Every day, Macworld brings you the essential daily news and other info about all things Apple. But staying on top of that torrent of information can be a constant challenge. One solution: the Macworld digital magazine. 

In the May issue

In the May issue we have all of the details of Apple’s new service offerings: Apple News+, Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade. Samsung just introduced an AirPod competitor. Find out how Galaxy Buds compare to AirPods on the iPhone.

Also in this month’s issue:

• MacUser: Apple updates iMac with 8th and 9th generation Intel Core processors; Google’s Stadia service could shatter the barriers of Mac gaming

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Apple’s “It’s show time” event on March 25 revealed a number of new services, most of which aren’t available yet. One of them, Apple News+, released immediately along with the update to iOS 12.2.

Just days later, the company released the first beta of iOS 12.3, which sets the stage for a major update to the TV app in May. 

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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Tim Cook is not one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2019. Nonetheless, as a three-time honoree of that list, he was invited to be interviewed by Nancy Gibbs at the Time 100 Summit. As expected, Cook didn’t reveal any details about new products, software, or services. Instead, the questions posed and answers given were broad, touching on Cook’s and Apple’s values and how technology fits into the world we live in.

Here’s some of what he said about a variety of issues. Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.

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Whether you’re motivated by water conservation, saving money, a drive to render every aspect of your home smart, or all the above, a smart irrigation controller will scratch that itch.

Like clockwork, Apple releases a major revision of iOS every year. The company formally unveils the new operating system for iPhone and iPad at WWDC in June, followed by a beta testing period and then a final release in the fall (typically in September, just before the new iPhones hit the shelves).

One never really knows exactly what new features and design changes Apple will bring until the company gets on stage at WWDC, but the rumor mill churns early and often. After all, iOS is one of the widest-used and most influential consumer operating systems in the world. We have our own wishlist of iOS 13 features, but we’ve also collected all the rumors about iOS 13 here.

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Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pros are powerful machines, but they also tend to pack a powerful punch to your wallet. Today, though, Amazon’s Woot site is softening that blow by offering a certified refurbished 2018 256GB 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch BarRemove non-product link for as little as $1,879.99, down $519 from the original price of $2,399. For only $100 more, you can bump up to the 512GB model.

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Blanket your home in Wi-Fi without wires with this fantastic deal on the Orbi Wall-Plug Wi-Fi System.

Apple gives icloud.com email addresses away at no cost, but it’s not always obvious how to obtain one by itself or add one to an existing Apple ID account, or how to get additional addresses if you already have one at icloud.com.

But there are three paths, which vary by what you already have and what you want.

• If you have an Apple ID without an associated icloud.com address, you can add one (via iOS or macOS).

• If you have an icloud.com address already, you can add aliases (via iCloud.com).

• If you want a separate icloud.com address for email that isn’t an alias, you can create one by creating an Apple ID account (via macOS).

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The Keychron K1 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard may as well be the anti-butterfly keyboard. It’s thicker than Apple’s MacBook and Magic Keyboard. It has wild RGB lighting. It has an 87- or 104-key layout. And most importantly, its keys don’t get stuck.

I’ve been using the Keychron K1 Mechanical Wireless KeyboardRemove non-product link with my MacBook Pro for a couple of months and it’s hard to switch back. I’m not generally a fan of the clickity-clack noise that mechanical keys make, but the Keychron K1 made me a believer in Blue switches. I imagine that in a quiet office I’d get a few dirty looks, but I actually grew to like the sound. Typing on it is way more pleasurable than the cramped and noisy MacBook keyboard, and its function row is inherently more useful that the Touch Bar.

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If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that Apple is behind on innovation. Let’s look at one innovation in particular that we’ve heard a lot about recently. That is…

[checks notes]

…incredibly fragile folding screens that can break after just a day.

Yes, that big innovation that was all the rage just a few weeks ago turns out to be kind of not great when put into use.

“My Samsung Galaxy Fold screen broke after just a day.”

Well, is $1,900 a day too much to pay for the future?

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The smart lock maker shrinks down its beautiful deadbolt, but it remains a frustrating experience.

A fascinating report at 9to5Mac offers a sneak peek at some of the announcements Apple has in store for developers at WWDC in June. Previous reports have focused on changes coming to iOS 13 and macOS 10.15, but this leak is all about the tools developers use to make apps and services on Apple’s platforms. If they prove true, it could mean a big improvement in the way we use our iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

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Surfing the web through a virtual private network (VPN) can keep your identity and data safe and secure online. We show you what to look for in a VPN and help you pick the best one for your needs.

After several poor reviews and broken devices, Samsung has reportedly decided to delay the launch of the Galaxy Fold originally planned for Friday, April 26.

If you want an Apple Watch but don’t want to spend a mountain of cash, then you should head over to Amazon and pick up one of the 38mm Apple Watch Series 3 models with GPS that it’s selling for a mere $199, down $80 from the normal price of $279. That’s a match of the lowest price we’ve ever seen on Amazon, and it’s been about a month since it was listed at that price. You can also get the 42mm model for an $80 discount.

I don’t think you’ll be missing out on much if you buy the Series 3 instead of the Series 4. I personally still use a Series 3, and I find it’s fast and capable, although I do sometimes envy cosmetic features such as the Series 4’s slightly larger display and its custom watch faces. You also won’t have access to some of the cooler health features of the Series 3, such as the built-in ECG and the fall detection sensor.

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Editing photos and videos can be complicated, and the best tools can get a extremely pricey. Today, though, you can grab your own PC or Mac downloads of Photoshop Elements 2019 and Premiere Elements 2019 for $100 on AmazonRemove non-product link, down from a list price of $150.

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The all-new mesh wireless system streams audio with up to 24-bit resolution and at sampling rates as high as 96kHz, but it also supports AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth.

