Welcome to episode 27 of the Brew and Byte Show.
First up we’ll say hello to Alistair. How are you today?
I’m good thanks. Travelling around but having fun, yes.
That’s always good to hear. Out and about. No stuck-in-the-tube strike I hope.
No walking or cycling at the moment, yes. Trying to avoid the rain.
Certainly, you need that on a bicycle, that’ll be fun. And we’ll also say hello to Martin, how are you?
I’m good. Good evening, Craig. Good evening, Alistair. And good evening, listeners.
Perfect. Thank you. And I think something hot off the press is the announcement that we didn’t think
was coming is Apple’s peak performance event. Does anybody have any initial thoughts?
Well, the usual thing about trying to in-depth psychoanalyse the image that everyone sort
of dives into, you know, is it a new colour scheme?
Some people think it looks like a bit of an ear sticking out.
Some people think it’s a 3D effect.
Is it to do with the new AR goggles?
It always intrigues me as to the amount of in-depth analysis of a simple logo.
So I would say that it seems to be that it might be so when they talk about peak performance
traditionally it’s either we have found a new way to make the Mac operating system work brilliantly
on our new M series chips, or it could be how to get the most out of your Mac devices with the new
AirPods and the best possible sound in the Apple TV, that sort of thing, the services that we
provide. We’re going to provide a new system or something along those lines. Or it’s a bit too
early to release anything sound, software-wise, because we’re before WDC. So I think it will
probably be hardware, I reckon. I’m going to predict two complete major things for tomorrow.
One being we finally wave goodbye to an iPad with a lightning port and that they will finally all
go over to being USB-C. And my other guess, will we ever see AirPod Pros 2? Is that a spatial audio
style logo that we’re seeing for their event or not? It could be, as you say, the new AirPods Pro 2,
which I still think Apple have got something in the background to be able to use spatial audio
and lossless audio over, maybe not Bluetooth. I haven’t heard of any new upgrades to the Bluetooth
spec, but it might be that they’re maybe thinking of using something like AirDrop to actually be
able to get the larger file sizes over to the AirPods Pro. So it could be that they’re tying
that all up together. And it may also, if the rumors, the long rumors about the VR headset or
the AR headset, that could also have the same sound system built in so that you are able to use,
especially if you’re going to be using an AR headset and you want to be able to turn your
head around, it’s important that that sound seems to stay in the same place. So it could be something
that they’re going to be experimenting to bring out a new form of wireless communication to get
these sounds over to the speakers and to the headphones. You may also see it in the Airpods
Max as well. The Airpods Max 2 come out with the same kind of feature built into it. It
does contain some pretty powerful chips in these little earpieces.
Yeah, and we may get a hint of what phones or iPads are coming out later in the year.
So it might be, as I said, if they are saying, “Oh, we’ve got this new web kit or we’ve got this
new home kit, we are planning on setting up some APIs so that you can link this up with
your Apple Music and we can provide you with the best possible sound which is better than Tidal or
anything similar to that. So it could go something along those lines.
On that subject, they have been doing a lot of groundwork in the background for spatial audio.
I don’t know how many of you have tried it or listened to it, but there is actually a spatial
audio playlist that’s being heavily pushed in the Apple Music Store and it’s getting updated,
I think, even weekly as we go along. They’re even going back over some of the old audio music that
I’m sure people are familiar with. How many of us have spatial audio equipment to actually try this
out on? I’ve got the AirPod Pros, yeah. They work phenomenally well. It’s quite intriguing to
literally move your head around and have the sounds change position or appear to change position
so they stay where the initial sound came from. So if you’re looking at your TV or if you’re looking
at your hi-fi when you start moving your head around obviously that sound stays in that position
so all of a sudden it all moves to the left or to the right or above. I must admit the sounds that
come over, appear to come over your head are quite weird and quite strange but that only works,
you know, if you have the, I said I’ve got AirPod Pro, AirPod Pro, so it works quite well. But
obviously I can’t get the full, the full lossless version as well because of the limitations.
