Category: Apple Insider

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On November 30, LastPass notified users that it was investigating an August “security incident” leading to user data theft.

Now, the LastPass CEO Karim Toubba has posted a blog informing users of the extent of what was stolen.

“To date, we have determined that once the cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys were obtained, the threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service,” the blog post reads.

The hacker also created a copy of customer vault data, which the company maintains is “stored in a proprietary binary format.” Some vault data, like website URLs, is not encrypted. Other data, like usernames and passwords, are “secured with 256-bit AES encryption,” which the company maintains cannot be decrypted by hackers.

“[Encrypted data] can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password using our Zero Knowledge architecture,” Toubba writes. “As a reminder, the master password is never known to LastPass and is not stored or maintained by LastPass.”

While the company claims that it would be highly unlikely that the hackers could decrypt the data, it warns users that they could be targeted by phishing or social engineering attacks.

LastPass has come under fire for questionable security practices in the past.

In December 2021, LastPass members reported multiple attempted logins using correct master passwords from various locations. The company assured customers that attacks were a result of passwords leaked in third-party breaches.

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Spotify subscribers may soon be able to “get the right music” for their workouts, thanks to a yet-unreleased feature spotted in Spotify’s iOS app code.

Chris Messina highlighted the relevant code in a tweet as noted by 9to5Mac, which implies the feature may be released soon.

By utilizing a user’s health data, as well as the musical preferences obtained via Spotify, the app would be able to generate personalized workout playlists.

Spotify also recently updated its Apple Watch app experience. The new update features larger controls, swipe gestures, and a better library view.

iPhone SE

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On Tuesday, Apple Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo took to Twitter to discuss Apple’s plans for the iPhone SE 4.

He noted that his latest survey showed signs that Apple is reconsidering the next iPhone SE. He believes that it is possible that Apple will either cancel or delay its current plans for a 2024 release date.

Previous rumors have suggested that the next iteration of the iPhone SE could look like an iPhone XR with a 6.1-inch LCD display, complete with notch.

However, another rumor suggests that Apple was not fully sold on the idea and had not nailed down the exact design by late October.

Apple has had a more difficult time moving lower-end models of the iPhone in recent months, forcing the company to cut back iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus orders.

Apple’s AirTag

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Apple updated the AirTag on November 10 to version 2.0.24. The update, detailed by Apple and spotted by 9to5Mac, enables Precision Finding to help users locate an unknown AirTag following them. The AirTag also will emit a noise.

The feature is part of Apple’s commitment to prevent people from using an AirTag to stalk others.

Apple also updated AirTag on December 12 to version 2.0.36. This update fixed a bug where the accelerometer was not activating in certain scenarios.

While users typically have ways to update devices’ firmware manually, there is no such option for AirTag. Instead, users have to wait for it to occur on its own.

You can check the firmware version of your AirTag via the Find My app on your phone. Once in Find My, tap the relevant AirTag, then tap the battery icon for the AirTag — this will display the serial number and the firmware version.

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A recent article in The Independent revealed British people spend over four months of their lives talking about the weather.

“Woo-ee, it’s really coming down out there.” We’ve all said it at one point or another, gesturing outside to tennis ball-sized hail pummeling the asphalt.

It’d no surprise that the weather is the unsung small talk topic of choice for quick exchanges with strangers and awkward situations, where we’re reaching for something to propel the conversation forward.

There’s no doubt that the weather dictates our lives, but with these impressive and intuitive weather apps for iPhone, we can stay in the know.

The Weather Channel app is for the storm chaser, outdoor runner, worried parent with kids out-of-state or abroad, allergy sufferer, and news devourer.

In essence, the Weather Channel app is the hub for everything weather For example, it details the current temperature with a feels like gage for days when the thirty-degree Fahrenheit reading will feel more like negative thirty due to wind chill.

It also includes hourly and daily projections, and for how long these big weather events (rain, snow, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc.) will be in effect.

Scroll down, and you’ll see metrics for wind, humidity, dew point, pressure, UV index, and sunrise/sunset. For the runner or allergy-sufferer, a health and activities subheader details whether the weather is good enough for a run right now, and if a potential allergy threat is in the area.

Scroll further, and you’ll find another subheader detailing outdoor conditions.

