I ran my first marathon in 3:34:31 (Boston Marathon 2009), my second marathon in 3:24:34 ( Boston Marathon 2010), and my fifth marathon in 3:05:43 (San Francisco 2013). But it would take me five more years, and over a dozen races before I would reach my goal of running a sub three hour marathon.

My problem? I wasn’t running all 26.2 miles at a consistent pace I would start off too fast, and burn out before crossing the finish line. It wasn’t until last year that I realized I needed to run a 6:52 mile, every mile, if I ever hoped to finish a marathon in under three hours.

Cool weather and a fast course certainly helped, but my Apple Watch is really what made my sub three hour marathon possible. Unlike most fitness watches, my Apple Watch shows me my current pace and average pace together every time I look down at my wrist. Keeping me on track to run a 6:52 mile 26 times!

I almost didn’t make it. The three hour pace group sped passed me with just over a mile to go, and I let my pace slip as I became discouraged. Luckily for me they were just eager to finish the race a head of time, because when I looked down at my Apple Watch I saw I still had a minute to go on the last turn before the finish line.

I finished the race with a time of 2:59:50. or just ten seconds under goal. I can now say I am sub three hour marathoner until next year, when I do it again if only to prove it was not a fluke.

As an Apple fan growing up in the 90’s, Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters has always been a special place. Not just an office park, but Disneyland. A place where magic happened and new Macs were made. One Infinite Loop is where the Apple faithful would pilgrimage, take self portraits outside the main entrance, and buy “I visited the Mothership” t-shirts from the Company Store. As a east coast kid I could not wait for my chance to go.

Now that I am an adult and Apple’s corporate address reads “One Apple Park Way,” I know Apple’s old HQ has lost some of its magic. But for me and the other Apple kids of the 90’s, Infinite Loop is still a symbol of Apple’s storied resurrection. The place where the Apple we know was born, and where all of our favorite Apple products came to be. If I could choose only one Apple HQ to visit, it would be the icon infested gardens of Infinite Loop on the eve of Steve Job’s return over the rolling hills, magnificent orchards, and curved glass ring of today’s Apple Park.

Unfortunately no time machine exists to take me back to the Apple HQ of lore, but this collection of interviews curated by Stephen Levy may be the next best thing. Here Apple employees past and present tell us the behind scenes stories that helped make Infinite Loop the mecca for so many Apple fans.

For more than a year I’ve been interviewing Apple employees, past and present, about their recollections of Infinite Loop. In their own words, edited for clarity and concision, here is the story of a plot of land in Cupertino, California, that brought us the Mac revival, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the Steve Jobs legacy.

My two favorite quotes come from Phil Schiller, and Tim Cook on his first day working at Apple.

Schiller: We’re like, “Steve! Newton customers are picketing! What do you want to do? They’re angry.” And Steve said, “They have every right to be angry. They love Newton. It’s a great product, and we have to kill it, and that’s not fun, so we have to get them coffee and doughnuts and send it down to them and tell them we love them and we’re sorry and we support them.”

Cook: At IBM and Compaq, where I had been working, I had been involved in helping with thousands of product introductions and withdrawals—and, I have to say, very few people cared about the withdrawals—and not very many people cared about the intro, either. I had never seen this passion that close up.

Steve Jobs is often criticized for killing the Newton because it was John Sculley’s creation, but I have long believed killing the Newton was a sacrifice Steve had to make to save Apple. Both hypotheses can be true, but these two quotes show a rare glimpse of Steve’s empathy for Apple’s customers and the passion for Apple’s products that made the company worth saving.

Of course I could not share this article without passing on a little Infinite Loop lore of my own.

My tenure at Apple’s Infinite Loop was shorter than most. During my two weeks of Mac Genius training during the summer of 2004 my classmates and I made the trip to Caffè Macs every day for lunch; often spending the remainder of our lunch break touring the halls of Infinite Loop and finding out what doors our employee badges opened (answer: none). During our initial orientation we were told to avoid contact with Apple’s “celebrity CEO,” a warning that played out humorously later in the weak when one of my classmates suddenly stepped out of the Caffè Macs lunch line because Steve was standing behind him waiting to “pay” for his Odwalla.

The highlight of my visit was hearing Steve Jobs speak during an employees only Town Hall meeting at IL4. (We got there early to get good seats; but sat far enough back from the stage as not to stand out in the crowd.) The topic was Microsoft’s entrance into the music business with their new PlaysForSure music service, how they couldn’t leave enough alone, and wanted to rule the world. Steve told us not to worry, Apple had great products in the pipeline, and they did.

After my two week stay in Cupertino, I vowed to return to Infinite Loop as a full-fledged Apple employee, but I never did. Looking back I am grateful to have shared — however small — a tiny bit of Apple’s Infinite Loop’s history.

