Category Archives: Macintosh

The computer for the rest of us

An old Mac Mini for the home theater

Hardware, Home theater, Macintosh

A tremendous value.

When crafting my home theater the default assumption was that the enormous 55lb. energy quaffing Mac Pro would be the computer of choice. This has served me faultlessly for many years and one of the really nice benefits was that four large hard drives could be accommodated within the chassis where many movies were stored. For perfect streaming nothing beats hard wiring, no wi-fi to go down.

Interested in saving power and cutting intrusive bulk, I was reading about the latest M1 and M2 CPU-eqipped Mini’s and quickly realized that this was far more computing power than was required for the simple job of streaming movies. (The Mac Pro, of course, is total overkill, but it’s so inexpensive nowadays that economics are not an issue). So I searched around and came across this rather ancient 2014 Mac Mini on Amazon which, in its base configuration, ran me just $126. Sure it has no internal additional hard drive storage, but that was easily side-stepped with a cheap Probox like the ones I have been using for years. The old Mini is blessed with no fewer than four USB 3.0 sockets and a Probox is connected to each, meaning 16 external hard drives are accessible.

By the way, the availability of these old Minis on Amazon is spotty but keep checking and they crop up. You do not need more than 4GB RAM or the costly SSD option for streaming movies. The advertised image is incorrect – the 2014 Mini I received does not have a slot loading DVD drive. Mine came with a fresh installation of OS X Catalina (10.15). Here are the connection options on the machine:



Abundant connectivity.

Note the presence of an HDMI socket which is used to connect to the UST projector in the home theater.

The Mini has several advantages over the huge Mac Pro in this application. It uses far less power (6 watts idle, 85 watts max, compared with 125/285 for the Mac Pro), is easy to hide (you really do not want ugly computer boxes cluttering up a home theater), has HDMI built in (the Pro needs a suitably equipped graphics card) and, most importantly, comes with excellent Bluetooth 4.0 sensitivity. The BT in the Mac Pro is simply awful. Why is this important? Because you can hide the Mini away in a credenza, no status lights showing, and it responds perfectly to a Bluetooth mouse at 15 feet, where the Pro really struggles, even with an external Bluetooth ‘dongle’.

So if you are looking for an inexpensive, elegant computer solution for your home theater installation, this old Mini is just the ticket. Mine arrived in absolutely mint condition from a vendor named ‘iSpyDeals’. And should the small 500GB hard drive fail, it’s easily replaced. Why, you could even install a cheap SSD for even snappier performance. Just do not make the mistake of thinking that you can use this computer for heavy video processing ….

Here are the specifications and options for the 2014 Mac Mini which is still supported by Apple, if you like spending hours on the phone with a clueless ‘technical advisor’, one whose native tongue is anything but English:



Specifications.

Louche Long

Hall of Shame, Macintosh

Taste and money rarely mix.

Apple has had several justly famous advertising campaigns, from the ‘1984’ ad where an athlete hurls a sledgehammer at a movie screen in a theater filled with automatons, to the ‘Think Different’ series which adulated original thinkers. But maybe the most beloved was the long running ‘I’m a Mac and I’m a PC’ with the comedian John Hodgman as the nerdy and lovable PC-using klutz and, well, Justin Long. Long portrayed the oh! so cool Mac user and his smarmy, condescending, hipster presence did nothing to endear prospects to the Apple brand, for it was Hodgman viewers tuned in to view. One of the best known ads had PC swathed in bandages head to toe, explaining that his multiple crashes were the cause. Another had him on the shrink’s couch relating how unloved he was. Hodgman simply nailed it.


Nerd and hipster.

Before examining the new Intel ads claiming their CPUs are superior to Apple’s new M1 – a CPU which is universally lauded as redefining the realms of possibility in Macs – it bears to relate Apple’s history with CPU makers. The Motorola 68000 family in early Apple ][ computers could not hold it own, Motorola falling behind the performance game, and gave way to the IBM G3/4/5 series. Capable performers, these suffered from high heat output and, when Steve Jobs asked for a cool running successor to the G3 in the fabulous Powerbook notebook, IBM gave him the G4 which did a more than passable imitation of a toaster. It ran that hot. So Steve started the team working on converting the product line to Intel’s CPUs and did so successfully until …. Intel started repeating the errors of Motorola and IBM. Slow development cycles, loss of competitive position, we had seen it all before. But Apple, as always looking down the road, had an answer, having been sub-contracting design and development of its iPhone and iPad CPUs to ARM with whom the company increasingly adopted a tailored approach, not willing to rest on the laurels of a commodity product suitable for all.

