Category Archives: Macintosh

The computer for the rest of us

Mac Mini M4 – Part II

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Migration pains.

Apple’s Mac laptops and desktops have seen four generations of CPUs. The original Macintosh used Motorola 68000 CPUs, the first ‘modern’ Macs used IBM’s G3/4/5 series, then came Intel and now it’s Apple Silicon.

When Apple decided to switch to Intel Steve disclosed that they had been working for two years on an ‘invisible’ app named Rosetta which would magically allow IBM configured applications to run seamlessly on the new Intel CPUs and his words were true. It was cleverly named Rosetta and kicked in invisibly when you fired up an IBM application. It never failed and the running speed of the many apps I used was fine.

Well, Apple crafted a new Rosetta for the Intel to Apple Silicon switch and …. it’s an absolute disgrace. It hardly works with any of my old apps, forcing me to upgrade (read: more cost, more complexity, more crappy unwanted ‘features’). The one old app which asked for installation of Rosetta was Lightroom, the first one I tried, which promptly shut down and refused to boot ever again. So I called it right in Part I – Adobe finally forced me to go with the subscription model. My $10 monthly gets me Lightroom Classic – the one I have been using for over a decade – and something called Lightroom Creative Cloud. Anyway, I ponied up, the LR interface came up and I hit Migrate to import my old LR catalog. 12 hours later I got this after many messages telling me my cloud storage was full and attempting to extort yet more money:


12 hours later.

I also got a huge file of error data telling me something about images not migrated. Blood pressure started spiking.

I fired up LR and, to my horror, found that the images were lumped together in one folder chronologically, all folder data lost. Meaning useless. Further, it appears that my images are stored in Adobe’s cloud. Seriously, are you going to trust this business with your art?

Then it occurred to me to check which version of LR this was, and the answer was v8. And yes, the interface is ghastly, pop ups everywhere, cryptic symbols in lieu of words. This is a disaster, I’m thinking. Blood pressure now through the roof. Wait a moment. LR Classic is now on version 14. I had used the wrong version of LR – the cloud one, not the local standalone! Back to the Adobe site, a quick download of LR Classic and 3 minutes later my old LR catalog and previews were converted and I was up and running in the familiar interface I have known since 2007 when the much missed Aperture was discontinued by Apple. Compliments to Adobe for a smooth conversion and a curse on the person who came up with the confusing naming of the two applications. Maybe they should call the cloud version LR Crappy?


A familiar interface.

The files reside on my local drives just as does the application, but cease paying Adobe and you can say hasta la vista to processing capabilities. Still all is up and running and even my several presets and plug-ins appear to be working. The old Photoshop (version CS5 in my case) is toast and I have to learn the many enhancements in LR since my old version 6 to see if PS is needed any more.

Helpful catalog information:



Migration in progress.

How about other commonly used applications?

Intuit Quicken 2007: Rosetta failure. Had to pay an annual subscription fee of $35 for the new version, conversion of the old data file was seamless and the new interface is ghastly. Rosetta fail. $36 annually for the ‘upgrade’.

Steer Mouse: This is an essential utility to enable the programmable functions of the several buttons on my Logitech G500 wired mouse, now in use 11 years and as good as ever. These buttons allow me to jump to the desktop, fire up Mission Control or start a web browser and the application comes with great programmability. Rosetta fail. $20 for the upgrade. Needless to add Logitech ceased supporting its own product years ago.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Mike Bombich’s backup and recovery software is state of the art, has been around for ever and is quickly updated for Apple’s latest planned obsolescence efforts with its OS. Rosetta fail, so another $39 for the upgrade.

Keyboard and mouse connectivity: I am using these short connectors to attach my USB-A devices to the USB-C only Mac Mini M4. The spacing of the three USB-C sockets on the rear of the Mini is way too tight, so do not use those plug-type adapters. They are too thick and you are likely to break one or more of the rather fragile sockets. On my first attempt neither the Kensington keyboard or the mouse were recognized – panic – but pulling the connectors and reinserting them cured the problem. Phew! I have to say those sockets strike me as way too fragile and I would not recommend frequent plugging and unplugging,

Disk drive enclosure: The Terramaster enclosure is now fully populated with 3.5″ spinning and 2.5″ SSD drives. No adapter is required for the latter. Sitting on my desk 2 feet away I can just hear the HDDs working but now that it has been relocated in the footwell the noise is inaudible. The instructions state you should replace the removable side pieces on the removable trays but that’s impossible once the drives are screwed in place. Not a problem. Just leave them off. $170.


Fully populated drive enclosure.

DVD burner/reader enclosure: The OWC enclosure is OK, though the sharp edges could be better finished. It looks rather crude and is missing rubber feet on the base, meaning that the four protruding screws will mar your desktop. I added rubber feet. I think there are better designs out there but it’s not like it cost that much. On first plugging in the drive was not recognized but pulling the plug and reinserting it cured that. Seems like this is a common issue for me. Both the MKV (BluRay) and MDRP (regular DVDs) apps work fine. A rare Rosetta success.