Other things I’d look forward to maybe in the announcement, I’m desperately wanting to find out
what they’re going to do about the larger size iMac. My whole upgrade program for my kit is,
is dependent on that. I don’t know whether to get a new bigger iMac, 27 or 30 inch iMac,
if that’s what they come out, and then tie that to a secondary screen for my Final Cut Pro work,
or do I invest in a MacBook Pro 16 inch, again with a secondary monitor to do it that way. So
I’m waiting to see whether that’ll be enough. I don’t think it will, to be honest. I think that
might wait until the summer before we hear anything about that. They did say it’d be two years,
didn’t they, to get rid of the Intel chips. And that comes up in, when did they announce
first one? November, wasn’t it? No, June. It was the WWDC they announced it and they
said in two years. So they’ve still got a couple of bits of kit to get rid of the Intel
chips out of. So we might hear some kind of pre-warning, pre-sale warning about, oh, the
new Mac Pro will be out with the M2 chip or the M1 Pro Max Plus Turbo version, whichever
they’re going to bring out by then.
I’m thinking is they’re going to do just the Martin special limited edition iMac with a keyboard
with a touch bar for you. Yes that would be perfect, you’re right and a Magic Mouse Mark 2
would be absolutely perfect. We’ve gone in the last two years from a two car family to a two
screen family. I think that’s been the theme of the last couple of years from people working from home.
There seems to be a huge market for a second screen, myself included in that one. My current
setup for MacBook Pro is that I’m using a Mac one mini, M1 mini, two are tied to a screen
and I use my laptop, 16 inch laptop with screen share. That’s the screen share, I don’t know if
you’ve ever tried that from the menu bar, it’s absolutely fantastic, it works so well. So I can
tie my MacBook Pro or my iPad Pro to the main screen and use that as my secondary side screen.
But as I said, my whole upgrade of all my kit depends on what they’re going to announce and
Yeah, please Tim, tell us what you’re going to do with the large iMac please.
Who says it’s going to be a large iMac?
They’ll either do that or they may talk about a smaller pro screen.
They might talk about a 30 inch model or 27 inch high XLR screen that you could then tie
up with the different parts of the kit you’ve got. Maybe we’ll see an upgrade, an uplift on the
on the Mac mini. Will it get the pro and the the max chips or will it get as room with the M2 chip?
So, you know, this is I think what the announcements will be is really about them roadmap for
maybe next 12, 18 months as regards chips.
We’ve also got a naming thing.
Is it going to be MM chip?
Because that’s two M’s or is it going to be M2 chip?
And they go follow the BMW style naming of things.
So it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.
I would say that screens are not as important at the moment.
it would be more likely that they’ll do a Mac mini
because that’s what the developers do the work on.
They already have the iMacs
and they don’t want to sabotage their colorful iMacs.
I think it’s going to be a bit of a delay.
If there is going to be an iMac,
I reckon it will come out after WDC.
- If they bring out the M2 chip and it’s a little two,
will that be called the M squared chip?
- So I think they’re gonna have a naming problem with this.
- You heard it here folks, you heard it here first,
M squared.
My theory is that yes there may well be an M2 chip but it will only be faster than the
original M chip.
It won’t supersede the M Pro or the Pro Max chip and then maybe next time we will see
an M1 or an M2 Pro Max chip.
So they did say this already.
If you remember when we were listening to when they were talking about a Pro, they said
there were going to be two lines or three lines of M series chips. As far as I can remember,
it would be one as a consumer, one as pro consumer, and one as high-end max performance,
wasn’t it? That’s what the three chip lines were going to be. Now, they’ve got a problem.
They can’t call it M1 squared because there’s a data company called EM Squared who own the
branding of that. They’ve been around for a very long time, so they’ve got a slight
technical problem, unless Apple have had the name for decades. They often buy weird names.
But it’ll be interesting to see what you get. I reckon it will be probably just a step upgrade,
because don’t forget that the ARM chips are not designed to be on the same sort of Intel demand
of change every new system and it’s the next generation, the next class. These are coming
from mobile phone technology, which moves in a very different scheme of things. And if you look
at it. What is it that we want the M series chip to do differently than what it would do on the
conventional iMac? The M series are still very fast at the moment and the high-end ones are very
powerful. What they put in the MacBook Pros. What would we be wanting it to do? I think it would
just be like a step upgrade. The other piece of news is for sadly people that want to try Apple
music is why have they cut the free trial? What happened?
I’ve been given the three months on a six month trial. They’re trying quite hard. What happens
is this. If you reinstall the operating system, it immediately gives you a trial. Or if you have
previously had a trial like I had, I had a year’s free subscription with EE, the mobile phone
network in the UK. It said, “Oh, by the way, would you like another free subscription?” So it’s done
with the network sometimes?
