main iPhone/iPad app is much more attractive and informative, but when it comes to ordering regulars from your favorite local takeaways it doesn’t get much easier than having Just Eat on your wrist.

Yelp

You’ve probably noticed something of a trend in our favorite apps: they tend to approach their mission by asking what useful things the watch can do rather than trying to cram an entire phone app into that tiny screen, irrespective of whether that’s sane or useful. Yelp is a great example of an app that gets it right.

When you open it you’ll see just four icons: Restaurants, Bars, Coffee & Tea, and Hot & New. Tapping on the one you’re interested in then shows you a list sorted by distance, with the all-important star ratings and average cost listed on top of a photograph. Tap again and you’ll get the opening hours and a map, and of course you can read the reviews too - that’s what Yelp is all about.

It’s particularly good for the kind of venues and experiences popular among bright young things in big cities, (the most committed Yelpers), but the database is truly enormous and doesn’t turn into tumbleweed whenever you venture into the countryside. Yelp’s app is very good for finding places in unfamiliar towns, or unfamiliar places in towns you know very well.
 

Chipotle

I sometimes wear my messy Chipotle burritos while scarfing down the healthy-ish Mexican platters, but I'm also purposely wearing Chipotle on my wrist to send order to the store via my Apple Watch.

While it's not the most groundbreak app, I can create a one-tap order with the Chipotle Apple Watch app and have my meal ready to go while I'm on the treadmill at the gym next door. It's as efficient as it is calorie rich. The best part is, I get the skip the always massive line.

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MacBook Pro 2019: what we want to see

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:40 AM PDT

While the MacBook Pro 2018 is undeniably an upgrade from its 2017 predecessor, there are still a considerable number of MacBook users that are getting fed up with Apple’s recent moves. Apple has been releasing new MacBook Pros and other Apple devices faster than our bank accounts can keep up. And, while some of these upgrades have resulted in better devices – looking at you, Mac mini – some of these updates are falling flat.

These updates are all thanks to Apple approaching the MacBook Pro in a different way, starting 2016, homing in on features that make one of the best Macs more appealing to everyday users by further streamlining the design. This is likely why Apple got rid of all the non-Thunderbolt 3 ports. The MacBook Pro is certainly a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. However, there are plenty of old-school Apple users that are being alienated by Apple’s latest design philosophy.

Granted, the MacBook Pro 2018 did benefit from a sizeable internal revamp, now rocking 8th-generation Coffee Lake processors and some of the fastest SSDs we’ve seen to date – granting it unprecedented speed. Apple has also improved the display with True Tone tech as well as fixed the issues with the Butterfly keyboard, or some of them at least, all while maintaining impressive battery levels from the 2017 model.

At the time of writing in 2019, Apple has released 15-inch MacBook Pro configurations that tout the latest 8-core Intel Core i9, Intel’s newest 9th generation processor (CPU). These configurations are now Apple’s top-of-the-line MacBook Pros, the cheapest of which supports the 2.3GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 (Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz) CPU with 16GB memory (RAM), a Radeon Pro 560X graphics (GPU) and 512GB SSD storage at $2,799 (£2,699, A$4,099). 

The rest of Apple’s lineup of MacBook Pro models – except for the 13-inch version sans Touch Bar – has received similar improvements with no changes to pricing.

What does this latest update mean for the MacBook Pro 2019? Well, it does lessen the possibility of a true redesign gracing us with its presence this year, especially with Apple unveiling the new Mac Pro 2019 at the WWDC 2019 Keynote, and the MacBook not getting an update last year. 

Instead, Apple might opt to roll out a completely new model in 2020 or 2021. However, it doesn’t eliminate those chances completely.

The MacBook Pro 2019 that we were expecting could still happen, which might benefit those users who are badly in need of an upgrade but have delayed doing so due to the 2017 and 2018 models’ less favorable features. Only, it won’t likely get any major revamps. Additionally, famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has produced some leaks that suggest Apple is going to release a 16-inch MacBook Pro 2019 with an “all-new” design, and that could still happen. And, we’re still keeping our fingers crossed they’ll give that still-pesky keyboard a redesign.

