Jan 17, 2020  So, having a Mac and wondering how to turn your ordinary life into an iLife with cool and exciting must have Mac apps. Although, some of the most predominate apps are initially installed in Mac (such as safari, mail.app etc), still your Mac destiny need some gentle push with these must have Mac.

1. Most Expensive App For Macbook Pro
2. Most Expensive App On A Mac Laptop
3. Most Expensive App On A Mac Tv
4. Most Expensive App On A Mac Pro

Mac OS X is an incredible operating system, far superior to Windows. Apple is designed to be secure and well-optimized for the hardware, but also elegant, simple and user-friendly. They thought about everything that they put in it and the results are spectacular. It comes built in with an armada of apps which are incredibly useful to the users and most app are really cherished. However some are completely ignored by users, even though they are extremely useful and could make their lives much easier. Check out these best Mac OS X apps you might have missed:

10. Digital Color Meter

For a designer, color is everything. So how great would it be if you could have an app which could tell you the color of a specific pixel on your screen? Well, it turns out that you do have one. Digital Color Meter allows you to know what the color is of a specific selection on your screen. You can choose how big or small the area is, with the smallest that the area can go being a single pixel. The app which is one of the best Mac OS X apps, will allow you to lock both the x and y positions of the selector and also to view the color in native values, sRGB, generic RGB, Adobe RGB or L*a*b*. It will even allow you to view the red, green and blue values as a percentage or as a hexadecimal value and once you have found the value of the color, you can then choose to send to it to the clipboard as either text or an image. You might wanna check out Top 10 Best iPhone Apps for Students.

9. Grapher

Programs which allow you to draw complex 2D and 3D graphs are usually thought to come with a big price tag. Well, not any more. Grapher gives you all the power of programs like Autograph but for free. It’s definitely among the best Mac OS X apps. You still have complete control over the axis and the graph layout, you still have the ability to create any graph known to man and you still have a wide range of examples built in, but the interface is simple and user friendly and all of it is completely free. It doesn’t leave out half of the features because you’re not giving money for the app, you get ALL of the features that you get from competitor apps but for a competitive price.

8. Stickies

Most people probably think that Stickies is a bit of a joke. It isn’t. It is one of the best Mac OS X apps. It is great to remember anything that you need to refer to often. You can use them to remember important information for your day to day use of your Mac, developers may often use them to keep certain snippets of code that they need to use often or designers may use them as mood boards for inspiration.

The best part is the fact that they are fully customization. You can get to choose the color of the note, the color of the text, the font of the text, the size of the text, the kern of the text and also the baseline of the text. You can add in images and use the markup feature to draw over them and you can choose to make the note window translucent, but best of all, you can choose to make it a floating window. This means that even if another window is in focus, the note will still stay above that window. That makes a lot of difference.

7. Terminal

Many people would cry at even the thought of using the Terminal, but actually it isn’t as scary as you may think. The commands are simple and very easy to learn and if you can’t remember one, you can look it up or keep some in Stickies. This app adds so much more control to the user. Using it allows you to customize your Mac so much. You could show hidden files, change the speed that the dock appears, alter file permissions, make screenshots to default to .jpg instead of .png, scan your network and so much more. It really allows you to turn your Mac into a personal computer.

The best part is that because Mac OS X was built on top of UNIX/Linux, it uses the same terminal, which has all of the same commands in it. This means that lots of you may even already know lots of commands for the Terminal but also it means that there is so much support online for those who might not be experienced with UNIX/Linux.

6. Activity Monitor

Most people will be familiar to Windows’s Task Manager. It’s a very useful program for people who know what they’re doing with it. It allows you to view all of the processes running on your device, so amongst other things, you can see what is slowing down your machine the most. Activity Monitor ranks among the best Mac OS X apps. It gives you all of the features of Task Manager but with a user interface that is much more refined and much friendlier to the user. You can see how much of the CPU each process is using, how much of the RAM each process is using, how much energy each process is using, how many bytes each process is reading and writing to the disk and how many bytes and packets each process is sending and receiving over the network.

However, unlike how Task Manager shows the processes with very long and complicated names, most of which don’t make any sense, Activity Monitor shows the processes with much less complicated names and if the process is from an application, it shows that application name and icon. This means that all you see is either the name of an app or the name of a system process which Apple has appropriately named to make it very easy to work out what it does. There is even an option to change the application icon in the dock into a live updating graph about either the CPU usage, the CPU history, the Network Usage or the Disk Activity.

5. QuickTime Player

Most people already use QuickTime Player if they want to play a video on their Mac or Windows PC. However, there is a lot more that you can do with QuickTime Player on Mac. The big thing is that it can record. You can record audio and video using either the built-in camera or microphone or with external ones. Even better, you can record both the screen of your Mac and your iOS device with audio at the same time as well. That is a big feature which people have been struggling to do for years and now you can do it completely legally and completely free. Not bad for a built-in program is it?

