Soundbyte 357 – November 2024

ChristopherNews, SoundByte

M4

Welcome to SoundByte! In this issue

November’s Meeting

Join LMUG this evening, November 11, to discuss Apple’s latest hardware releases. We’ll be going over each new Mac in detail and discussing who’s getting them. We’ll also look at the performance of the new M4 chips. This will be your chance to ask questions and share insights so we can all learn together.

Check the email this newsletter came in for the Zoom link to the meeting. You can also find the link in our Slack General Channel. 

The photos from our Photo walk last month are in and we’re ready for your votes!

Below is a link to the Photowalk Showcase video. Please take a few minutes to watch through and send in your votes, which will help us choose the best Photograph and Best Photographer after all their efforts.

Showcase Link: https://we.tl/t-trNLeaM9o6

  • Choose your 1st, 2nd & 3rd choices using the photo reference code.
  • Send your votes to [email protected]

Follow the London Mac User Group on…Mastodon🐘! If you are not familiar with Mastodon, have a look at TidBit’s explainer here.

Mini innovations

Apple had a week of hardware announcements recently. The iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini were all updated. All now come with 16GB of RAM (at last, ED), to better support Apple Intelligence. The iPad Mini also got upgraded to support Apple Intelligence (of which, AI remains a contentious technology).

iMac gains the M4 chip, some new vibrant colours, an option for a matt screen and USB Type-C peripherals (the keyboard, mouse and trackpad all switched from lightning charging to USB-C). Have a look at iJustine’s unboxing below:

MacBook Pro was also upgraded to M4 and for professional users, Apple added two new chips, the M4 Pro and M4 Max. The M4 Pro and Max versions also gain ThunderBolt 5 (so far, mostly useful for improved monitor support and a new cable is required) and the option of a matt display. As I mentioned in Future Shock Part 6, the M4 is a complete redesign of Apple Silicon using an industry leading new fabrication process. The M4 Pro and M4 Max also feature industry leading speed and power efficiency, gaining even more battery life. It is fantastic to see Apple continue to push the envelope (and the competition) with Apple Silicon. Onwards!

Now it seems (according to reviews) that the M4 is such a shift in performance that those who surfed the first performance blast with the M1 chip are considering this upgrade. The M4 has the fastest single core performance of any Mac and the Pro and Max are faster than M1 and 2 Ultra in some tests! Have a look at the professional and performance considerations below:

However, outshining all of this was the announcement of a dramatic innovation in mini computing. Let’s step back for a moment to the last time Apple did this. It was back in year 2000 that Steve Jobs unveiled the G4 Cube to astonished reactions at its tiny size:

Now the footprint of the G4 Cube was 7.7 x 7.7 inches. It set a standard in Apple. That footprint, carried over to Mac Mini. The difference was that the Mini was dramatically shorter. Years later, those same dimensions were kept for the Mac Studio. Mac Studio perhaps fulfils the performance dream of the Cube, except not in a cube shape.

Now, Apple has ripped up the template. The new Mac mini is no longer 7.7×7.7, it is now a dramatically smaller 5×5 inches. It fits in the palm of your hand! Apple has out-designed the Mini/Silent PC competition making a smaller device that’s more powerful than anything else in that market.

They have done this by leveraging all the power efficiency benefits of Apple Silicon. This includes a new ventilation system that sucks in from the bottom front and blows out from the same bottom at the back. The motherboard is stacked (with apparently some upgradability). The new design includes 2 ports on front for USB-C peripherals and a headphone jack. Apple also offers the Mac mini with M4 Pro and Thunderbolt 5, creating a mini workstation. They also put the power button on the bottom. Some people find this controversial, but if you use your Mac regularly you’ll know that we sleep our Macs, we rarely turn them off. It’s only Windows PCs that need to be shut down regularly, it’s no big deal.

Just as with the M1 Mini, the M4 Mini has professional users doing a double-take and making new performance evaluations. Have a look at this deep test below of the cheapest model:

Secrets of Sequoia

If you haven’t upgraded to Sequoia yet, the good news is that there isn’t any signifiant bad news to report about it. One tidbit is that macOS again appears to be one of the few remaining official distributions of Unix. Perhaps more useful are the secrets below, which could help you get the best from this new OS:

Apple buys Pixelmator: what now?