Harry McCracken “making sense of the most confusing new iPhone lineup ever“:

As the iPhone lineup has expanded in recent years, Apple has let go of that minimalist clarity. It seems less like an accident than a willful decision, and—since nobody at the company is likely to acknowledge the shift as a change in strategy with pros and cons—it’s up to us to figure it out for ourselves. Why has Apple released three new iPhones that are kinda similar and kinda different in ways that require explanation?

Harry has his own explanations for why Apple might want to standardize on the high-end iPhone X platform, but I think the message from Apple’s September 12th event is clear. If you are looking for a phone with a smaller screen, a phone with a headphone jack, or or a phone that costs under $400, Apple no longer makes an iPhone for you. In short, Apple has discontinued their entry-level iPhone SE in favor of larger phones that require additional adapters and cost upwards of $750.

As someone who doesn’t value his cell phone as much as the next Apple nerd, the iPhone SE has been an important product for me because of its price. The iPhone SE kept me invested in the iOS ecosystem, and enabled me to purchase a Apple Watch without approaching the ~$700 iPhone ASP I normally attribute to laptop computers. Now that an updated iPhone SE is no longer an option, I am evaluating alternative cell phone platforms. I am sure I am not alone.

Manton Reece explains how Micro.blog is serious about preventing abuse and harassment:

the platform was designed, from the beginning, to prevent abuse and harassment. Your microblog is your own, where you are free to write about whatever you want, but we protect the timeline, where you can @-reply others, through a variety of tools and curation. We have community guidelines that are enforced.

I don’t believe tools, curation, or community guidelines will ever be able to police the public park as well as the walls of a private garden. But Micro.blog was not designed to be a public park. To participate on Micro.blog (hosted or unhosted) you have to be willing to create a blog, put your name on it, and stand behind it. Accountability is the wall that will protect Micro.blog against the kinds of anonymous harassment observed on public social networks like Twitter that are just festering with throwaway accounts.

“On Micro.blog, you control your own content.” But your content keeps you in check.

But won’t there be anonymous Micro.blogs?

Sure, but I believe anonymous Micro.blogs will be the minority. People like to put their name on the work they have created, and they want to be proud of that work. This is where the community guidelines come in. Micro.blog is a community of creators, and the creators help protect the Micro.blog community they are proud of.

But what about the Micro.blog hosting fees?

Not everyone has $5 a month or the skills needed to setup a micro blog of their own. Won’t these barriers to entry prevent the mass adoption of Micro.blog — excluding a large swath of well-meaning people from participating on the platform?

More from Manton:

Many people are looking for “the next Twitter”, but it’s not enough to replace Twitter with a new platform and new leadership. Some problems are inevitable when power is concentrated in only 2-3 huge social networks — ad-based businesses at odds with user needs and an overwhelming curation challenge.

When you design your platform for everyone you have include everyone; good and bad. To participate in Micro.blog you have to be accountable for your own blog, but blogging is not for everyone. Micro.blog does not have to be a Twitter replacement, it does not have to be for everyone. By remaining small Micro.blog remains a community of creators, self curated without the need for ads.

Twitter and Micro.blog can coexist, and do through cross-posting. If your goal is to include everyone you can try to build a better Twitter.

I have been failing at social networks since the early 2000’s. I rode the MySpace wave in 2005. Joined and quit Facebook half a dozen times over the last decade. Paid $50 for a one year subscription to Apo.net. Since 2008, Twitter has been my water cooler of choice on the web; a place to procrastinate, meet new people, and share ideas. But over the last few years expectations of Twitter and my friend’s expectations of me have been coming up short. It might be time for me to leave Twitter.

Snark…

For someone who doesn’t make new friends easily, my participation on Twitter has led me to meet some pretty cool people, and at least one punk. But my snarky sense of humor often makes my replies come across as trollish and arrogant. I am not making as many new friends as I once did. Instead of driving people away it might be time for me to go.

Software…

The simplicity of trading short 280 character messages from the comfort of handcrafted third-party apps has always made Twitter appealing to me. Unfortunately Twitter doesn’t treat its third-party developers much better than the way I come across on social media; trollish and arrogant. The official Twitter client has long since lost its charm, and the future of third-party Twitter clients looks uncertain.

I don’t want to participate in a social network where my timeline is controlled by an algorithm, obscuring the posts of the people I follow, or presenting tweets out of order. Twitter owes a lot to its third-party developers, and we deserve better than this.

Hate…

Worse, Twitter has gotten so big it now attracts the lowest of humanity. Parasites who rely on Twitter’s prominent platform to amplify their messages of hate. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, has gone so far as to defend the hate. Driving people I respect off the platform and onto greener pastures. I don’t expect Twitter to police their platform perfectly, but I do expect Twitter to deny access to repeat offenders who publish hate or proclaim acts of violence against others.