4. Time Machine

This allows you to back-up all of your files and settings to a Time Capsule or any other Time Machine supported external wireless storage. It automatically backs-up any file that you update in the background to the Time Capsule but it makes sure that the Time Capsule keeps all versions of a document so you can choose a specific version to restore a file from. The best thing about this app is the fact that it is really easy to use and how it integrates very well with the whole operating system. For example, if you ever wiped your Mac or got a new one, you can very easily point to a backup on the Time Machine and it will very quickly restore your Mac to a mirror image of the state that it was in a couple of hours ago. Another useful list for you – 10 Best iOS 7 Apps That Look Great on Device.

3. Script Editor

Every single thing on Mac OS X can be operated in two ways. They can either be operated by the keyboard and trackpad or by something called AppleScript. AppleScript is a very simple and easy scripting language which can be used to automate time consuming tasks on your Mac. Many of you will be quite intimidated by AppleScript, but is what we call a very high level scripting language. The means that it is incredibly close to human language so it is very easy to understand. For example, this following line of code just gets the name of the open Finder window that was last used i.e. Document or Desktop – ‘tell application “Finder” to get the name of front Finder window’.

In case it isn’t obvious yet, Script Editor is a program which is among the best Mac OS X apps and which you can use to create and run AppleScripts or if you prefer JavaScript. You could use many other programs to create an AppleScript but there probably aren’t many programs which can run them.

2. Automator

Automator allows you to create thing called workflows which are similar to AppleScripts. However the difference between an Automator workflow and an AppleScript is that AppleScripts require you to open Script Editor and to run the script in that but workflows can be run when an action triggers it e.g. an item in the secondary click menu. This means that not only can you use Automator to automate time consuming tasks like AppleScript does, but you can also use Automator to customise your version of the operating system.

However, another benefit of Automator is that instead of having to code the workflows (which you can still choose to do if you want), you can create them by using a drag and drop interface and because there are so many actions to put together and because there is support for third party apps, it means that you can create just about anything with Automator. This pne ranks thrid in our list of best Mac OS X apps.

1. Spotlight Search

After Apple revamped it in OS X Yosemite, Spotlight Search has been the most useful feature on the Mac, one of the best Mac OS X apps but the tragic thing is that most people just ignore it as they think it is just a big faff. However, after you start to get used to it though, Spotlight becomes a much quicker way to boot up apps and documents, to find the definition of a word, to find a certain iMessage or E-mail, to find a contact, to find news about a specific topic, to find a place in maps, to find an event in a calendar or to search the web. Spotlight Search becomes especially quick if you turn on the keyboard shortcut for it in settings (⌘Space).

In case you are a great fan of mobile video game, check this out – Top 10 Collectible RPGs for Android and iOS.

10 Best Mac OS X Apps

1. Spotlight Search
2. Automator
3. Script Editor
4. Time Machine
5. QuickTime Player
6. Activity Monitor
7. Terminal
8. Stickies
9. Grapher
10. Digital Color Meter

Written by – Davs Grove

When Apple announced the new, more powerful GPU configuration for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, we reached out to ask about performance. How did it compare to the previous top-of-the line model that we tested in December? Apple’s response: test it out for yourself.

A few days and a little bit of loan paperwork later, we were the proud (and very temporary) owners of the most expensive MacBook Pro Apple makes: a beast of a machine with a 9th-Gen 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9 processor, 64GB of RAM, a whopping 8TB of storage, and the new-and-improved AMD Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB of specialized HBM2 high bandwidth memory.

Price tag? An eye watering $6,700 if you opt for the fully-loaded 8TB version. But even with a more reasonable 1TB of SSD storage, you’re still looking at $4,500—that’s $600 more than the previous top-of-the-line model with the Radeon 5500M and 8GB of VRAM.

Which begs the question… is that $600 upgrade worth it? And what does $6,700 worth of Apple laptop get you? We took Apple’s advice to heart, and tested it out for yourselves.

Design, Build Quality, etc.

I won’t belabor this point since, aesthetically speaking, the 16-inch MacBook Pro in my lap right now is no different from the 16-inch MacBook Pro we reviewed in December. Key points are all the same:

• The fit and finish of the computer is fantastic, as we’ve come to expect from the aluminum unibody MacBooks over the years.
• The updated keyboard is great, with twice the travel of the notorious butterfly keys and far less likely to be brought to its clickity clackity knees by a errant crumb.
• The new 16-inch display is great, with the same great color accuracy, 500 nit brightness, and smaller bezels that look far more modern than even the newest 13-inch MBP.
• The speakers are the best you’ll find in laptop, period. Seriously, you have to hear them to believe it.
• The 100Wh battery is the largest ever in a MacBook, and helps to deliver all-day battery life despite the bigger screen.
• The Touch Bar is still lame but it’s gotten less and less buggy, and at least they brought back the physical ESC key.
• There is still no SD card slot or any other I/O other than four Thunderbolt 3 ports and a headphone jack.