Well, my understanding of it is that they’ve gone from three months free trial to one month.
And rumor has it, is it something to do with a royalties dispute?
I think it’s just part of their natural advertising ploy. They started the three months to kick
it all off, get people involved. It’s also bound up in your, if you’re in the Apple One
scheme where you’re getting all that, that’s covered as well. So maybe they don’t feel
they need to offer as much of a freebie as they used to.
Some companies give away headphones to try and sell their phones.
It’s a strange way to do that.
Apple have done a few little promotions,
but they’ve never been really big on promotions, have they?
- No.
The biggest promotions they had was the back to school.
So the back to school advertising is normally where you get the headsets,
or you get the AirPod Pros, or you get discounts or something.
But they were doing some quite good deals at one point.
Yeah, they actually did something different this year round in the for education.
If you bought a MacBook Pro, I think it was you could get the AirPods.
But you had an option to pay the difference to upgrade them to AirPod Pros, which is a first.
I don’t think they’ve ever done that in the past.
The other one which I’ve seen, which wasn’t in this country, but was in America,
they were doing a very good deal for Beats.
So you get Beats, but it was a US only.
so that they were saying, if you upgrade and you’re going to university, we will give you
beats because you know, we’re working from home and you have problems. So I thought that was quite
an interesting. So our main topic is actually all to do with passwords and in particular,
password managers. So the idea for this show came from two places to start with. Firstly,
I got a reminder email from the service I use to say, “Your year is up. It’s time to renew your
subscription.” And yes, I was a LastPass user. And before I’ve decided to use my renewal,
I thought, “Is it really worth it?” That posed the question. And then also, we got some feedback from
our Twitter followers in which we did a poll on which provider they use the most. And interestingly,
LastPass came last, so I wonder why. So my question for you guys is which ones do you use and why?
I’ll kick off because I am nearly entirely Apple based. I don’t have or use any other products
other than Apple. For me the logical choice is Keychain. It looks after all my password
requirements. The only thing I’m slightly reticent about is, you know, when you go in you’re going to
to put a new password, it comes up with, “Do you wish to use a strong password generated by
Keychain?” I tend to not use that. I have my own method of creating substantially strong passwords
for each individual website or supplier or wherever I go. But then I leave Keychain up
to manage it all. So whether I’m on my iPad, my phone, my MacBook Pro, my Mac, whatever I’m using,
it’s then a simple way that Keychain remembers all that and I can log in wherever I am using either
Touch ID or Face ID or just the password itself. So for me, Keychain works reasonably well and I
don’t have any problems with it. But I think if you get into a mixed environment where you’re
using maybe PCs or you might have an Android phone or something else, then that’s where Keychain
would fall down in that issue. So therefore, one of the password managers would be a good option.
I think it would be worthwhile looking at if that’s your kit set up then yes you should
consider maybe an alternative password manager.
You’re in that position aren’t you Alistair?
I’m sitting in front of a Mac and a PC.
I have a Mac and PC laptop.
I have an Android phone as well as an iPhone.
I have to support both Mac and PC so I have to have an ability to jump between different
browsers and different devices.
So it’s not uncommon in the five minute period to start on the Mac, then go to PC, then go
to iPhone and then jump back again.
You need a browser to do that because it’s quite common to do that, especially if you’re
client side and you’re needing to check something and you just want to check something briefly
because you’re storing passwords or you need to get the serial number for a piece of software.
And I’m not going to remember that weird alphanumeric 26 character password.
That’s what a password manager is for.
People are very good on their keychains so I use keychain on my iPhone especially for
sites which I have to log in on a regular basis for or for sites which I only use on
my iPhone.
So for example if I’m going to Ringo the mobile phone app for parking in the UK I would use
that because I don’t you can’t use Ringo when you’re on the desktop.
I mean yes you could park your desktop on the on the table but you don’t have to pay
for it.
That’s why I have different password managers for different purposes, if that makes sense.
Apple have a very good security system.
Theirs is very similar to Google’s one-time passwords, so they’re both excellent.
And Google also has signed up to the check if your password is on a dark web or other
known password exploit and it will say, “By the way, this particular password is guessable.”
