Category Archives: Macintosh

The computer for the rest of us

Shocking hypocrisy

Hall of Shame, Mac Pro, Macintosh

Apple’s planned obsolescence.

The other day I sadly took my 2010 Mac Pro to the recyclers. The resale value approximated what it would cost to ship this behemoth and the last six generations of OS X releases saw to it that none would run on the machine, denying me the security fixes announced seemingly monthly.


Can you spell ‘planned obsolescence’?.

While this piece is focused on Apple, like thinking applies to all computer hardware makers. They conspire with the software authors (in Apple’s case they conspire with Apple) to make sure that older machines can no longer run the upgraded operating system and many of the related applications. The conspiracy deepens when you look at the horrendous costs laid on users by ethically challenged businesses like Adobe who, in obsoleting earlier versions of their apps, use the planned obsolescence strategy to force you into a rental payment system, euphemistically known as the ‘subscription model’.

So it was with the memory of that great recycled Mac Pro that I read this well researched article in Macworld magazine. The bottom line is this:

So, in answer to the question: How long do Macs last? We’d say five to eight years, but beware that you may not be able to replace any faulty parts in a Mac when more than five years have passed since Apple last sold it.

Imagine if your house or your car lasted only 5 years. But, the hypocrites in Apple Marketing are the first to tell you about their environmentally friendly packaging for the new Mac Mini. It’s cardboard for heaven’s sake. See for yourself:


Hypocrisy redefined.

Any mention of the fact that your new Mac will be toxic landfill 5 years hence because Engineering was told by Marketing to make sure it’s obsolete by then? And because avoiding that required just a few lines of code? You must be joking.

Mac Mini M4 after one month – Part VI

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

It will do, and is fine with LRc.

In Part III I set forth some technical measurements which indicated that the performance of the 2024 Mac Mini M4 was pretty much on a par with that of the 2010 Mac Pro fitted with dual 3.46gHz 6-core Intel CPUs, 80gb of memory and a speedy Nvidia GTX980 GPU. By contrast the M4 Mini has a single 10 core CPU and just 16gb of very fast memory. This testifies not only to the great performance gains realized by Apple with its in house Apple Silicon M4 CPU with its integrated GPU, but also shows just how awfully good that old behemoth, the Mac Pro tower was almost 15 years ago. Sadly, Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy, which saw to it that the Mac Pro was now six generations of MacOS behind, forced the upgrade. Well, that and the aggressive pricing of the new Mini, and my electricity bills will fall!

I now have a month of heavy daily use with the M4 Mini under my belt, much of that with the Apple Silicon optimized Lightroom Classic (LRc – v14.1.1), an upgrade from the prior Lightroom v6.4), so the following observations are mostly subjective.

Start up is much faster at 4-6 seconds compared with 20 for the older version, if I get a beachball it’s maybe once or twice a week, and with previews enabled image-to-image flipping is instantaneous. There’s the very occasional delay of 3-4 seconds for the image to render in full definition but that was also much the case with the Mac Pro.

More significantly, the latest version of LRc adds significant functionality in terms of localized image adjustments with both the Remove and Masking tools well implemented and easy to use, largely obsoleting the more complex variants in Photoshop. Indeed as I hate paying rent I dropped PS all together and made a one-off purchase of Affinity Photo 2 which does all I need on those rare occasions where LRc cannot do the trick.

A good example of the use of these new to me tools is in this night snap of a retailer’s window in Carmel, CA. The host of images I took in that setting all have a common factor which is that the dynamic range is very high, necessitating exposure for the highlights, to avoid burn out, with a post processing need to bring up the shadows. In the case of these ‘before’ and ‘after’ images not only was the shadows slider used to bring up the shadows across the whole image, I then selectively masked the fountain at the lower left to bring the sparkle in the water to life. The difference is, err…., night and day:


Before.


After.

In learning some of these new features I invested in Scott Kelby’s book. It does not cover the recently added Remove/Generative Fill functions but is an excellent learning resource, greatly superior to any video I have seen.

