hoakley 
M1 Macs have perhaps had the most unfair testing of any recent models. Aimed at the lower end of the market, where 16 GB memory is ample, and few users do things like boot from an external disk, we’ve been … Read more
Floating point maths is a careful compromise between speed and accuracy. One widely used design feature in many processors is the use of fused instructions to perform both multiply and add in one fell swoop, that is to calculated = … Read more
In the next few days those using M1 Macs will be updating to Big Sur 11.5, blissfully ignorant of how, as an admin user, their Mac could refuse to update. Because now, in addition to regular users, admin users and … Read more
From the outset, Mac OS X and macOS have been designed around a relatively small kernel which is given additional capabilities by kernel extensions. The kernel itself runs at a highly privileged level, giving it most direct access to resources … Read more
In the first article in this series on developing for Apple Silicon Macs using assembly language, I built a simple framework AsmAttic to use as the basis for developing ARM assembly language routines. In that, I provided a short and … Read more
Just as WWDC was about to start, Michael Tsai posted a brief note in which he details how to download and access Apple’s old conceptual documentation for macOS, much of which has never been replaced or updated over the last … Read more
If Apple is true to its annual cycle of operating systems, it will announce macOS 12 at WWDC next week. It has made it clear in its version numbering that the next major version of macOS will be 12, rather … Read more
Last week I showed fascinating screenshots of how M1 Macs can run background processes exclusively on their four ‘efficiency’ cores. I’ve now been digging deeper, and this article is a summary of how Intel and M1 Macs deal with multiple … Read more
Big Sur’s sealed System volume seemed like a good idea. Although the read-only version in Catalina may look impregnable, guaranteeing integrity using a Merkle Tree of hashes, then locking the whole lot in a snapshot, looks even more robust. Like … Read more