Where do I go from here…

Brent Simmons describes the harsh reality long time Twitter users like myself are facing today:

There is no scenario where the Twitter we loved in 2008 comes back.

Even if it were sold to some entity with energy, resources, smarts, and good intentions, it’s too late. It has celebrities with millions of followers. It has the president. It has millions of accounts using it for unlovable purposes.

It’s never coming back, and using your emotional energy hoping it comes back is a waste.

While Stephen Hackett spells out the truth that alternative social networks like Mastodon, or Micro.blog never stay green long after the mob arrives.

If you think switching social networks can mask the basic fact that a lot of humans are terrible to each other on purpose, you’re in for a surprise.

Yeah, Twitter leadership is really bad at running Twitter, but rules only provide punishment. Humanity’s dark center will always break through eventually.

I am not suggesting a specific alternative to Twitter, just that it is time for me to take a break from the birdsite. I am deleting my Twitter apps and logging out of Tweetdeck. Over the next 31 days Tweetdelete will erase my remaining tweets. I want to spend more time blogging. I can’t say my decision is right for you, but I will leave you with these wise questions from Macdrifter Gabe Weatherhead.

If you are a Twitter user, answer this. Keep it to yourself, but try to be honest. What valuable thing have you learned from Twitter in the past 48 hours? Was it about an Apple product or something about some tech startup not liking poor people on their commuter buses? Did you take action on the information? I’m not going to judge you, but I will tell you that in my experience what Twitter gave me was almost never valuable and it certainly came to the exclusion of actual joy.

Update:

After Multiple Provocations, Twitter Has Banned Alex Jones And Infowars

After weeks of equivocation, Twitter permanently suspended the accounts of Infowars and its founder Alex Jones on Thursday, following similar moves by other large tech companies, including Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify. The decision came after a series of provocations from Jones that Twitter deemed in violation of its “abusive behavior” rules.

Finally.

During this year’s “Introducing Dark Mode” session at WWDC Apple gave us three reasons why they were including Dark Mode as a feature in Mac OS Mojave.

1. Dark interfaces are cool.
2. Dark interfaces are not just inverted.
3. Dark Mode is content-focused.

As Stephen Hackett points out, reason No. 1 is hard to argue against; dark user interfaces are cool. (How far we have come from when the black on white interface of the original 1984 Macintosh was considered fashionable.) But dark user interfaces are also difficult to pull off; especially with over 17 years of Mac OS X graphical user interface history behind them. Stephen Hackett shows us how Apple does Dark Mode right.

The system requirements for each new Macintosh operating system are rarely out-of-step with Apple’s marketing message. Mac OS Mojave is no exception. A big theme for this year’s WWDC keynote was improved performance through optimization, and as expected the Mac OS Mojave system requirements reflect upon that theme.

• MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
• Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
• iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
• iMac Pro (2017)
• Mac Pro models from late 2013 (plus mid 2010 and mid 2012 models with recommend Metal-capable GPU)

At first glance the Mojave system requirements don’t appear to follow a specific trend. It is only when we examine the minimal hardware requirements for Apple’s next generation graphics API Metal, that we find our answer.

During a “What’s new in Metal” session at WWDC, Apple announced that Metal support in OS X extends to Macs built since 2012.

But why is Apple making Metal a requirement for Mac OS now? The answer is optimization. While every other major operating system has good OpenGl support, Apple’s implementation of OpenGL has been languishing for years. Metal promises to improves the Mac’s graphics for less CPU cycles and fewer watts than OpenGL, but at the cost of compatibility.

As a proprietary system-wide 3D graphics engine, Metal does not benefit from the same large cross-platform developer community OpenGL enjoys. Metal only runs on Apple hardware and drops support for Macs made earlier than 2012. This wouldn’t be a problem for Macintosh Developers if Apple continued to support Metal and OpenGL side by side, but with the release of Mac OS Mojave and iOS 12 Apple is depreciating OpenGL in favor of Metal. Forcing 3D developers to choose Metal if they want to continue continue working with the Mac.

As a long time Mac user I have reasons to be wary of proprietary system-wide 3D graphics engine’s from Apple, but by retiring OpenGL in favor of Metal I believe Apple is making the right choice for its customers. Today’s Apple isn’t in the same beleaguered position it once was in 1999 when it adopted OpenGl. Today’s Apple has the market share needed to move to a new optimized API while keeping developersonboard. Mac OS Majove isn’t the last we will see of OpenGL on the Mac (depreciated features take a long time to disappear), but now we finally know why OpenGL is so poorly supported on Mac OS.

