Craig Butcher

Week Note Forty Six - The Core

Apple Silicon

We all know that the announcement of this chipset was imminent yet on the scale they were showing off a lot of what it can do. The specs?

It is in the following hardware available:

The Pro and Mac mini still has the Intel offering, while the iMac, iMac Pro, and Mac Pro also has it. There are speculation of future chipset potentially M1X happening. Remember, this is a two year transition to allow time for developers to switch to the new hardware. There is a ridiculous, yet realistic, thought that the Mac Pro will have high end specs that could wipe the floor of any CPUs offerings out there.

They all contains the same hardware apart from memory and storage space offerings. My advice for people who are going to be buying the Mac? Make sure you ramp up the ram to 16GB and get a good amount of storage space you can afford because it is all soldered in.

There is a lot to think about here especially when it comes to Rosetta 2 where the app has not been transitioned to Universal version. For instance, you should be able to run Intel-based apps on Apple's new chipset until the support is available. iPhone and iPad apps will be available to run on the Mac which is a huge must have.

All of the Macs with Apple's M1 can drive one external display up to 6k resolution at 60 Hz. My advice is that if you happened to have a couple of monitors, it would be a great idea to opt for one ultra wide screen monitor. Having two external display seems incredibly strange unless you really need that screen estate.

The talk about benchmarks? It is all going to come out over the next week or so when people starts to get hold of these new Macs. It is only today that the M1 emulating x86 is still faster than every other Mac in single core benchmark appeared - hint: it beats Intel i9 10 cores @ 3.6ghz.

Before you want to read on about macOS Big Sur, you might want to read Intel's disruption is now complete.

macOS Big Sur

I haven't been following much of the WWDC regarding the next version of macOS and for the first time, I was excited about installing this onto my six months old Macbook Air 2020, after backing up everything, the first hurdle was to install a clean version of Big Sur because I cannot seem to trust the upgrade path on macOS.

It was a dodgy start because it fails to allow me to boot from USB external media. Even Apple's About Startup Security Utility was a good point of reference and nothing was working. I suspect I have a broken USB drive and ended up opting to boot back to macOS Catalina via internet recovery, install Big Sur, and reinstall. It was a mess and lessons were learnt here about internet recovery being an incredibly useful tool.

What I absolutely love about Big Sur is the look and feel of it, everything feels tied together, the space between the words in the menu seems easier to read (I'm in my early 40s, this is a bonus) including the fact that everything seems reworked.

Restoring from backup? I do not use Time Machine at all as daily work is mostly in repos in github and keybase, docker is used for development, and using Homebrew to install packages and apps using a script I have written.

NaNoWriMo grinds to a halt

I'm okay about this because of other factors that as hampering this. The idea is there and all I need to do somehow is to keep at it. Although, it is not going to be completed this month and I have learnt a lot how a novel is written regarding in plots, chapters, characters, and not to be a cheapskate like Dan Brown did with his books.

All in good time!

And finally...

Week-notes 46 arrived a day late after dealing with a flu that knocked me out for a couple of days.

Stay safe, do the right thing.

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