We take a look at the brand new gear just released by Apple: M4 iMacs, Mac minis and MacBook Pros, and we talk about the latest operating system updates, which include the first Apple Intelligence tools.
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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 368
Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security for Thursday, October 31 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast includes a look at the brand new gear just released by Apple: iMacs, Mac minis and MacBook Pros. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast. Veteran Mac journalist, Kirk McElhearn. And Intego’s. Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.
Kirk McElhearn 0:32
Good morning, Josh, how are you today?
Josh Long 0:34
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?
Apple unveils new products over three days
Kirk McElhearn 0:35
I’m doing well. This has been a busy week, hasn’t it? We got operating system updates on Monday. We’re going to talk about that first we got new Macs. We got three new Macs with announcements on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. First time apples ever done this. Instead of doing one of these events that lasts 45 minutes or an hour, they just dropped a new Mac each day. And you can get these 10 or 15 minute videos on the product pages on the Apple website, which look exactly like the videos they do when they do these bigger events, just without Tim Cook at the beginning and the end.
Josh Long 1:04
Right, which has led to some speculation about what that could mean for Tim Cook’s future at the company. But what I think is interesting, though, is that all of the individual bits where, okay, now I’m throwing to so and so and so and so is going to talk about this other thing. Every one of those felt like it could have fit in a single, fluid Apple event, except for the ones with John Turner, who revealed that this is going to be a multi day event, and we’ll see you next time at the end of the first two videos. So it could be that maybe these other things were filmed sort of in their own context, able to be dropped into any style of event, and then maybe they re filmed things with John Turner’s. I don’t know whether that was their original plan. All along, there was some speculation though, there was going to be an Apple event, and then we got this sort of surprise. You know, there’s going to be multiple releases over the course of a week?
Kirk McElhearn 2:02
Well, of course, the three days, actually, we’re recording this on Wednesday. We don’t know if there’s going to be anything on Thursday and Friday, but after the first one, at the end of the first one, John Turner said we’ll have more announcements tomorrow and Wednesday, something like that. So he did make it clear we were speculating before we started recording, that there hasn’t been an Apple TV update in about two years. Would they do that before Christmas? Because that’s a Christmassy thing. But I don’t think so. After doing three days of updates like this, I don’t expect to do that. John Turner seems to be from the rumors the person who will eventually replace Tim Cook, and the fact that he’s so visible on these videos at the beginning and the end kind of makes it seem like is Tim Cook on his way out? Is he not feeling well? Is he getting ready to retire? I don’t think we need to over speculate, but it is weird to have anything like this without Tim Cook showing up. Okay, let’s talk about the operating system updates, because this is a big deal. This is finally Apple Intelligence available to some of the masses, depending on which devices they have. We talked about the Apple Intelligence writing tools last week, which is, I guess, the biggest feature in this Apple Intelligence Suite. The new Siri doesn’t come out until the doc two releases. So these, there are betas for this now. And if you want to download the betas. We’ll link to an article in the show notes about installing the beta operating systems on your Apple devices. Don’t really recommend it if it’s your most important device, but this is the first taste people are getting of Apple Intelligence, and I’m not seeing a lot of excitement about it on social media. I don’t see people saying, Wow, this Apple Intelligence stuff is so cool, because everyone’s waiting for Siri, for Siri with ChatGPT, which is coming in the dot two releases, the Genmojis, which is in the dot two betas, but you have to be put on a waiting list, and not a lot of people have been accepted so far. And you said even before the show, you haven’t even used the writing tools because you don’t even care about them.
What is the Apple Intelligence experience like at this point?
Josh Long 3:59
Well, I’ve played with it just a little bit, but, but, yeah, no, I that’s one of the main reasons why I actually wanted to get a new phone. Was because I wanted to have the Apple Intelligence features, including the writing tools. It’s not something that I’ll probably use on a daily basis, but I do see myself using this to shorten things a bit. When I’m writing social media posts or writing articles or things like that, sometimes it can take out a few words, which is all you need to get something to fit a little better or be a little more concise. So it’s really, really useful for things like that. And that’s one of the things that I think that I’ll probably use the most out of the current feature set, which, again, is very limited. It’s basically just writing tools right now.
