512 Pixels

The 2015 MacBook Pro is more flexible, more reliable and costs less than its newer Touch Bar siblings. It’s the one to buy.

Apple:

To upgrade the firmware on your Power Mac G5, read through the instructions below. You can print these instructions so they are available while you upgrade your firmware.

The Power Mac G5 Firmware Updater Version 5.1.5f2 is installed in Applications/Utilities.

If you run into problems, be sure to check out this support document.

Caroline Haskins, writing at The Outline, gets into why some weather apps seem to get things wrong so often:

Thousands of these events occur around the world each day, and there isn’t the human infrastructure to provide individual attention to each event.

This means that a large portion of weather forecasts on apps end up being dictated by computer models, which can’t explain their reasons for making a forecast. Users have no way of knowing whether their local forecast has been reviewed by a human.

And of course, not all forecasts are equal. According to 2016 research from Forecast Watch, the best forecast services for one to three day forecasts are Weather Underground, The Weather Channel (which owns Weather Underground), and Accuweather, which are accurate about 75 percent of the time. In comparison, Dark Sky and World Weather Online, the eighth and ninth most accurate forecasting services, are accurate 64 to 67 percent of the time.

For what it’s worth, I use Carrot Weather plugged into Weather Underground.

Ian King and Mark Gurman:

The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices – including Macs, iPhones, and iPads – work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.

Buckle up.

With the release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 yesterday, eGPU support has officially come to any Mac with Thunderbolt 3 support:

• Late 2016 MacBook Pro and later¹
• 2017 iMac or later
• iMac Pro

The following GPUs are officially supported:

• AMD Radeon RX 570
• AMD Radeon RX 580
• AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100
• AMD Radeon RX Vega 56
• AMD Radeon RX Vega 64
• AMD Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition Air
• AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100

You’ll notice there are no Nvidia GPUs listed, but there are reports online of users getting them working.

If you want to stick to the official list, Apple also has several eGPU enclosures listed on that support page, noting that not every enclosure supports every video card. If you think you may upgrade down the road, keep that in mind.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 has finally shipped. Here’s what’s new:

• Adds support for Business Chat conversations in Messages in the US
• Adds support for external graphics processors (eGPUs)
• Fixes graphics corruption issues affecting certain apps on iMac Pro
• Allows jumping to the right-most open tab using Command+9 in Safari
• Enables sorting Safari bookmarks by name or URL by right clicking and choosing “Sort by…”
• Fixes an issue that may prevent web link previews from appearing in Messages
• Helps protect privacy by only AutoFilling usernames and passwords after selecting them in a web form field in Safari
• Displays warnings in the Safari Smart Search Field when interacting with password or credit card forms on non-encrypted web pages
• Displays privacy icons and links to explain how your data will be used and protected when Apple features ask to use your personal information

It’s up in the Mac App Store now.

Ryan Christoffel at MacStories:

Today Apple released the latest update to iOS, version 11.3, which adds the previously promised iPhone battery health settings, along with four new Animoji, ARKit 1.5, a new Music Videos section in Apple Music, and more.

No sign of Messages in iCloud or AirPlay 2.

This week on Connected:

The crew is back together, just in time to talk about the big questions around Apple’s education event, Apple Watch rumors and the frustrations of troubleshooting iCloud issues.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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Peter Kafka at Recode, recounting a couple of Tim Cook statements to Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that.

And:

Swisher posed a question for Cook: What would he do if he were Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg? His answer: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

Carolina Milanesi at Tech.pinions:

Forty years on from the first device that was ever targeted to education, Apple held an event in Chicago at the largest single building high-school in the country. Apple did this not to just introduce an iPad but to tell their story on education, to show the end-to-end solution they now have to help teachers to really transform their curriculum.

I came into this event hoping to see three things: hardware pricing, an improved productivity and collaboration suite and a bigger focus on managing the classroom. Apple addressed my three points but in true Apple fashion it did so in a way that was not obvious to me.

As always, this article from Carolina is well worth the read.

This week on Query, Serenity and I talk about Apple’s education event, Facebook and more. My thanks to our sponsor:

• Pingdom: Start monitoring your websites and servers today. Use offer code QUERY to get 30% off.

One of today’s announcements is that Pages can now be used for ebook creation, both on the Mac and on iOS.

The Pages update is out now, and I took the new Mac version for a spin. It’s pretty basic at this point.

It cannot open my iBooks Author file for my book on the iMac G3 and history of Mac OS X. I’m not super surprised by that, but as the future of iBooks Author is unknown, I’d like a way to know I can edit this file using Pages in the future.

The options when creating a book in Pages are currently more limited than what is available in iBooks Author. There are fewer templates available, and the hierarchy of chapters and sections are nowhere to be found. iBooks Author includes tools for a Table of Contents and Glossary, and these are missing from Pages as well.

Pages also lacks iBooks Author’s widgets. These can be used to add Keynote files, pop overs, review questions, videos and even HTML content to books. This is a pretty big oversight, as these tools can add real interactivity to a book.

Lastly, iBooks Author has much more robust tools when it comes to publishing. The app can send a preview to an iPad for on-device proofing, which I find incredibly helpful. The app also includes a publishing tool that makes it easy to prep a file for the iBooks Store; all Pages can do is create an ePub file to the Finder.

I have a lot of questions about this. Is Apple going to slowly roll these features into Pages? Does iBooks Author have a future for those who need more power than iWork can offer? I think Apple should clarify their roadmap here. iBooks Author, while buggy at times, can create amazing, interactive work. Pages just isn’t up to the task quite yet.

Update: Serenity Caldwell asked Apple about this very issue:

So if you’re working on iBA projects, continue away! And if you want to build quick books on iPad, you can do that too. But ebook creation is still currently split between Pages (simple but few features) and iBA (Mac-only).

— Serenity Caldwell @????????????‍???? (@settern) March 27, 2018

That definitely makes me feel better things. She continues on iMore:

iBooks Author isn’t going anywhere (yet). It’s not being discontinued, .ibooks files will still work in the iBooks app, and you can make them to your heart’s content.

And that’s important, because Pages’s ebook creation — while much better than before — is still in its rudimentary stages. Support for things like quizzes, HTML5 widgets, and popovers just don’t exist currently on the Pages side.

But will iBooks Author be around forever, the Logic to Pages’s GarageBand? I’m thinking no.

Update 2: Apple has posted a pair of support documents outlining Pages’ book creation abilities.