Or, “By the way, you’ve just connected to something like web.”
So I was doing a test earlier last week.
I got an old Netgear router and I had my latest SE phone and I wanted to connect to the Netgear.
The Netgear said it was WPA but the iPhone was going, “Nope, this is WEP.
We refuse to connect.”
So the iPhone is now very security conscious and it won’t let you connect to weak security.
It is all quite interesting the way which Apple are moving quite cleverly in that direction.
I’m a last-past user and I have been for a very long time but I’ll be interested in other
users. I mean, yes, keychain is very good. The only minor thing I would say is I prefer
keychain on a Mac than keychain on the phone because if you’re looking for a Wi-Fi password,
you can always go to keychain on a Mac and it will tell you. But because of policy from Apple,
they deliberately won’t let anyone look at what the Wi-Fi password is on an iPhone. There is no
ability to recall it ever. It’s quite a clever system.
Yeah, you can only view which previous Wi-Fi’s you’ve joined to, but not the password.
Yeah, and even Apple can’t look at it.
My question would be, is it really worth paying for a password manager?
This has been my complication and I’ve come to the conclusion, maybe it’s not.
I think Apple offers enough now for people to use their services for free.
I think, as I said, if you’re in an Apple environment, yes.
If you’re in a mixed environment, it becomes more difficult and it may be something you have to look at.
The other thing is the last pass, de-merging. They were bought by Logmein and I think they’re
de-merging from that. They’re a different company now. There’s a couple of different services which
I’ve seen. There was a couple which were mentioned on security now, one which is Linux, one which
was GitHub and another one which was like a password sentry, I think is it called or something
similar to that. There’s also Bitdefender. Has anybody used that? That’s quite an up and
coming one at the moment. Bitdefender I’ve used quite a bit as an antivirus but I’ve not used
any of their volts or anything like that. The other thing I would say is whenever you’re looking at
password manager how easy is it to get the passwords in and the passwords out of that
password manager and does it support the other browsers. Now believe this or not most of them
struggle to put something in Safari. This comes down to the whole way that plugins are supported
with Safari, isn’t it? And I know they made a big thing at the last WWDC about how they’re going to
support developers with this, but I don’t think it’s really worked. Believe it or not, the
last pass works better on a Mac, Chrome and Firefox than it does on Windows. I’ve got this
thing, I like Favacoms. I like to look at the icon of the website and Apple are very against Favacoms.
So I thought, okay, fine. Safari is very nice, but it doesn’t support Favacoms unless you’re on the
the latest operating system and I can’t put it on this particular Mac. So it’s like a
slight problem.
The other one we’ve not talked about is what happened with OnePassword. OnePassword has
a huge fan base. I’ve been a customer of theirs in the past. They’re a very good company.
They hit the headlines this week for something that I don’t think people really understood
very much about. And that was their support for Bitcoin wallets. Does anybody understand
what went wrong?
The only thing I was going to mention that you say there was a kerfuffle a few months
back when OnePassword went over to their now an Electron-based app rather than being a
direct app from the company.
I think there was a bit of a hike in the subscription fees as well.
A lot of people weren’t happy that it had gone over to Electron application and that
caused quite a number of really hard and fast OnePassword users to actually jump ship.
I was seeing several on Discord server belong to complaining that they were not happy with
this new format. That could have had something to do with, as regards to Bitcoin, no, I haven’t
got my head around that yet. I’m not entirely sure what they’re trying to do.
My thought process of this was I think a lot of average users don’t really understand Bitcoin
and Bitcoin has this kind of image of not exactly legit or that it’s with a hacking
community. I don’t think people have quite understood what their thought process is behind
that. I don’t know what your opinions are of that.
A lot of people who are not in the tech sphere will often base their facts on Bitcoin about
what they read in the newspaper. If they’re slightly more knowledgeable, they’ll say,
“Okay, it’s clever technology, but it’s not backed by essential currency, so I’m not going
to use it.” Or they’ll say, “Oh, isn’t that good for transmitting files if you’re geek?”
It’s for the mafia to use for transferring laundered money.
It depends on who you’re talking to.
I would imagine that someone who is a Bitcoin user would want to store their wallet details
in the secure system because there was a very interesting article saying that North Korea
had been using hackers to break into Bitcoin wallets to steal the money to pay for the
armaments expansion.
expansion.
