Author: James Galbraith

The NEC MultiSync EA244UHD is a 24-inch, 4K desktop monitor. Priced around $1350, the EA244UHD may be expensive, but when connected to a new Mac Pro over Mini DisplayPort, its pixel-doubled resolution can provide you the desktop “retina display” experience not available from an Apple display.

The EA244UHD is the third 3840 by 2160 (4K) monitor we’ve seen in the lab, and at 23.8-inches diagonally, its also the third different size we’ve seen. The previously reviewed Asus PB287Q is a 28-inch monitor and the Sharp PN-K321 measures a massive 32-inches, diagonally.

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Supermegaultragroovy’s Capo is a great tool to help guitarists learn new songs. With versions available for both Mac and iOS, Capo allows users to easily learn songs by altering a song’s speed without changing its pitch, generating chords for the song, and more. The recently released Capo touch 2.0 brings the Mac app’s innovative chord recognition features to iOS for the first time.

New to both the Mac and iOS versions of Capo is iCloud syncing of your project files. You can open a song in Capo 3.1 on your Mac, make edits to the tempo, pitch, and chord choices, then close the app. If iCloud syncing is enabled, Capo touch will display those songs in its Projects window and allow you to open and continue editing.

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Last week, Apple updated its Retina MacBook Pro line, and while the new models are identical on the outside to their 13- and 15-inch predecessors, released late last year, the “Mid 2014” models feature processors that are just a little bit faster. As modest as these internal improvements are, they do provide more performance bang for the buck.

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The NEC MultiSync EA274WMi is a 27-inch widescreen desktop monitor that uses high-quality IPS panels, LED backlights, and an anti-glare screen. This 2560 by 1440 resolution monitor connects to your Mac or PC via DisplayPort, HDMI, DVD-D, or VGA and offers a four-port USB hub for peripherals. You can also connect two sources to the display and use NEC’s Picture By Picture feature to view both simultaneously. The display has built-in speakers as well as a port for plugging in headphones—handy features, especially for people using the EA274WMi with tower computers. The EA274WMi doesn’t offer a DisplayPort Out connection, which is a nice-to-have-but-rare feature that allows you to daisy chain monitors.

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I think all Mac users can agree: Thunderbolt is both fast and flexible. Not only is it capable of 10 Gbps of bi-directional throughput on each of the dual channels in its original form and 20 Gbps max on a combined channel in Thunderbolt 2, it can also transport PCIe, USB 3.0, FireWire, Mini DisplayPort and gigabit ethernet data. But that’s not all: you can also daisy-chain up to six Thunderbolt devices per Thunderbolt port on your Mac. With six available Thunderbolt 2 ports on the new Mac Pro, that adds up to a plethora of possible peripherals.

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Though we call them late 2013 Mac Pros, it took us until March of this year to receive our new entry-level Mac Pro. Apple released the redesigned Mac Pro near the end of last December, but high demand quickly pushed the systems’ estimated ship date to February 2014 and beyond. At $2999, the least-expensive Mac Pro features a single quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor running at 3.7GHz, 256GB of PCIe connected flash storage, 12GB of RAM, and dual AMD D500 graphics with 2GB of VRAM each.

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The HP Z Display Z27i is a 27-inch professional desktop monitor with 2560 by 1440 native resolution. It features a high-quality IPS screen, LED backlighting, and an anti-glare that many people—including myself— find desirable.

The Z27i also offers far greater ergonomic flexibility than most monitors, providing height adjustment, tilt, and the ability to rotate into portrait orientation. Other niceties include four downstream USB 3.0 ports and plenty of connection options such as VGA, DVI-D, and HDMI. Though the Z27i does support DisplayPort, it does not offer the DisplayPort out connection necessary to allow for that spec’s multi-streaming feature that lets you daisy chain monitors.

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It took some time, but Macworld Lab finally got a stock configuration Mac Pro. This new Mac Pro has a single 6-core Xeon processor running at 3.5GHz, with 256GB of flash memory, 16GB of RAM, and dual AMD D500 graphics. With a $3999 price tag, it’s $1000 less than our previously tested custom Mac Pro, and this stock model held up well in our benchmarks.

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The Pegasus2 R6 from Promise is the first Thunderbolt 2 peripheral to make its way into the Macworld Lab. It’s a six-drive 12TB hardware RAID box and can be purchased from the Apple Store for $2299.

The Pegasus2 R6 we received has six 7200-rpm hard drives with 2TB of capacity each, the same capacity as the first Pegasus we tested. The Pegasus2 is a hardware RAID that comes preconfigured as RAID 5 array, but can easily be changed to to RAID 0, 1, 10, or JBOD using the included software. The Pegasus2 has a black aluminum case to better match the design of the new Mac Pro and has two Thunderbolt 2 ports to allow for daisy chaining up to six compatible devices. Thunderbolt products with just one port, must sit at the end of a daisy chain, and having two ports gives you more flexibility, and have two Thunderbolt 2 ports means that you can connect more Thunderbolt 2 devices.

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When Apple released the new Retina MacBook Pro last October, it also marked the debut of Thunderbolt 2 in an Apple product. But with no Thunderbolt 2 peripherals available at the time, we here in the Macworld Lab were left to test these new systems using older device using the original Thunderbolt.

The wait is over. The Pegasus2 R6 from Promise is the first Thunderbolt 2 peripheral to make its way into the Macworld Lab. It’s a six-drive, 12TB hardware RAID box available from the Apple Store for $2299. You might remember that Promise was also first out of the Thunderbolt gate with its original Pegasus line of multiple drive RAID boxes.

The Pegasus2 R6 model we received has six 7200 RPM hard drives with 2TB of capacity each, the same as the first Pegasus we reviewed. The Pegasus2 is a hardware RAID and can be configured easily to RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or JBOD.

The new model has two Thunderbolt 2 ports to allow for daisy chaining up to six compatible devices. Some Thunderbolt products have just one port, meaning that it must sit at the end of the chain. Having two ports gives you more flexibility and have two Thunderbolt 2 ports means that you can connect more Thunderbolt 2 devices.

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Most of the products Apple announced at WWDC won’t ship until later this year, but the new MacBook Air models are here. The MacBook Air didn’t undergo a dramatic, Mac Pro-like redesign—all of the changes to the MacBook Air are hidden under the hood. Even compared to last year’s MacBook Air—which brought Thunderbolt and USB 3.0—this new Air is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Mike Homnick

Haswell inside

The biggest change in this iteration of Apple’s most portable of portables is the inclusion of Intel’s latest generation of Core processors, code named Haswell. These fourth-generation Core processors replace the Ivy Bridge processors in last year’s MacBook Air. The Haswell processors require less power than Ivy Bridge, which improves battery life in portable computers like the MacBook Air.

Haswell also includes new integrated graphics in the form of the Intel HD Graphics 5000, which Apple says provides 40 percent higher performance than the HD Graphics 4000 used in Ivy Bridge processors.

The new MacBook Airs all support the new 802.11ac wireless networking standard, and the flash storage has also been improved, with higher capacities on the 11-inch models and faster performance across the line.

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