Mac

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Thanks to more modern PCs, a wider install base for Intel Macs, and dedicated enthusiast communities and forums like TonyMacx86, it’s not too hard for anyone comfortable with PC building to assemble a Hackintosh using off-the-shelf parts. Community-developed apps and tools streamline the process of creating install media and setting up drivers, and while you’re probably going to have to do a little bit of Terminal work getting everything to function perfectly, most major setup problems are easy enough to overcome for anyone who has been building and maintaining their own PCs for a while.

And:

At this point I should mention this article is in no way intended to be an install guide or an endorsement of Hackintoshing. Today, as has always been the case, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple’s licensing agreement.

And:

Apple has done surprisingly little to shut down the Hackintosh community. When companies attempt to commercialize PCs running Mac software, as a long-gone company called Psystar briefly did back in 2008, Apple shuts them down swiftly and decisively. But macOS itself doesn’t do more than a surface-level check for genuine Apple hardware—the underlying hardware needs to be close-ish and special bootloaders spoof things like the model, firmware information, and serial number. These OSx86 enthusiast communities have existed for years without so much as a cease-and-desist. Contrast this with Apple’s much more stringent approach to iOS jailbreaking: the company releases new updates to disable old jailbreaks pretty quickly, at least in part because these jailbreaks rely exclusively on serious security flaws to work in the first place.

There is so much more to this article, well worth the read. But it is interesting that Apple has allowed the Hackintosh universe to survive and even to flourish.

Also interesting is the thought of what form Apple’s coming Mac Pro will take. Will Apple build an upgradeable tower, one designed to last longer than a generation? Given Apple’s reluctance to update a machine with relatively low sales numbers, I think they’d do well to build something that they can release into the wild, let the user community update and upgrade with third party parts, with a nice long extendable life span.

A win for the “Pro” community (not sure of a better label here), a win for the small army of parts suppliers who will seize on the opportunity to sell parts and supplies, a win for the communities who will benefit from product produced using these ultra-powerful machines.

Daniel Pasco, renegade polymath:

I use a 5k iMac for work and am interested in VR production and gaming. Some friends told me to build a dedicated Windows box and others suggested building a Hackintosh, but I was sure there was a better way to get what I wanted.

So I turned a 2009 Mac Pro I picked up off of Ebay for $1300 into a superb professional workstation, gaming, and VR platform, simply by adding an SSD drive and a new video card.

This is a pretty cool idea. Read Dan’s post to see how the machine stacks up as a VR platform (spoiler: very, very well).

But read on, as Dan shifts gears, focusing on the Apple’s coming Mac Pro:

I realized that the corner that Apple has painted us into is just another “sweet solution” (similar to Jobs proposal that we develop web apps for iPhone instead of native apps).

I can do the work that Apple feels is appropriate with a 5k iMac, but the massive pile of external disks and their power supplies stacked up behind it speaks to the adaptions I’ve quietly had to make in order to get it to meet my basic needs.

Apple’s agenda has been to stay focused on its cash cow: the iPhone. As a result it has quietly mothballed some amazing products and technologies along the way, seriously impaired the economics of commercial software sales, and neglected macOS in their efforts to homogenize it with iOS.

Who is this guy? Daniel Pasco is the CEO of Black Pixel, a top development shop. So in my book, he’s earned his opinions.

Glenn Fleishman pulled together this reasonably comprehensive look at options for capturing over the air TV signals and recording them on your Mac. If you’ve thought about cutting the cable cord, this is for you.

Don’t do this. But it is an interesting read. But don’t do it. And go back up your Mac.

Thoughtful post from Marco Arment on the current Mac Pro design, with collected thoughts on where Apple should go with the model currently in the works.

This particular paragraph captured my feelings about the 2013 Mac Pro design:

While minimalism is one aspect of one view of good design, it’s often overused, underconsidered, and misunderstood, resulting in products with surface-level appeal that don’t actually work very well because they were optimized for visual design and minimalism rather than overall real-world usefulness.

And from the wrapup:

There is no single design, no single set of trade-offs, that addresses a large set of pro users: they all want different things, and the only way to serve that with one product line is to have it be extremely versatile and offer a wide variety of configuration options. You can’t do that with a minimalist industrial-design indulgence like the 2013 Mac Pro.

Good read.

Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, starts with this Phil Schiller comment:

“The Mac mini remains a product in our lineup. Nothing more to say about it today,” Phil Schiller told reporters, according to John Gruber.

and then digs into the past and potential future of the Mac mini. Good read.

Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5Mac:

I’m currently in the process of building a new Hackintosh rig for 2017, so imagine how surprised and happy I was to hear that Nvidia is working on beta drivers for its GPUs with the latest Pascal architecture. Up until today, I had just settled on being relegated to a Radeon RX 480, or a Maxwell-era Nvidia card.