Chill index is particularly important for the dog walker or runner. If your hands and knuckles have been cracking and dry, check out the dry skin index to confirm if it is indeed a very high concern.

For those who live in polluted areas, this app serves as a helpful indicator of current air quality. If you live in Los Angeles and the pollution rating is severe, consider swapping your outdoor jog for an indoor workout next to your trusty air purifier.

For parents with children living out of state or abroad, keep tabs on all of your loved ones by adding their current city of residence to favorites.

Gone are the days when your love language was scraping your son’s windshield before he slid off to high school. Now, empty-nesters can take similar measures by opening The Weather Channel App and texting Jimmy – “Looks like that hurricane’s going to hit you guys in a few days. Got your hurricane shutters up?”

The app also includes a live radar and map. To see the projections for when exactly that storm will hit where you are, click the play button to watch the storm shift through by the hour.

Additionally, the app offers the capability for significant weather alerts to be pushed to your phone. You can choose which alerts you’d like to be notified about.

To switch on these alerts:

• Open The Weather Channel app on your iPhone or iPad.
• Tap the Alert Bell icon in the top right-hand corner
• Select Manage

From here, you can choose for which events you’d like notifications:

• Significant Weather
• Change Ahead
• Real-Time Rain
• Lightning Strikes
• Government Issued Alerts
• Breaking News
• Daily Rain/Snow Alerts
• Pollen

Tap the simple “on/off” toggle to switch notifications on or off for any particular weather event.

For the pro weather tracker who wants the intel on all — and we mean all weather around the world, the Weather Channel App is the app to download. The app’s greatest strength, however, is also its weakness.

Being the hub that it is, even including short news clips and flu-tracking in your area, it has two problems. It takes at least three seconds to open — bad news for the wildly impatient, and the app quits often, especially during video playback.

However, because of the grandiose, all-encompassing nature of the app, these small bugs can easily be overlooked.

RadarScope is next level for weather aficionados, and for those who have a basic understanding of atmospheric science — or are eager to learn.

If you’ve graduated from The Weather Channel App with a thirst for more precision and detail, RadarScope is of the professional-grade weather tracking variety. In fact, it is advertised in the app store as a utility for weather enthusiasts and meteorologists.

The app reflects data from The Next Generation Weather (NEXRAD) and Terminal Doppler Weather (TDWR) radars in the USA and around the world.

NEXRAD belongs to a 160 string of networks of high-resolution S-band Doppler weather radars, operated by the National Weather Service.

TDWR is operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and is used by air traffic controllers. Its interface looks government-issue, akin to radars used in the military.

These are the same radars that meteorologists and scientists use to track weather systems. Holding a ranking of #1 in weather in the App Store, this app has no choice but to be reliable.

The user is able to track weather systems with maximum accuracy, even to a street-by-street level.

RadarScope offers real-time lightning data and up to 30 frames of radar data, including extended loops of super-resolution data.

Subscribers have access to a data interrogation tool that regulates data values for radar pixels, as well as a highly proficient multi-pane mode, giving the user the capability to evaluate two to four radar products, side-by-side.

Apple Watch users, be aware that the app can be unreliable without your iPhone nearby. This means that if you are on a run, the radar might not load before you are caught in that avoidable downpour.

RadarScope’s Pro Tier 1 has an annual 9.99 subscription fee, is compatible with iOS 14 or later, and is a 35.6 MB download.

For those overwhelmed by RadarScope and The Weather Channel App’s many features, Apple’s more simplistic Weather app might be for you.

Firstly, it has a gorgeous, clean-cut interface.

If it is raining or snowing, rain and snow will travel across your screen. This is a particularly cool feature, reminiscent of the moving portraits in Harry Potter.

Like The Weather Channel App, there is an hourly weather projection and 10-day forecast.

There are also some bells and whistles, such as the feels like feature (and even cooler, why it might feel two degrees cooler).

It also includes UV index, sunrise and sunset, wind, precipitation, humidity, visibility, and pressure. Comparably, you can easily add your favorite locations to check up on your out-of-state or abroad loved ones.

Both apps give the weather aficionado the option to turn on weather alerts. To turn on alerts for Apple’s Weather app:

Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > Weather, then tap Always. This way, you’ll be informed when certain weather events are heading your way.