If the completely overhauled MacBook Pro 2019 is still in the works, here are the things we’re hoping to see.

Cut to the chase

MacBook Pro 2019

Image Credit: Apple

MacBook Pro 2019 release date

Although a 2019 follow-up redesign to the MacBook Pro (as well as the Mac Pro) is still something Apple fans are looking forward to, there’s no rumored release date at this time. It’s hardly a surprise since the last update just dropped in July 2018, and Apple just dropped its 9th-gen Intel Core CPU configurations. 

Sadly, we didn't a MacBook Pro update at the WWDC 2018, though it would be curious to see macOS Catalina in the next MacBook Pro. We might need to wait a few more months for a clearer date, or even a confirmation, that it will happen.

However, if we’re going by Apple’s previous release dates – MacBook Pro 2017 launched in June 2017 while the MacBook Pro 2018 model debuted under the radar in July 2018 – a summer release for the MacBook Pro 2019 makes sense and is plausible.

Still we must consider that, after Intel announced the 10nm Ice Lake chips at CES 2019 for a late 2019 release date – not to mention the fact that they just gave their 15-inch model a 9th gen refresh – we could see Apple delay the MacBook Pro until Fall to take advantage of the new tech.

We probably won’t be seeing Apple share updates on it at WWDC 2019, either, seeing as the Mac Pro, which hasn’t seen an update since 2013, takes precedence and no hardware was showcased at last year’s event.

While it looks like the possibility of a redesigned MacBook Pro in 2019 is slimmer than before, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. At the very least, we’ll see another spec bump later in the year. Though we’re stuck waiting until Apple is ready to share any MacBook Pro 2019 information.

MacBook Pro 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

MacBook Pro 2019 price

Just the fact that Apple hasn’t upgraded its non-Touch Bar MacBook Pros this year says a lot about the direction they’re going, which is likely to phase them out and continue to make us pay for tech that, while promising, hasn’t been perfected yet.

The worst part of the 2018 models is the fact that you need to spend thousands to secure the highest amount of RAM (the 32GB RAM option is only available to the 15-inch models) and the largest SSD combo. Otherwise, you’re stuck with smallest amount of RAM and a Touch Bar that isn’t even universally compatible yet. Photographers and filmmakers who need a bigger screen? You can forget about getting a non-Touch Bar model.

You can also forget about upgrading your 13-inch. The majority of its parts are soldered, so you’ll be forced to bring in a professional and break your warranty. You also may have to buy a third-party docking station since the only ports available to you are the USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack.

Of course, it’s hard to predict these things, but you’ll probably see more of the same price tags. Currently, the basic 13-inch with Touch Bar configuration, which has 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and four Thunderbolt 3 ports, will cost you $1,799 (£1,749, A$2,699). You’re basically paying $300 more for the Touch Bar, Touch ID and two additional Thunderbolt 3 ports.

As far as the 15-inch’s 9th gen Intel Core i9 configurations, which start at $2,799, we’d like to keep its price while still getting its design refresh.

MacBook Pro 2019

Image Credit: Apple

What we want to see from MacBook Pro 2019

Apple hasn’t been getting a lot of love lately, what with the great keyboard debacle of 2016 through 2019, the problematic Touch Bar and the soldered RAM, to name a few. However, we’re still hoping that Apple takes a new lease on life in 2019 and actually offer the users some of the things they need.

More port variety, please
Or, at least, if Apple’s going to insist on Thunderbolt 3, include a docking station or an adapter for USB, Mini DisplayPort and HDMI without an additional charge. You know, instead of making us shell out more money for a third-party one. 

