Category: Apple

https://www.trebleet.com/product-page/mac-mini-thunderbolt-3-dock-with-nvme-sata-slot-cfexpress-card-slot-gray

I received this on August 25, 2022. I immediately installed a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB NVMe, then plugged the dock into AC power via the included power supply brick and into the Mac Studio M1 Ultra via the included Thunderbolt 3 cable. The performance to/from the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB NVMe is what I had hoped.

This is more than 3X faster than any other dock in this form factor available today. Sure, it’s not PCIe 4.0 NVMe speeds, but given that all other docks available in this form factor max out at 770 MB/s, and that Thunderbolt 3/4 is 5 GB/s, this is great.

I also checked some of the data in system report. All looks OK.

My first impression: this is the only dock to buy if you want NVMe in this form factor. Nothing else comes close speed-wise. Yes it’s pricey. Yes, it’s not a big brand name in North America. But they did the right thing with PCIe lane allocation, which hasn’t happened with OWC, Satechi or anyone else.

There’s really no point in buying a dock with NVMe if it won’t ever be able to run much faster than a good SATA SSD (I hope OWC, Satechi, Hagibis, AGPTEK, Qwizlab and others are paying attention). Buy this dock if you need NVMe storage. I can’t speak to longevity yet, but my initial rating: 5 out of 5 stars.

I finally have a computer I LIKE to place on my desk. I’m speaking of the Mac Studio M1 Ultra.

Apple finally created a desktop that mostly fits my needs. My only wishlist item: upgradeable internal storage (DIY or at Apple Store, I don’t care).

This was partly coincidence. The Mac Studio with M1 Ultra ticks the boxes I care about for my primary desktop. Faster than my Threadripper 3960X for compiling my C++ projects while small, aesthetically pleasing, quiet and cool. 10G ethernet? Check. 128G RAM? Check. Enough CPU cores for my work? Check. Fast internal storage? Check. Low power consumption? Check.

I’m serious: thanks, Apple!

This machine won’t be for everyone. News flash: no machine is for everyone. But for my current and foreseeable primary desktop needs, it’s great. And it’ll remain that way as long as we still have accessories for Thunderbolt available that are designed for the Mac Mini or Mac Studio. This isn’t a substitute for the Mac Pro; I can’t put PCIe cards in it, nor 1.5TB of RAM (or any beyond the 128G that came with mine). It’s also way more than a current Mac Mini. But that’s the point: it fills a spot that was empty in Apple’s lineup for a decade, which happens to be the sweet spot for people like me. Time is money, but I don’t need GPUs. I don’t need 1.5TB of RAM. I don’t need 100G ethernet (though I do need 10G ethernet). I’m not a video editor nor photographer; my ideal display is 21:9 at around 38 inches, for productivity (many Terminal windows), not for media. Hence the Studio Display and the Pro XDR are not good fits for me. But the Mac Studio M1 Ultra does what I need, really well.

Some people at Apple did their homework. Some championed what was done. Some did some really fine work putting it all together, from design to manufacturing. Some probably argued that it was a stopgap until the Apple silicon Mac Pro, and that’s true.

That last part doesn’t make it temporary product. Apple, please please please keep this tier alive. There are many of us out here that can’t work effectively with a Mac Mini, iMac or MacBook Pro but find it impossible to cost-justify a Mac Pro. And post-COVID there are many of us with multiple offices, one of which is at home. At home I don’t need a Mac Pro, nor do I really want one in my living space. I need just enough oomph to do real work efficiently, but don’t want a tower on my desk or the floor or even a rack-mounted machine (my home office racks are full).

I don’t care what machine occupies this space. But I’ll buy in this space, again and again, whereas I don’t see myself ever buying a Mac Pro for home with the current pricing structure.

Given that my new Mac Studio M1 Ultra is an ‘open box’ unit, I needed to fire it up and make sure that it works properly. One of the things I needed to check: that it works fine with my Dell U3818DW via USB-C for display. I have seen many reports of problems with ultra wide displays and M1 Macs, and I do not have a new display on my shopping list.