Apple’s Weather app comes with your phone and is compatible with iOS 10 or later.

In three words, Carrot Weather is wisecracker weather fun. Whether you are a comedian or just looking for a daily laugh, Carrot is for you.

Its design is similar to Apple’s Weather app, with bright colors and a simplistic user experience. Its in-app prose and style is raises eyebrows, and — it hopes — will get a chuckle or two during your daily commute.

It is advertised as much more than a weather app, where the user can “complete activities to strengthen [their] relationship with the homicidal A.I., follow clues to track down 100+ secret locations [and] film [their] own TV-news-style weather report videos.”

Its creative nature is unlike any weather app out there. For those seeking a laugh, its Age Rating is 17+ for mild sexual content, suggestive themes, profanity, and crude humor.

Upon downloading and opening the app, the user has the ability to cater to their own personality preferences, ranging from professional to overkill.

The user soon finds that Carrot, more an entity than a utility, is their new overlord. She provides important messages upon entry into the app, such as this one:

If Carrot has a little too much personality for you, feel free to switch off her sassiness.

To boost endorphins in the brain, the app also offers achievements, like experiencing one’s first snow — which serve as clever incentives to revisit the app.

Its whimsy, however, does not overshadow its professional-grade functionality.

Carrot provides features like radar, storm cells with direction tracking, weather fronts, and a cool feature called cards that lets you customize your weather notifications.

If you’re afraid of Zeus smiting you, for example, you can choose to be alerted if there are any lightning strikes within a certain number of miles of your location.

All in all, Carrot overflows with personality and is a privacy-conscious app.

Carrot Weather offers free and premium ($19.99) versions, is compatible with iOS 13, and is a 226 MB download.

Like the RadarScope app, there is a learning curve to using MyRadar Weather Radar due to its impressive, real-time home screen radar presentation.

Upon opening the app, instead of a daily or 10-day forecast, the user is confronted with a live radar.

This is exciting for some, but might be overwhelming for others who are looking for a simple, written rain/no rain prediction.

Instead, the user must zoom in to see where the applicable weather systems are.

Click through each widget at the bottom of the screen to figure out what each selection does. Once these are committed to memory, operating the app is a breeze.

One particularly cool feature that mirrors The Weather Channel app is the videos function, showing all relevant and recent weather news in the country.

The app provides more than enough information for the weather aficionado. Centered on a large, zoomable radar of your current country, it includes graphs to see weather trends in real-time and beyond.

Like the other abovementioned apps, this app provides customizable alerts for noteworthy weather systems.

MyRadar offers free and premium versions ($9.99 annually), is compatible with iOS 14, and is a 173.6 MB download.

With the above apps, you’ll have all the weather intel necessary for those: “Phew, shows six feet of snow tonight!” conversations with strangers.

Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD Docking Station

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When you buy a MacBook Pro, you’re stuck with what you buy for storage and ports. In 2022, seven years after the USB-C connector was introduced on the MacBook, ports are easy to add with a huge array of USB-C and Thunderbolt hubs and docks.

Storage is easy and relatively inexpensive too, as long as you go external. But while you could plug the drive and a dock into a MacBook Pro’s ports, it still means you’ve got two boxy devices on your desk, and probably extra power cords too.

The Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 NVMe 8TB SSD Docking Station aims to solve that problem by combining a dock with high-speed storage into one single device. It connects to just one port on your Mac, giving you the best of both worlds.

Sabrent’s design consists of a durable aluminum enclosure, with a lightly textured top and sides, and Sabrent’s branding on the top and front. All of the ports for the dock are located at the front and back, leaving the sides clean.

It’s a fairly compact dock as well, measuring 5.55 inches long and 5.57 inches wide, and 1.7 inches in height. This gives it a smaller footprint than a Mac mini, but it’s still slightly taller.

At 2 pounds and 2 ounces, it’s pretty dense as far as docks go. But more on this in a little bit.

Along with the enclosure, you get a fairly large 150W power brick, which is longer and taller than the dock, but still small enough to be hidden behind a desk. We wouldn’t call it light, but if you’re already lugging around a 16-inch MacBook Pro, what’s another two pounds.

Also inside the box, you get a two-foot long Thunderbolt 3 cable for connecting it to your hardware. As always, enough to get started, but not enough for most uses.