Kirk McElhearn 4:44
But to be fair, there are some other features. There are these notification summaries. So if you get a bunch of notifications, you’ll get one notification that resumes all the notifications. Sometimes they can go really wrong. So a friend of mine sent me a screenshot from. Twitter, and the person says, My mom said that hike almost killed me, and Apple’s AI summary says attempted suicide, but recovered and hiked in red ones and Palm Springs. That’s kind of weird for that sort of mistake. Now I’ve seen the summaries on email messages, which are actually quite useful for email messages. But when people think AI, they think robots and Androids, and they think generative AI, and they think fancy images. And you’re not going to get that with any of your Apple devices, at least not yet. Well, not through Apple, because Apple’s not providing that stuff. When they come out with the image playground, you’re going to get a limited number of options to create images, Genmojis, which are what animated memojis or whatever they call them, but you’re not going to get the fancy stuff that you see online, on social media, all these graphics and things.
Josh Long 5:50
Well, at least not this stuff like you say, that’s coming directly from Apple, that it’s a little bit different. So you can get a third party app that will do basically all the things that you can do on any of the Android phones that have these, a lot of these features built in, there’s really starting to push AI features on a lot of Android phones now.
Kirk McElhearn 6:11
But then that’s third party app intelligence. That’s not Apple Intelligence, right?
Josh Long 6:16
Right, but Apple has said from the beginning, when they first announced Apple Intelligence, look, our whole thing that we want to do for you is to make your life easier. So we’re not focusing on the gimmicks. What we want to do is be able to give you the next generation of Siri, where you can have it be your personal assistant, and it does all these things for you that well, frankly, maybe some of these things we should have had it doing for the past several years, when we barely worked on Siri at all, it seems. But anyway, that’s that’s really where they wanted to put their focus. Is, how can I make your life easier for you, where Siri understands you and understands the context of everything you’re asking and can perform a lot more tasks for you? So that’s still not here, like you said, that’s coming in the future. One thing we did get was the glowy ring around the outside of your iPhone if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.
Kirk McElhearn 7:10
Or an iPad as well. Certain iPads, my M4 iPad Pro also shows that.
Josh Long 7:15
Yes, and you can double tap at the bottom of the screen to pull up a keyboard if you want to type to Siri as well.
Kirk McElhearn 7:21
And on a Mac the default keyboard shortcut is to press the Command key twice, but you can change that in the settings.
Josh Long 7:28
Right? So this is, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a first stage, right? We know we’re getting a lot more stuff later on, but hey, at least we’ve got some of the features now, as you alluded to, you know, we’ll have a link in in the show notes to an article where you can find out about getting the point two betas, which do technically come with the image playground app, although you can’t actually use it yet in most cases. So there is technically a waiting list to get Apple Intelligence in the first place. So first of all, if you’ve upgraded to the point one releases of the operating systems that just came out this week, you have to wait a very short period of time. For me a week ago because I was using the release candidate, it took literally four minutes of being here on the wait list when I tried to put my wife’s device on the wait list. It took not too much longer. I think it was maybe like 20 minutes or something. Wait. No, is that right? No, it wasn’t too long. It was maybe, I think, an hour and a half somewhere around there, and that was on day one. That was on Monday, when everybody was trying to join the wait list all at the same time, so very likely you’ll have somewhere in between my four minute experience and the 90 minute experience for my wife. But that’s just for the basic features of Apple Intelligence. There’s a second wait list that not a lot of people are talking about, because first of all, it requires the developer version of the beta to get the point two right now, and you have to have that, that image playground app installed. And when you open the image playground app, you have an option to request early access. So on my wife’s iPad, I requested that on Monday, and here we are recording Wednesday, and I still don’t have access yet. Every time I open the image playground app, it says early access requested. You will be notified when image playground Genmoji and image wand are ready for you to share feedback.
Kirk McElhearn 9:32
So you can also make this request in settings Apple Intelligence and Siri, and it will tell you access requested. I did this on Saturday when I installed the 18.2 version of iPadOS and on my M4 iPad, and I’m still waiting. I did see someone on social media today say that they had gotten access, but nothing more than that. So anyway, it’s not going to come very quickly. Let’s talk about the security updates. Because, as usual, there’s hundreds of security updates and all these operating. Systems. Was there anything really important that was updated, and has that old version of Libra SSL finally been updated, Josh?