This exercise culminated last year in Apple going whole hog and developing its own M1 CPU which not only derived from the state-of-the-art A14 in the iPhone, it also spanked the competition on performance (high) and power use and heat output (low). It was such a success that Apple has started migrating its notebooks and the Mac Mini to the M1 and later this year will do the same for the iMac and Mac Pro.

So Intel, always a day late and an idea short, felt it had to strike back and hired the louche Long, ever willing to prostitute his C-list Hollywood credentials, to talk up the advantages of Intel’s latest (very late) and (not so) greatest CPUs. And they got it so wrong, it’s comical to behold. Not only is Long still smarmy and condescending – characteristics as tied to the actor as the sneer is to Donald Sutherland – it’s really quite unclear what he is going on about.


See what I mean about Long?

For the whole story, capably reported by Apple Insider, click here.

Mac Mini – 2020

Macintosh

The M1 CPU comes to the Mac.

The first Apple desktop computers used the MOS 65xx series of CPUs through November 1990, with the Apple IIC Plus. This was the Steve Wozniak designed series of machines which was replaced by the Macintosh in January 1984, though it took a while to die.

The Macintosh brought the innovative graphics interface to the screen and the Motorola 68000 series of CPUs saw to the heavy lifting. The last Macintosh, the Quadra 630 was sold in April 1996 by which time Motorola had proved unable to meet Apple’s growing CPU performance demands.

By the time the iMac was introduced in May 1998 Apple had dropped Motorola and retained IBM, using its broadly available series of G3 CPUs. These were very capable machines and the CPU also found itself into the G3 Powerbook laptop in November 1997 and constituted what was broadly recognized as the best laptop available. IBM enhanced performance in its CPUs in the G4, which also went into these machines, but the even faster G5 only made it into the laptop. That’s because it put out enough heat to make toast with your morning coffee and Steve Jobs realized that IBM’s day was done as CPU supplier to Apple. You can read about my sad experience with the G4/5 iMacs here, and the less said the better. Not only did the CPU overheat, the GPU was even worse – thank you Nvidia. Nvidia was dropped soon after in favor of ATI for graphics processing.

Jobs retained Intel, and the iMac of early 2006 used the Intel Core Duo CPU. This used less power, saw to it that you brought the toaster out of storage as the Intel CPU ran cool and, as a reult, Intel and Apple looked forward to a long and fruitful relationship. Meanwhile, toaster sales took off.

That relationship saw sunset this week with the introduction of the first M1 powered MacBook Air and the latest Mac Mini.



Mac Mini 2020 with the M1 CPU.

The M1 is a variant of the splendid Axx series of CPUs found in the iPhone. Anyone using an iPhone 11 with the A13 on board knows only too well how this CPU performs. Extremely low power consumption, heat output so low that no power hungry cooling fan is needed, and the whole thing sells for a starting price of $700. Add your disk drives, keyboard and display of choice and a mouse and you have a very capable desktop for relatively little money.

When Apple migrated from the IBM G series CPUs to Intel they also wrote one of the greatest utilities of the time, named Rosetta. This came with every Intel Mac and would permit the running of G3/4/5 apps with no input from the operator. It was invisible, and the performance penalty compared with later Intel apps was modest. Brilliant. I recall Steve saying that it took two years to develop Rosetta, and it was perfect.

Apple is doing something similar with the M1 powered Mini and Air and once again older apps promise to run seamlessly, though native versions can be expected soon and should outperform the Rosetta-translated ones.

In much the same way that Apple is moving away from the serial intellectual property thieves at Samsung for its cell phone components, the move to the in-house designed M1 will confer like independence and pricing power with the Intel bond broken. Most importantly, it gives Apple full control over software design, no longer beholden to someone else’s chip architecture. Here are the M1-powered MacBook Air performance specs:



MacBook Air 2020 with the M1 CPU.

Apple to fire Intel

Macintosh

No more Intel CPUs.

I well recall the growing disaster of the IBM PC CPUs, the G3, G4 and G5.

Apple used these in their desktops and laptops through 2005, when Steve announced that Apple would be dropping the IBM CPUs in favor of Intel CPUs.