Microsoft Excel: DOA. Rosetta fail. I’m no longer slaving for an honest crust on Wall Street so do not need the power of Excel. Apple’s free Numbers is adequate and reads the Excel .xlsw file just fine. $0. Ditto for Microsoft Word. I simply use Apple’s excellent Text Edit, which is free. For more advanced formatting I would use the free Apple Pages.

Apple Sequoia OS 10.15: One look at System Preferences – now named System Settings because all change is good, right? – and you can see what an absolute pig OS X has become. Too much of everything, useless features that few want or need, change for change’s sake. At least it has not yet locked up so I do not need to access the Mini’s power button which some idiot placed underneath the machine. Probably the same idiot who placed the charger socket for the (not so) Magic Moise on the underside. Steve must be spinning in his grave.

Lessons learned? Migration is hell and Rosetta is largely useless. Be prepared to pay for software upgrades for all your commonly used apps. And set aside a solid 8 hours because things will go wrong and you will have several setbacks. I’m already missing my Mac Pro …. if not its size and electricity demands.

In Part III I will address performance data.

Mac Mini M4 – Part I

Hardware, Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

Time to move on.


Tiny.

Apple’s planned obsolesence strategy has seen to it that my 2010 Mac Pro, a machine as reliable as a hammer, is now no fewer than six generations of OS out of date. That means that those nasty Russkie hackers can have at it to their hearts’ content and next thing you know my credit card will have run up $10mm in charges for caviar and vodka and yours truly will be out on the street.

But a strange thing happened. Apple just released the minuscule Mac Mini M4 at what can only be called a bargain price by Apple’s gouging standards, starting at $600 for the 16GB/256GB model. I paid Amazon $745 for the 16GB/512GB slightly upgraded version as I need a larger SSD to store all my applications and the 80GB of Lightroom preview files which load quickly from the SSD. (The picture files, much larger, reside on a slow, spinning disk drive, where speed is not required).

My Mac Mini M4 arrives tonight and because I will need to move the disk drives from the innards of the Mac Pro I had to procure an external drive enclosure as well as an enclosure for the BluRay DVD reader/writer. Along with a handful of cables the bill came to $1,000, one quarter of the investment in the significantly upgraded Mac Pro.

After doing some reading I have determined that the safest and fastest way to migrate apps from the Mac Pro is to use the Time Machine (sequential) back-up (using Migration Utility) which I always have running in the MP.

While the wi-fi here is fast and reliable I am going for a wired connection of the TM HDD to the new Mini. Wired connections do not go down.

So first I removed the TM HDD from the gorgeous MP (boy am I going to miss that machine). Here it is, all 54 lbs of it, as perfect an industrial design as Apple conceived, and actually Jony Ive’s first major effort at Apple, before he became obsessed with smallness and thinness to the detriment of ergonomics. 5 large fans plus 2 in the GPU, two 3.46GHz 6 core Intel CPUs, Blu Ray DVD, USB3 upgrade, super Nvidia 980GTX GPU and all of 80GB of RAM:


Not tiny.

The new Terramaster disk drive box:


Terramaster drive enclosure.

The other three bays will hold a 512GB SSD to back-up the Mini’s OS and applications, the main Data drive (a 2TB HDD – don’t need speed there) and another 2TB back-up Data drive. The OS/apps and Data drives are automatically cloned daily using Carbon Copy Cloner. Time Machine runs on its own schedule. I copy the photos to an SSD in my car monthly for ‘belt and suspenders’ safety. Of course, should both the home and garage burn down ….

All my photos and documents reside on the Data drive. The Terramaster is nicely made, the drives (either 3.5” or 2.5”) are easily installed, and it has two large and silent cooling fans. It will eventually be moved into the footwell of my desk, out of sight. It’s USB 3.1, so fairly speedy. Even though SSDs are now affordable I really do not need the speed and the old HDDs continue working well at no added cost. I will simply hard wire the Terramaster (USB-C) to the new Mini and have at it for migration.

Next I will remove the BluRay DVD reader/writer from the MP and install it in an OWC separate stand-alone enclosure. One of the nice things about the old MP is that all major peripherals are stored inside the enclosure. No more.

A major issue will be whether my (ancient) versions of Lightroom and Photoshop can have their perpetual licenses transferred from the MP to the Mini. The web is all over the place on this. Adobe is a very low integrity business so I may be finally forced into their subscription model – $38/mth for LR and PS. The advantage is that those latest versions are optimized for the Apple M series CPUs, meaning they run faster, and as we know LR is a real bear. Plus the apps have been significantly enhanced since my 9 year and 12 year old versions. The disadvantage is $456/year and the revolting thought of sending Adobe money, however modest the sum.

The Kensington keyboard (I cannot stand Apple’s designs), Logitech mouse (ditto – the Apple mouse is an ergonomic disaster – what idiot placed the charging port on the underside of this already horrible design?), and Logitech speakers (the Mini has a coaxial socket for those), along with the BenQ monitor, all hard wired, will carry over to the Mini. I had to procure a bunch of USB-A to USB-C adapters because USB-C is all the Mini offers. As the monitor will be connected to the Mini using HDMI, whereas the Mac Pro uses Display Port, I can have both computers connected to the monitor during the conversion period and simply switch inputs when needed. Nice.

More in the next article as I contemplate the horrors of migration.

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.