Turncoat Jenny still out front, but here comes Desktop Dan. เทิร์นโค๊ด เจนนิ่ง ยังคงนำอยู่ แต่เดสท์ท็อป แดน มาแล้ว Dentist of Detroit (2011) Second place goes to Turncoat Jenny. Dec 22, 2015 A monthly review spotlighting the best titles the UK indie press has to offer. By Olly MacNamee. Turncoat Writer: Ryan O’Sullivan Artist: Plaid Klaus. Jan 12, 2019 The original mac was named for Charles Macintosh, who got a patent in 1823 for a solution of naphtha and crude rubber that he used in cementing two pieces of fabric together to make them waterproof. Justin Long Can’t Even Get Facts Right. 15 years ago, Apple started an incredibly memorable advertising campaign called Get A Mac. Personifications of each platform extolled the virtues of the Mac, and the blunders of the PC, to a hilarious effect!

• Turncoat Mac Os 11
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You knew it was inevitable, it simply couldn’t be avoided, there HAD to be a collective freakout over the new M1 Macs at some point! And here it is! We have arrived upon M1 Mac SSD Wear – gate!

M1 Mac SSD Wear Issue Not Well Researched

The TD;lr of this issue is the fact that Solid-State Memory has a finite life span and it was reported that M1 Mac SSD were burning through this lifespan, possibly becoming unusable within a year. The main problem simply that the SSD is built into the computer, and not a removable module. This would make the entire computer useless if the part failed prematurely.

But, when it all boiled down, it was found that some of the folks who were reporting the potential issue had computer problems causing excessive disk use, not using properly optimized tools, had flaky math, and/or didn’t understand the fundamentals of the issue. I’m not saying Apple isn’t capable of some impressive guffaws, but for people to think Apple would release a product with such a glaring flaw is impressively cynical. Ok, so am I letting them off the hook? No! I still think there is PLENTY of room inside ANY computer for a removable storage memory module. I don’t care if it’s a standard SATA drive, a crazy M.2 variant or some insane Apple proprietary connector.. but at least make it modular!

Because yea, no matter what, parts fail, and the more modular a system is, the easier it is to repair it. It would suck if you had to replace your car’s engine if your tires wore out, right?

The Basics Of SSD’s

So what is the underlying issue that this is all about and can anything be done?

No. Not really.

Solid State Hard Drives all work the very same way. They are comprised of millions, billions, hell, TRILLIONS of individual Memory Cells, each capable of storing 1 bit of data. In a traditional mechanical drive, these bits are stored by flipping a magnetic particle, either in a North/South or South/North configuration. Unless acted upon by an external force, nothing should change their state, and they can be flipped pretty much as many times as you need. Email me if you like to learn just how that works!.

In an SSD that bit is read or written by either charging or draining that individual memory cell of electricity. This process relies on an oxide layer to contain the charge. Unfortunately, as the electrical charge passes through this oxide layer it wears down, and eventually, it’s unable to contain that charge, which renders that memory cell unusable. If you want a super in-depth video on this, check this out.

This wearing out is the basis of the problem everyone freaked out over. Because this is a basic limiting factor of SSD’s, manufacturers have a statistic referred to as Total Bytes Written. This is usually measured in Terrabytes, meaning that a total of say, 600 Terrabytes can be written to the entire drive before it “wears out”.

When new Apple M1 Mac users ran 3rd party diagnostic tools to view the stats on their solid-state drives, some people were shocked to see that this reportage lifespan was already at 1% after two months, some were doing math that seemed to indicate they would wear out their drives in only 6 months!

2TB 16GB model. 3% used.

Turncoat Mac Os 11

That means that for a 256GB model, proportionally, you’d expect ~30% usage.

If this is accurate, some of these machines aren’t going to last half a year to 100%.

And that’s a 16GB model. 8GB should be worse.

Holy shit. https://t.co/9HcmaYgJPT

— Hector Martin (@marcan42) February 15, 2021

The Devil Is In The Details

So, it was found later that a lot of errors and assumptions had been made.

• The software used to measure was untested with the M1 Mac SSD configuration, incorrectly reporting bits written and erroneous power readings.
• Calculations were made on bytes of data written AND read. Wearing only occurs during the time data is WRITTEN, not read.
• Total Bytes Written warranty was low balled, assuming Apple uses crap memory modules rated for as low as 150TB.
• The assumption was that the drive suddenly dies at the Total Bytes Written limit.

When you are testing something, you need to make sure the providers of the testing software have properly configured their software for what you are testing… this wasn’t done. Now, it’s true that there seemed to be a lot of data being read and written on some of these drives, more than should happen. This was due in some cases because of runaway apps, in one case a piece of software called Hand Mirror was using enormous amounts of resources.