Though if we’re really being honest, limiting us to Thunderbolt 3 is inconvenient. MacBook Pro is for professionals who are looking for a seamless workflow. Yes, the Thunderbolt 3 is powerful and versatile, offering a port for charging as well as output and data transfers; but we’re still using many devices and accessories that don’t support it. If we’re expected to connect this cable to that adapter to plug in to that port, Apple cannot expect us to be happy about it.

And, while we’re at it, can we just bring back MagSafe charging, please? Some of us tend to trip over those cables, and it was nice to know that we wouldn’t damage those older models by doing so.

However, seeing as how Apple launched the latest MacBook Air with just two Thunderbolt 3 ports and no MagSafe charger, chances are slim that Apple is going to diversify the ports on the MacBook Pro 2019.

Improved Touch Bar
When it comes to the new Touch Bar, it seems that Apple is standing its ground. Despite many grievances from users and the fact that many other would be happier without it, Apple seems to be in the process of phasing out the MacBook Pros without the Touch Bar. In fact, it’s only the MacBook Pros with Touch Bar that were given the 8th-gen Intel processor and True Tone display upgrades this year.

That’s all fine and dandy and, we admit, the technology is promising. However, if Apple is going to ask for a few hundred bucks for a new feature, we’d like to maximize its use. So far, Touch Bar compatibility is only limited to a few programs and apps, and we demand to see more added to this list if it’s here to stay. Plus, it would be nice to get it properly working sans the freezes and fat finger issues.

MacBook Pro 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

Or offer an alternative
Again, the Touch Bar shows promise, but it isn’t exactly something that most users need. Not all of us are photographers or filmmakers or artists. Some use the MacBook Pro for productivity because streamlined interface and user-friendliness, and those folks won’t have a need for a Touch Bar at all. In fact, it might only get in the way.

We’d like to see an option for such users. Resuscitate the Touch Bar-free 15-inch model and upgrade the 13-inch model without it, perhaps.

Better keyboard, display and sound
Sure, Apple has refined the keyboard so that it’s quieter, but it’s still stiffer than what we’re used to and has less travel than most keyboards. As far as ergonomics, the new keyboard isn’t the best. It’s not that we hate it, but it’s certainly harder to love. Of course, we could get used to the keyboard, but we’d rather see a better one. Better yet, Apple could bring back the old design most of us are partial to.

The MacBook Pro designers should take cues from the iPhone X and phase out the bezeled design. That’s a lot of valuable real estate wasted, and rolling out a bezel-free screen will give users a bigger display without having to sacrifice size. Additionally, by going bezel-free, it’ll give the update a fresher, more modern look. Also, a laptop designed to edit 4K media should have a 4K screen option.

And, while Apple’s at it, we’d like to see it reconsider those speakers. We get that Apple is going for a thinner design, but the speakers in the older MacBook Pros are considerably better. With all the technology they come up with, it would be incredible to get a premium set of speakers that are louder and have better base.

New Intel processor, more memory
The MacBook Pro 2018 just got updated with Kaby Lake Refresh and Coffee Lake on the 13-inch and 15-inch, respectively, with the 15-inch touting an Intel Core i9 configuration. Unfortunately, Intel has already pushed out Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processors – putting some of the MacBook Pro configurations behind the curve, if only just barely. Whiskey Lake, after all, only provides a minimal boost to performance that most users won’t notice.

At CES 2019, however, Intel announced Ice Lake, its first round of 10nm Sunny Cove processors for laptops. We’re expecting to see these chips in late 2019, so if Apple plans to include these next-gen CPUs in its next MacBooks – and it definitely should – it would need to delay the next MacBook Pro until late 2019. 

If and when that happens, we’re hoping to see Apple phasing out its 7th gen Kaby Lake configurations as well as awarding its 13-inch model a 9th gen Coffee Lake configuration.

We’ve also seen rumors that Apple is going to back up whatever processor it uses in the MacBook 2019 with more RAM – particularly in the 13-inch model. Where previous 13-inch MacBook Pros top out at 16GB, word on the street is you’ll be able to get an extremely portable Mac with a whopping 32GB of memory. This is excellent news, as memory demands keep going up year over year.

