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Apple silicon

Scheduled activities: 3 launchd or DAS?

While macOS uses DAS-CTS to schedule hundreds of background activities, third-parties normally use launchd. Comes with a full diagram explaining DAS-CTS.

February 2, 2023 Macs, Technology

Scheduled activities: 2 Running the activity

How running a background task takes a tiny fraction of second, although the task itself takes seconds or minutes, and why it’s run on E cores.

January 30, 2023 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: Knowing your limitations

Know yourself, including your methods and their limitations; nothing to excess, and certainty brings insanity: the maxims for those who study macOS.

January 29, 2023 Macs, Technology

Curious bugs in Help Viewer and Stage Manager

Not only do Help windows work differently on Intel and Apple silicon Macs, but on the latter they can bring Stage Manager to a grinding halt.

January 25, 2023 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: The evolution of Apple silicon

The M2 Pro and Max gain an extra two Efficiency cores, compared to their M1 equivalents. What effect will that have on their performance, and what of the M2 Ultra?

January 22, 2023 Macs, Technology

How macOS schedules background activities

The story of how Mac OS X went from cron, to launchd, and ended up with Duet Activity Scheduler, to schedule background activities like backups.

January 21, 2023 Macs, Technology

Recovery mode problems and how to solve them

If there’s a problem, you may try Recovery mode. What do you do when that proves to be a problem? Solutions for Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

January 6, 2023 Macs, Technology

Lightweight VMs are sparse files, and how to keep them compact

Virtual Machines for lightweight virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs rely on sparse files. Here are tips to ensure they stay small and don’t explode to full size.

January 5, 2023 Macs, Technology

Panaceas: which general fixes still work well?

Is reinstalling macOS still a useful solution to problems? What about installing macOS updates, or resetting the NVRAM and SMC?

December 17, 2022 Macs, Technology

Explainer: Rosetta 2

T T Read More

Rosetta 2 is key feature for the transition to Apple silicon, and is also available to run Intel x86_64 binaries in virtual macOS and Linux (in Ventura).

December 10, 2022 Macs, Technology

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