hoakley December 31, 2021 Macs, Technology

Looking back at 2021 on my Mac: articles worth reading again

It’s conventional at this time of year to look back at the old year just about to close, and make predictions about the New Year just about to start. For Macs, those seem consummately easy: 2021 was the year of the M1 Pro and Max, and the first major version of macOS since Sierra to consolidate rather than bring deep change. Next year will be the year of whatever Apple releases to complete its switch from Intel.

On 1 January, I called for last year to be the year of Disk Utility, little knowing that it was about to get more attention and include new features for working with snapshots. Although in Monterey it’s more capable, it’s still marred by bugs, particularly one that prevents it from unmounting volumes, causing First Aid to fail repeatedly. Perhaps last year was but the start of a full campaign by Apple’s engineers to modernise Disk Utility.

At the end of January, I started a whole series on Spotlight. Given the number of Mac users who report problems with search, you may find the following articles handy:
Spotlight on search: How Spotlight works
Spotlight on search: Search and you might be lucky
Spotlight on search: Better and different, 3rd party apps
Spotlight on search: In-app search (Core Spotlight)
How to test Spotlight out in 30 seconds with Mints 1.0b11
Spotlight on search: Four different Spotlights
Spotlight on search: How to diagnose and fix problems
Diagnosing a Spotlight bug in Big Sur: failure to index RTF content
As we had hoped, a little while later indexing and search of RTF files was magically fixed.

One of my long-term projects has been getting external boot disks to work with M1 Macs. In February I was still struggling, but with a little help finally got there in 11.4, and explained the process in detail recently.

In the summer, I started looking in earnest at the performance benefits of M1 series Macs, a subject which has continued to occupy plenty of my time, and subsequent articles. At the heart of Apple’s magic is sound user psychology coupled with its tight integration of two different types of core.

One of the big problems with Big Sur and Monterey for many users are the changes made to the ways to update them. For Big Sur, this meant a succession of large downloads, and those with more than one Mac should be using the bundled Content Caching Server to reduce their downloads and make updates faster. Although this is usually trouble-free, I put together an article on troubleshooting it.

One persistent problem which has troubled many Mac users over the later part of the year has been websites with broken certificates. This is likely to recur in the future, and is worst with older versions of macOS, so you may need to refer back to my guide on how to deal with them.

As I get to grips with the new features in Monterey, I’ve been writing about them. Among these are some articles about Shortcuts which you may find useful:
Shortcuts: Automating the Mac
Getting started with Shortcuts: 1 Basics
Shortcuts: counting files and Quick Actions
Shortcuts: flow control, filters, sorting and iteration

Finally, to end this review and the year, it may be time to erase all content and settings, something else new with Monterey. And with that I look forward to providing further information in the New Year.

20Comments

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1

Alan Ralph on December 31, 2021 at 9:23 am

For me personally, 2021 has been the year where I finally knuckled down and started to learn how to *use* the various apps I have — in particular, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel and DEVONthink — to automate some of the busywork I find myself doing. It’ll be interesting to see what Shortcuts can do for me in the coming year. Many thanks for all your technical articles, and the utilities you’ve produced to shine light into the hidden depths of macOS. 🙂

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- 2
  
  hoakley on December 31, 2021 at 8:11 pm
  
  Thank you.
  Happy New Year!
  Howard.
  
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3

bhallstein on December 31, 2021 at 11:02 am

I found your site early this year and immediately added it to my RSS feeds. Congratulations on a year of fantastic informative content!

I wonder if this year, time machine will become able to convert old HFS+-style ‘hard link’ backups to new APFS-style ‘snapshot’ backups.

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- 4
  
  hoakley on December 31, 2021 at 8:15 pm
  
  Thank you – Happy New Year!
  Sadly, I think the complexity of converting HFS+ backups to APFS means that there will never be any facility to do that. Even for a third-party developer, it would be a nightmare, and the number of users who might wish to do that is falling every day.
  Howard.
  
