Mac

Even if you'd never lay a finger on a Mac, you have to admit these Apple-made features would rock on a Windows PC.

Reader Simon Hansen finds his Mac slow to do his bidding. He writes:

By participating in GIMPS, a distributed computing project to find Mersenne prime numbers, you could win $3,000 or more, not to mention mathematics immortality

Tell your Mac what to do and give your Mac a voice with the built-in speech recognition and text-to-speech features.

If your Mac should crash, here's how to recover your Mac from a back up copy

Apple will manufacture one of its Mac lines exclusively in the U.S. by the end of 2013, CEO Tim Cook told NBC and BusinessWeek in interviews made public today.

With Thanksgiving upon us, it’s time for the annual avalanche of Black Friday sales—and Pre-Black Friday sales, and Cyber Monday sales, and Weekend-Before-Cyber Monday sales, and…you know the drill. But most of those sales, whether online or in physical stores, focus on hardware and gear. If you’re looking for some great Mac software, either for yourself or for your favorite gift recipient, there are currently two big Mac-software bundles, each offering a bevy of apps for one reasonable price. Even if you just wanted the Mac Gems each bundle contains, both are bargains, but each also includes a bunch of other good software that sweetens the pot considerably. (All apps included in these bundles are full versions.)

Mac shops with significant FireWire investment may not need a total Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 makeover, but staying put with current hard drives and devices will come at a price

First, the bad news. Once again, Mac users are at risk due to a flaw in Java, similar to the one that enabled the Flashback Trojan. Even worse, there isn't (yet) a patch to fix that vulnerability. But don't worry: This time around, there's good news for Mac users: Thanks to changes Apple has made, most of us are likely to be safe from this threat.

A new version of SketchBook Pro, the “artistic toolkit” application for the Mac, has made its debut on the Mac App Store, offering an interface overhaul and cloud support among other features.

Setting up your Mac for remote file access can be handy when you need to retrieve an errant file while on the road. Dan Moren walks you through the process of setting it up.

Software developer Sparrow, maker of the popular Mac and iOS email clients of the same name, announced on Friday that it has been acquired by Google, and that the Sparrow team will be joining forces with the search giant.