Is your Dock busy? How well are you able to distinguish Apple’s new app icons cast rigorously into rounded rectangles? I’m still failing, and open FaceTime when I want Messages.
macOS 11
Improved tests, statistical analysis, and interface, together with a 21 page Help book detailing its range of tests in 5,000 words. Ready to use for real.
Boot disk volume layout is intricate in Big Sur. M1 Macs lose the EFI partition on their internal SSDs and gain two more for APFS. Contents of /System/Volumes has also changed.
Diagrams of the layout of volumes on boot disks for macOS 10.13 to 11, covering both Intel and M1 models.
Two bugs – one affecting SDK version beyond 11.0, the other changing designation of the Audio privacy entitlement. Now fixed.
Detailed tutorial steps you through getting accurate and reproducible benchmarks for your disks. Also further projects and tests you can try.
Now with proper random write and read tests, sophisticated analysis including group medians and linear regression, and detailing reporting.
There’s no more critical app on your Mac, yet Disk Utility has suffered years of neglect – years in which APFS has grown many new features, and all Disk Utility gets is bugs and workaround.
If you try booting into Big Sur in Remote (Internet) Recovery, you’ll get Catalina instead. But nowhere does Apple alert users to this problem.
Can M1 Macs really defy the laws of physics and read files from SSD at around 12 GB/s? Or are their performance improvements more modest?
The Eclectic Light Company 