Quad-core performance has done this machine a lot of good.

Update: Jonathan Morrison has a video highlighting the new notebook:

Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch:

Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent, the company told TechCrunch this evening.

Apple has apologized for the bug and for the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while a fix is made.

Here is the company’s statement:

We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.

While that is a pretty bad bug, it seems like that Apple jumped on this much more quickly than the did the previous Group FaceTime bug, which was similar in nature.

With today’s revisions to the Mac notebook line, choosing between a new MacBook Air and a new MacBook Pro has gotten a little more interesting.

The machines are similar in many ways. They both come with two Thunderbolt 3 ports, Touch ID, 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB SSD. Both can be stepped up to 16 GB of memory, while the Pro tops out at 2 TB of storage, as opposed to the Air’s new 1 TB cap.

Once you start poking around, you can see some differences. Upgrading from the $1,099 MacBook Air to $1,299 MacBook Pro comes with these features:

• A quad-core Intel processor, with twice the cores of the MacBook Air. While the base clock speed is slower on the Pro, its Turbo Boost frequency is higher, and in its higher-TDP application, the Pro should be able to sustain higher speeds for longer.
• A display that at 500 nits is a full 100 nits brighter than the MacBook Air. The Pro’s display supports the P3 wide color gamut while the Air does not.
• The Touch Bar. Your mileage will vary on how useful you find it.
• A slightly more robust Intel GPU. The Pro can push more external pixels, but performance wise, it shouldn’t be a night and day difference.¹
• Worse battery life. The Pro comes with a 58.2-watt-hour battery clocked at 10 hours on Apple’s “wireless web” test, but the Air’s 49.9‑watt‑hour unit tested at 12 hours. I’d blame that core count.

I think for almost everyone, the MacBook Air is the right notebook. It’s thin and light, with plenty of power for most tasks, but if you need a better GPU or more cores, the MacBook Pro is a logical upgrade. I like it when the Mac product line makes sense.

All of Apple’s current notebooks use the same revision of the butterfly keyboard, and all are under Apple’s keyboard repair extension program. That’s not great, but at least it’s better than some of the notebooks using older versions of the keyboard.

Mitchel Broussard at MacRumors:

Alongside a refresh of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro this morning, Apple has also dropped the price on high-end storage upgrades across the Mac lineup. This includes the iMac, iMac Pro, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and even the soon-to-be-discontinued Mac Pro.

Additionally, the MacBook Air now has a 1 TB option, unlike before where one had to jump from 512 GB to 1.5 TB. When I bought my wife a MacBook Air, I was disappointed by this, and helped her cram her user data into a 512 GB SSD because the 1.5 TB was so expensive at $1,200. Now, the 1 TB SSD is just $400, the same cost as the 512 GB we purchased.

This morning, Apple has announced an updated MacBook Air. The new machine is the same as the 2018 model, but now includes a True Tone display. The MacBook Air now starts at $1,099, while students can buy one for $999.

I think Apple has finally gotten the starting price right for the MacBook Air.¹

One rung up the product line, the two-port MacBook Pro, previously dubbed the “MacBook Escape” by the Mac faithful, has received a pretty big overhaul. Here’s a bit from Apple’s press release:

The entry-level $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest 8th-generation quad-core processors, making it two times more powerful than before. It also now features Touch Bar and Touch ID, a True Tone Retina display and the Apple T2 Security Chip, and is available for $1,199 for college students.

Both of the new notebooks ship with the “new materials” keyboard tweak that showed up in the recent MacBook Pro revision. No scissor keyboards here.

I think this makes the MacBook Pro line much more cohesive. For $1,299, a customer can get a machine with all the features of the more expensive models, and as they go up the line, the machines become faster, pick up an extra two ports and eventually, a larger display with the 15-inch model.

Every MacBook Pro comes with the Touch Bar now, and all Mac notebooks come with Touch ID and Thunderbolt 3. The latter puts to rest previous incompatibilities between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro that often led to strife in Dongletown.

(Apple, please come out with Touch ID in an external keyboard for us desktop users…)

Noticeably absent from these updates is the 12-inch MacBook. In fact, the small machine seems to be missing from Apple’s website entirely:

It makes sense to me that now would be the time to kill off the MacBook. The MacBook Air is a great notebook, and the MacBook Pro line makes more sense now than it has at any point in the last three years. In fact, from top to bottom, the whole Mac notebook line seems pretty easy to understand again.

macOS Catalina Developer Beta 3 added a new screen saver named Drift:

Like some of Apple’s other screen savers, including my long-time favorite Flurry, Drift comes with several options for its color scheme:

The options are mostly pretty self-explanatory, except the top two. “Desktop” takes its palette from the current desktop picture, while Spectrum shows a wide range of ever-changing colors:

I’m a fan. Apple certainly doesn’t have to add things like this to macOS, but I’m glad it does

Benajmin Mayo, on 9to5Mac:

In a report published today, Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will roll out a new keyboard design based on scissor switches, offering durability and longer key travel, starting with the 2019 MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro is also getting the new scissor switch keyboard, but not until 2020.

The new scissor switch keyboard is a whole new design than anything previously seen in a MacBook, purportedly featuring glass fiber to reinforce the keys. Apple fans who have bemoaned the butterfly keyboard should be optimistic about a return to scissor switches.