Jason Snell on May 23, 2018:

Here’s a bit of numerology for you. Today marks 17 years, one month, and 29 days since Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001. That’s a strangely odd number—6,269 days—but it also happens to be the exact length of time between January 24, 1984 (the launch of the original Macintosh) and March 24, 2001.

In other words, today the Mac’s second operating system era, powered by Mac OS X (now macOS) has been in existence as long as the first era was.

I grew up with Macintosh 512K in my home, a computer that is almost as old as I am. I have known the Mac all my life, and yet I am still surprised Mac OS X is as old as the Classic Mac era that came before it.

Perhaps this is because:

• I was not fully aware of the first era during the early years of my childhood.
• The first era saw several long years of stagnation; I am looking at you System 7.
• The second era began during my adolescence — in the early 2000’s — when Internet adoption, technological innovation, and Apple’s growth were accelerating.

No matter which era feels longer, the truth is we are all now living in the third era of Apple system software. An era where iOS has replaced Mac OS as Apple’s most important platform. iOS comes with all of advantages of the first two eras:

• The adoption of multi-touch and universal wireless data changed the world just as much as the introduction of the GUI in the first era.
• With over 11 annual iterations the third era has never showed signs of slowing down due to a lack of innovation the way the first era did.
• The third era has already witnessed an increased rate or Internet adoption, technological innovation, and growth that far exceeds the second era.

And yet for me Apple’s third era feels the least significant. Perhaps this is because iOS — at 3,981 days since its introduction — has still not replaced the Mac I am using today.

This week we learned a new Mac Pro isn’t coming until 2019. Clearly this revelation is a Apple public relations move designed to reign-in expectations prior to this year’s WWDC. But what makes this announcement so absurd is the guises that it is being made in the name of transparency while omitting any details describing the upcoming machine.

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community, so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.” In addition to transparency for pro customers, there’s also a larger fiscal reason behind it.

“We know that there’s a lot of customers today that are making purchase decisions on the iMac Pro and whether or not they should wait for the Mac Pro,” says Boger.

This is why Apple wants to be as explicit as possible now, so that if institutional buyers or other large customers are waiting to spend budget on, say iMac Pros or other machines, they should pull the trigger without worry that a Mac Pro might appear late in the purchasing year.

It’s almost as if Apple is telling its pro customers to buy different company’s modular computer.

Pro Working Group

Instead of facts we got some spin about how Apple was setting up a “Pro Working Group” to find out what their professional customers need in a pro workstation computer.

“We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn’t one thing,” says Ternus. “It’s very diverse. There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions, not just deliver big hardware, which we’re doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically.”

Apple forming a pro computer steering committees in 2018 is pathetic. The last Mac Pro was released in 2013 and it was a design failure. Apple has had nearly four years to figure out what pros want. Are they just starting now?

The disclosure of the “Pro Working Group” smells like a smoke shield deployed to distract us from the fact Apple is still figuring out what professionals want. Professionals who used to count as some of Apple’s most loyal customers.

Apple’s inability to produce a computer their professional customers want in a reasonable time frame is a sign removing Computer from the company name in 2007 was the right decision.

This tweet by Dr. Drang best sums up Apple’s latest Mac Pro announcement.

Apple will be taking an extra year to design the only product in its lineup whose buyers don’t care about its design.

David Sparks:

Over the years, Apple Products have become increasingly less repairable. The latest teardown of the new iPad evidences this fact with photos of densely packed electronic components and copious amounts of glue. This led iFixit to give the new iPad a low repairability score.

I get that, but also don’t see it as big of a strike against the iPad as most people make it out to be. For years now, repairing these devices, even without the glue, has been no walk in the park. To make these devices small, they have to be dense, and things are locked together inside, so the contents don’t move around. This also leads to that sense of sturdiness you feel with an iPad in your hand.

I don’t believe a computer has to be less “sturdy” to be more “repairable”. The two do not go hand-in-hand. The 2008 MacBook Pro introduced the Unibody chassis which made it far more sturdy than its predecessors, while remaining just as repairable.

That being said I see what David is getting at: “The vast majority of us are not going to take a screwdriver to our iPads at any time, no matter how repairable it is.” … “we buy these devices to use them every day, not take them apart.”

Apple is trading repairability for experience. They are making their computers thinner, lighter, and smaller, but they are paying the price for those improvements in solder, glue, and proprietary components. With a few exceptions, Apple computers are getting more reliable with each new generation. As long as that trend continues consumers should continue buying Apple products.

Apple has an advantage over other computer companies when it comes to maintaining their computers. Their fleet of local Apple Stores and organized repair depots makes fixing issues fast for Apple consumers. That being said an expedited repair process doesn’t hold the same value for all people. Some customers prefer to perform repairs and upgrades themselves; often past the customary five to seven years Apple supports their own products. To those people I say “don’t buy Apple.” If you value repairability over experience Apple is no longer making a computer for you.

