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APFS

How can I now have two apps named Pages?

If you’ve installed the new Creator Studio versions of Keynote, Numbers and Pages you’ll have noticed those apps have the same name as the iWork ones, and can sit side-by-side with them. What trickery was used to do this?

March 24, 2026 Macs, Technology

What to do with APFS warnings and errors

Should you attempt a repair in Recovery mode? Is it just a warning? How to identify the file or folder with a problem, and what to do to fix or prevent it from recurring.

March 20, 2026 Macs, Technology

macOS Tahoe no longer fully supports Time Capsules

If you’ve upgraded to Tahoe, your Time Capsule should still back up normally. But erase it to start new backups, and Time Machine refuses to back up to it any more.

February 11, 2026 Macs, Technology

What happens in early kernel boot on Apple silicon?

After the Boot ROM, LLB and iBoot (stage 2), kernel boot starts setting up security services and putting the hardware to work. CPU cores are started up before file systems are mounted, and the Mac starts userspace boot.

February 3, 2026 Macs, Technology

Which snapshots could you delete?

As Time Machine has changed, first to back up APFS volumes, then to create backups as snapshots, its needs have changed. This makes it complicated to decide which local snapshots you can delete without affecting its backups.

February 2, 2026 Macs, Technology

Explainer: snapshots

Fundamentally simple: a preserved copy of a volume at a moment in time. How its size can only increase with time, how they’re managed, what they’re used for, and the tools for using them.

January 31, 2026 Macs, Technology

How to tell where a file or folder is

It makes a big difference whether an app, file or folder is in the System or Data volume, or maybe somewhere else. Here’s how to tell accurately, rather than according to one of the Finder’s illusions.

January 23, 2026 Macs, Technology

Explainer: UUIDs

How to read a UUID to determine whether it’s supposed to be random, or has a specific meaning. Where you’ll find them, and whether you’ll ever see two the same.

December 24, 2025 Macs, Technology

When the Finder suffers premature ejection: a longstanding bug

T T Read More

Add another volume to your Mac’s internal SSD and try to eject it. All hell breaks loose as the Finder wants to eject the whole disk, it seems. Probably a 6-year old bug.

December 22, 2025 Macs, Technology

Which local file systems does macOS 26 support?

A survey of support for APFS, HFS+, FAT and ExFAT, NTFS, ZFS, Linux file systems, and MacFUSE with its potential for file systems running in user-space.

November 18, 2025 Macs, Technology

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