Returning to the Mac Mini M4, it never gets more than a tad warm to the touch, is small enough to nestle at the back of the keyboard tray and performs equally to the old Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost. While there were many frustrations regarding application incompatibility when switching from Intel to Apple Silicon CPUs these are now behind me, though I still hate paying Adobe $10 monthly in rent for LRc. Otherwise, what’s not to like?

Networking Macs

Macintosh

How to do it.

While the Apple TV 4K is a very capable streaming device, Greedy Timmy in Cupertino has seen to it that you cannot make it stream content from hard drives connected to other Macs in the home. Yes, Greedy Tim wants to sell you more hardware. Imagine!

This is irksome as my home theater has some 40tb of movies stored on hard drives connected to the Mac Mini in that location but the fact that I have an Apple TV 4K connected to the OLED TV in the living room does not mean I can access those movies for display on the TV. Frustrating.

However, there is a cheap solution which takes advantage of the very low used prices on 2014 vintage Mac Minis which are renowned for one thing. They are bog slow. You would not want to have to process your photographs on one of these tortoises, let alone manipulate much larger video files. But for my purpose, the streaming of movies, these machines are ideal and typically sell used on Amazon for $135-200.

I have two of these machines. One is in the home theater upstairs and has all those hard drives connected to it, routing the video and sound signals to the large projection screen using HDMI through an UST projector. It’s controlled using a Bluetooth mouse.

The second 2014 Mac Mini is connected using an HDMI cable to the downstairs OLED TV, and has nothing else connected. It’s also controlled using a Bluetooth mouse. While this second machine is the faster of the two shown above, the slower model is perfectly adequate for these purposes.

The third Mac, my workhorse Mac Mini M4 is the current very speedy device which took the place of the behemoth Mac Pro of 2010 in the home office. In the context of movies it’s used to rip DVDs for storage on those hard drives in the home theater, with the ripped movie conveyed to its destination over wi-fi.

You can see all three computers in the sketch at the introduction to this article.

While networking computers can be a black art (I really would rather not think about doing this with Windows) with Macs it’s relatively easy. The key is to set up the Sharing settings correctly – these are in System Preferences on the older Minis and in System Settings on the current Mac Mini M4.

Again, in my configuration I have three Mac Minis:

  • The Server Mac (2014 vintage) in the home theater where all the hard disk drive boxes are connected
  • The Remote Mac Mini M4 (2024 vintage) in the home office where DVDs are ripped and sent wirelessly to the storage drives in the home theater
  • A second Remote Mac Mini (2014 vintage) connected to a TV in the living room used solely to watch movies on that TV.

There are three steps to allowing files on one Mac (the “Server Mac”) accessible by another (the “Remote Mac”).

Step 1: On the Server Mac you need to make the drives visible on the network:


This is the (Server Mac) Mini with all the attached hard
drive storage in the home theater. You must give
access to those hard drives to other Macs in the
File Sharing panel. See “Shared Folders”.

Step 2a: On the Remote Mac you need to tell that Mac to join the network:


This is the (Remote Mac) Mini attached to the TV set.
It simply needs File Sharing turned on.

Step 2b: On the second Remote Mac which is used to rip DVDs:


This is the second (Remote Mac) Mini M4 in the office
used to rip movies and send them to the hard drives
attached to the Mac mini in the home theater.
Yes, the new interface is an abomination.

Step 3: Next you need to make those drives attached to the Server Mac visible to the Remote Mac(s):

To connect to the movie hard disk drives from a Remote Mac (meaning one not connected to those hard drives), on the Remote Mac open Finder->Go->Connect to Server and choose the remote disk drive(s):


Connecting to the hard drives from
a Remote Mac using Finder.

After choosing the Server Mac and clicking Connect, you will see all the drives connected to the Server Mac (the Mini to which all the hard disk drives are connected), thus:


Shift-click to choose all or
Command-click to chose individual drives.