So on Sunday I left my hackintosh plugged in to the DisplayPort on the U3818DW, and plugged the Mac Studio into the USB-C port. It looks to me like it works just fine. I get native resolution, 3840×1600, with no fuss.

I am using a new Apple Magic Trackpad 2, and an old WASD CODE keyboard just to set things up. I don’t really need the new trackpad, since eventually I’ll decommission my hackintosh and take the trackpad from there. But I need one during the transition, and it was on sale at B&H.

With just a 30 minute spin… wow. I honestly can’t believe how zippy this machine is, right out of the box. Therein lies the beauty of using the same desktop computer for 10 years; when you finally upgrade, the odds are very good that you’re going to notice a significant improvement. In some cases, some of it will just be “less accumulated cruft launched at startup and login”. But in 10 years, the hardware is going to be much faster.

Compiling libDwm on the Mac Studio M1 Ultra with ‘make -j20' takes 32 seconds. Compiling it on my Threadripper 3960X machine with 256G of RAM with ‘make -j24‘ takes 40 seconds. You read that correctly… the M1 Ultra soundly beats my Threadripper 3960X for my most common ‘oomph’ activity (compiling C++ code), despite having a slower base clock and only having 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores. While using a fraction of the electricity. Bravo!

“Moore’s Law is dead.”. In the strictest sense, just on transistor density, this is mostly true. Process shrink has slowed down, etc. But the rules changed for many computing domains long before we were talking about TSMC 5nm. See Herb Sutter’s “The Free Lunch is Over“. Dies have grown (more transistors), core counts have grown, clock speed has increased but very slowly when compared to the olden days. Cache is, well, something you really need to look at when buying a CPU for a given workload.

This last point is something I haven’t had time to research, in terms of analysis. If you need performant software on a general purpose computer, cache friendliness is likely to matter. Up until recently, reaching out to RAM versus on-chip or on-die cache came with a severe penalty. That of course remains true on our common platforms (including Apple silicon). However, Apple put the RAM in the SoC. For the M1 Ultra, the bandwidth is 800 GB/sec. DDR4 3200 is 25.6GB/sec if you have 8 channels. DDR5 4800 with 8 channels is 76.8GB/sec. Let that sink in for a moment… the memory bandwidth of the M1 Ultra is more than a decimal order of magnitude higher than what we see in Intel and AMD machines. My question: how significant has this been for the benchmarks and real work loads? If significant, does this mean we’re going to see the industry follow Apple here? AMD and Intel releasing SoCs with CPU and RAM?

I know there are tinkerers that bemoan this future. But we bemoan the loss of many things in computing. I’m going to remain optimistic. Do I personally really care if today’s CPU + RAM purchase turns into an SoC purchase? To be honest, not really. But that’s just me; computing needs are very diverse. Those of us who tinker, well, we might just wind up tinkering with fewer parts. I don’t see the whole PC industry reversing any time soon in a manner that creates a walled garden any more than what we have today. It’s not like the current industry hasn’t been good for Intel and AMD. Yes, computing needs have diversified and we’ve put ‘enough’ power into smaller devices to meet the needs of many more consumers. And Intel and AMD have largely been absent in mobile. But they’ve maintained a solid foothold in the server market, cloud infrastructure, HPC, etc. As a consumer I appreciate the diversity of options in the current marketplace. We speak with our wallets. If we’re a market, I trust we’ll be served.

Apple turned heads here. For some computing needs (including my primary desktop), it appears the M1 Mac Studio is a winner. It doesn’t replace my Linux and Windows workstation, nor any of my servers, nor any of my Raspberry Pis. But for what I (and some others) need from a desktop computer, the M1 Mac Studio is the best thing Apple has done in quite some time. It hits the right points for some of us, in a price tier that’s been empty since the original cheese grater Mac Pro (2006 to way-too-late 2013). It also happens to be a nice jolt of competition. This is good for us, the consumers. Even if I never desired an Apple product, I’d celebrate. Kudos to Apple. And thanks!

Apple silicon has arrived for the Mac. Not in my hands, but it has arrived.

My thoughts…

Wow. I’m hesitant to call it revolutionary, simply because they’ve been on this path for over a decade. But I’m wowed for a number of reasons.