Security updates in the latest Apple operating system releases
Josh Long 10:08
Okay, well, we can start with the last one, because the answer is no. All the open source software that’s included with the operating system that was out of date last time is still out of date. Okay, at least they’re consistent, yeah, well, right. It would be nice if Apple patch that stuff, because it’s like, Why do I want years old vulnerabilities? But anyway, so aside from that, we did get a number of vulnerabilities patched. The one that got the most was MacOS, Sequoia, 15.1 at 59 CVEs. These are Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. These are unique identifiers that you can use to tell you know that that same vulnerability affects multiple products. So in many cases, a vulnerability that affects one Apple operating system more than likely affects other Apple operating systems too. And so we got 59 CVEs patched with Mac OS Sequoia15.1, 28 for iOS and iPadOS 18.1 and a bit fewer for vision, os watch OS and TV OS, they also did release, of course, updates for Mac OS, Sonoma and Ventura and iOS and iPadOS 17 as well. So if you, for some reason, are still on the old operating systems, you can get patches. There’s not quite as many patches, of course, but you can at least get some vulnerabilities patched if you’re on the older operating systems for now.
New Cleanup feature in the Photos app
Kirk McElhearn 11:35
Okay, briefly, I want to talk about one more Apple Intelligence feature, and this is the cleanup feature in photos. And I just took an example of a photo. I was in London for a couple days, and I shot a photo in Covent Garden. And if you’ve ever been there, it’s this kind of big covered garden with restaurants and everything. And there’s a bunch of people in the photo, a guy sitting on the curb, people walking around, standing around. We won’t put the photos in the show notes, but very quickly, with a few clicks, I was able to remove most of the people in the foreground of this photo. And if you were to take a really close look, you might spot that the bricks on the ground are a little bit different. But I think Apple’s goal here is, you’re taking photos of a group of friends, and there’s someone in the background you want to get rid of. You don’t care that it looks perfect. You just want to get the distracting person out of the way. What I did was, you know, dozens of people that were removed, and if you didn’t see the two photos, you wouldn’t really notice the difference. So this is a feature that’s actually quite practical for, I want to say, normies, because people can do this with Photoshop and other apps with a much more refinement than this, but here it’s just basically, I did this on my Mac. I clicked a couple of things, waited 10 seconds, and then, boom, the people were gone.
Josh Long 12:47
Now you said that if you were looking at the second photo without having seen the original, you wouldn’t necessarily notice the difference. So I would argue that if you’re giving it a cursory glance, absolutely true, you wouldn’t notice that there were people that got removed from the photo. If you look a little closer, though, this is where you see a lot of the typical, like, kind of generative AI things as it tries to to fill in the gaps and make some assumptions about what was there, and it doesn’t get everything quite right, which, I mean, you expect, like, that’s exactly what we’re used to seeing with this sort of technology elsewhere. It’s just it feels a little bit odd for this to be something that I’m getting out of an Apple product. Again, it’s, it’s, I guess, better than not having this feature at all. But I wonder about the practicality and the utility of having this right? If, if I were going to post this picture somewhere, I would want to, you know, get in and dig, dig in there with a graphic editor and use the cloning tool and, like, clean things up and make it look really nice.
Kirk McElhearn 13:55
No, you wouldn’t, Josh, you don’t do that. See, that’s the thing. This is not for people who do that kind of editing, who use the who know what the cloning tool is even.
Josh Long 14:03
Right exactly, or I would just take the original image and post it, which is what most people are going to do anyway. And I think in most cases, that probably makes sense. Like, is it really that big of a deal that there’s bystanders, like just hanging out in the photo? I mean, if they’re not the center of the photo, I don’t think in most cases it’s that big of a deal.
Kirk McElhearn 14:23
Yeah, I think people are going to use it. As I said, you’ve taken a picture of a group of friends, and there’s some people on the side. You want to get rid of them. Maybe there’s a car in the way.
Josh Long 14:31
The examples that Apple gives like, I think they showed people on the beach, and that’s a scenario where it’s really easy, right? Because there’s just sand in the background, or waves or whatever, and that kind of stuff looks really good if you clean it up with AI.