My Ephemeral nature does not stop at blogging. I delete my old tweets automatically using a service called TweetDelete.

Protect your privacy by automatically deleting posts older than a specified age from your Twitter feed. This allows you to delete all your tweets all at once (up to 3,200 tweets), and helps make it easier to delete multiple tweets in one go.

According to the website most people use Tweet Delete to improve their privacy.

TweetDelete is useful for people who want to reduce the amount of old data in their Twitter account (perhaps because of other apps they use on it) or people who want to limit the amount of data about themselves they expose online. Tin foil hats are optional!

I don’t wear a tin foil hat, and I don’t think deleting my old tweets protects my privacy. I use TweetDelete because I treat Twitter like a form instant messaging.

Twitter is important to me because of the personal interactions it provides, but I am never going back to relive those old conversations. If I feel strong enough about a topic I will write it down keep and publish it on a website I control. Using TweetDelete is my way of telling Twitter you don’t own me.

I am not a good writer. Words rarely flow for me. Compared to other people it takes me a lot longer to write a meaningful sentence. I spend far too much time editing when I should be writing. Combined with a touch of perfectionism, and you can understand why I am wary when it comes to publishing. I only want to show my best work.

One of the ways I have learned to get past these fears is by accepting the ephemeral; nothing lasts forever. Just because our computers and content manangement systems are capable of archiving everything doesn’t mean we have to save it all.

Egg Freckles is a ephemeral blog. I choose what I keep. I’ll only show you my best work, and leave the rest for the Internet Archvive. Breaking links is a terrible way to blog; it’s bad for the Internet. But I am okay with that; this is my place.

The Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE Cellular promises to free Apple Watch owners from the shackles of their iPhones. Allowing them to receive notifications, place calls, stream music, and ask Siri on the go while leaving their phone at home. But despite these freedoms the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE Cellular is still a prisoner. It cannot be used without first being paired to its owner’s iPhone.

This makes the $399+ Apple Watch with LTE Cellular a companion device. Second fiddle to the functionally superior iPhone every Apple Watch owner already choose to put in their pockets. Purchasing an Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE Cellular means you are willing to spend $70 more at checkout and up to $120 annually for the privilege of leaving your $700 iPhone at home. ANd that doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.

But what about exercise? People like to run, play sports, or workout at the gym while leaving their phone at home. To those people I say keep exercising. Your iPhone was never a good fit for exercise, and the Apple Watch with LTE Cellular isn’t one either. Save money and get a better workout without notifications buzzing on your wrist. You didn’t need a wrist phone before, and you don’t need one now.

September is a busy time of year. Summer vacations are ending. Back-to-school season has begun, Apple is putting the finishing touches on Mac OS High Sierra, and system administrators are getting their first glimpse of the new documentation.

Mac OS High Sierra brings several exciting features to the Macintosh platform, but for System Administrators who image and maintain hundreds of Macs there are a few important features you need to know about.

Security

Mac OS High Sierra includes the following changes to TLS connections:

• Removes support for TLS connections using SHA-1 certificates. Administrators of TLS services should update their services to use SHA-2 certificates.
• Removes trust from certificates that use RSA key sizes smaller than 2048 bits across all TLS connections.
• Uses TLS 1.2 as the default for EAP-TLS negotiation. You can change this default setting with a configuration profile. Older clients might still need 1.0.

These security restrictions should not be a problem for System Administrators who keep their fleet of Mac’s system software up-to-date.

Filesystem

• When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically.
• Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won’t be converted to APFS.
• You can’t opt-out of the transition to APFS.

Apple is making the migration to APFS mandatory for modern Macs with solid state storage. You can’t opt-out of the transition, so make sure your clients have a good backup. Systems with hard disk drives and Fusion drives won’t be migrated automatically. but could be converted to APFS later this year with a future update. Systems with custom partitions or secondary solid state storage are undocumented We will just have to wait an see how High Sierra deals with these edge cases.

Boot Camp is supported when upgrading to macOS High Sierra, unless the Boot Camp volume is greater than 3 TB and resides on a Fusion Drive. Boot Camp doesn’t support ReadWrite to APFS-formatted Mac volumes.

Apple is not providing a Boot Camp Windows driver for APFS like they did for HFS+. Boot Camp users will have to come up with their own solution for sharing files between their Mac and Windows desktops. Virtualization solutions like Parallels and VMWare, which rely on local networking to share files, will not be effected.

• AFP can’t share files on Apple File System (APFS). If you need to share files, switch to SMB. If you have network home directories shared via AFP on an APFS volume, update the mount records and user records to use SMB.