And Bitcoin seems to be more readily available and the average person can even buy Bitcoin
online quite easily. It’s not that you need a whole room size full of machines generating
Bitcoins anymore. The culture behind that has completely changed, I think.
Yeah, I still think it’s Bitcoin. They weren’t the first, but they became the biggest name,
didn’t they? And now there’s a dozen different ones out there, cryptocurrencies out there.
I think that it’s a bit like NFTs.
It all sounds a little bit as a dodgy way of making some money on the side.
And I think that’s why it hasn’t come down to mainstream really taking this up.
Would you say there’s one best password manager or does it come down to, as you commented
on Martin, what you want to use it for?
I did have a one password account.
I started it to see whether that was the way to go.
it didn’t really give me any major differences over Keychain.
I recently did a trawl through all my subscriptions
and all the things I’m paying monthly for my IT stuff.
And it was one of the things I thought,
no, I don’t need to be paying this monthly amount
when Keychain will do pretty much what I want.
So again, it might be an issue where people are starting
to look at what their monthly expenditure on IT is,
that it might be one of the items
that you could think about dropping if you don’t need it.
But as I said, if you are multi-platform or accessing passwords from various different
sites or you’re moving around a lot, then yes, something like one password could be
a real benefit for you.
I think one added feature that may be worthwhile paying for is the fact that you can share
passwords easily with people, with some of the providers, that you may want to give access
to things.
And I don’t think that’s available in Keychain.
Am I right in saying that, Alistair?
Lester, part of your family.
- Yes.
In going into Safari recently,
I noticed there is a share icon,
but it’s to literally physically airdrop it
to a nearby device rather than I’ll email you this password
so you have access to something.
And that’s what LastPass and OnePassword
were very good at, I think,
in being able to have a shared vault.
- I think the main thing it comes down to
is the fact it’s like this.
Where you plan on using it, desktop or mobile,
because if you’re using it,
because the pricing is different for different providers.
So LastPass will provide a free version for one type.
So mobiles and tablets or desktops.
The other thing to bear in mind
is which can be easiest for yourself to use.
So certain systems work well for certain individuals,
but not one system will rule them all.
The other thing is that how annoying
or how easy is it to use when you’re going onto a website,
which you just want it to fill in the passwords
and the username for.
I mean, there are obvious ones
where you will always have problems,
like banking sites, which are by their nature,
something where you shouldn’t be storing it anyway.
But there are an awful lot of people
who still believe that having one password
across every single website is good enough
because they still believe in the philosophy,
I have nothing to hide,
to which I will often say,
I have nothing to hide from those I trust,
which is a very different concept.
The other thing is the amount of people who use the notes app to put all the passwords
in.
It all depends on what the system is designed to do.
And I think that’s where Keychain really came out was because Apple was getting a bit fed
up of everyone storing everything in notes.
I use TextExpander and for that I have my login details for my bank accounts as shortcuts.
So if anyone actually had a keylogger, managed to get a keylogger onto my system, all they
would see me put in is X1VDB.
Now that will translate to my login details for my bank account.
So they wouldn’t actually see what I’m typing in as the name of the bank account,
let alone the password.
I said, just for me, that’s just a simple thing I use in it to even further hide
certain data, especially about, you know, that line about I’ve got nothing to hide.
Well, if you’ve got a contact list and you’ve got my email address in there,
that’s not something I want you banding around.
That’s for me to decide who gets my email address.
So someone logs in or breaks into your system,
they now have access to my name, address,
my phone number and my email address,
which could be the start of a personality scam.
So yeah, when people say,
“Oh, we’ve got nothing to hide.”
Yes, you have.
You’ve got an awful lot of other people’s data
and information that they’ve got my date of birth on there,
so they wanna send me a happy birthday.
All that is potentially good information for a scammer.
So yeah, don’t say you’ve got nothing to hide.
got an awful lot to keep secure.
The other one was LazyMindyOfThinking, it is the most common quoted one.
And they go, I won’t say any names, but I was recently called out to repair a MacBook
Pro 2010 17-inch and the hard drive had worn out.
So I put a new hard drive in, but the operating system copied the data over.
Let’s just say he worked for a very large multinational bank and I said, “Do you have
any backup?”
And he says, “No, I have you instead.
I don’t need backup.”