Kirk McElhearn 14:44
Okay, we’re gonna take a break. When we come back, we’re gonna talk about the three new Macs that Apple announced this week.
Voice Over 14:53
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A look at the specs of Apple’s latest Mac hardware
Kirk McElhearn 16:09
We’ve never had this sort of multi day Apple Jubilee product announcement. It’s always been, here’s the event, and we announce everything at once, and it’s you can pre order on Friday, etc. And the three day thing, as we mentioned earlier, was interesting. Rather than tie everything together in one which they could have, they did it over three days. Don’t know why. So first new Mac was the iMac with M4 and this is interesting because the M1 iMac came out in May 2021, it wasn’t updated until last year, I think October, with the M3 so they skipped a generation. But I guess because they had all these M4 processors, they wanted to bring everything up to M4 which, as we’ll explain in a minute, not everything, but most of them. So we have the new M4 iMac, same price as previously. The big difference with the M4 iMac and all the others is that they now start with 16 gigabytes of RAM, and this presumably because Apple Intelligence couldn’t function with just eight gigabytes. Not only do the new Macs this week, the iMac The Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro, start with 16 gigabytes, but Apple has also upgraded the M2 and M3 MacBook Air to also start at 16 gigabytes. So Apple is really saying you need 16 gigabytes for Apple Intelligence. They’re making it very clear, even if your eight gigabyte M1 Mac will run Apple Intelligence. They’re making it clear that to have the really good performance, you want to have at least 16.
Josh Long 17:35
That seems to be the assumption here. Now Apple hasn’t said we’re making sure that the new baseline is 16, including in older generation products that we’re selling. But it’s kind of implied, right? Like we know what’s really going on here, and the reason why they’re getting rid of eight gigs, Apple really held on to eight gigs for a long time. You know, Apple has a tendency over the over the past several years, to want to hold on to, like a lesser gigabyte baseline on the ram far longer than PC manufacturing…
Kirk McElhearn 18:07
Because it costs $200 to go from eight gigs to 16 gigs.
Josh Long 18:11
Well, it doesn’t cost Apple anywhere near that much money.
Kirk McElhearn 18:14
But no for for consumers, when you look at that eight gig iMac, you think that’s not going to be enough, and that 1099 iMac turns into a 1299 iMac. And when you want to up the storage, that’s more so they kept the eight gig as the entry level, which for a lot of people, was sufficient, right?
Josh Long 18:31
Especially if you are switching from a PC where you’re used to, oh, I need a ton of RAM. I just need to, like, max out my RAM, or else I’m not gonna be able to do anything with my PC, right? And so I think they were maybe kind of hoping that they could get people to spend a little more and upgrade, they could keep the nice looking baseline price. But in any case, arguably, Apple operating systems have had much better efficiency when it comes to memory management than PCs have, and I think that’s probably still the case. Again, I really do think that either this means that Apple is anticipating that future generations of Apple Intelligence are going to literally require a 16 gig baseline, which is quite possible, or at least, like you’re saying, that maybe it’s just we know it’s going to perform better with at least 16 gigs of RAM.
Kirk McElhearn 19:23
Okay, I have to tell you something. I broke a promise. I promised that I was going to keep my iMac for five years, and I’m not going to. I ordered an iMac M4 so I’ve had my iMac three and a half years, and it’s basically Apple Intelligence that made me think the same with the iPhone, that if I want the Apple Intelligence experience more, because I write about this stuff, that I should get the M4 now, the fact that they went from M1 to M3 then to M4 suggests that there won’t be an m5 right? The next one will be an m6 like the M3 to M4 to me, sounds like this is Apple. Intelligence, so they need to get the faster processors, but they’ve skipped two years, generally for the iMac. So I’m not going to promise. I’m going to keep this one five years, but it will be a target. I did upgrade the RAM from 16 to 24 gigabytes, and this is something you could never do before. It was always 816, 3264, and they have 24 which makes you think that, okay, eight was the baseline, and if I upgrade it to 16, and then that extra eight is to make Apple Intelligence stuff work really well, maybe.
Josh Long 20:29
Maybe one thing that is interesting is that if you look at Apple’s refurbish store, they are still selling several models with eight gigs of RAM. So if you really want, like a cheaper device, because it’s refurbished, primarily, you can still get some refurb models from Apple with eight gigs.