From the benchmarks I’ve seen, as well as the reviews, the performance isn’t what has wowed me. Yes, it’s impressive. But we had seen enough from iPhones to iPad Pros to know full well what we could expect from Apple’s first generation of their own SoC for the Mac. And they hit the marks.

I think what had the most profound impact on me was just the simple fact that they delivered on a promise to themselves, their users and their company. This wasn’t a short road! In this day and age, there are almost no technology companies that can stick the landing on a 10-year roadmap. Heck, many tech companies abandon their products and users in the span of a few years. Apple quietly persevered. They didn’t fall prey to hubris and conceit. They didn’t give us empty promises. They kept plugging away behind the scenes while Intel and others floundered, or overpromised and underdelivered, or just believed that the x86 architecture would be king forever. And much of this work happened after the passing of Steve Jobs. So to those who thought Apple would flounder without him… I think you’ve been wrong all along.

It’s not like I didn’t see this coming; it’s been rumored for what seems like forever. But I hadn’t really reflected on the potential impact until it arrived. Some background…

I’m a Mac user, and I love macOS. But I’m a software developer, and the main reason I love macOS is that it’s a UNIX.  I like the user interface more than any other, but I spend most of my time in a terminal window running emacs, clang++, etc.  Tasks served well by any UNIX. For me, macOS has been the best of two worlds. I shunned OS 9; I loved the Mac, but OS 9 fell short of my needs. When OS X arrived, I was on board. Finally an OS I could use for my work AND heartily recommend to non-techies. And the things I liked about NeXT came along for the ride.

The other reason I’ve loved Macs: the quality of Apple laptops has been exceptional for a very long time. With the exception of the butterfly keyboard fiasco and the still-mostly-useless Touch Bar (function keys are WAY more useful for a programmer), I’ve been very happy with my Mac laptops. Literally nothing else on the market has met my needs as well as a Macbook Pro, going back longer than I can remember.

But now… wow. Apple just put a stake in the ground that’s literally many miles ahead of everyone else in the personal computing space. It’s akin to the Apollo moon landing. We all saw it coming, but now the proof has arrived.

To be clear, the current M1 lineup doesn’t fit my needs. I’m not in the market for a Macbook Air or a 13″ Macbook Pro. I need a screen larger than 13″, and some of my development needs don’t fit a 16G RAM limitation, which also rules out the M1 Mac Mini (as does the lack of 10G ethernet). And like any first generation product, there are some quirks that have yet to be resolved (issues with some ultra wide monitors), missing features (no eGPU support), etc. But… for many users, these new machines are fantastic and there is literally nothing competitive. Just look at the battery life on the M1 Macbook Air and Macbook Pro 13″. Or the Geekbench scores. Or how little power they draw whether on battery or plugged into the wall. There’s no fan in the M1 Macbook Air because it doesn’t need one.

Of course, for now, I also need full x64 compatibility. I run Windows and other VMs on my Macs for development purposes, and as of right now I can’t do that on an M1 Mac. That will come if I’m to believe Parallels, but it won’t be native x64, obviously. But at least right now, Rosetta 2 looks reasonable. And it makes sense versus the original Rosetta, for a host of reasons I won’t delve into here.

Where does this leave Intel? I don’t see it as significant right now. Apple is and was a fairly small piece of Intel’s business. Today, Intel is in much bigger trouble from AMD EPYC, Threadripper, Threadripper Pro and Ryzen 3 than Apple silicon. That could change, but I don’t see Apple threatening Intel.  Apple has no products in Intel’s primary business (servers). Yes, what Apple has done is disruptive, in a good way. But the long-term impact is yet to be seen.

I am looking forward to what comes next from Apple. Something I haven’t been able to say about Intel CPUs in quite some time. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a heavy FreeBSD and Linux user as well.  Despite the age of x86/x64, we do have interesting activity here.  AMD Threadripper, EPYC and Ryzen 3 are great for many of my needs and have put significant pressure on Intel. But I believe that once Apple releases a 16″ Macbook Pro with their own silicon and enough RAM for my needs… there will literally be nothing on the market that comes even close to what I want in a laptop, for many years. It will be a solid investment.

