Last year, Apple celebrated World Emoji Day (July 17) by giving us a preview of some of the emojis coming to iOS 12 and macOS Mojave in the fall of 2018. This year, Apple’s doing it again.

In February, the Unicode Consortium finalized the Emoji 12.0 list, approving 59 new emojis to be included in our operating systems this fall. Those 59 new emojis include over 170 variants of gender and skin tone to better represent the diversity of people and couples on the planet.

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Update 7/16: Apple has issued two more silent updates to macOS that address other apps that may be using Zoom's localhost server.

Apple is taking further action to shut down Zoom servers that may be running on your Mac without your knowledge . A week after Zoom released a patch for its Mac app that removes a localhost web server from your Mac and allows users to manually uninstall the app from the menubar (you can download that patch here), Apple has issued its second and third updates to shut down servers running in the background.

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Apple released iOS 12.3 in the second week of May, bringing us its new TV app with Channels subscriptions. Just days later, it started releasing betas to developers for another point release, iOS 12.4.

Those who are part of Apple’s developer program can register a device for developer betas by heading to developer.apple.com/download. Those who are not in the developer program can register their devices for public beta releases by visiting beta.apple.com while using the device on which they wish to run the beta software. While many beta releases are stable and even include new bug fixes, we suggest you do not run beta releases on your primary device.

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With macOS Catalina, Apple is providing a tool for developers (called Catalyst) that makes it really easy to take an existing iPad app over to the Mac. Apple started testing the technology in macOS Mojave last year, by porting over some of its own iOS apps—News, Home, Voice Memos, and Stocks.

This year, Apple expands its list of iOS apps on Mac with Music, Podcasts, TV, Screen Time, and the new Find My app. Those first four apps introduced last year are getting an upgrade, too.

While these are welcome changes, I can’t help but think Apple is missing a huge opportunity. Two of macOS’s most important apps—Maps and Messages—are so far behind their iOS counterparts that we would all be better-served by Apple just porting the iOS app in the same fashion.

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Jony Ive has left the building and it’s only a matter of time before the building falls down and must be paved over.

Writing for The New York Post, Jonathan Trugman says “Departure of chief designer Jony Ive is rotten for Apple.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Nick.)

“Why, it seems a clever person might take the name of the company, ‘Apple,’ and use it to great metaphoric effect by comparing it to an actual apple. I believe I am the first to discover this.”

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With the public beta out for macOS 10.15 Catalina, you might be a thrill seeker and want to test out the in-progress version. But maybe you’d like to hedge your bets. In the past, you’d need to partition your startup drive, which could turn into a lot of effort, or get an external drive—preferably SSD—and install and boot from that.

However, there’s a better way to have your Catalina and boot it, too. It’s even a path Apple documents and recommends.

With Apple’s not-quite-so-new APFS filesystem that replaces the long-running HFS+, drives are no longer organized into partitions, but volumes and containers. A container gets a pool of a fixed amount of storage on a drive when it’s configured, but containers can have multiple volumes. Volumes share all available free space within the container without requiring any other rejiggering—they grow and shrink automatically.

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As you’ve probably heard, Apple is finally eliminating support for 32-bit Mac applications this fall. That means older software which hasn’t moved to 64-bit code won’t work on the latest macOS Catalina and although Cupertino has provided guidance on the impending “app-ocalypse,” identifying and taking action on affected apps is a hassle.

A free (donations accepted) Mac utility called Go64 aims to ease the 64-bit transition by performing a quick scan of your applications and creating an inventory of those where 32-bit code is still present. It’s fast and painless—Go64 took less than 45 seconds to scan 1,586 apps (?!) on my iMac Retina 5K startup disk.

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Games have been the top app category since the App Store’s inception. They’re so popular that, in iOS 11, Apple actually split Games off into its own tab, separate from other apps.

But, with few exceptions, the top games today are of a single type: freemium, or free-to-play (F2P) titles that cost nothing to start, but will suck your money away a few dollars at a time, seemingly forever.

We don’t know exactly what games will be included in the Apple Arcade subscription service when it launches this fall, nor what it will cost. But with the weight of Apple behind it, its own tab in iOS 13’s App Store, and plenty of top-tier developers on board, it may finally save us from freemium gaming hell.