However, in everyday computer use, available hard drive space is used by the operating system for something we call swap space. In its day-to-day background operations, the Operating System has to read and write all sots of data. This is typically done in RAM, but should the system use up all of the available RAM, it uses the “empty” space on the hard drive to do these functions. This is also the reason it’s important to restart your Mac once and a while! Now, when you have to consider that that memory has a finite number of use cycles, it does become a concern.

BUT, considering the two other factors, it’s not nearly as much to worry about! Since the wear only occurs during the write cycle, the numbers improve drastically as most folks were measuring data read and written. Then, when you consider most good quality memory is rated for 10,000 cycles or 600TB TBW, not that bargain bin 150TB TBW, the numbers improve even more. Even with just these numbers factored in, lifespans improved to 6-8 years with standard use.

Manufacturers Know And Plan

MacWorld’s Jon Jacobi made a great statement of fact,

No person in their right mind would buy a new car thinking that would cease working in five years or 50,000 miles, but that’s a common warranty.

So why did people think this would happen with M1 Mac SSD wear? We’ve used the exact same memory in iPhones for 13 years, and I have yet to see an iPhone stop working due to memory wear out.

Furthermore, manufacturers are fully aware of this issue. Tell me, if you manufacturers whatsits, and you know they would fail after 4 years of regular use, would you warranty it for 4 years? No, you warranty it for 1 year, hoping to have to replace as few whatsits as possible. SSD manufacturers are logically doing the same. So, they warranty the drives for up to 600TB, but more than likely will survive at least 1200TB, and even more, I’m sure.

Additionally, there is a spec in the industry referred to as “overprovisioning”. This refers to the practice of manufacturing an SSD drive with more memory cells than advertised. The manufacturers know all about wear and tear, and they provide more than the advertised number of memory cells just so that if some fail, they can “retire” those, remap and provision a new cell to take its place.

They also build methods into the hardware to reduce that wear and tear. They spread out the writing cycles over a large array of cells that include the pool of overprovisioned to reduce wear and tear on all cells. They do a LOT to increase the longevity of this memory, and they keep coming up with ingenious ways to make it even better.

What Can You Do About Your M1 Mac SSD?

With that being said, you can do a few things to improve the life span of your M1 Mac SSD as well. Since it’s possible a significant amount of wear could come from that OS swapping stuff we mentioned, learn to run your system a bit leaner… don’t have 70 bloody tabs open in Safari, like a certain lady I know and I’m quite fond of not mentioning any names or particular relations to myself.

For some folks, power users like video editors and photographers, keeping your RAM usage low is just not possible! So what do you do? Make sure you buy your system with an excessive amount of RAM, and as large a drive as you can budget for. Shift your thinking from, “will I ever use this amount of RAM or storage space?”, to “the more I have, the longer it will last”.

But what is the absolute, number one thing you can do to protect yourself?

So, you lose the lottery, your drive packs it in and suddenly dies after writing 125GB and you want to call and shout at me about this article… did you have a backup? Good! Just never trust technology and back up your data, in double, hell, triplicate if you can, and make sure you have an offsite copy!

By the way, a super important fact that most people don’t mention about Solid State Drives is that they LEAK. Yes, they leak electrons! With some of the newer memory especially, those oxide layers are getting thinner and thinner, electrons can leak through those layers over time…meaning that the “state” of that bit can change… corrupting those beautiful photos of your new baby. It’s been shown that an SSD sitting on a shelf unpowered for a year or two can leak enough electrons to make you have a very bad day. So, do not use solid-state memory for long-term storage.

Relax And Buy M1

I’m actually of the opinion that it’s generally a bad idea to buy “1st Gen” products. But, the fact is, the M1 is a 15th generation product… it is the same processor we’ve been using in our iPhones and iPads for ages now. Technically, it’s an A15 if you want to think about it! I personally was still going to hold off and purchase the last generation Intel iMac, the specs were great and it would last me another 9 years like my current 2012 iMac has.

But after the M1 event we saw that Apple wasn’t exaggerating their unbelievable claims, the performance of these new machines could not be ignored, and I felt I’d be a fool not to migrate to the M1 platform. So, I’m currently waiting on what they have in store for the first Apple Silicon desktops. Truthfully though, it is my hope that the iMac will at least have a modular hard drive and upgradable RAM.

We are seeing an evolution of computers, the inevitable continued shrinking and conglomeration of components into single modules. This integration of the storage chips is natural, unfortunately, but there is hope we can steer the industry back towards some basic modularity.