  AFP was depreciated years ago. If you need to share files on a APFS volume switch to SMB. No one should be using networked home directories in 2017.

Kernel Extensions

• macOS High Sierra introduces a feature that requires user approval before loading new third-party kernel extensions. This feature requires changes to some apps and installers in order to preserve the desired user experience.

Your documentation may need to be updated to include an extra step when installing software that requires a kernel extension.

Directory Services

• macOS High Sierra supports binding to Active Directory domains running with a domain functional level of 2008 or later. Windows Server 2003 isn’t supported.
• macOS High Sierra removes support for NIS.

Make sure your Windows Active Directory is running a domain function level of 2008 or later. You would be surprised how many older domains are running on newer servers and operating systems. Who still uses NIS?

Software Deployment

You must be connected to the Internet when you upgrade your macOS. After your Mac confirms your connection, the Installer uses the model number of your Mac to locate and download a firmware update specific to only that Mac.

Only the macOS Installer can download and install the firmware update. Firmware updates can’t be done on external devices, like those connected via Target Disk Mode, Thunderbolt, USB, or Firewire.

Monolithic system imaging can only be used to re-install macOS, not to upgrade to a new macOS version.

If you try to use a monolithic system image, required firmware updates will be missing from the installation. This causes the Mac to operate in an unsupported and unstable state. You can use system images to re-install the existing operating system on a Mac.

Monolithic imaging died years ago. If you are doing it now, you are doing it wrong. Installing the operating system on one Mac using the Target Disk Mode of used to be a neat trick, but it was never supported by Apple and can now only be used for reinstalling High Sierra.

Content Caching

• You won’t be able to run Content Caching on a virtual machine. This action has never been supported in previous versions of macOS, but is explicitly disallowed in macOS High Sierra.

Client-side content caching seems like a neat trick to save bandwidth, but the returns mostly benefit Apple servers. I have a hard time imagining any Macintosh System Admin deploying client-side Content Caching. Use a centralized Mac OS sever.

Configuration Profiles

• In macOS High Sierra, vardbConfigurationProfiles is now protected by SIP. Admins should now use the profiles(1) command to install startup configuration profiles. See the profiles(1) manual page for more information.

Just one more way Apple is protecting it’s users’ and the hard work of ever Macintosh System Admin out there.

Mac OS High Sierra looks like an exciting release. I look forward to seeing it on September 25th.

If two things are glued together using “industrial adhesive” they were not meant to be pulled apart. And if one of those two things is a MacBook Pro lithium-ion battery that releases “toxic smoke” when punctured, you should think twice before trying to save a buck.

iFixit, everyone’s favorite pull-it-apart online repair guide is at it again. This time with a “glue-busting battery kit” that comes with all of the tools you need to replace your MacBook Pro battery. For somewhere between $89 and $120 iFixit promises to save you money over the Apple Store.

And while iFixit’s kit comes with everything you need to replace your MacBook battery, they fail to tell you that Apple’s battery service comes with a replacement trackpad, topcase, and keyboard (provided these components are in good working order), plus professional installation with a 90-day warranty all for $199.99. With iFixit you get a do-it-yourself project with more risk and less value than if you brought your MacBook to the Genius Bar.

Only once in my life have I owned the undisputed best of anything. That was the original iPgone on June 29th, 2007; the first day it went on sale. Purchasing an 8 GB iPhone in 2007 bought me the best mobile phone money could buy. Android would not be released for another year. Windows Mobile required a stylus. The BlackBerry was a oversized pager. The iPhone was in a league of its own. It started a brand new era in computing.

Owning an iPhone in 2007 was more of a point of interest than a practicality. Strangers would stop me on the street to ask questions about my phone. But once you got past the novelty of pinching and zooming there was little else you could do.

Only 15 apps were included on the phone. There was no App Store. I could send a text, make a call, read an email, or schedule an appointment, but there was no copy and paste. I found myself watching the stock market for the first time because I could do it on my phone. There was no iCloud. To sync my data, I had to plug my iPhone into my computer. Using an iPhone was exciting because of how you did things, not because of the things you could do.

If the iPhone had a killer app, it was Safari. It put the whole Web in my pocket at blazingly fast 2G EDGE speeds. There were no iPhone optimized versions of popular websites back then. You had to wait for things to load. But for the first time in human history, the world’s largest library of information was always just a few taps away. Trivia night at the local pub suffered. People started to spend their free time staring into 3.5 inch screens. Conversations would never be the same again.

A lot has changed since the original iPhone first went on sale over ten years ago. Owning an iPhone is no longer a point of interest; everybody has one. Multitouch is no longer a novelty. The word App became common language. Phones have gotten smarter, faster, and their screens have gotten larger. People are talking to their iPhones and their Phones are talking back.