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MacBook 2019 release date, news and rumors

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:38 AM PDT

Last year came and went with no sign of the new MacBook. Instead, Apple launched the new MacBook Air – which some would argue replaced it. However, because the latest thin and light has been out for nearly 2 years, we’re more than ready for the sequel. Unsurprisingly, it didn't make an appearance at the WWDC 2019 alongside the redesigned Mac Pro 2019 and macOS Catalina, but we're definitely hoping it will make later this year.

However, looking back, the MacBook 2017 is everything we’ve wanted since the thin and light rebirth back in 2015 – at least on paper. It boasts the powerful 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake processors that gave it a massive boost to power, as well as the Butterfly keyboard, which is better than ever, even if it still has some frustrating issues. 

Now that we have Intel Amber Lake processors, we want the MacBook 2019 to utilize these, taking a huge leap over the 2017 model and giving MacBook users an excellent reason to upgrade. Hopefully it’ll be as dramatic as the leap the new MacBook Pro experienced.

Cut to the chase

  • What is it? The next 12-inch MacBook
  • When is it out? Later in 2019
  • What will it cost? Presumably the same as current models

macbook 2019

MacBook 2019 release date

None of the most recent reports, rumors or leaks give any idea as to when we’ll see the 2019 MacBook. Of course, we can happily speculate based on the previous three releases of Apple’s 12-inch laptop.

In 2015, Apple released the first MacBook in April, directly following a March keynote. That’s an increasingly common time for Apple to release a device, but that obviously didn’t happen this time.

However, Apple went all of 2018 without releasing a new 12-inch MacBook, and while we initially thought the blame was on Intel’s 14nm shortage – the Cupertino behemoth had no problem putting out the MacBook Air 2018. 

Apple didn't showcase the MacBook 2019 at WWDC 2019, which is unsurprising as this year's hardware portion of the keynote focused entirely on the new Mac Pro 2019 and its 32-inch 6K Retina display, the Pro Display XDR. 

However, with the new macOS 10.15 boasting new features such as the Apple Music, TV and Podcasts apps (formerly iTunes), Sidecar and Voice Control, Apple could use that opportunity to show off a MacBook that’s obviously designed for entertainment – the MacBook 2019. 

Still, we’ll have to wait until Apple is ready to show the MacBook 2019 off. Don’t worry; we’ll be updating this page as soon as any information comes our way.

macbook 2019

MacBook 2019 price

Right now, we think that Apple will launch the MacBook 2019 around the same price as the current models. 

This is another aspect where we’ll have to speculate based on the current pricing of the MacBook. Currently, the entry-level MacBook will run you $1,299 (£1,249, AU$1,899) to start. Only one more model, with more storage and power, goes for another $300 to 450 on top of that. However, there is speculation that Apple is going to be releasing a cheaper 13-inch MacBook, but that turned out to be the new MacBook Air. 

With the pricing so tight here, amounting to minute differences in hardware between offerings, we probably won’t see a price drop. The only way we see the current version of the MacBook budging on price is if Apple introduces sizable storage or higher power options, which will send the price up, rather than the opposite. 

For the MacBook price to come down, or for Apple to release a cheaper MacBook model alongside more expensive version, something has to give. Apple could lower the memory down to 4GB from 8GB, but we don’t think that’ll happen, especially because 8GB is standard these days. 

Instead, we believe the only way we’ll see a cheaper MacBook 2019 would be a MacBook with a 128GB SSD instead of starting with 256GB, which might be beneficial to those who’ve already invested in external drives.

We’ll keep an eye out for new rumors and update this article as soon as the MacBook 2019 price begins to crop up as we inch closer.

macbook 2019

What we want to see in MacBook 2019

All of this uncertainty surrounding a possible MacBook 2019 release is fertile ground for a well-crafted wishlist.

