There’s a problem with your Mac, so you try starting it up in Recovery. But that doesn’t work. What should try next? Intel and Apple silicon Macs are then quite different.
Intel
How have the CPUs in our Macs become faster since the Macintosh 128K was launched by Steve Jobs forty years ago?
From Hypervisor APIs in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, through early VirtIO kernel extensions in Mojave in 2018, and Arm hypervisor support in Big Sur.
Comparison between 2 Intel and 2 Apple silicon Macs running vector and matrix functions from Apple’s Accelerate library. Was that new M3 worth the money?
No updates for Intel Macs without T2 chips, apart from the iMac19,1, and there only in Sonoma. T2 and Apple silicon models are more confusing, though.
Three years and four major versions of macOS later, are Apple silicon Macs diverging from Intel models? It might look like it.
First added to Macs in the T1 chip, the Secure Enclave makes it far harder for an attacker to gain access to secrets like the FileVault encryption key.
Why some report macOS updates as being more than 1 GB smaller than the figures given here. Don’t believe the size given by softwareupdate.
Although your Mac may be unable to boot into macOS, it might be able to start up in Recovery, or offer its internal SSD in Target Disk Mode.
Provenance, condition, AppleCare, Activation Lock, and finally Handover – steps to ensure your money is well spent and you don’t get buyer’s remorse.
The Eclectic Light Company 