But even though the original iPhone is gone, it can never be forgotten. It started the mobile revolution, and popularized software as an app. The original iPhone gave us a map to new places, and lifted our limitations once we got there. It allowed us to share our experiences like never before. There is no longer a good excuse for being uninformed.

Sometimes I am sad I cannot go back to that time to 2007 when having unlimited information at my fingertips made me special When the joy of multitouch was new, and the web was unprepared. Maybe someday I will dig into my desk drawer to show my kids the iPhone that started it all. Remembering a time when 15 apps was all you wanted — well that and copy and paste.

I skipped WWDC again this year. Apple’s emphasis on iOS over the last three years removed the sparkle I once felt as a Mac user Instead of flying to California, I watched the keynote with the CocoaHeads Boston crew in a lecture hall at MIT. Daniel Jalkut was there; he does not wear his Burger King crown in person.

Despite staying in Boston again this week, I saw Apple’s 2017 WWDC keynote from a new direction. I am no longer a Mac user. For the last three years I have been a Hackintosh user at home, and a MacBook user on the job. Then I changed jobs and sold my Hackintosh. I still carry an iPhone in my pocket and wear an Apple Watch one my wrist, but I not the Apple fanatic I was a decade ago. Today I watched the keynote as an outsider.

Apple TV

• Amazon Prime content on Apple TV. Enough said.

Watch OS 4

• The new Siri watch face represents a push for powerful background artificial intelligence. Much more than the voice-activated query and reply routine we have today. I expect to see the Siri brand expand to fill more artificial intelligence foles in Apple’s future product announcements.
• I am a long distance runner. I train for several marathons throughout the year. Some days I need a little extra incentive to get out the door. Over the past year Apple’s Holiday Activity Challenges have kept me running even during inclement weather. Personalized activity challenges that include distance and speed goals would be a welcome addition to Watch OS 4.
• Some days I go swimming after a long Summer run. Watch OS 4 makes combining workouts easy. Hopefully it also lets me remove workouts from the list I am never going to perform.
• I only run indoors during the worst Winter storms, but when I do my Apple Watch never stays in sync with my treadmill. Watch OS 4 promises to keep my treadmill and watch in sync during my workout.
• Listening to music and podcasts on my Apple Watch is something I have always wanted to do, but syncing audio to my Apple Watch is a pain in the ass. I would be more excited about pairing a playlist with a specific workout if it didn’t require an Apple Music subscription.
• Watch OS 4 turns my Apple Watch into a flashlight, or a blinking safety light during night time runs. Eagerly awaiting the Ben Brooks review.

High Sierra

• The name ‘High Sierra’ sounds like it was chosen purely for the comic material Craig could deliver at the keynote.
• Autoplay Blocking and Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari are powerful privacy features that will no doubt be circumvented by online advertisers.
• Outsourcing books, websites, and other printer material from Photos.app’s projects makes sense. Apple’s only interest in the coffee table books is to showcase their own products.
• Apple File System is the new default, but will it automatically arrive on Macs with built-in RAID or custom partitions? Instant file duplication is the kind of feature computers should have had decades ago.
• It is exciting to think Apple is taking dedicated graphics hardware seriously again. Powerful discrete GPUs and external eGPUs will benefit more than just the gaming community. Apple acknowledges VR is a thing with support from major third-party players.
• The Mac OS window server now users Metal 2. It is like Quartz Extreme all over again!

Mac Hardware

• The push for improved graphics performance continues with brighter screens and more accurate colors on all iMacs. The entry-level 21.5-inch iMac features Intel Iris Plus Graphics, while the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs with Retina displays include the latest AMD Radeon GPUs.
• Unfortunately all 21.5-inch iMacs still ship with a 5400-rpm drive standard. The 24 GBs of Fusion Drive flash storage added to the high-end iMacs is embarrassing. Apple should give us the option to spec out a lightening fast NVMe SSD and pair it a roomy large capacity hard drive. The mounting hardware to install both varieties of storage simultaneously is already available in both size iMacs.
• Apple does USB Type-C right by including it alongside standard USB Type-A ports on the new iMacs.
• MacBooks also received a Kaby Lake update with faster integrated graphics, faster SSDs, and the latest latest AMD Radeon GPUs in the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Although these updates will only provide ~15% improvement over last years models, it is nice to see Apple taking the Mac refresh cycle seriously again.
• Apple closed the MacBook section of the keynote by offering a $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 128 GB SSD, and “bump in megahertz” to the MacBook Air.j0 Don’t buy either of these computers.

