hoakley 
Christmas Day was ideal for the refactoring I wanted to do in my free macOS lightweight virtualisation app Viable. As a result, I have a new version, still a beta-release but hopefully edging ever closer to full release quality. I … Read more
Hard disks are electro-mechanical devices that wear out. Predicting their working life is something of a black art, and most influenced by the wear and tear they sustain, particularly when they’re spun up, and even their specific manufacturing batch. Solid-state … Read more
On Sunday, in my article Home truths about macOS, I made some bold and important assertions that Apple doesn’t normally maintain even critical parts of macOS once a version has been superseded as the current release. As I wrote there: … Read more
Deciding whether and when to upgrade macOS is one of the more difficult choices we face. If your Mac isn’t capable of running the current release of macOS, or you’re dependent on key hardware or software which is incompatible, then … Read more
For fifteen years Mac hardware development was largely determined by Intel’s product release cycles. This year’s WWDC marks the start of Apple’s second M-series release cycle, promising valuable incremental improvements in performance, with particular emphasis on the Neural Engine (ANE). … Read more
So far, I have concentrated on trying to understand how macOS allocates threads to the two different types of core in M1 series processors, and how running threads on the E cores can lead to increased energy efficiency. This article … Read more
Fast compact external SSDs have one major drawback: because they rely on passive cooling, they tend to get warm in use. As a result, their firmware should slow transfer rates in order to prevent them from getting too hot – … Read more
As more developers are looking at giving the user control over which cores do the heavy lifting in their apps, when running on M1 Macs, they’re puzzling over contradictory figures given by Activity Monitor. In many cases, these appear to … Read more
In conventional multi-core processors, like the Intel CPUs used in previous Mac models, all cores are the same. Allocating threads to cores is therefore a matter of balancing their load, in what’s termed symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). In Activity Monitor’s CPU … Read more
Apple claims that all its new models using M1 series chips come with Thunderbolt ports which support “USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)”. However, many users have reported performance which doesn’t reach 10 Gb/s for directly connected external disks. … Read more