What happens when an M1 Mac starts up? – The Eclectic Light Company:

You can learn a great deal from the unified log entries of a system startup, and that for an M1 Mac is even more fascinating for the insights it gives into the hardware in the M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). These were obtained from an M1 MacBook Pro with 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores running macOS 11.0.1 fairly clean, and in full Secure Boot.

I always liked low level stuff in computers. I learned 6502 assembly language (if we can call this a “language”) when I was a teenager. If you’re into these type of things, it is a fascinating short read that opens the door to what is going on in your M1 Mac.

Who knew COVID-19 would have a very positive side effect on me. It started on March 13th of 2020, and it’s still going on nearly uninterrupted. What is it? I have more time than ever to focus on my writing and publishing activities. Why?

As I’m working from home from mi-March of this year, I no longer have to commute. I save countless hours per week just because of this. On top of that, consider many activities on the weekend that no longer can take place because of the on-and-off restrictions in place.

I never wrote or published as much stuff in the last nine months as in the last year or so. I have a lot of projects in my head, small and more significant. I did spend quite a lot as I no longer travelling on software, services, work-from-home equipment. I also have more time for reading than before, it makes a difference.

COVID-19 is transformative at the society level but also a personal level. There are things that I don’t want to return when COVID-19 is no longer among us. Time is a precious resource, once you have it, you don’t want to mess with it.

Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than a Quadra 700 (even in 2020) | Ars Technica:

The '040 was a substantial upgrade over the '030 that had previously been used by Apple. It featured 1.2 million transistors, over four times as many as its predecessor. This processor increased the L1 cache size by a factor of eight to 4096 bytes, and it was the first 68k processor to have an on-board floating-point unit (FPU). While not without its drawbacks, the '040 processor was an obvious candidate for Apple's next line of premium workstations at the time. And this line would become known as “Quadra,” starting with the Quadra 700 and 900 models in late 1991.

In 1990-1991, I was working for an Apple authorized dealer. I remember the Quadra line, in particular, the 700. It was the most popular machine among desktop publisher. It was fast. I liked its vertical and boxy look. It was different. What is interesting is the description of the Motorola 68040 processor. Compare this to the Apple Silicon, it’s simply unbelievable. The M1 chip comes from an alien world.

Recently I spent more time than usual on YouTube for different reasons: to look at AirPods Max first impressions, to learn more about Synology DSM 7.0 beta, etc. After a while, it’s easy to see a trend that bugs me: design uniformity across the board. See the previous image gathers a few popular YouTubers channel content pages. They all look about the same or at least designed by the same designer. On top of that, there seems to be a trend where the weider you look, the better. When did that trend start?

Published by BasicAppleGuy, a short survey of his experience with MacOS Snow Leopard, back in 2009. I remember Steve Jobs talking about this release of MacOS as a pause in new features introduction in order to build the foundations for the next decade of MacOS (now spelled macOS). In fact, I would argue that, no new flashy feature was a new feature in itself. Something Apple could do these days. Their operating systems are muc more complex and feature rich, Apple is not standing still either. I cannot see them doing this.

For a while, I used to maintain a table of measures related to Apple that were in four categories: Finance, Products, Expectations, Market Landscape. Each attributes had his own ponderation. I wold give a scope from 0 to 10 on each of them. A formula would calculate something call the Health Index. I would revisit this table four times a year. It was obviously totally subjective but it was fun to do. Today, their score would be 9.140 out of 10. Not bad.

Wait for the previous gif to load and animate. What the fusk is wrong with the owners of iPhone in Canada website? This animated gif shows how wrong the web can become. There are 21 trackers on this website. The more trackers, the more ads, the less content there is. What a pity. For this reason, I don’t visit their website, I only subscribe to their RSS feed and Safari notifications. They should know that at some point, they cross the inflexion point where too much is like not enough.

During my digital assets cleanup this weekend as I’m preparing a move to Synology, I came across this screenshot of my iPad running iOS 6. Looking carefully to this image, it’s fascinating to see all the things we lost since then. First, many of those apps no longer exist. Second, design.

Enjoy in all its glory.

When you get an update from the App Store stating a size of, let’s say 179.4 MB, this doesn’t represent the actual amount of data that will be downloaded. In fact, depending of your device, the size will be much smaller. If you want to see this in action, turn on Low Data Mode. Then, go to the App Store and download an application update and look at the actual size of the download in the alert box. Tadam!

I use to keep a time of all the news and announcements emanating from Apple, Cupertino. It was fun but time-consuming. I failed to find a good use of it, so I stopped updating it. Maybe I should have continued, as a blogger, it could have been really useful.