Some suspect Apple of scanning images stored on your Mac. What evidence is there that could be happening? | Continue reading
An accessible account of how Apple silicon chips use cores of two different types to do their work, and how to get the best from them as a user. The start… | Continue reading
Running Linux on an Apple silicon Mac may now be straightforward, but it presents challenges for installation and management. | Continue reading
What’s the cost in terms of lost performance of these new anti-malware scans, and how do we get told of their results? | Continue reading
If you’re running a beta of Ventura on an Apple silicon Mac, here’s a virtualiser for GUI Linux with a footprint of only 33 MB. | Continue reading
How many macOS guests can lightweight virtualisation run at a time, and can it nest them, running a macOS guest in a macOS VM? | Continue reading
This new version of Viable uses HiDPI in Displays to create a crisp scalable virtual display as good as you’ll get from a Retina display. Here’s how. | Continue reading
What are the penalties in staying with Monterey, if you choose not to upgrade to Ventura, or your Mac isn’t supported? Please report serious bugs we should know about. | Continue reading
How could Ventura apply security patches to itself while still running, and not require a restart? Here’s what is likely to happen. | Continue reading
Should you wait for Apple’s to release Macs with the M2 Max, or won’t those be available until next year? Here are some speculative dates based on the M1 release cycle. | Continue reading
Both P and E cores are run at different frequencies according to the load on M1 chips. This explores how macOS manages their frequencies and why. | Continue reading
Will Monterey 12.5 fix the memory leak in the Find feature in the Finder? That looks increasingly unlikely, and may influence your decision as to whether to upgrade. | Continue reading
Using a test of compressing a 1 GB file with AppleArchive, measurements of power used by core clusters show how efficient using the E cores really is. | Continue reading
Using CPU % or Energy values in Activity Monitor appears to show that running code on E cores is less efficient than on P cores. Don’t believe a word of it. | Continue reading
Which of the external disks tested can be used to boot from? Do they work reliably with Secure Boot? Could you boot from an external hard disk? | Continue reading
From the 8 cores of the original M1 chip to the M1 Ultra’s 20, this is how macOS manages threads from apps, services and other code. | Continue reading
M1 Macs don’t support SMART monitoring over USB-C, forcing us to choose between Full Security without SMART, or Reduced Security with SMART support. | Continue reading
Is a process named triald stealing lots of CPU? Or maybe ~/Library/Trial is huge, or filling your backups? Maybe it’s all just one of Apple’s Experiments. | Continue reading
How can you tell when software uses the Neural Engine in an M1 series Mac? How much power does it use, and what is Espresso? Mysteries unravelled. | Continue reading
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well? | Continue reading
Visual Look Up also recognises flowers, landmarks and pets, as well as well-known paintings. Here’s how it does those, and how Live Text is different. | Continue reading
How analogue sound is turned into digital audio, how the limits of human hearing determine how that conversion should be performed, and how you should set your Mac’s audio up. | Continue reading
The first phase analyses, classifies and detects any objects within the image. When the user clicks on the white dot, this completes with a search for the best match. | Continue reading
Remember Apple’s failed attempt to detect CSAM in images? Would that have been similar to the way that Visual Look Up works? Is this the thin end of the wedge? | Continue reading
There are two situations when M1 chips confine code to just one of their Performance cores: during startup, before the other cores are running, and when preparing an update. | Continue reading
A promising start for a new feature which could, with a little improvement, become a uniquely powerful tool. | Continue reading
To the north of Kyiv is a 40-mile long column of Russian vehicles, trapped by bad tyres, breakdowns, fuel shortage, and mud. But what of the occupants? Are they fit to fight? | Continue reading
In Activity Monitor, % CPU isn’t on a scale of 0-100. In M1 Macs, it also makes no distinction between E and P cores, nor does it allow for their changing frequency. | Continue reading
Each additional Safari window increases WindowServer’s memory use by 1.7 MB on an Intel Mac, but 50 MB on an M1 Mac – thirty times more. | Continue reading
All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups. | Continue reading
When running some tasks confined to E cores, the original M1 chip from 2020 completes them significantly quicker than an on an M1 Pro. Here’s the detail. | Continue reading
Users and other processes have very limited control over which threads are run on which type of core. As Apple Silicon develops, this is an area set for change. | Continue reading
Fed up with your M1 MBP always starting up, or waking from sleep, when you open its lid? How might you change that behaviour? | Continue reading
We can expect Universal Control in macOS 12.3, but when will Apple get round to fixing the severe memory leak in the Finder’s Find feature? | Continue reading
If you use any of these, Apple’s next update to Monterey 12.3 will bring changes. Start preparing now. | Continue reading
Apple’s Private Relay service isn’t a full VPN, but is designed to ensure that no one knows both your IP address and the sites you connect to. Is it a good choice? | Continue reading
Understanding each of the four stages in the Secure Booting of an M1 Mac. These are summarised in diagram available here. | Continue reading
How can the two E cores in an M1 Pro/Max apparently match the performance of the four in the original M1? Answers, please. | Continue reading
Some apps and other code doesn’t appear to run faster on M1 chips, and some even runs more slowly. Could this be a result of it not using the best acceleration for vectors and matrices? | Continue reading
What are all those files and folders doing inside an app? Which can you safely change to customise an app? Why all the helpers? | Continue reading
Does your M1 Mac run more slowly when it’s on battery power, or with Low Power mode enabled? An exploration of effects on its CPU cores provides an unexpected answer. | Continue reading
The E cores on the original M1 and M1 Pro chips appear to be managed quite differently, with respect to the performance of background processes at low QoS. | Continue reading
Obtaining estimates for individual P and E core performance of processes run mainly in an ALU and those using floating-point and SIMD gives further insight and confirms the cores haven’t chan… | Continue reading
Fed up with the Flying Pointer? Tired of the oldest Universal Bug in Finder Column Widths? Want updates from the App Store? These are some of the annoyances in 12.0.1. | Continue reading
Many folders have them. They’re so invisible that you can’t even see them when you show hidden files. And the only way you know they’re there is when they cause problems. | Continue reading
How does macOS load processes onto the cores in M1 series processors? Are its policies similar between the original M1 and the M1 Pro? | Continue reading
Geekbench 5 scores for the M1 Pro are around 2800 single- and 12500 multi-core. Do they represent maximum performance, though? | Continue reading
How this memory leak probably occurs, which apps it affects, and what you can do to avoid it completely. | Continue reading