Over the last year I have published well over 350 articles about Macs and macOS. Here are some of my favourites that you might have missed, or want to return to. Although I had originally intended this to be a single article, this covers hardware, firmware, recovery, troubleshooting and updates, and tomorrow’s sequel breezes briskly through the remainder.

Hardware

It became clear that different Apple silicon Mac models run their CPU cores at different frequencies. In January I compiled an initial list of each chip available then, and updated that on 30 October. Those are tabulated here.

Many Apple silicon models offer one or more alternative power modes. Understanding exactly what they do was one of my first tasks for the year. This brought a series of articles through that month, covering CPU cores, GPUs, an early overview, details on Low Power mode and CPU cores, and running an M4 Pro at full and low power.

One of the early criticisms of Apple silicon laptops was their behaviour when you opened their lid. Apple responded by changing that, and this article explains how you can control that for MacBook Air and Pro models.

Staying with Apple silicon laptops, their Thunderbolt/USB-C ports come with security controls and liquid detection built in. The latter resulted in outcry claiming it was only for Apple’s benefit, but I explained them more carefully here.

Whether SSDs Trim determines their performance, but it has been a murky area for years. This article should make it clearer, and provides a simple test to determine whether any given SSD does Trim as you’d hope.

Ever since the first Apple silicon Macs were released, one of their great challenges has been how to make an external bootable disk for them. What is relatively simple for an Intel Mac appeared unreliable with M1 models and their successors. It turned out that Apple knew that each Apple silicon Mac has one USB-C port that can’t be used for this purpose, as it’s that designated for use when in DFU mode. Although some still seem to suffer problems, this has transformed the process, as detailed for macOS Tahoe here.

Firmware & recovery

Every year or so since macOS boot disks became complex in structure, I revisit this subject, but last year I was tempted to expand my horizons and provided an account of boot disk structure in iOS and iPadOS, and followed that with a summary of stages during the early part of their boot process.

That highlighted the fact that Macs and devices with support for AI load related components in a long series of cryptexes, an opportunity to mention Creedence Clearwater Revival. I’ll let you discover the connection.

One of the less-known new features in Tahoe is its Recovery Assistant, as I described here.

Troubleshooting

With so much emphasis on what you can and cannot do in Recovery mode, Safe mode tends to get overlooked. However, there are several good reasons for starting your Mac up in Safe mode, if you’re struggling to get an update to install, or need to flush its caches. I explore them in detail here.

Given the high cost of larger internal SSDs, it’s not surprising that some have to buy a Mac with less storage than they’d like. Sooner or later that can result in their startup disk almost running out of free space, posing problems as to how to recover it, as explored in this article.

There are also times when you need to bring in the heavy cavalry to fix problems. Many of the older solutions that folk still recommend may not work, so I explored those that do last month.

Updates

Another of macOS Tahoe’s new features, BSI, looks like it’s a second attempt to get RSRs to work again. Those Background Security Improvements are explored here.

Inevitably, there are those who don’t want to rush into Tahoe just yet. This article explains how you can still keep your Mac up to date without upgrading it.