Pixelmator

Apple has purchased the software company Pixelmator who make the award-winning image editors Pixemator Pro and Photomator. This acquisition has raised a number of questions about Apple’s intentions and the impact on its competitors. This Petapixel article has some interesting ideas on how Apple could get back into complicated photo editing and professional photo management. Could this be a return to Aperture type software – some are dreaming about it.

Are smart glasses ready?

Last month we saw Meta unveil smart glasses that were a vision of the future, but actually not possible to make until far into the future. But there have been a few launches of smart glasses that include a screen and some attempts at useful functions. Especially with Christmas coming up, are any of them any good? It’s a mixed bag! have a look below before spending your money:

Well those look weird. Too weird maybe. The Ray-Bans are universally liked for their design. How are they for long-term use?

Hmm, some issues there. But what about these ones from Apple alumni. Does it have any Apple magic?

Not terrible, but maybe not amazing. This seems to have limited uses. But these ones look the part. Have they cracked it?

Oh dear, not yet.

But it is exciting to see the envelope being pushed. I have no doubt that Apple is watching to see if basic smart glasses with a simple screen gain any traction. Remember the original Apple Watch was mostly notifications at the start. Do we need to wait for the full power of the Vision Pro to be small enough to fit into glasses? That is years and year away. Is a quicker lower powered sweet spot possible? We will have to see what happens in future.

Privacy snooping out of control?

Hacker Eye
(c) Getty

Apparently many apps are now seeking to track our locations, for no obvious reason. iOS can warn you when this happens, make sure you turn that off unless you can see why it’s needed. Read about what’s going on on Ars Technica.

Firefox comes of age

FireFox is 20 years old, nearly time to buy It a drink!

To be fair, it’s 20 years young, since it is still updated regularly. Our technical editor describes Firefox as Safari’s cousin. Your SoundByte editor counters: not really. Neighbour perhaps.

Firefox was the culmination of efforts to replace the Netscape browser, which was the first popular browser on the Mac. Netscape was toppled by Apple’s agreement with Microsoft to bundle their Internet Explorer browser (and drop their own unpopular browser). The Netscape browser was old and becoming unwieldy. Consequently, Netscape decided to develop a new open source web engine called Mozilla (later Gecko). This took many years to mature into the popular Firefox browser.

In the meantime Mozilla-based independent off-shoot browsers became counter-culture alternatives to Explorer, which back then was the dominant web browser on the mac. Around this time KDE, who are Unix interface developers had to decide whether or not to adopt Mozilla for their own web browser for Unix. They chose to go their own way and created the KHTML engine. Some time later Apple took this open source engine and created the Safari web browser. They then wrapped up their improvements into a new open source engine called Web Kit. Then Google adopted and then forked Webkit into their own open source browser engine called Blink to power their broswer called Chrome and the rest is history!

Future shock Part 8: Ruthlessness

The fight is on to bring the competitive advantages that Apple have demonstrated with Apple Silicon to the PC. Some companies are hoping this advantage will shake the dominance of Intel and AMD and gain them market share and success. So how’s it going?

Well, we know that Qualcomm are the main protagonists here with their new chips from ex-Apple engineers. But those engineers had made a server based chip originally. They did this with an ARM license that was configured to align with the likely revenues from the server market. It turns out that ARM licenses are unique to each customer depending on the value of they are doing. Read this interview on their plans, business model and future. When Qualcomm acquired the engineers and their chip to re-use it in PCs, ARM wanted to renegotiate the licence fees for the bigger market. Qualcomm said no thanks. Uh-oh. So what has ARM done in response? Watch below, to find out, As The World Turns:

Sleep Soundly

I’ll end with a recommendation, particularly for Men, of a British snoring app called Sound Sleep. This app is free and not full of privacy tracking. Rather than selling you, they sell anti-snoring devices. It’s underpinned by university research and artificial intelligence. This app listens to your sleep and gives you an assessment on your sleep quality and snoring level. This is serious, as heavy snoring affects your breathing, health and alertness. I would suggest giving it a go. Santé!