It’s a simple and popular request: how is my Mac’s SSD ageing? How long is it likely to last? But macOS has no tool to offer, and 3rd party tools aren’t really ideal for M1 Macs still.
System Information
SilentKnight was producing some results in a mixture of English and Dutch. Its environment settings needed correction. When that didn’t fix it, I looked deeper to find language-unfriendly design in a command tool.
How can you tell whether your Mac’s shiny new Sealed System Volume is properly sealed? You could easily be misled into thinking it isn’t.
Identical code using system_profiler to look up the firmware version number worked in two apps but failed in a third. The solution was obscure.
Trying to get hardware info within an app – simple data like CPU details, logic board ID, type of internal storage – is fraught and undocumented, the victim of prolonged self-neglect.
You can find out which EFI version your Mac is running, but how do you know whether that’s current, or old and vulnerable?
How reliably does Legacy Software detect 64-bit compatible upgrades? For some apps, it doesn’t notice at all, it appears, and continues to give wrong information.
How to check whether an app, or other executable code, is 64-bit. It wasn’t an easy task despite the tools that macOS provides.
Have you given up with the Legacy Software section in System Information? It’s getting more useful, and probably an escalating nudge on the part of Apple. Here’s why.
We are warned that a future release of macOS will not run old 32-bit software. Should we worry? How to find out the scale of your problem.
The Eclectic Light Company 