And I’m just going, “Okay, so this guy didn’t believe in password management, didn’t believe
in backup.
He believed in IT guys just to recover everything.”
And I’m going, “Sorry, Apple provides all this extra stuff.”
And what I came to the conclusion from working in this industry, there’s three types of individuals.
Those who don’t care and are low hanging fruit and will always get knocked out by everyone
because they have zero interest in security.
Those who are very good at security, who are in the minority, are slowly increasing and
will try quite hard to do all the tick boxes and will stay quite good and secure.
Those who are sheep, those which are the majority, who fluctuate from one end of the scale to
the other and they have a haphazard system which sort of works.
It’s all to do with convenience versus security.
What system can I use which is convenient, which is slightly more secure?
Often when they mean secure, it’s to stop my two-year-old from accessing it or it’s
to stop me from getting it.
It’s their level of security is not based on nasty guys is about doing that.
The amount of times I have to go around and say, “Okay, by the way, have you looked at
sites like “Have I Been Pwned?” and put in your email address and say, “Okay, this is
what’s happened to you.
You might want to change your email address because it’s far too easy to change this.”
And the amount of times I’ve shown this to people and they suddenly get shocked and they
go, “Ooh, where did they get all this information from?”
I’m going, “Well, do you receive lots of spam?”
That’s because you’ve been exposed on these databases numerous times.
So that is something you do have to hide at times.
Do we want to jump to tech questions?
Okay, so question one was actually sent as a DM message on Twitter and we have been asked
that they like to keep their tech in good shape, but how can they run a diagnostic mode
on their new M1 Mac Pro?
we have any suggestions to help them out?
It depends on what you’re using diagnostics to find. Originally, all the Intel Macs had
diagnostic mode, which was command D on when you ran it. You went bong or pling, to give
the official name. Then you’d hold down command D and boot in diagnostic mode. That would
only work providing you had never changed the hard drive.
That’s actually a really good point about the hard drive. I know many people that have struggled to say,
“Oh, I can’t get to diagnostic mode.” And it’s because they switched the internal drive out.
The other good one is Command R. So Command R is internet recovery mode, which will bring you up
disk utility, which is very helpful at times. And it will allow you to reinstall the operating system
if you need it. And this command option gives you the original operating system designed for that
particular Mac based upon the serial number. I believe Craig can tell you what the code
combination is for the M1 series to do diagnostic mode.
So they’ve actually moved away from holding the D key down and they’ve gone for something
rather more simple in that you have to press and hold the start-up button. Then if you
hold it for long enough you will see that the gear icon appears and then you can press command D on
the keyboard and the screen will look quite different. So diagnostic mode, Apple hardware
diagnostic however you want to describe it, then shows what looks like an install progress bar and
in the little bottom corner you’ll also see a barcode which is actually your device’s serial number
if you ever do need that and then you will actually be presented with different options
for diagnostic mode. Slightly different process so you can still use the typical click command
R to restart as well as S for shutdown but there are some very weird combinations out there as well
with command G. Have you ever used that Alistair? No, what was command G give you? Command G is
get started or get information. Your Mac will restart to a web page showing more information
about your device and it’s actually a secure version of Safari and you can’t browse any website
in that except for Apple support documents. This is the same with the one you get on command R,
so the idea behind this was if your machine has been hacked or has certificate change changed in
it. This is designed as a safe relay system to provide you with information to come back on it.
But if we’re looking at, you used to have command S as well, which was single user mode,
which is still like the black and white mode. So you could do like fish or in my old days,
remember, did anyone ever use Apple Jack? We’ll put a link in the show notes. So Apple Jack was a
brilliant piece of software and that was excellent. And you could get, that could help you out in a
number of ways. And you just type Apple Jack and it would run, you know, what would you like to do?
repair permissions, verify disk, what was the other ones, clear the cache and it was brilliant
because it ran in single user mode it went really fast and really quick and you could just bin stuff
at speed and it was excellent it was pre the operating system so it was great fun. The other
thing I will say is that you also have to do some different things now so we’ve got SSDs are most
likely just to stop suddenly but there’s another new thing about SSDs which a lot of people don’t
realize nowadays. Mechanical drives have a warranty for years. SSDs don’t. SSDs, especially Samsung
and other providers will say “Mean Time to Failure” or TWA or something similar to that, which is how
many cycles has that drive done and the average 1TB E870 drives can only do 600,000 write cycles.