For the long run… Apple has now finally achieved what they’ve wanted since their inception: control of their hardware and software stack across the whole product lineup. Exciting times. Real competition in the space that’s long been dominated by x86/x64, which will be good for all of us as consumers. But make no mistake: Apple’s success here isn’t easily duplicated. Their complete control over the operating system and the hardware is what has allowed them to do more (a LOT more) with less power. This has been true on mobile devices for a long time, and now Apple has brought the same synergies to bear on the PC market. As much as I appreciate Microsoft and Qualcomm SQ1 and SQ2 Surface Pro X efforts, they are far away from what Apple has achieved.

One thing that continues to befuddle me about what’s being written by some… things like “ARM is now real competition for x86/x64”.  Umm… ARM’s relevance hasn’t changed. They license reference core architectures and instruction sets. Apple is not building ARM reference architectures. If ARM was the one deserving credit here, we’d have seen similar success for Windows and Linux of ARM. ARM is relevant. But to pretend that Apple M1 silicon is just a product of ARM, and that there’s now some magic ARM silicon that’s going to go head-to-head with x86/x64 across the industry, is pure uninformed folly. M1 is a product of Apple, designed specifically for macOS and nothing else. All of the secret sauce here belongs to Apple, not ARM.

I’ve also been seeing writers say that this might prompt Microsoft and others to go the SoC route. Anything is possible. But look at how long it took Apple to get to this first generation for the Mac, and consider how they did it: mobile first, which brought unprecedented profits and many generations of experience. Those profits allowed them to bring in the talent they needed, and the very rapid growth of mobile allowed them to iterate many times in a fairly short span of time. Wash, rinse, repeat. Without the overhead of owning the fab. And for what many have considered a ‘dead’ market (personal computers). Yes, PC sales have on average been on a steady decline for some time. But the big picture is more complex; it’s still the case that a smartwatch isn’t a smartphone, a smartphone isn’t a tablet, a tablet isn’t a laptop, a laptop isn’t a desktop, most desktops are not workstations, a workstation isn’t a storage server, etc. What we’ve seen is the diversification of computing. The average consumer doesn’t need a workstation. Many don’t need a desktop, and today they have other options for their needs. But the desktop and workstation market isn’t going to disappear. We just have a lot more options to better fit our needs than we did when smartphones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc. didn’t exist.

I’ve always been uneasy with those who’ve written that Apple would abandon the PC market. The Mac business, standalone, generated 28.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2020. That would be at spot 111 on the Fortune 500 list. Not to mention that Apple and all the developers writing apps for Apple devices need Macs. The fact that Apple’s desktop business is a much smaller portion of their overall revenue isn’t a product of it being a shrinking business; it’s 4X larger in revenue than it was 20 years ago. The explosive growth in mobile has dwarfed it, but it has continued to be an area of growth for Apple. Which is not to say that I haven’t bemoaned the long delays between releases of Apple professional Mac desktops, not to mention the utter disaster of the 2013 Mac Pro. But Apple is notoriously tight-lipped about their internal work until it’s ready to ship, and it’s clear now that they wisely directed their resources at decoupling their PC fates from Intel.  None of this would have happened if Apple’s intent was to abandon personal computers.

So we enter a new era of Apple. Rejoice, whether you’re an Apple user or not. Innovation spurs further innovation.

I’ve been wanting to try the Clover bootloader on my hackintosh for quite some time. I just didn’t have an impetus to bother with it. That is, until the issue with iMessage appeared in late December 2012 and the various Chameleon developers and their branches did nothing about it (including Chimera, which is what I was originally using before switching to Chameleon and now Clover).

Clover is working great for me, and I don’t see myself going back to Chameleon or a Chameleon derivative like Chimera. The reality is that development is MUCH more active on Clover, and given that it has much better support for UEFI (including a built-in EFI shell), it’s the right thing for me to use on future builds. Plus it already has the infrastructure to cope with issues like the iMessage snafu.