So, while we wait for any kind of official word from the Cupertino behemoth, here’s what we hope to see Apple improve about the MacBook for 2019.

MacBook 2019 keyboard and screen

Throughout 2018, there were plenty of rumors that Apple was planning on making a MacBook with dual screens. One of these screens would be a capacitive touch keyboard. Early 2019, we stumbled upon a rumor that the touchscreen keyboard would have raised glass and haptic feedback, so it will feel as much like a traditional keyboard as possible. However, it’s easy to expect this to raise the price on any MacBook that implements it.

Even if this touchscreen keyboard doesn’t make its way into the 2019 MacBook, it doesn’t mean the Butterfly mechanism keyboard won’t be improved upon. Apple has recently admitted that some of the keyboards in recent MacBooks are faulty – and will even repair them for free. That’s why we’re pretty sure that the MacBook 2019 will feature the same third-generation Butterfly keyboard as the new Macbook Pro while MacBook Air will have with a membrane that makes it less prone to jamming up.  

More ports, please

One of the biggest problems with the 12-inch MacBook, ever since its initial release has been the all too obvious lack of ports. With just the one Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) port and a headphone jack, this port situation absolutely needs to change in the MacBook 2019. Even one additional port will help.

We’ve already seen Windows laptops accomplish this feat. Take the Huawei MateBook X, for example, with its two USB-C ports, or even the similarly priced MacBook Pro, which has two. Maybe there’s room for a microSD card reader too, though that may be pushing it.

Punchier processors

Costing what it does, Apple really needs to put some more power into its 12-inch MacBooks. 

Then again, the MacBook has consistently used energy efficient Intel Core ‘M’ and ‘Y’ series CPUs up to this point, so we wouldn’t bank on seeing full-fat Ultrabook processors, as they’d generate too much heat for the tiny form factor.

Now that Amber Lake Y-series CPUs have been released by Intel, we’d like to see Apple shove these latest 8th-generation processors into the new MacBook. However, at this point, those are essentially old tech already, so again, we’ll just have to see.

We’ve also seen some rumors that Apple is planning on crafting an ARM-based MacBook at some point, and if the iPad Pro 2018 is any indication, we could definitely see this happening. Apple would just have to work out some kinks in getting macOS to run on an ARM system.

It’s also safe to assume that Apple will put its T1 or T2 processor into the MacBook 2019 – as it has with all of its latest Mac releases.

Since the 12-inch MacBook lacks a Touch Bar, it’s safe to assume that if one of these co-processors is implemented, it will be used for the automatic wake and ‘Hey Siri’ functionality that’s currently unique on to the iMac Pro, MacBook Air 2018 and MacBook Pro 2018.

Sturdier build

The Apple MacBook already feels remarkably sturdy in hand, but over time it can become inundated with scratches – even if you are exceptionally careful. Lucky for us, Apple has recently filed a patent that details plans for making ‘indestructible’ hardware, through some unique coatings. This will be an excellent option for a premium device that most users won’t want to upgrade for four to five years, as well as help keep the MacBook looking as gorgeous as the day you opened it. 

Of course, we don’t know if this patent will ever see the light of day, but this approach, alongside the improved Butterfly keyboard found in the MacBook Pro 2018, could make the MacBook 2019 a much more durable device.

Stronger audio and video

Speaker performance and webcam quality are two corners that Apple obviously cut when in designing the MacBook. With the MacBook 2019, this needs to stop. Tinny speakers and a sub-HD webcam for a laptop this expensive simply isn’t acceptable, and not in this day and age.

Apple needs to simply beef up the webcam up to 1080p, like its price tag suggests, and problem solved. The speakers, though, are a problem we don’t necessarily have a solution for. Supporting the speakers with down-throwing bass modules in the base might work? Otherwise, stick to your better made external speakers and headphones.

