Jeff is the head of video content production for 9to5. He joined 9to5Mac in 2016, producing videos, walkthroughs, how-tos, written tutorials, and reviews. He takes pride in explaining things simply, clearly, and concisely. Jeff’s videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times by people seeking to learn more about today’s tech. Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube to catch Jeff’s latest videos.
iOS Decoded is Jeff’s flagship video series that breaks down what’s new in iOS betas, including behind-the-scenes deep dives into undiscovered features and exclusive details on the iOS roadmap.
Jeff also produces a weekly podcast, alongside co-host Fernando Silva, entitled 9to5Mac Overtime. A video-first podcast, 9to5Mac Overtime airs weekly on our YouTube channel, but can also be enjoyed in audio form via Apple Podcasts, or your podcast app of choice.
Elgato, the now Corsair-owned company famous for its gaming products, has produced its second Thunderbolt 3-enabled dock, aptly named the Elgato Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock.
Just as its name states, the Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock, available in stores on September 13 for $150, is designed to be small and portable. It even features a built-in Thunderbolt 3 cable that hides away when not in use.
Although it features such I/O options as USB-A and Ethernet, the main purpose of the Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock is for connecting up to two 4K displays at 60 Hz. Watch our hands-on video for the details. Expand Expanding Close
Earlier this year during its education-focused event at a Chicago high school, Apple revealed the sixth-generation iPad with a base price of only $329. This was the first non-Pro iPad to support the Apple Pencil. Instead of creating a cheaper Apple Pencil or dropping the price of the existing version, Apple lent its technology to Logitech, and thus the $49 Crayon digital pencil was born.
After initially only being available to school districts, today marks the news that the Logitech Crayon will be made available to the general public, meaning it’ll be sold inside Apple Stores and online. Starting September 12, the same day of Apple’s upcoming press event, the Logitech Crayon will go on sale at Apple stores, and Logitech’s website. Afterwards, in October, the Crayon will be available at other retail locations.
How does the Logitech Crayon compare with the Apple Pencil for 6th-generation iPad users? Watch our video unboxing and review for the full scoop. Expand Expanding Close
Last year I reviewed the Sonnet Fusion Thunderbolt 3 SSD, and at the time it was the fastest bus-powered external SSD that I had ever tried. But there’s now an external drive that eclipses the performance of the Fusion SSD, and it’s made by Samsung, a company with a long reputation of producing fast, reliable SSD storage.
The precursors to the X5 — Samsung’s T3 and T5 portable SSD — are still extremely popular products for those looking for a reliable and fast external storage solution, but thanks to the prevalence of Thunderbolt 3, the X5 is turning up the speed rating significantly with up to a whopping 2,800 MB/s read speeds and 2300 MB/s write.
Is the Samsung X5 Portable SSD, with its supercar-inspired looks, worth its rather hefty price of admission? Watch our hands-on unboxing and review for the answer. Expand Expanding Close
After being teased on video late last year, Affinity Publisher, from the same team that brought you Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, is now available in public beta. The public beta comes a few months ahead of the initial public release, but developer Serif is allowing users to take it for a free test drive ahead of launch. Expand Expanding Close
When you think of Thunderbolt 3 accessories, there are only a handful of companies as prolific as Akitio. The California-based company has released numerous Thunderbolt 3-centric products aimed at Mac users, and recently sent us its latest offering — a dock headlined by its 10GbE connectivity.
In addition to the 10GbE connectivity, the dock also features a speedy UHS-II-enabled SD Card 4.0 reader, and a rare CFast 2.0 slot. Where does the Akitio Thunder3 Dock Pro fit into a Mac user’s workflow? Watch our video review for our hands-on synopsis. Expand Expanding Close
Piggybacking off the success of its wildly popular T3 and T5 series of portable SSDs, Samsung today officially announced a new portable X-series NVMe SSD featuring Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. The Samsung Portable SSD X5, the company’s first portable NVMe external SSD with Thunderbolt 3, promises eyebrow-raising read speeds of up to 2,800 MB/s, 5.2 times faster than SSDs based on SATA III. Expand Expanding Close
AirPods are one of my favorite Apple products to come along in quite some time, and I use them every single day. I especially enjoy using them while traveling, because they’re completely devoid of wires, have all-day battery life, seamless device pairing, and are easy to stow away.
I was skeptical during their initial unveiling, but after using AirPods for the last year and half, they’ve become one of my favorite tech products of all time. Next to my iPhone, AirPods are easily my favorite tech-related travel companion.
Whenever I complain about how companies tend to ship 0.5-meter cables with their Thunderbolt 3-enabled products, I sometimes encounter pushback reminding me that longer cables noticeably hinder performance. But is that really the case? Expand Expanding Close
The CalDigit Thunderbolt 3 Mini Dock is a dock made specifically for connecting to two 4K displays simultaneously. Available in HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.2 versions, this bus-powered dock makes it easy to connect your MacBook Pro to a 4K monitor. Watch our hands-on video for more details. Expand Expanding Close
Back to the Mac is a series focused specifically on the Mac, including hardware, accessories, I/O, software, and more.
On this week’s episode of Back to the Mac, we go nuts with an eGPU setup featuring two Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 650 units mated with a pair of workstation-class 16GB AMD WX 9100 GPUs.
As we’ve touched on before, if you’re a DaVinci Resolve user, or if you use any other app that can wield multiple GPUs at the same time, such a setup can put up some noteworthy numbers. Watch the latest episode of Back to the Mac for more details. Expand Expanding Close
Lacie’s Rugged RAID Pro is an external portable RAID-enabled HDD that’s primarily aimed at photo and video editors who often find themselves on-the-go. Donning an unmistakable bright orange shock-resistant rubber sleeve, it fits right in with the Seagate-owned company’s other storage-centric options.