The best laptop at the time was the Apple Powerbook G3 which used the G3 PowerPC CPU. The problem was that as speeds increased with the G4 and G5 the CPUs ran hotter and hotter and Steve concluded that, as IBM was unwilling or unable to address the heat and high power consumption issues, a change was called for. Indeed at the time I recall using a G5 iMac and the machine could have doubled as a toaster. It revved up the fans at the slightest provocation and you just knew that its service life would be limited. I sold it and went to Hackintoshes when Apple switched to Intel. The Macs of the time were too expensive for my taste.

When the first Intel CPU Macs were introduced they came with a truly brilliant application named Rosetta. This ran invisibly and was an emulator which ensured that if you fired up a PowerPC application that it would run seamlessly under Intel’s architecture. That took years to develop, was invisible to the user, and it will be intriguing to see how Apple does like magic this time around.




The G5 iMac – the Apple toaster.

Now it seems that Apple is about to announce that it is switching from Intel to ARM CPUs in its laptops and desktops and the reasons appear similar – too much power consumption, too much heat and too slow a development cycle. And this time Apple will have total control over the CPU’s design, predicated on its years of expertise with the Axx series of CPUs in the iPhone and iPad. I can testify to the prowess of the A13 ARM CPU in my iPhone 11Pro which is a wonder and a great pleasure to use.

For the full story check out this Apple Insider article, which also includes details on the financial aspects of the switch. It is written by the estimable and always dependable Daniel Eran Dilger.

MacBook 2017/2018

Hardware, Macintosh

A fine replacement for the 11″ MacBook Air.


The 11″ MacBook Air at left next to the 12″ MacBook.

My son and I have long been aficionados of the 11″ MacBook Air. Light, adequately fast and with sufficient internal chip storage for all but large video and photo catalogs, it was affordably priced. Sadly, Apple discontinued the 11″ version in 2015, and only the 13″ version continues in the line.

As my son works his way to the Ivy League he has stepped up his efforts and just scored an A+ mid-term grade in calculus, so it seemed only fair to hear his complaint about the slowness of his 2013 MacBook and procure him an upgrade. There were, however, two issues. First the closest match in size to the 11″ MBA is the 2017/18 MacBook – the specifications remained unchanged in 2018 – but the asking price of $1300 is outrageous. Second, when the current MacBook first surfaced in 2015 we tried one in the Apple Store and were very disappointed by the mushy feel of the keyboard.

Well, both issues have been happily resolved. First, B&H in New York had a special on the 2017 MacBook a few days ago, slashing the price by $500 to $800, albeit available in gold finish only. No big deal – it looks OK, even if silver would have been preferred. Second, Apple redesigned the keyboard in 2017 and the feel is now superb. The keys are crisp and light and every bit as good as those in the MBA.

Memory is doubled to 8gB and speed is now up to 1867MHz. The latest integrated Intel GPU sees to speedy screen response of the Retina display and data storage is now 256gB of quick RAM compared with 128gB in the 2013 MBA. The CPU is Intel’s Core m3 with a Geekbench score of 6643 compared with 4974 for the 2013 MBA despite the slower clock speed of 1.2gHz vs. 1.3gHz in the older laptop. That’s 33% faster. (The last 11″ MBA made, the 2015, scored 5568).

Display pixels? 1366 x 768 in the MBA compared with 2304 x 1440 for the MacBook with retina Display, or almost three times as many pixels per unit area. My son reports that the Retina Display in the MacBook is noticeably sharper than the regular one in the MBA.

Testifying to continued improvement in engineering the MacBook weighs in at a scant 2.0 lbs compared with 2.4lbs for the 2013 MBA, yet the screen is 19% larger in the MacBook. Wonderful. Battery life is a claimed 10 hrs, presumably measured in a dark room with minimum screen brightness and no activity ….

What’s not to like. Well, yet another connector switch with the MacBook using USB C at both the laptop and power brick ends. And because the laptop has only one USB C socket for power and data (the MBA has two USB A sockets and a power socket) this means that an adapter will be required if, say, you want to use the laptop with an external display while simultaneously charging it. Not great.

Transfer of apps and data from the old MBA was a breeze as my son backs up everything automatically to iCloud. While Apple really should include a progress bar when recovery to the new laptop is in progress – the screen display just remains static and you have no idea if anything is happening – the whole process took but 10 minutes. Very nicely done, Apple.

The old 2013 MBA will sell for $400 or so on Swappa making the net upgrade outlay just $400. Now that’s what I call a bargain, given the six years of hard use my son got from the machine. Be sure to wait for the B&H discount to reappear as the $1300 full retail price is way too high.