And:

With today’s announcement, the Hackintosh just got exponentially more appealing. Nvidia’s announcement is positive for a variety of reasons: there’s the prospect of using an eGPU setup with a MacBook Pro, along with future prospects of Nvidia cards powering future Mac Pro hardware.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you do decide to build a Hackintosh, start here.

There’s a new Mac Pro coming, eventually, but there’s an interesting story that unfolds. Pop over to the main Loop post for all the details. My 2 cents? Well worth it.

Samsung rolled out their latest and greatest smartphone yesterday, the Galaxy S8. Interesting phone, includes a new digital assistant named Bixby, a fingerprint scanner/encrypted facial recognition, and a desktop dock (a la Microsoft’s Continuum).

What does this have to do with the Mac? Click through to the main Loop post and follow along, see if you agree.

Small fonts an issue on your Mac, especially as your eyes get older? Rob Griffiths walks you through the solution, the Zoom tab in the System Preferences Accessibility pane. Good tips.

Have your heart set on a speedy new Mac Pro? Given that nothing appears to be on the horizon from Apple, your best bet is to build your own Hackintosh. For about $2,000 you can have a tower machine that will run macOS, Windows, and Linux, with benchmarks way faster than the fastest Mac Pro Apple currently sells.

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If I read this right, Bare Bones Software will take all of TextWrangler and fold it into the demo version of BBEdit. When your free 30-day demo expires, you’ll still have basic BBEdit features and ALL of the TextWrangler features.

Smart move, and respectful of the user base. And it still doesn’t suck.

Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog:

A developer-only preview of what would become the macOS Sierra 10.12.4 software update references a total of eight next-generation MacBook Pro models with the latest Kaby Lake processors from Intel.

Lower power consumption and, more importantly, support for 32GB of RAM. Interesting and inevitable.

UPDATE: A little birdie tells me that Kaby Lake’s built-in memory controller does not support 32GB RAM. So the move to Kaby Lake does not necessarily mean we’ll see Macs with 32GB RAM without the addition of a separate memory controller.

Gordon Mah Ung, Macworld, gets to the bottom of the MacBook Pro’s disparate battery tests. Most testers got great battery life, others found it to be terrible. Why? Turns out, it’s a bug:

In looking at other battery run-down scenarios, I ran smack into a problem that’s likely at fault for many of the confusing battery life issues with the laptop, at least in macOS Sierra 10.12.2. On occasion, the laptop’s discrete GPU would just get stuck on and consume power even when it wasn’t used. Others had reported this too, but you’d really have to stumble onto it.

I was able to reproduce the issue in Safari by opening Google Maps, which would cause the laptop to switch over to the GPU for the WebGL workload. Opening additional browser tabs and then closing the Google Maps tab would, on occasion, leave the GPU consuming up to 10 watts of power while doing absolutely nothing.

Terrific job homing in on this. Nothing helps tech support more than a problem they can reliably reproduce.

This is one of those posts filled with tips you’ll know most of. But scan through the list, just in case there are a few you don’t know.

Even better, pass this post along to the folks in your life to whom you are the go to tech support. Good, foundational info every Mac user should know.

If you use Time Machine for backups, read the post before you do a restore. Even better, do a verify periodically to make sure you are not backing up on top of a bad backup.

UPDATE: Turns out that the verify backup option is disabled (appears in grey) for USB drives. My sense is that this was designed for Time Capsule. Well here’s an article from a few years back that discusses this.

Mark Gurman and Ian King, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is designing a new chip for future Mac laptops that would take on more of the functionality currently handled by Intel Corp. processors, according to people familiar with the matter.

The chip, which went into development last year, is similar to one already used in the latest MacBook Pro to power the keyboard’s Touch Bar feature, the people said. The updated part, internally codenamed T310, would handle some of the computer’s low-power mode functionality, they said. The people asked not to be identified talking about private product development. It’s built using ARM Holdings Plc. technology and will work alongside an Intel processor.

If this interests you, take a look at Rene Ritchie’s take on the Bloomberg report. Here’s a taste:

Power efficiency is Apple’s jam. Unless and until they license x86 or swap MacBook to ARM, there’s only so much even the tight and belabored integration they do with Intel will deliver them.

Offloading low-power, low-level tasks to their own silicon, though, is absolutely something Apple could and would do regardless of the main processor architecture. Same as they could and did offload display to their own, custom timing controller when they wanted to bring 5K to the iMac and the industry just hadn’t gotten there yet.

To me, it makes sense for Apple to control as much of the silicon as it can. This is just another step down the road to an ARM Mac.