On paper, the Lacie Rugged RAID Pro won’t light up the scoreboards. Even in the RAID 0 performance mode, it features a rather pedestrian 250 MB/s max read speed. But where the drive lacks in speed, it makes up for in the sheer amount of storage offered — 4TB — stuffed inside a rugged chassis. It also comes with a feature that sets it apart from other bus-powered external drives on the market: a built-in UHS-II SD Card reader — extremely handy for MacBook Pro users.
Does the Lacie Rugged RAID offer enough to make it worthy of consideration? Have a look at our hands-on video review for the details. Expand Expanding Close
As a MacBook Pro user, having access to external SSD storage is important given the price of build-to-order SSD upgrades. For example, a 4TB SSD upgrade alone on the 2018 MacBook Pro can set you back $3400, more than the price of the laptop itself.
With this in mind, such upgrades can’t be reasonably justified for many users, which means relying on external storage where necessary. Thankfully, there is no shortage of external storage solutions for the MacBook Pro, with many of them featuring bus-powered USB-C connectivity for plug and play functionality.
Now that new quad-core and hexa-core MacBook Pro models are here, I’ve been eager to see how they pair up with an AMD Vega 64-powered eGPU setup. Specifically, I’d like to see how such a setup compares with the recently released Blackmagic eGPU.
A new iOS 12 developer beta has been released, and with it comes a handful of new changes and features. Watch our hands-on video as we walk through what’s new. Expand Expanding Close
The 2018 revision of the MacBook Pro is here, and as usual it arrives in two sizes, a 13- and 15-inch version. On the surface, Apple’s new laptops look exactly the same as previous generations, but there are significant upgrades to be found under the hood.
Most importantly, a new 3rd-generation butterfly switch keyboard has been introduced, and Apple notes in its press materials that it results in a quieter typing experience. Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be the only benefit of the new keyboard, as an internal repair document shows that a new membrane has been put in place to help prevent debris ingress.
Apple’s Mid-2018 MacBook Pro establishes two firsts for its laptops: quad-core CPUs on all 13-inch models, and hexa-core CPUs on all 15-inch models. These changes are made possible thanks to Intel’s 8th generation Coffee Lake architecture, of which the Core i5, i7 and i9 CPUs found in every new MacBook Pro are card-carrying members.
Another first for the MacBook Pro? DDR4 memory is now standard on 15-inch models. This allows buyers to finally, if desired, configure this machine with up to 32GB of memory.
While the MacBook Pro didn’t undergo a major new physical redesign, there are quite a few notable changes in this revision that will extend real benefits to users. Watch our hands-on video walkthrough for the details. Expand Expanding Close
Alongside the new MacBook Pro launch and Blackmagic eGPU, Apple also released a new Leather Sleeve for its flagship laptop, albeit to significantly less fanfare and/or controversy. The MacBook Pro Leather Sleeve follows in the footsteps of similar leather-based offerings for the 12-inch MacBook and iPad Pro.
Comprised out of high-quality European leather, the MacBook Pro Leather sleeve is available in one of three colors for both 13- and 15-inch models. Should you consider dropping $179 (13-inch) or $199 to protect your MacBook Pro in style? Expand Expanding Close
When it comes to rolling out a new network standard like 5G, there are a lot of moving parts involved, and just as many obstacles. One of the biggest challenges to the upcoming move to 5G cellular technology is producing eligible millimeter wave antennas that are small enough that can fit inside modern smartphones. Qualcomm has been hard at work at producing an antenna module, the QTM052, capable of operating at the high frequencies required for 5G. The production of such a small antenna means that one of the biggest hurdles to making next-generation 5G technology a reality has been cleared. Expand Expanding Close
It seems like there’s always some controversy surrounding new Apple hardware. These devices are some of the most popular in the world, which means that they’re bound to get closely scrutinized, perhaps more so than any other tech product on earth.
With that said, there’s a brewing controversy over CPU throttling in the new MacBook Pro. Of course, throttling on a laptop as thin as the MacBook Pro is to be expected, but issue has been taken with the amount of throttling present in Apple’s high-end 6-core Core i9-powered machine.
The scrutinization is warranted, especially when you consider that the least-expensive Core i9 MacBook Pro sells for $2,700. If you opt to max out the GPU, RAM, and SSD storage, the price quickly balloons to nearly $7000 after tax.
Just how bad is CPU throttling on the 2018 MacBook Pro? Let’s do a brief export test with Final Cut Pro X to investigate further. Expand Expanding Close
The Blackmagic eGPU is an external graphics enclosure sold exclusively (for the time being) at the Apple Store. It’s a notable product for several of reasons. First and foremost, it’s the first time that Apple has sold an external graphics enclosure in its store. This makes sense, considering that macOS was recently upgraded with official eGPU support in version 10.13.4 back in the spring.
Another reason to take note is that the Blackmagic eGPU is the first external graphics chassis to include official support for the LG UltraFine 5K display (hands-on), a monitor that Apple recommends as a replacement for its now discontinued Thunderbolt Display.
But perhaps the most appealing feature of the Blackmagic eGPU is its silence. Blackmagic advertises its ultra quiet status right on the product packaging, and it’s not joking, this enclosure is extremely low noise.
With a launch alongside highly anticipated new MacBook Pro hardware, the Blackmagic eGPU is now available exclusively at Apple Stores. Is this the eGPU that you should consider for your Mac? Watch our hands-on video for the details. Expand Expanding Close
Good news for those of you who can’t wait to get your hands on Apple’s just-announced MacBook Pro. First shipments of Apple’s refreshed laptops begin today, with expedited orders slated to arrive as early as tomorrow. Expand Expanding Close