Since I consider this switch permanent, I spent a little time creating a Clover theme since I wanted an orange-colored theme. Here’s a screenshot from the theme package I uploaded to insanelymac.com:

Soapbox on…

I feel sorry for the many people on the tonymacx86 forum that don’t seem to realize that moving from Chimera to Clover is not terribly difficult. The bootloader is a tiny portion of what they’ve gotten from tonymacx86 and Chimera is not significantly different than a vanilla Chameleon build. In fact I had been using Chameleon for the last few months before I switched to Clover. The last time I diffed Chimera and Chameleon source tree trunks, the differences were purely cosmetic. I feel really sorry for the folks who gave money to tonymacx86 recently for the fixes for iMessage, given that the tonymacx86 team did NOTHING to resolve the issue. AS of today, that thread on tonymacx86 is 68 pages and growing, with almost 100,000 views. The fix is to use Clover, and the tips on getting that done were all provided by members, not the tonymacx86 team. I’m starting to understand why some other sites’ members despise the tonymacx86 site. You can’t blame the members of the tonymacx86 site, they’re completely innocent. And I guess I can’t blame the tonymacx86 team for the ignorance of some of the members that have given them money, but… it still feels underhanded to me. Especially given the fact that the tonymacx86 tools are primitive and somewhat braindead. MultiBeast might work for some users who really don’t know what they’re doing (and I was once one of those people), but at the same time, stomping on kernel extensions without showing the user what’s being done (and not providing a means for them to revert the changes) is downright user-unfriendly and amateurish from a software engineering perspective.

Two weeks ago I assembled my first hackintosh. I had hoped to buy a new Mac Pro. Unfortunately Apple has not updated it in over 2 years, and the price hurts for hardware that’s 2 years behind. No Thunderbolt, lame video card options without sufficient power supply output to run a modern 3D card, etc. It’s a great machine, but the price is fairly obscene for the age of the components and the power supply weaknesses.

I also considered a 27″ iMac, which is a very nice machine for an all-in-one, but the reality is that I need expandability that doesn’t exist on the iMac. I don’t want external drive enclosures. I also want USB 3.0. And I have a pair of 24″ 1920×1200 monitors I wanted to continue using, if just for the sake of saving money.

So in the end, my best option was a hackintosh. I considered a dual Xeon setup, but the price is high and power management is essentially non-functional on the dual Xeon hackintosh machines. My main goals here were maximum compatibility, reasonable speed, low noise (no screaming CPU fan), and simple maintenance. So I built a fairly simple (and relatively inexpensive) hackintosh based on a Gigabyte Z68 board and Intel I7-2700K CPU with an EVGA GTX570 video card. I am using a USB Bluetooth adapter and an Apple Magic Trackpad since I’ve become addicted to all of the gestures over the last few years. I considered a watercooled video card, but in the end decided I didn’t want the maintenance I’ve had to deal with on my watercooled machines. The Corsair H100 is dandy for my CPU, and since I don’t play 3D games on my computer, my video card isn’t really subject to high heat conditions.

The gory details can be found on my hackintosh1 page. As of today, I have most everything working, including (finally!) sleep and wake. There are some nits with USB connections with my iPhone, but it works if I use particular ports. I have a few items left on the wish list like the SSD, 16G more memory and a new keyboard, plus software. But I’ve been using the machine as my primary desktop for the last 2 weeks and I’m a happy camper. My libDwm library compiles in 7 seconds with no overclocking, which is much faster than was possible with my old dual 32-bit Xeon FreeBSD workstation. I’m also not memory-constrained as I was on that machine. At this point, I can settle in and just use the machine and add my planned upgrades at my leisure.

Kudos to the web sites that support those of us with hardware needs that aren’t met by Apple: tonymacx86.com, insanelymac.com, osx86.net and others. While I’m a strong supporter of Apple and own (and love) some of their hardware (and have spent many thousands of dollars on it over the years), right now they don’t have desktop hardware that meets my needs at a price point I can tolerate. Hopefully that will change in 2013, but I’ve become very wary of waiting for Apple desktops that meet my needs. The hackintosh fits my needs for now and at the moment is working nearly flawlessly running OS X Lion (10.7.4).