And if you exceed that in one year, tough, it’s ended.
And the program you use to determine this is what is my favorite little program called DriveDX by Binary Fruit.
And I went around to a client recently who had exceeded the mean time to failure and was at 1%.
We’re currently waiting for it to be sent off to Samsung for verification and to come back again.
And you have to check very carefully because Apple have to follow the same procedure now.
Of course, if you are a member of Setup, you can use CleanMyMac. It’s another good one for that.
It’ll give you the count and numbers on the various components.
The next question, I loved this one and this took some challenging research to figure out why this
was happening. So, Anne wrote into us and said, “When I use my iPhone to view some websites
in the native Safari app such as Amazon or eBay, you get the little bar at the top that
says open with. But when you click the open with, it takes you straight to the app store
rather than the app. Can you suggest an answer to this? Can anyone think why this might happen
or a solution?
This is us guess, but I’m thinking that if you went to say got a JPEG and did command
or right click and get info, it says what would you like this to be opened with?
And it would switch the link over to something else and something may have changed it?
Or is there something more complex than this?
So say as an example, I sent you a link to a product on Amazon.
You open the link on your iPhone and it says open with the Amazon app
and it goes straight to the app store rather than open the Amazon app.
reason is that Safari is in private mode and because it’s sandboxing the
connection it advises you to go to the app store rather than open the link
directly within the app. The minute you turn into the standard mode of Safari on
your iPhone it will work. So I hope that answers that question. And you can tell
if you’re in private mode because on the latest version of iOS it goes black
around the sides whereas it’s it’s like a light gray if you’re on normal mode.
And in Monterey on private mode it actually says private by the sidebar
with the URL. The thing I couldn’t understand is that Firefox and Chrome
for years had either a little mask to show you’re in private mode or had a big
distinctive feature that the whole thing changed and Apple very slow at
changing it. So our third and final question is how do I enable reader mode automatically on websites
for mobile and desktop versions of Safari? This varies dependent on the operating system.
So for iOS it’s a little bit easier but let’s start with macOS Monterey. So in the URL you’ll
you’ll have a little icon as if you’re going to put a bookmark in that shows like a little
notepad icon. And if you right click the icon, there is two pop-ups that come up that say
use Reader Automatically for this website or Reader Website Preferences. And if you
open that up, you can actually slide the slider to say every time you visit this website,
only in reader mode. And on iOS, if you press the little AA icon in Safari, there is a little cog
that says website settings and you can choose between request desktop version of this website
or use reader automatically. And if you have any other content blockers on your phone,
there are actually hidden functions in there as well. So you can actually pick and choose
individual websites that you want to allow content blockers to use or not use.
Are there some other things that people wanted to cover or pick on or highlight that this week
that they found during Mac OS or iOS that’s different?
So the thing which is going to be interesting is if NVIDIA doesn’t buy ARM, it goes back to
Softbank. This doesn’t go anywhere at the moment because it’s just will it or will it not. But
here’s a really interesting one. If it doesn’t go that way, it could go to a European buyer.
Wasn’t part of the original theory as well that Softbank was too big for itself and needed to be
broken up? The other problem was that the Americans don’t want ARM to be American because it will fall
under huge problems trying to regulate it.
Well, no, it actually is easier if it’s not American or Canadian.
It makes their life a lot easier.
Yeah, it’s easier to ban it.
No, it’s actually, it’s the direct opposite.
If it’s American, they have to ban it and they can’t use it because it means that Nvidia
would own 70% of it, which means that they would have to take it out of all the things
that they own, which is too complex.
They have to have in certain things like medical care, a certain percentage of stuff which
is not American.
they call it disaster management.
That’s interesting. Okay, on that subject, I think we’ve come to the end of our show
for yet another week. And next time, we’ll be excited to see what shiny new things have
been released at the recent event. Or will we buy shiny new things? First up, we will
say thank you to Martin. Thank you for this evening, as always.
It’s been a pleasure, guys. You know, to turn the fat over Apple products is always interesting.
Thank you. And thank you to Alistair.
It’s been interesting, especially as we’re not quite sure what Apple are going to release.
All I can say is that bite time is over and it’s time to get a brew.
On that note, I will say thank you for listening from me. Until next time, goodbye.
(upbeat music)