Archive for April 29, 2022

Friday, April 29, 2022

Apple Watch Late Adopter

I started using an Apple Watch SE in January. I’d always thought that I’d get a watch eventually, but I’d long expected to wait for it to mature for a couple more generations. In the end, I gave in to the frustration of not being able to use Face ID to unlock my iPhone while wearing a mask. Naturally, Apple then delivered watch-free unlocking with iOS 15.4, but I’m still glad to be using the watch.

Previously:

Which Devices Should You Boot Your M1 Mac From?

Howard Oakley:

Before going any further, allow me to reiterate: unless you’ve got a compelling reason, only ever boot your M1 Mac from its internal SSD. That’s how it’s designed to work, and that’s how it works best, even when it’s not working properly.

[…]

The best reasons that I know for wanting to boot an M1 Mac from an external disk are when you need to be able to run several different versions of macOS, perhaps for testing purposes.

[…]

One last warning: don’t try cloning its internal SSD to an external disk ‘so that you can boot from that’. Sometimes you can get away with it, but the best way to install macOS on any bootable external disk is using its installer app, and not cloning.

[…]

If you want to use your M1 Mac when it’s booted from an external disk, aim for a Thunderbolt 3 device returning at least 1 GB/s read and write speed, faster if possible.

Around Mavericks or so, macOS started to perform much worse when booted from a spinning hard drive. (This was compared with earlier versions using the same hardware—obviously, adding an SSD made it perform better than before.)

Now, you can definitely tell when you’re using a slower SSD, even though it has at least double the throughput of a hard drive—and much better latency.

Before, I think the difference was that macOS started trying to do more things at once, which played to the hard drive’s weaknesses. Now, I think we’re seeing a different effect, which is that SSDs have gotten a lot faster and macOS is able to take advantage of that. (To a point—even with my new MacBook Pro’s fast SSD I can feel when the system is paging because Downcast or systemstats is using 25 GB of RAM.)

Previously:

Autocorrect Explained: Why Your iPhone Adds Annoying Typos While Fixing Others

Ben Lovejoy:

But yeah, people do complain, and even the guy who created the feature – Ken Kocienda – admits that sometimes it can be more of a hinderance than a help. Indeed, if you think that it’s gotten worse rather than better over the years, that can actually be true …

The reason, paradoxically, is that autocorrect has grown more intelligent over the years, and the more we ask it to do, the more potential there is for new types of errors.

The WSJ’s Joanna Stern went on a mission to learn more about why autocorrect can sometimes be ducking annoying.

[…]

The personalized dictionary looks for words not in the static dictionary, which you have typed three times. That’s the point at which it decides you know what you’re doing, and it’s a real word. However, if you make the same typo three times, it learns that instead!

John Gruber:

Don’t miss the video, which involves some actual ducking ducks.

Louie Mantia, Jr.:

You ever get that absolutely horrible bug in macOS messages where you’re typing a long message and at a certain point it starts chopping up everything you’ve written, replacing characters, moving entire passages, and duplicating text?

Steve Troughton-Smith:

This is the serious autocorrect issue Apple introduced in macOS 12 to Catalyst apps. Twitter also suffers from it. macOS 11, no problem

Previously:

Update (2023-03-28): Todd Thomas:

“There’s no possible way I could guess what you were trying to type…”