Bill Thomas, Gabe Carey and Michelle Rae Uy has also contributed to this report

Image Credit: TechRadar

  • These are the best Macs that 2019 has to offer so far

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MacBook Air 2019: what we want to see

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:36 AM PDT

After years of waiting, the latest MacBook Air finally hit the shelves in October 2018. And, with it came a few improvements to the MacBook Air lineup, like the awesome new fingerprint sensor. However, we think more could have been done to bring the popular laptop into the modern age. And, that’s why we can’t wait to see what Apple does with the MacBook Air 2019 – that is, if a MacBook Air 2019 does indeed come out. 


We’re not sure what Apple has in store for 2019, so we’re not positive a MacBook Air 2019 will even happen, but that is not out of the ordinary. However, we do know that Apple has revolutionizes at least one Mac, the Mac Pro 2019 (slated for release in the Fall of 2019), so we can make some educated guesses about when we might see a new MacBook Air, and create a wishlist of what we would like to see. 

Unfortunately, Apple hasn't dropped any hints at this year's WWDC 2019 Keynote, but with the unveiling of macOS Catalina, it would be nice for MacBook Air users with aging models to have a new, grounds-up piece of hardware to go with it. Don’t worry, we’ll keep this page updated with all the latest MacBook Air 2019 rumors and leaks so be sure to keep it bookmarked.

Cut to the chase

  •  What is it? The next MacBook Air
  •  When is it out? November 2019 at the earliest  
  •  How much will it cost? Likely around $1,199 (£1,199, AU$1,849) 

MacBook Air 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

MacBook Air 2019 release date

Speculating when the next MacBook Air release date is, is going to be tricky, thanks in large part to Apple's strange history with its mainstream laptop lineup.

Ever since Apple redesigned the MacBook Air in July 2011, a new MacBook Air came out within the same April-to-July timeline. At least, until 2015. After that, Apple skipped 2016 altogether, opting instead to unveil a simple refresh of the MacBook Air with the same 5th-generation processor and a faster SSD in June 2017. 

Then, Apple rolled out the new MacBook Air in November 2018, with a redesigned chassis and updated internals. So honestly, we don’t think that a MacBook Air upgrade will come out this summer – it definitely didn't make an appearance at WWDC 2019 – that’s far too soon.

Instead, if a new MacBook Air does come out this year, we’d bet on a November launch, though it’s highly likely we don’t see it until 2020 at the earliest. 

MacBook Air 2019

Image Credit: Apple

MacBook Air 2019 price

The MacBook Air has always been the cheapest way to get macOS running on a laptop. And, while that’s still true, Apple did raise the price from $999 (£949, AU$1,499) to $1,199 (£1,199, AU$1,849) with the release of the MacBook Air 2018. 

We believe (or rather, hope) Apple will keep the price the same with the next MacBook Air, barring another complete redesign – in which case the price would more than likely just go up. We probably won’t be seeing a price decrease, unless Apple launches a MacBook Air with an ARM processor. Of course, that’s more likely for a 2020 release at the earliest.

MacBook Air 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

What we want to see

The 2018 model did bring a lot to the table, ushering the MacBook Air to the modern age, with its 8th-generation Amber Lake fanless processors, modern SSDs and a Retina display. However, it wasn’t quite as revolutionary as many had hoped, so there’s still a lot of room for improvement. So, here’s what we want to see in the MacBook Air 2019. 

Let’s see some faster processors

MacBook Air 2018’s processor isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it wasn’t great either. Because it’s a fanless dual-core chip, it lags behind other laptops. Now, usually in a thin and light notebook, this approach would make sense. But, at its thickest point, the MacBook Air is actually thicker (albeit just barely) than the 2018 MacBook Pro. 

We’d like, therefore, to see Apple shove some full-fat, Ultrabook-class processors in the MacBook Air, and maybe design a fresh cooling solution. Who knows? Maybe once Intel’s Ice Lake hits the market, we’ll see some Ultrabook-class processors that don’t produce so much heat.