Sabrent includes quite a few ports with the dock, split to the front and back. At the front, the dock has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port that works at 10Gbps, a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A that runs at 5Gbps, separate headphone and mic jacks, and an SD UHS-II memory card slot.

Around the back, Sabrent has a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, Gigabit Ethernet, and two USB 3.2 Type-A connections, one each of Gen 2 and Gen 1.

One of those Thunderbolt 3 ports is intended to be connected to the host Mac, and provide up to 96W of power. This is enough to recharge a connected MacBook Pro, making it suitable for those wanting to have a single-cable docking system.

It kept our 16-inch MacBook Pro fully charged with no battery drain. What it is not, is MagSafe, and does not provide power for fast charging.

We like this arrangement of ports. The ones to the back aren’t typically plugged and unplugged that often, and most of the time you’re probably going to leave this dock set up somewhere.

The DisplayPort is able to power an 8K display at up to 30Hz, a 5K screen at 60Hz, or a 4K screen at a maximum of 120Hz, as well as lower resolutions. Depending on the video support of your Mac, this is a decent selection of resolutions.

What it will not do, is give multiple monitor support to computers that can only support one monitor on USB-C connections. That’s left to docks with DisplayMate compatibility — and that’s fine.

Sabrent offers the dock in 2TB, 4TB, and 16TB capacities as well as the 8TB version supplied for review.

Rather than using a normal SSD, Sabrent includes an NVMe version, which usually provides sky-high transfer speeds. According to the company, the included drive can handle read and write speeds of up to 1,500MB/s.

This speed is basically what we got in testing. In bursts, it can go up to about 1.6 gigabytes per second, but that may be an artifact of the caching of the drive. When the cache is full, speeds drop to about 500 megabytes per second, but given that the drives aren’t operating at maximum speed, this takes a while to reach.

We took apart the unit, as it is designed to be upgradeable later, and the drives inside are Sabrent 4TB Rocket Q NVMe capable of about 3 gigabytes per second, each. We swapped them out with a another matched pair of PCI-E drives from a different manufacturer capable of more than 3 gigabytes per second each, and were unsurprisingly still seeing the same speeds.

This is likely intentional. This allows for good-enough speed for nearly any task, while not hampering the speed of the other ports at the same time.

As a package in its own right, the Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD Docking Station is pretty good. It has a relatively small volume, plus an ample selection of key ports available to use.

The power delivery is more than suitable for MacBook users, even those with the 16-inch MacBook Pro. That one-cable life is possible here — and we’ve been using it daily, replacing our regular dock for the purposes of review.

It’s more than fast enough to satisfy power users, such as video editors. The 8TB capacity will provide more storage overflow for more typical users.

Let’s be frank — the 8TB model costs $1,299.99, the 2TB version retails for $499.99, and the 4TB is $649.99. If all you need is the storage, that is a decent price for a dock plus 8TB of Flash storage, but terrible for 8TB of storage on a hard drive.

This is a key example of considering what you need, down to the absolute last detail before you buy. A 8TB external hard drive at 1/10 the speed, retails for about $145. A good Thunderbolt dock without storage is in the vicinity of $300.

So, if you just need mass storage and legacy ports, without speed being a requirement, this is not the product for you.

If you need semi-portable fast storage, it might be, though. Going up to 8TB of storage on the 16-inch MacBook Pro adds $2200 to the price. The Sabrent Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD Docking Station is half that price with about a third of the delivered speed as a MacBook Pro SSD, in a complete package that’s about the same volume as two MacBook Pro power bricks.

We don’t think we’d haul it to Starbucks and work from it there. But, we have used it in off-site locations, when we’ve set up for days at a time, and it’s been pretty good for that.

And, you get a lot of so-called legacy ports to boot.

• Compact dock size
• Good port selection
• Built-in fast storage reduces need for a separate drive
• User-upgradable storage

• Cost can be a factor at higher capacities
• Two SSDs could theoretically deliver faster speeds, but might hamper the other ports at the same time
• Large — but not enormous — power brick

The Sabrent dual NVME SSD docking station is available with up to 16TB of storage from Sabrent’s website, starting at $499 for 2TB. As reviewed, the 8TB version sells for $1299.

Sabrent products are also available on Amazon, with the 2TB option starting at $501.