Kirk McElhearn 20:48
Okay, so in addition to the M4 processor, the new iMac has a 12 megapixel front camera, and it has a desk view built in. And this is something that Apple added that you could use an iPhone that you’d put on top of the iMac, and it kind of points down and sees what’s on your desk. That’s pretty cool. It’s the what’s it called, not the stage fright camera, but the one where, as you move, the camera follows you around center stage. Center Stage, that’s what it is. Okay? So the baseline iMac has two Thunderbolt four ports and two USB ports. And the more expensive one has four Thunderbolt four ports. Now, when we get to the Mac Mini. So the Mac Mini was Tuesday, and this is cool. The Mac Mini has looked like this since, I believe 2007 this this square form factor, seven and a half inches square. And the new Mac Mini, they missed, calling it the Mac Nano, which is what they should have done, right? Because it’s about the size of an Apple TV, but thicker. It’s really cute. And I have a two year old Mac Mini that I use as a file server for a bunch of things. I’m not going to replace it, but the smallness of this Mac Mini is really cool. It has three ports on the back, two on the front, USB C ports, so Thunderbolt and or USBC, depending it has two different processes, the M4 and the M4 Pro. You can pack it full of RAM. You can go up to two terabytes of storage, which, at the base price of the Mac Mini of $600.02 terabytes of storage, it’s an additional 800 and so you’re getting up into, you know, a high price the Mac Mini, if it’s maxed out with the M4 Pro, it’s good competition for the Mac Studio, which is still with the M2 Pro, Max or Ultra. And I saw some benchmarks saying that they’re pretty close, which suggests that the MAC studio is going to be updated soon, maybe not till next year, but they need to have a more powerful Mac. But that Mac Mini is so cool. It’s so small.
Josh Long 22:43
Yeah, it’s really an incredible machine, like they were talking about how, if you want, you know, this level of performance in a PC, you would need a tower that’s literally 20 times the size of the Mac Mini, which is pretty funny to see them side by side in the presentation the Mac Mini really was an impressive product announcement, by the way. So you mentioned the old one was like seven and a half by seven and a half length, width, and the the new one is five by five, so significantly smaller. Now, one thing that people are poking fun at Apple for is putting the power button on the bottom of the unit. I see people both attacking apple and defending apple. For this decision, my personal take on it is that was kind of a weird place to put a button. You know, imagine that you want to have your Mac Mini kind of out of the way. Maybe you’re not running it as a server. Maybe you don’t leave your computer on 24/7 and you just want to have it kind of out of the way. And now you kind of have to have it somewhere where you can reach under, lift it up, and press the button on the bottom of it, and which makes it a little bit awkward to turn on.
Kirk McElhearn 23:56
Okay, I’m gonna go the other way and say that this is a totally logical place to put it the bottom of the Mac Mini. The center of the bottom is round, so the edges are a little bit elevated right and it’s the same on the current Mac Mini to allow air flow to go through it. And the button is on one of the corners. It’s under the front right corner, so all you have to do is put your finger under it, lift it about a half an inch and press the button. I see people on social media saying, Oh, you have to press the button to turn it on and turn it off. You don’t turn off a Mac by pressing the power button. You go to the Apple menu and choose shut down. You don’t press the power button at all. It’s not a big deal. People were complaining that they updated the Magic Mouse to use USB C, and that they kept the charging thing on the bottom. I mean, come on, there’s more things to worry about in the world than that.
Josh Long 24:39
That was amusing, though. I mean, because people have been saying for years, like, really, I have to turn my mouse over and plug into it on the bottom to charge it. So that means I can’t even use it while it’s charging.