All in all, nobody is going to pick up this laptop and be disappointed by the build quality, the display quality, or any part of the design. But we already knew that. What we want to find out is just how much more powerful this 2020 model with the Radeon 5600M really is…

Performance

We ran the new 2020 model through the same battery of photography-specific tests that we run every laptop we’ve reviewed so far: Puget Systems’ PugetBench Photoshop benchmark, a Lightroom import test, a Lightroom export test, and just for good measure we ran a Blackmagic Disk Speed test to see how fast the built-in storage really is.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Disk Speed Test

We didn’t run this test on our previous 16-inch MacBook Pro, but the results from this one were promising. As you can see from the screenshot below, the SSDs inside the 16-inch MacBook Pro are very fast—more than fast enough for all your creative needs:

For comparison’s sake, here’s the same disk speed test run on my one-generation-old, base-model 13-inch MacBook Pro:

And again on Microsoft’s brand new Surface Book 3 that we reviewed last month:

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro (review here) showed the same results as the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, so it looks like Apple has upgraded their SSDs in the latest iteration of both product lines. Rest assured, they’re top of the line.

Lightroom Import

For anything that’s primarily CPU based—like Lightroom Import and Export—you can expect very little (if any) difference between the 16-inch MBP we tested in December and this more powerful model. Both use the same exact CPU, and as expected, both perform equally well. As a reminder, our import test involves importing 110 61MP Sony A7R IV files and 150 100MP PhaseOne XF files, while creating standard previews.

In the charts below, we’ve also included our results from the top-of-the-line 13-inch MacBook Pro for comparison. That smaller computer has no integrated GPU and uses a 10th-gen 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 CPU, but you can see why we called it “surprisingly powerful” in our review:

Lightroom Export

Same disclaimer applies as above: we didn’t expect the new GPU to help with this test, and we were proven right. As a reminder, our export test involves exporting those same Sony and PhaseOne files after applying heavy global edits—we export as 100% JPEGs (sRGB), 16-bit TIFFs (AdobeRGB), and DNGs with Medium JPEG previews.

Photoshop Benchmark

This is where things get interesting. As of our most recent PugetBench benchmarks, the 16-inch MacBook Pro we reviewed in December was still the highest-scoring laptop we’d tested. That includes the 2020 Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition, which we’re in the process of reviewing right now (stay tuned…).

It was the highest scoring. The Radeon 5600M helped the newer computer blow the previous model out of the park. More importantly, it did so in ways that will matter to some photographers and retouchers.

Here’s the top score from the “old” 16-inch MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and a Radeon 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory:

And heres the top score from the “most expensive” model with 64GB of RAM and the Radeon 5600M with 8GB of specialized HMB2 memory:

Not only were the GPU, Filter, and Photomerge scores—and therefore, the Overall score—all higher, look closely at the times for GPU accelerated Filters. Everything that’s GPU dependent/GPU accelerated saw a significant improvement: Smart Sharpen, Field Blur, Tilt-Shift Blur, and Iris Blur in particular saw a noticeable speed bumps.

As a bonus, the maximum 64GB of RAM in the new computer seems to have improved the Photomerge tests as well, which both saw between a 5% and 15% speed bump. We know that’s not GPU accelerated (see here) and that’s backed up by the fact that there’s no difference between the score we got with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro (no GPU, 32GB of RAM) and the previous 16-inch MacBook Pro we tested (older GPU, 32GB of RAM).

The charts below show the average Overall and Category scores, based on 5 consecutive runs of the benchmark. The new computer didn’t manage to break the 900 barrier, but we have a new champ:

Conclusion

Back in December when we compared the 16-inch MacBook Pro against the 2019 Razer Blade 15 Studio Edition, we pointed out that a more powerful GPU didn’t necessarily mean better performance for photographers. That’s doubly relevant when the GPU we were talking about was an NVIDIA Quadro model, which is really designed for CAD work and 3D modeling tasks, not photo editing.

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The chance to test out a maxed-out MacBook Pro put this theory of ours to the test, and it was mostly confirmed: where photo editing is concerned, a more powerful GPU really only impacts very specific stills tasks that companies like Adobe have bothered to properly optimize/accelerate.

The question you have to ask yourself is: what kind of work are you doing?

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If you’re making use of Photoshop’s GPU accelerated filters a lot, the extra $600 you have to spend on the AMD Radeon 5600M model might be worthwhile—it actually does make a real-world difference, and would probably make an even bigger difference for GPU accelerated video editing in Adobe Premiere. For the rest of us, we can spend that cash maxing out the RAM and CPU instead. That, combined with 1TB of storage and the lower-end Radeon 5500M GPU comes out to $3,800.

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Say what you will, but that’s a lot more palatable than $6,700.

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