Sometimes, you need to turn a piece of paper into a digital file. Maybe you need to include a receipt, registration, or other form of proof in an online form. Or, you want keep copies of your important documents in the cloud, so they’re always accessible and safe from being lost or destroyed. Such documents are often digitized as Portable Document Format files, or PDFs.

It used to be that you needed to use either dedicated hardware or a third-party iPhone app to take a photo of a document and convert it to PDF. In iOS 11, Apple added a very handy document scanner into the Notes app, and it does a surprisingly good job of capturing most documents and converting them to PDF. Because it’s not very obvious, you’d be forgiven for not even knowing it exists. Here’s how you scan, convert, and store documents with Notes.

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Apple wants us to believe that augmented reality will be a transformative technology. I want to believe it. It sure as heck feels like it has better potential than virtual reality, which still strikes me as little more than a means of escaping the world by sticking your eyes to a sweaty box. AR, though, can add wonder to the mundane. It can provide information at a glance that we could otherwise only guess at (especially when Google Lens finally makes a full debut on the iPhone). And yes, in some cases, it can even make the world more fun.

But even in its flashiest keynotes, Apple struggles to show us any compelling reason why we should embrace AR technology now. With that in mind, here's a list of AR apps from the App Store that best show what AR technology is currently capable of, and how it’s evolved from the simplistic days of Pokémon Go. Whether you want to learn how to waltz or feed donuts to mythological creatures, you’ll find something to like here.

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External hard drives have been steadily dropping for months, but this deal is one of the best we've ever seen: Best Buy is selling a 10TB WD Easystore hard drive for just $160Remove non-product link, down from a list price of $300 and just $0.016 cents a gig.

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Teen loses driving permit, gets wrongly linked to spate of thefts

A teenager is suing Apple in the US for $1bn, claiming he was misidentified as a thief by a mysterious facial-recognition system in the iGiant's stores.…

Rental firm fuming after consultancy 'never delivered a functional site or mobile app'

Car rental giant Hertz is suing over a website redesign from hell.…

Meanwhile, the only pro-privacy proposal gets quietly pulled

Analysis The right for Californians to control the private data that tech companies hold on them may be undermined today at a critical committee hearing in Sacramento.…

TLS 1.3, speedups, reduced memory overhead, and more

Node.js, the popular JavaScript runtime that relies on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, hit version 12 on Tuesday, bringing with a handful of potentially useful features and capabilities.…

Yes, converged infrastructure model is still a thing

Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed the dark pact under which the two collaborated on converged infrastructure (CI) products for a decade.…

Is it a nerd? Is it a control plane? No, it's... SuperSSD

Israeli NVMe/TCP pioneer Lightbits finally showed up to the all-flash array market today with an Ethernet-attached SSD appliance – the imaginatively named SuperSSD.…

NASA schedules walloped, Cynus launches, and Owen Garriott's final voyage

Roundup It has been an eventful past seven days in space what with SpaceX making a big cloud o' orange smoke, Cygnus docking, and veteran astronaut Owen Garriott taking his final journey into the black.…

Ministers can't tell Ofcom to ignore the law after all

UK comms regulator Ofcom can't be ordered to ignore its legal duties, the High Court has ruled, paving the way for GSM gateway operators to claim compensation after Home Office ministers and mandarins destroyed their businesses.…

The 'E' is for 'Ersatz'

US network operators Sprint and AT&T remain coy about the details of a 5G ceasefire they have just agreed.…

Residents' scheme flags up scourge of lazy dog owners

Is there anything more triumphantly British than fields strewn with dog toffee? Well, there is now: fields strewn with dog toffee with Union Jacks proudly planted in them.…

iPhone maker set to feed competitor even more dollars over the next five years

Apple has been identified as one of the largest customers of Amazon Web Services, splashing tens of millions of dollars each month on public cloud infrastructure supplied by its rival.…

Plus: Windows 10 May 2019 Update on MSDN, Surface Hub 2S has a trolley

Roundup Last week was all about Windows as Surface Hub 2 crept closer to availability and Windows 10 arrived on MSDN. But the Easter Bunny didn't deliver Sets this year.…

Giffgaff tops satisfaction ratings, Vodafone brings up the rear

Updated Cheapo MVNOs have again scored far higher than the UK's big four mobile networks in Which? magazine's customer satisfaction ratings.…

3 variants become 2 with lower latency and just the one format

Updated Micron has replaced its U.2 and AIC-format 9200 SSDs with an U.2-only 9300 line, beefing up capacities from 11TB to up to 15.36TB.…

One-day event promises to cover all angles

Promo Whether you are an experienced techie or a newbie still mulling over the prospect of venturing onto the cloud, there will be plenty to sink your teeth into at the Amazon Web Services Summit taking place on 8 May at London’s ExCel.…

Platinum-class MRAM exchange bias is the key

Taiwanese spintronics boffins have made an important finding in magnetic random access memory (MRAM) tech: a faster way to switch MRAM states by using a nanometre scale layer of platinum.…

...and here's a quick summary of what's been going down in infosec land

Roundup Welcome back, Brits, from your Easter break – assuming you weren't working or on-call over the four-day weekend.…

Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a software factory!

A protest by tech employees in China over the expectation of 72-hour work weeks has this week attracted the support of 30 workers from Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary.…

Uncle Sam wants to run fliers' fizogs through photo databases by 2023

Water cooler Hey El Reg, help me out with this. I saw someone on Twitter complaining that she had to have her face scanned by US airline JetBlue before flying overseas from America. Why would they be doing this?…

Good bye to Nvidia, hello to the Samsung-fabbed FSD

Tesla claims to have built a "fully self driving" (FSD) system using custom-designed math processors, allowing its vehicles to potentially drive themselves completely autonomously.…