Fix that keyboard, Apple 

Another year, another MacBook, another keyboard. Look, we get it Apple; you want to make your MacBooks as thin and light as possible – ultraportable is in, after all. However, the Butterfly keyboard has produced more issues than Apple’s traditional keyboards. 

The third-generation Butterfly keyboard placed a rubber film below the keyboard that was supposed to stop it from malfunctioning. But, the MacBook Air 2018 is running into its own problems, with key presses repeating. 

We’re not sure how Apple can fix this problem without designing a whole new keyboard, but we’ve seen a patent that suggests it’s on it. We might see a touchscreen MacBook keyboard with raised, tactile keys. This might be Apple’s answer to its keyboard woes.

Cheaper storage upgrades

We get that larger SSDs are going to command a price premium, but the cost of upgrading is a little bit inflated. 

The base MacBook Air comes with a pitiful 128GB SSD, which might be fine for people with cloud storage and not a lot of app use. However, to upgrade to 256GB of SSD storage, you’re looking at a $200 (£200, AU$300) price jump.

That’s huge by itself, but if you want a 1.5TB SSD, you’re looking at a whopping $1,100 (£1,100, AU$1,650) price jump. For that price, you could literally buy a second MacBook Air.

Admittedly, Apple’s SSDs are some of the speediest in the business, but there’s no way a 1.5TB SSD costs that much. The SSD upgrades for the MacBook Air 2019 need to be more affordable. Otherwise, you’re better off getting an external SSD.

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Mac Mini 2019: what we want to see

Posted: 03 Jun 2019 11:35 AM PDT

Just when we thought that Apple has forgotten about the Mac mini, the company swept us off our feet with a stunning return to form late last year, alongside the new MacBook Air. In fact, that new Mac mini was so impressive that we’re already eagerly anticipating a Mac mini 2019.


Even at its base configuration, the Mac mini 2018 brings high performance, as it features desktop-class 8th-generation Intel Coffee Lake processors to keep up with intense workloads. The miniature Mac also has a ton of ports for connectivity, as well as a decent thermalk architecture to keep temperatures under control. 

Of course, the new Mac mini is far from a perfect piece of hardware. The integrated graphics leave a lot to be desired while the SSD storage is the bare minimum. That’s not to mention it’s price tag, which is not all that affordable – even if it is the cheapest Mac available.

Just in case Apple does decide to release a new Mac mini this year – unfortunately, it hasn't made an appearance at WWDC 2019, we’ve whipped up a wish list. Check back for more updates as more Mac Mini 2019 release date and price information starts to leak, if at all. 

Cut to the chase 

  • What is it? The next Mac Mini computer 
  • When is it out? October 2019, if at all 
  • What will it cost? Possibly starting around $799 (£799, AU$1,249) 

Mac Mini 2019

Image Credit: Apple

 Mac Mini 2019 release date 

It took Apple four years to release the 2018 update, so it’s hard to know if it will release a Mac mini in 2019 at all. In fact, we may have to wait until a new MacBook Air or Mac Pro refresh. Still, if a new Mac mini does release this year, it probably won’t happen until October, when it typically reveals new Mac releases. 

At least that’s how it played out last year, when the company broke the news of the Mac Mini 2018 at the Apple Event in late October, with the mini desktop hitting the shelves a few days later in November. 

If so, this will put it right around the same time as macOS Catalina will be made available to users, which means you will be enjoying the Mac mini 2019 alongside macOS' cool new features like Sidecar, Voice Control and Screentime. But again, whether Apple will release a 2019 Mac Mini model is pure speculation at this point, but we’ll update this story once we hear anything more concrete. Keep your eyes peeled.

Mac Mini 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

Mac Mini 2019 price 

At the moment, the Mac Mini 2018 has two configurations: the $799 base configuration, which has a Core i3 processor, 8GB DDR4 RAM, a UHD Graphics 630 integrated graphics and a 128GB SSD; and the $1,099 “high-end” configuration, which boasts a Core i5 processor a 256GB SSD, and the same integrated graphics and RAM.