Once you click OK all those drives will be accessible on your Remote Mac. This setting is non-volatile. Restart any of the Macs involved and the setting is preserved. Nice.

As having the home theater (Server Mac) Mini go down through a power cut risks corruption to the hard drives, that computer and all the hard drive boxes are connected to an APC UPS.

All the Minis and the Apple TV 4K streamers use either RF or Bluetooth for communications with peripherals like remotes, mice and keyboards so they can be hidden out of sight, so long as they are afforded adequate ventilation. In the case of the TV devices they nestle comfortably under the TV screen.


The Mac Mini and Apple TV 4K under the TV screen.

Those old Minis may not be speed demons but for routing video they are excellent and reliability is high. And if you power them through an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) they rarely go down.

The DVDpedia application used to catalog and run all those saved movies was profiled here. While Conor, the developer, has taken a hiatus he has nonetheless updated the application to run on Apple Silicon and you can download it here. I can confirm it runs fine on my Mac Mini M4 though the movie count flags are incorrect. Not a big deal. When first starting DVDpedia on a Remote Mac be sure to hold the Option key down before double clicking on the local (meaning on the remote Mac) DVDpedia application. When DVDpedia starts you will be asked for the location of the DVDpedia database and you should point to the database on the Mini which has all those hard drives connected. It’s under Library-> Application Support->DVDpedia->Database.DVDpd. That way any changes you make to the database either on a Remote Mac or on the Server Mac will be applied in the correct place. You only have to do this once.

Mac Mini M4 – Part V

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Matching storage.

In Part IV I wrote about the French company named Polysoft which is providing upgraded storage for the Mac Studio computer, adding that I expect they will expand their offerings to include the Mac mini M4.

That may take a while as they will have to reverse engineer around Apple’s greed, but meanwhile another entrepreneurial outfit has produced an external SSD in a box with the same footprint as the Mini. TechRadar has the story and storage capacities from 512gb to a whopping 8tb will cost from $140 to $1000. That is extremely competitive when you look at Apple’s upgrade pricing – Greedy Timmy wants an additional $800 for just 2tb.


The Orico external SSD for the Mac mini M4.

Orico claims a throughput of 40Gbps which seems unlikely to me, but we should soon be seeing test data.

Mac Mini M4 – Part IV

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Expect storage upgrades soon.

In Part III I wrote:

Internal SSD upgrades: Early teardowns of the Mac Mini M4 disclose that the NAND storage resides on a removable card. However, components on that card make it impossible to simply plug in a larger storage one as the Apple design ties the card to your particular machine. However, hackers with micro-soldering skills have unsoldered the two existing NAND modules from the card, replacing them with much larger ones for very low cost, and things work well. So you can bet that an aftermarket business will shortly arise offering this service. When you realize that Apple charges $200 for the jump from 256gb to 512gb, and $600 more to go from 256gb to 1tb, there’s money to be made from competing with Apple’s greed. So if you want a 1TB drive or greater it might make sense to buy the base 256gb $600 Mac Mini and wait for the market to offer upgrades.

Well, here we are not a month after the release of the Mac Mini M4 than French company Polysoft has reverse engineered the NAND storage in the Mac Studio and will soon be offering 8tb upgrades for $1,160. Here’s Apple’s pricing – greed personified while Mr. Cook walks around the stage, hands prayerfully clasped in supplication to the god of money:


Mac Studio SSD upgrades.

And here’s the excellent article and related video from Cult of Mac explaining what Polysoft accomplished and it’s really magical:


Click the image for the article.

In contrast to much of the appalling dreck found on YouTube, Luke Miani’s presentation is articulate and involving.

The real volume for Polysoft’s business will be selling upgrade SSDs for the Mac Mini M4 because that’s where the money is. I would expect they should have a competitive offering in a quarter or two. And yes, Apple’s greed for upgrades to that machine is equally abundantly on display. Well done Polysoft. Vive La France!