In the meantime, feel confident in your purchase of an M1 Mac, what we’ve seen so far is fantastic… and always give collective freakouts a lil time for the truth to bubble to the surface.

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We’re in the midst of WWDC 2020, and one of the biggest things to slip out post-keynote is that the 20-year-old Mac OS X is dead… we are now officially in the MacOS 11 era. Like was done to Classic Mac OS 9, MacOS Big Sur is putting OS X in the pine box. We mean that literally… Steve Jobs did it on stage!

MacOS Big Sur Number Change Very Significant

To the general public, the version numbers really didn’t meant anything, it was what used to be the internal code name that was significant. But, when the tech field saw MacOS X(10) has changed to 11, we realized just how seismic this shift was. On the surface, we are getting simply a new user interface, something that relies heavily on cues from iOS. Transparencies, rounded corners, neumorphism…

I said years ago, we are slowly seeing the merge of MacOS and OS.. we are very nearly there!

You can’t look at MacOS Big Sur and not see iOS, which isn’t a bad thing, the design is beautiful and easy on the eyes, easy on the brain. There is a more unified approach to layout, employing a universal sidebar to app windows, making it easier to find application options. A refund toolbar and overall increased spacing between elements point toward a touchable future. The dock looks more like the dock found on iPads, with the biggest change being entirely new icons. The icons are immediately familiar as iOS, with slight variations that seem to make sense on the Mac.

Apple has included a variant of Control Centre to ensure easy access to things like screen brightness and volume control. You can add “widgets” from the control centre to your menu bar as well. The new notification centre makes heavy use of customizable widgets that give you immediate access to the information you customize.

A very welcome return is coming as well, the Mac Startup Chime! As a lifelong Apple user, this reassuring start-up noise means so much!

The startup chime in macOS Big Sur. pic.twitter.com/rRSN4MrIBp

— Juli Clover (@julipuli) June 23, 2020

Core Applications Getting New Features In MacOS Big Sur

Safari has been updated in MacOS Big Sur naturally, mostly with privacy in mind. You can now get a report card of sots on each site you visit. Click on the icon to get information on exactly what the website is doing in the background, as in, what is it tracking. You can also see what information is being spread to 3rd party advertisers. A possible negative side effect though is to web developers like me, Google Analytics data is blocked as well. This is valuable, but typically benign data that is gathered to help a website owner monitor their traffic.

We also get what looks like a nice customizable home screen, an evolution of my favourite “tabs view”. Giving you Site Icons of your favourites or history, even your reading lists. If you visit multilingual websites, there is a new built-in translator that will change the language of the website you are on in place and as you scroll. Apple has added a tab preview as well, hovering over the tab will show you a preview of the page, again, similar to what we see on iOS. Dare we notice a trend here??

Messages in MacOS Big Sur is now pretty much a perfect copy of Messages in iOS, taking advantage of new threaded messages, pinned messages and of course new Memojies. Group messages are improved with icons that show you exactly who is talking and when, and you can also @ people, similar to full-fledged chat apps like Slack or Discord.

For laptops, we’ll finally be getting proper battery usage analytics and reporting similar to iOS, and the much-vaulted return to power time estimates! Maps is getting some great updates for EV drivers, showing where charging stations will be, and being able to plan trips accordingly. There is a new emphasis on cycling, but due to its limited coverage will not yet be useful for my audience.. Calgary is a beautiful city, but we are no LA or New York apparently.. but it will come. Lots of improvements everywhere, but do this seemingly surface polish justify an entirely new number for MacOS? No… but…

Apple Silicon Now Coming To The Mac

… combined with an entirely new software architecture certainly does.

What does that mean? Well, the Central Processing Unit in your Mac is currently manufactured by Intel, based on an underlying concept known as X86. This determines how application software like Microsoft Word, Photos, iMovie, are written by the developer. They have to write it in a language that the Intel processor understands.

But, Apple is beginning a two-year changeover to the same processors found in your iPhone and iPad. These are what are called ARM processors in the industry. This may seem to not make a lick of difference or matter to you in the least, but know this is a monumental change in the industry. This is like if car manufacturers all suddenly announced we are moving to hydrogen power only. It would require massive changes in the industry to make it work. This is what Apple is now doing, and there is lots of work ahead for developers.

What are you going to have to change? Nothing. This transition is designed to be completely transparent to the end-user. Apple has introduced several tools for developers that will ensure in a multitude of ways that their applications will work on an Apple Silicon Mac without the user even knowing something is happening. It should be utterly seamless to you as the user.. but one interesting thing; all of a sudden your favourite iPhone and iPad apps will work on your Mac.

