In short: MacUpdater discontinues service +++ Apple highlights eight-fold “crash zoom” of the iPhone 17 Pro in new advertising | News

Anyone who has installed a lot of apps on their Mac may be familiar with this problem: after opening an application that may not have been used for some time, a window pops up. This advises users to update. Although this is generally a useful note, such messages are often a nuisance in everyday workflow. To get around the problem, you can use the Mac App Store. This keeps the downloaded software up to date – at least in theory. In practice, this doesn’t always work, and many applications can’t even be found in the store.

In order to update as many apps as possible as quickly as possible, tools such as MacUpdater are available. However, the developers CoreCode announced some time ago that they would end support for the app from January 1, 2026. CoreCode kept its word: MacUpdater 3.5 is the final version of the software and the number of apps that can be updated through it has fallen from 7,000 to 3,500 and will continue to decline. The developers also point out that there will be an increasing number of “false alarms”. The server with the database is scheduled to be shut down after about a year.

The developers explain that they were against a subscription model, but the app was never economically viable. Furthermore, the effort required to maintain the tool is disproportionately high for such a small team. By the way, CoreCode refers to the alternative Latest: This is a similar app, but it doesn’t detect as many application updates.

New advertising: Eightfold “crash zoom” with the iPhone 17 Pro
Apple recently released three short commercials that encourage people to stick to New Year’s resolutions – ideally with the support of the Apple Watch (see here). Now the company is presenting a new clip that explains one of the new features of the iPhone 17 Pro (Max): In the video Detectives 8x Zoom is about two investigators who visit a warehouse and talk about the so-called “Crash Zoom”. The camera quickly zooms in on a specific object, for example to increase the tension of the action.

Apple is advertising the eight-fold “zoom in optical quality” that the two Pro models have. The iPhone 16 Pro is satisfied with a maximum of five times optical zoom.