Soundbyte 362 – April 2025

ChristopherNews, SoundByte

More Personalised SIRI

Welcome to Soundbyte. In this issue:

April Meeting

Join LMUG next Monday, April 14, 7pm GMT to discuss looking after you Mac. It’s spring so it’s a good time to do some spring cleaning! Clean up your drives, wipe out any malware and get some other great tips. Please share your tips and insights as well.

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. 

I hope you weren’t tricked by our April fools joke!

Follow can now follow the London Mac User Group on Bluesky! Come and say hello 👋 over there 👉🏾 https://bsky.app/profile/lmug.bsky.social. Read more about it here.

Spring term, learn some new things!

It’s Spring, a good time to refresh and maybe learn some new skills. Even I, a grey-beard who started on MacOS 7, learned a few things (and remembered a few old things) from this video.

Here’s a bonus for the more advanced users amongst us. There are some time saving apps in this video, especially if doing video editing.

And here’s a further one on how to take notes on iPad effectively so you learn and remember. This may be familiar for some of us.

Round-up round-up, get your updates!

Apple have released its regular updates to its operating systems, but older OSes have also got some critical security updates. I’m talking about macOS Ventura from 2019, iOS 15 from 2021 and later versions. If you are running older hardware capped at these older versions, snap up these updates without delay. Read about what these updates are fixing in The Register.

Mac mini has an upgrade secret

The new Mac mini M4 starts at a very keen £599. This base model, however comes with just 256GB of storage. If you use the build-to-order options to increase this storage space, the price races up. Apple’s first-party storage and RAM prices are infamously high. Tear downs of the Mac mini however, have shown that the solid-state storage chip in that device, rather than being soldered on, is on a little board that is plugged in. Which means…it could be unplugged and replaced. Unfortunately, Mac mini does not use a standard nVmE board. Instead, Apple, per reputation, chose to design a slightly different, custom board.

Those of us who remember the old days know that for some hardware companies (like Newertech), custom Apple parts were an opportunity for profit. The opportunity was to sell upgrades much cheaper than Apple’s build-to-order prices, helping Mac users upgrade at an affordable price.

A company in Singapore, has done just that for the Mac mini. iBoff, has custom designed a storage upgrade for Mac minis. Before watching their video, know that upgrading your Mac this way won’t be supported by Apple or authorised. But these type of upgrades were never authorised by Apple in the 1990s and they were very popular with Mac users back then. Looking at iBoff’s website, it’s popular today as well. Have a look at their explanation below:

Mac Studio: who needs 512GB of RAM?

Mac Studio M3 Ultra has been put to the test for local AI workloads. As mentioned last month, running AI locally rather than in the cloud could have benefits for various professionals like developers. How critical is the RAM? Have a look at this video comparison against its main competition to find out:

For a more rounded review of the new Mac Studio have a look at this video from the Tech Chap:

The nadAIr of Apple Intelligence

Anyone reading Soundbyte could see this coming (or rather not coming). Coincidental with the latest embarrassing and tasteless hallucinations from Apple Intelligence and Google, Apple put the main feature of Apple Intelligence back on the shelf.

What is this main feature? It’s the improved Siri and its ability to see what’s in your phone, or on your screen and do things, like look up if your mother’s flight is delayed, if you ask it. This could be transformative to how we use personal technology. Except it can’t do it, and neither really can the other AI’s. It turns out this is much harder than the marketing promised. But Soundbyte readers looking at Microsoft and Google tripping up, knew this.

For some fun, see this video below from the last time Apple promised something like this. Look carefully at what the technology is doing before watching Apple’s modern advert below it – notice anything similar?

An improved Siri is desperately needed. I think competitive/shareholder pressure influenced Apple to announce this game-changing Siri, before it was working. What’s more shocking though, is that Apple then based their marketing campaign to sell iPhones on a feature that is still not working, even today, months later.

Instead, what we have now in iOS 18 is a strange out-sourcing of most queries to ChatGPT with the warning that it may give inaccurate replies. There are different theories on what’s causing the delay. It could be security, or it could be that Apple Intelligence itself is the issue. Whatever it is, it’s clearly very hard to fix. It seems we will have to wait till 2026 to see if Apple can achieve the breakthroughs needed to make it work.

Something must be wrong on the other side

Let’s cleanse with a reminder that it’s not all bad. Have a look at the setting up process for a Windows Laptop and the performance using it vs a Mac. It’s worse than you might think!

Did you know there was a Linux for Apple Silicon?

Did you know there was a Linux specially made for Apple Silicon? Asahi Linux is based on the Fedora distribution with reverse-engineered support for M1 and M2 processors and the built-in webcams and trackpads etc on MacBooks. The news now is that the Lead developer has resigned. Apparently there were several interlocking issues at play, sadly. This could be significant as the other news is a roadblock for the project in terms of its ability to work on M4 Macs. The underlying issue is that Asahi is tolerated by Apple, but they receive no support. This makes the development effort very hard indeed.

Your editor is a bit unclear as what utility an ARM based Linux on Mac has. Perhaps there is a gaming niche?

But for more general computing, I fear an ARM Linux may face the same challenge as Windows on ARM, but worse. The challenge is that most Linux apps are written for Intel processors, not ARM processors. Mac app developers have mostly made the transition. Windows’ developers are, perhaps, on the way. I do not know about Linux. Most of the distributions and projects are Intel only as far as I can see. Perhaps someone can shed light in our Slack General channel.

Shameless or Flattery?

Could it be possible that the copy-cat designs coming out of China are not just blatant rip-offs of Apple Design but actually homage? That’s the argument put forward in the video below. The copying here has been done to a shocking degree, but maybe that’s the point? You decide. Have a look at the tablet which is most definitely not an iPad.

You won’t recall, but a few years ago, I told you about my Monitor. I can’t recall the brand. In that company’s quest to ape Apple design, they hid the logo. However, my pretend-an-Apple display has a key disadvantage compared to the real thing. The Apple Studio Display is a full 5K resolution, whereas mine is 4K. 5K is a native resolution for the Mac whereas 4K involves some stretching and squeezing of text and images. Some people, especially professionals, can see it; I can’t.

In a new low (or high) of blatant copying, professionals can now get a full 5K display that looks indistinguishable from a Studio Display. It’s another Chinese homage perhaps. For this devil’s bargain you get the same appearance but you lose the Apple integration. You won’t have Apple’s factory-calibrated colour or the built-in webcam/mic/speaker quality. This could be worth the saving if you can work around these limitations. The main thing is the 5K screen after all. Have a look at this shocking copy of Apple Studio Display below:

The bigger point here is that the monitor indicates the slight commoditisation of 5K monitors. New models appear to be coming in at around half the price of the Apple Studio display, which is hard to argue with. Another example is this Acer. Next move, Apple? They have technologies like Pro Motion and Micro-LED they could use to jump ahead in value. Maybe a manufacturing breakthrough is needed for Apple pull ahead again in their biggest displays.