Why?

There is all sorts of speculation out there as to why Apple has chosen to dump Intel in favour of their own processors. Intel has been struggling lately and frankly falling behind in the industry. Companies like AMD and TSMC are leaving Intel in the dust when it comes to technologies like circuit size, power efficiency, processing power, and more importantly quality and yield. Sticking with Intel could cause Apple plenty of issues in the future when competing against PCs running AMD processors.

The fact is that the majority of computing devices out there could soon be ARM-based. Most phones, tablets and an increasing number of computers use processors based on the ARM technology, which includes Apple of course. It’s happening at a slower pace in the desktop computer space. Interestingly, the same day Apple announced the transition to its own ARM-based CPU’s, it was announced the new fastest computer on the planet is ARM-based. Japan’s new Fugaku supercomputer is 2.8x faster than the US-based Summit system. For the tech geeks out there, it employs 152,064 A64FX chips, generating 415,500 teraflops of processing power. That is 7.2 million processing cores! For reference, Intel’s top of the line processor is capable of 1 teraflop.

…looks like I’ll have to move the couch to fit that in my living room…

The biggest reason is simple though, consistency. Apple has spent years now designing their own processors, and the results have been spectacular. They consistently outperform any other mobile processor they are compared to. They are incredibly efficient, incredibly powerful and constantly employ new technologies to lead the industry. The hope is that we will see an incredible increase in performance for the price in these new Apple Silicon systems, some industry folks are saying we could see a 50% to 100% increase in performance when the change over happens. No longer having to worry about coding for X86, Apple and their developers will be able to write their apps ONCE, and it will work on any and all Apple equipment.

To developers this is a boon, they suddenly don’t have to write their program twice, or have to make the decision to release their app for only Mac or iOS. To you as the user, any App you purchase has the potential to work on any and all of your Apple devices. The only drawback o far is the inability to use BootCamp, the Windows environment for Mac that required an Intel processor. But, there is already an indication from emulation companies like VMWare that they will release a version allowing you to run Windows on your Apple Silicon Mac.

This Has All Happened Before

Back in the day, Apple made hilarious ads that poked fun at Intel.

But, then in 2005, they did this…

And now, they are switching away! The reason back then was the failure of Motorola and it’s the ability to deliver the powerhouse G5 for laptops, switching to Intel because of their better power consumption and performance. Now that Intel is starting to fall away from the pack, Apple is not sitting on its laurels, they expect to stay the leader of the pack, and with the transition to their own CPU’s, they are ensuring that.

Apple has gone through now four major transitions in its history, from it’s original 6800 series chips in the original Macintosh to the PowerPC, then a software change from Classic Mac OS 9, to what we’ve lived on since 2000, Mac OS X. Apple then revealed the secret life of MacOS X being that it was always able to run on Intel, and made the transition to Intel in 2005.

Mac Os Download

2020 brings the 4th major transition, this time cutting the ties to all outside umbilicals. Perhaps they got sick of being let down by their processor manufacturers, and after showing the world they can not only hold their own but in fact beat everyone, they now design the entirety of their systems in-house. Apple informed the developers watching WWDC 2020 that MacOS X is basically dead, the future is MacOS 11 that lives on Apple Silicon. Personally, I’m really hoping they hold another funeral…

Compatibility

As is typical, a few systems get left behind.. and it looks like The Stem is going to have to upgrade soon himself! I for one will be looking at those ARM Macs! Here is the official list…

• MacBook, 2015 and later
• MacBook Air, 2013 and later
• MacBook Pro, late 2013 and later
• Mac Mini, 2014 and later
• iMac, 2014 and later
• iMac Pro (all models), 2017 and later
• Mac Pro, 2013 and later

The Future Is Bright

There is plenty of trepidation and celebration surrounding this announcement. I’m celebrating it because I know what Apple has done with the A-Series processors we use every day in our iPhones and iPads. If they can pull it off in the Mac, we are going to have some true powerhouse systems! Making the jobs of developers so much easier is only going to attack yet more attention to Apple’s platform, end users are going to see the eventual merger of iOS and MacOS, at least on the surface. Unlike the bludgeon approach by Microsoft which resulted in the horror show of Windows 8 Metro, Apple has proceeded with a much more gradual unification of its OS, and I personally love the new User Interface in MacOS Big Sur.

For the end-user, this should be much easier to adapt to, and in the end, muckiest more rewarding since it’s so well thought out. Let’s see what the next 20 years holds!

Look for MacOS Big Sur in the fall, and contact us should you have any questions!

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