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5

Peter on December 31, 2021 at 11:56 am

Thank you for a wonderful year of incredible information on Macs and Art. Two subjects I hold dear to my heart and your vast knowledge of both has lifted my spirits many time this year. I check in twice a day here in Australia to see what you have managed to enlighten us with and I have yet to be disappointed. Keep up the wonderful articles and have a great 2022 Howard. 🙂

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- 6
  
  hoakley on December 31, 2021 at 8:16 pm
  
  Thank you – Happy New Year!
  Howard.
  
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7

Agam Brahma on December 31, 2021 at 10:00 pm

This blog has been immensely useful and entertaining and inspiring for the past few years.

Happy new year and all the best for writing more !

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- 8
  
  hoakley on December 31, 2021 at 11:45 pm
  
  Thank you: Happy New Year.
  Howard.
  
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9

BenSar on December 31, 2021 at 11:05 pm

A wonderful distillation of so much valuable information.

More useful than an index, because your descriptions overcome “lost” search terms!

It would be wonderful if it could be kept up to date as you add more articles for our benefit and delight.

A very happy and productive year to you from a very grateful readership.

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- 10
  
  hoakley on December 31, 2021 at 11:44 pm
  
  Thank you. Happy New Year!
  I fear that maintaining that is a great deal of work in itself.
  Howard.
  
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11

BenSar on January 1, 2022 at 1:12 am

Absolutely understood.

We can but dream!

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12

Duncan on January 1, 2022 at 1:22 am

I wish for the new year that Howard finds the time to take a well-deserved vacation. Someplace with no electricity or Internet access 🙂

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- 13
  
  hoakley on January 1, 2022 at 3:36 pm
  
  Thank you.
  Howard.
  
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14

David B. on January 8, 2022 at 5:43 pm

Hello Howard – I wish you a happy and healthy new year too. 🙂

May I ask, please, about a recent EtreCheck scan I’ve carried out after purchasing the product? See https://pastebin.com/te1yQTa5

There appears to be a Virtual Machine within my iMac.
Is it something which I can remove? I didn’t put it there. A few weeks ago I started in remote mode and used Disk Utility to erase the drives before installing a virgin copy of Monterey from Apple.

I would welcome you advice if you are willing to give it.

Thanks

David

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- 15
  
  hoakley on January 8, 2022 at 8:17 pm
  
  I can’t see any evidence of there being a ‘virtual machine’ there. Can you be more specific about what you think states that, please?
  Howard.
  
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  - 16
    
    David B. on January 8, 2022 at 8:39 pm
    
    Thank you so much for responding, Howard.
    
    This is what concerns me: disk2s4 – VM (APFS) [APFS VM] (Shared – 5.37 GB used)
    
    David
    
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    - 17
      
      hoakley on January 9, 2022 at 10:55 pm
      
      Ah. That’s not a Virtual Machine at all – it’s the volume which macOS uses to store its Virtual Memory swap files. They used to be stored on the boot volume, but in the new boot disk layout they get their own volume. This was introduced with Catalina.
      Howard.
      
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    - 18
      
      David B. on January 9, 2022 at 11:31 pm
      
      d’oh! So sorry to have troubled you with this, Howard. Is there any, albeit remote, possibility that some data/code could have survived on the hard drives even after me having actioned matters as described. i.e. started with Command +R and then erased both drives using Disk Utility?
      
      David
      
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    - 19
      
      hoakley on January 10, 2022 at 9:48 pm
      
      David,
      When you format a disk, the old data isn’t normally destroyed fully. However, the file system which has to be used in order to access that data is destroyed and replaced by a new one, which has no knowledge of the data there previously.
      In the case of HFS+, data recovery specialists can still recover much of the data from an ‘erased’ disk, although it’s a specialist task and not something that the man in the street could attempt without a specialist tool. While some can be done in APFS, that’s a much tougher proposition still.
      So yes, some of the old data could potentially be recovered, but no, it’s no longer accessible to the new volumes you have created. One important factor here is whether and how a volume may have been encrypted. There are tricks you can use to make old encrypted data completely inaccessible – throwing away the encryption key is a good one used to great effect in macOS. Do that with an encrypted volume and any old data is lost and gone forever, and might as well just be random bytes.
      I hope that settles your mind.
      Howard.
      
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20

David B. on January 10, 2022 at 10:02 pm

I much appreciate all that you have told me, Howard. Thank you so much.
With kind regards,
David

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