With these two configurations, the Mac Mini 2018 has been dubbed the “cheapest” Mac on the market, and we definitely want to see the same prices on the 2019 update. Unless Apple has some big, expensive feature it plans to add –  e.g. the MacBook Pro and its wonky Touch Bar – we expect the prices to stay in the same ballpark. 

Although if Apple were to upgrade the storage, something that may not be entirely necessary considering most creatives (its target users) have their own heavy-duty external drives anyway, the price might go up a little.

Mac Mini 2019

Image Credit: TechRadar

What we want to see

Again, while the Mac Mini 2018 has been largely well-received due to its superior performance packed in a compact form factor, it does still leave some things to be desired. If Apple’s tiny computer does get its update this year, there are a couple of things we’d like to see improved, plus some new things we’d like added.

A cheaper base model

When the Mac Mini first released, it was priced at $499 and supposed to compete with PCs as an affordable entry into the Apple ecosystem. Though the Mac Mini is five times faster than its predecessor and is still the cheapest Mac around, at $799 it’s still more expensive than comparable PC desktops. 

And that’s without the monitor, keyboard and mouse you might have to shell out for, which essentially puts you at almost the same price as an iMac ($1,099) with more storage space to start.

The Mac Mini 2018 may boast impressive performance, but its price point is nowhere near competitive. We’d love to see the same level of performance and a much affordable price in its 2019 iteration, if the computer does get an update this year.

More storage

While the Mac Mini’s target market is creatives, most of whom may already own one or two external hard drives to keep up with their storage demands, paying $799 for a base configuration with only 128GB of SSD storage still feels pretty steep. 

These days, that is the bare minimum for desktops, and hardly enough for storing a handful of apps and software, let alone big files, like images and videos. At least 256GB of space to start is essential for a would-be 2019 model.

Better integrated graphics

One of the main complaints about the Mac Mini is the fact that its integrated graphics are underwhelming in just about every graphics-intensive application, whether you’re streaming and rendering videos or gaming. Dropped frames, low frame rates and slow video rendering are some of the reported issues. Considering that many of Mac users handle graphics-heavy files and work, that’s not a good sign.

Some folks have resorted to adding an external GPU to their setups, but that only adds to the cost and defeats the computer’s minimalist purpose. So we’d love to see Apple step up its game, and improve the Mac Mini Intel Iris integrated graphics or even a discrete GPU inside. Perhaps something similar to what the MacBook Pros have, which are considerably better.

Separate the power supply

While the Mac Mini has an improved thermal architecture, some units have experience thermal throttling and overheating, at times peaking at over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, according to end users. It’s become such an issue, in fact, that some have resorted to replacing the thermal paste with third-party stuff just to keep the heat down, though not by much.

Separating the built-in power supply could be an effective way to manage this heat issue, giving the Mac Mini an even better performance and possibly a smaller form factor (or enough space for a dedicated graphics card).

More user upgradability

The earliest Mac Mini models were known for their upgradability, but this latest generation has very limited user upgrade options. Before, you could update the CPU, RAM and storage to your heart’s content; now, however, only the RAM is upgradeable; and it’s hardly an easy undertaking.

The CPU, RAM and storage in the Mac Mini 2018 may be upgraded when you’re ordering them, maxing the price out at $3,999. However, since Apple’s doing it for you, it can get expensive quickly. We’d like to see Apple bring back the old generation’s user upgradability in the Mac Mini 2019, especially if the computer largely sticks to the same specs at purchase.

Better speakers

This is more of an afterthought, but the Mac Mini 2018’s speaker is considered poor by some critics’ standard.

A headphone jack is on hand so you can attach better speakers, but it would be a welcome upgrade to give the 2019 model a better speaker – or remove it entirely for an even smaller form factor.

  • Check out our list of the best Macs you can buy today

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