Kirk McElhearn 24:49
Yeah, it takes 10 minutes to charge. They charge so fast. Now, all right, I want to move on to the MacBook Pro, because this is the one with the biggest, I want to say the biggest change, because there are. Are three chips, M4, M4, pro and M4 Max. The usual exercise of costing out the top model, with all of the ram and storage and everything, comes to over $7,000 they have a nano textured glass, which is available on the iMac and the MacBook Pro notes, I think it’s $100 extra. This is a non glossy glass right now I’m on my iMac, and whether it’s night or day, I don’t get glare on the glass because I know to not sit with the window behind me, right? And that’s the thing. The Nano texture would be good on a laptop when you might be working outside, and you don’t have that kind of option for the iMac. I don’t see that as being really useful. They’ve had this on the iPad Pro for a while, and a lot of people like it, but it does dull the screen a little bit. In any case, the M4 M4 Pro and M4 Max are the next step in the M4 family. Notice that the iMac only gets the plane M4 I don’t think we’ll ever see an iMac pro again, but what we’re going to get next is what the M4 Ultra Pro max on the Mac Studio whenever that comes out, if it follows with Apple’s previous chip strategy. So these are basically the same Max as previously. We talked about a week that happened a couple weeks ago, and they’re the same just with the M4 processors, and they start with 16 gigs of RAM. All, as we said earlier, they all do. And other than that, it’s not that much different. It’s a faster processor, and everything else is pretty much the same. There’s no change in design. There’s no change in case they come in. Let’s see black and silver as usual. And that’s about it.
Josh Long 26:37
Okay, but the performance of these M4 chips is really impressive, like, if you’re looking at, you know, compared to previous generations, I’m surprised that Apple is still able to squeeze this much performance from generation to generation. And Kirk, you pointed out, maybe some of this has to do with the fabrication process. And they’re using, you know, three nanometer technology now, and so maybe they won’t be able to go any smaller than that for, you know, some period of time. And so maybe we won’t be getting m fives right around the corner, or maybe they won’t be quite the jump in performance as like, say, M3 to M4 but we’ll, see in time. Just one interesting data point on this is that they mentioned that the M Force CPU core is the fastest core in any processor. That’s pretty impressive.
Kirk McElhearn 27:31
I want to mention one thing that Apple’s done on the website, and I don’t think they’ve done this previously for computers. If you scroll down on the page with the iMac, you can compare your current iMac to the new iMac with M4 right? And so to give you three options in a menu, the 2019 Intel, 21.5 inch iMac, the 27 inch intel from 2020 and the M1 24 inch from 2021 so I choose that which is the one I have, and it says up to 70% faster on everyday tasks, 12 megapixel center stage camera with desk view, etc. It’s the first time I recall that they’re giving you an option to select your existing computer to see what the difference is and what’s interesting here. And I saw someone in social media who said, and I quote, bra, why are they comparing it to the M1 iMac when we’ve already got an M3 it’s because people don’t upgrade I max every year. It’s the three year or four or five year cycle is where the upgrade goes. And so they’re showing I max from 2019, to 2021, I think that’s a really good way to market this, instead of comparing it just to last year. So you’ll see, for your particular model, how much an upgrade will mean to you. There’s one more thing to point out, Lightning is dead. So the new iMac comes with a USB C keyboard and a USB C mouse or trackpad. So Lightning is dead. Finally, when I got my new iMac, I can get rid of the Lightning cable. The only thing I still have with Lightning is my AirPods Max.
Josh Long 28:59
Well, there wasn’t just Lightning free. Now we also have more Thunderbolt the faster Thunderbolt port. So Thunderbolt and Lightning, we got all kinds of things going on, but Thunderbolt five, just to quickly mention this, because I think this is really cool. The Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro, not the iMac, have a thunderbolt five port on them, which is even faster. And by the way, the cable is even cheaper. If we have time, maybe we’ll talk about that next week. But I think this is a pretty cool upgrade too, especially if you need fast data transfer speed, particularly if you’re copying files from one Mac to another. This is a really great way to do it.
Kirk McElhearn 29:34
Okay, that’s enough for this week until next week. Josh, stay secure.
Josh Long 29:37
All right, stay secure.
Voice Over 29:40
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn and Josh long to get every weekly episode. Be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review, links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the [email protected] the Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software intego.com.
About Kirk McElhearn
Kirk McElhearn writes about Apple products and more on his blog Kirkville.
He is co-host of the Intego Mac Podcast, as well as several other podcasts, and is a regular contributor to The Mac Security Blog, TidBITS, and several other websites and publications.
Kirk has written more than two dozen books, including Take Control books about Apple’s media apps, Scrivener, and LaunchBar.
Follow him on Twitter at @mcelhearn.
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