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Apple is said to be spending a couple billion dollars over 2018 and 2019 on the development of exclusive original programming. That’s a lot of TV! It’s nothing compared to the $12 billion Netflix spent on content in 2018, but it’s still a very big investment.

What can you get for a couple billion dollars? Apple hopes to attract some of the best talent in TV and film production, including huge stars and directors, and to lock down the television and movie rights to best-selling books. Though the company has only given us a glimpse at a handful of shows, the Hollywood trade press has uncovered many more through its reporting on deals from casting agents and production companies.

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Quick—open up Safari on your iPhone and hit the View Tabs button in the bottom right.

If your phone is like mine, you’ve got a stack with dozens of tabs... leftover pages opened from social media posts, movie times from the film I saw weeks ago, search results, you name it. I don’t need any of that stuff anymore, but it’s kind of a pain to go swiping through all my open tabs every few weeks to clean out the cruft.

Fortunately, iOS 13 adds a new feature to Safari that can automatically close tabs after a period of time. It’s easy to set, if you know where to look.

1. First, open the Settings app.

2. Then scroll down to Safari settings and tap on that.

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When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of his early moves was to vastly simplify what had become a bloated line-up of Mac hardware. Jobs famously showed off a two-by-two product grid: pro and consumer, desktop and portable. Filling the grid were four products—iMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook—each addressing one of those combinations.

The two-by-two grid lasted for several years, until the debut of the category-busting Mac mini in 2005. Since then, there’s been an almost magnetic impulse to cite the grid as the holy grail of Apple product design aspirations. Every time Apple releases something a new Mac, pundits try desperately to figure out how to shove the latest addition into the already bulging grid.

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By the time an application reaches version 7.0, users anticipate fewer whiz-bang new features as developers focus on refining core functionality and required compatibility updates. The question then becomes, has the software improved enough to justify buying an upgrade to the latest and greatest version, often on an annual basis?

Such is the case with ExpanDrive, a venerable macOS utility that mounts cloud and network-attached storage in the Finder so you can more or less use them like locally-attached volumes. Despite a recent focus on eye candy, it’s what’s under the hood that makes the latest update worth a look.

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Major changes to Apple’s MacBook lineup! Has Zoom made your Mac vulnerable to hackers? What will Apple be like without Jony Ive? And your hot takes! That's all in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.

This is episode 658 with Jason Cross, Leif Johnson, Roman Loyola, and Michael Simon.

Listen to episode 658

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You’re planning on buying a new Mac laptop. So you head over to your local Apple store, or you peruse the pages of Apple’s website, and you find yourself with money to spend but no idea on which MacBook to buy.

Don’t worry! That’s why we’re here. In this guide, we’ll go over Apple’s current MacBook lineup, point out their differences and similarities, and provide you with the information you need to pick the right MacBook for you.

The affordable choice: MacBook Air

Longtime Mac users may remember when the MacBook Air made its debut years ago as Apple’s entry into the ultra-portable laptop market. But times have changed, and starting in 2015, the MacBook was repositioned as Apple’s affordable laptop.

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Less than 24 hours after Apple issued a background update to remove a vulnerability in Zoom’s Mac app that installed a surreptitious web server that could activate the video camera without the user’s permission, Apple has disabled another app for a possible security breach. And this time it’s one of its own: Walkie Talkie.

Walkie Talkie was introduced with watchOS 5 as a quicker way to communicate between Apple Watches. Apple promotes it as “a new, easy way to have a one-on-one conversation with anyone who has a compatible Apple Watch.” However, it might not be as private as you think. Apple announced late Wednesday that it was temporarily disabling the Walkie Talkie on the Apple Watch due to eavesdropping concerns.

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People interacting with their phone while driving have been implicated in an enormous number of accidents. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says 3,166 people were outright killed as the result of distracted driving in 2017.

Apple added the Do Not Disturb While Driving feature in iOS 11 as a tool to help reduce distractions without you have to take extra steps. It leaves Siri enabled among a few other features. But the DND-While-D feature can trigger automatically when you’re not in the driver’s seat. You might be a passenger in a car or in another mode of transportation.

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