iMac Pro

• The rumors were true Apple has been developing a Space Gray iMac Pro. This is the first time the iMac has been offered in an alternative color iMac in a alternative color since Indigo, Graphite, and Snow.
• With up to 18 Xeon Cores, 128 GBs of ECC RAM, 4 TBs of solid state storage, and Radeon Vega graphics featuring 16 GBs of VRAM, I am surprised Apple decided to announce there will be a new Mac Pro next year. What does a modular Mac Pro get you that a iMac Pro doesn’t, especially when you consider the expansion possibilities of 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports and external GPUs?A

iOS 11

• Apple Pay in the messages app makes peer-to-peer payments easy. As long this feature does not include a credit card processing fee, Apple Pay will become a game changer for everything from Craigslist to splitting the restaurant bill. Maybe you grandmother will even adopt it in time for your next birthday card.
• Siri will be available in new voices, in more countries, with suggestions, contextual news and more all straight from within Messages. Will Mac users get these same Messages features, and do they even want to be messaged my Siri?
• HEIF replacing JPEG for 2x better image compression on you iOS device. It would be great to see an option to recompress your existing photos using this new standard and bring it back to the Photos.app on the Mac. Sharing your photos as JPEGs remains as easy as ever.
• Editing, adjusting, and capturing a still frame from a Live Photo is a welcome change for the millions of people recording Live Photos accidentally.
• The new iOS 11 Control Center promises to be less of a waste of space; especially on iPad.
• Apple Maps now offers internal floor plans for popular malls and airports. A quicker way to find the Apple Store and get out.
• Lane guidance and speed limits makes Apple maps useful in California. Good luck driving in downtown Boston.
• The new Do Not Disturb While Driving feature uses wireless know-how to learn when you are driving and avoid distractions. Most people will turn this feature off, but it could be an important preemptive measure to avoid future cellphone regulation.
• Apple Music offers profiles and shared playlists. The return of iTunes Ping?
• A brand-new redesigned App Store makes its way to iOS while Mac users are left in the lurch.
• Games are separated into their own tab giving more space to the rest of the iOS ecosystem.
• The Today tab shows you a curated look at what’s new in the App Store.

iPad Pro

• The new 10.5-inch iPad Pro replaces the 9.7 inch model with a 20% larger display and 40% reduced borders. Apple claims 10.5 inch is the perfect screen size for the on-screen keyboard and Smart Covers.
• The 12.9-inch iPad Pro gets True Tone display, P3 color, HDR, and increased brightness.
• Both iPad Pros get 120 MHz ProMotion. At twice the refresh rate of a typical LCD, animations and video appear smoother while reducing Apple Pencil latency down to 20 ms. Refresh rate is intelligently adjusted, saving battery life on static images.
• Apple once again shows off its CPU design prowess by debuting a new A10X CPU with 6 compute cores, 12 graphic cores, and 40% faster graphic performance.

iPad Software

• New iOS Dock enables drag and drop multitasking while preserving familiarity with Mac OS.
• App Switcher is iOS version of the Mac’s Mission Control; preserving app state and pairing.
• Drag and drop images, text, and URLs make the new iPad software a multitasking powerhouse.
• Cloud-connected Files app bring some of the power behind the Mac OS Finder to iOS, but grandma is still going to find file management confusing.
• Markup anything on you can see or print with Apple Pencil and share your comments and corrections.
• Apple notes gains a built-in document scanner, in-line drawing, and searchable handwritten text.
• The iPad is starting to feel less like a larger iPhone and more like a smaller Mac, while Notes on unlock feels like a Newton feature.

HomePod

• HomePod is a 7-inch tall Homekit enabled speaker with six microphones, seven beam-forming tweeters, one upward-facing woofer, and a Apple A8 CPU.
• Available in December for $349 HomePod is just another way to bring an Apple Music subscription into your home. By offering automatic detection and balance between two HomePods, Apple thinks you will buy two of these.

So what am I most excited about?

New technologies such as the Apple File System, Metal 2, H.265 video, and HEIF photos. Apple’s return to a regular update cycle for Mac hardware. The introduction of the iMac Pro;a true all-in-one professional workstation. Apple’s increased interest in discrete graphics, VR, and the potential for Apple to support eGPU solutions in the near future.

Even though I am not an iPad user I am glad the iOS is gaining increased functionality and improved multitasking by adopting familiar features from Mac OS. I believe multitouch is the future of computing, and a stronger iOS ecosystem will deliver the future to us faster.

I would have liked to see decreased sandbox restrictions in the Mac App Store. Many of the Apps I have grown to love over the past decade are no longer eligible for the Mac App store due to these restrictions. Their absence from the App Store is hurting the Mac ecosystem, and sending the message innovation is not welcome on the Mac platform.

Steve Frank of Panic fame admits to having his company’s source code stolen:

Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer.

In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned.

Long story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of source code to several of our apps.

I am sorry this happened to Steven, but at the same time honestly documenting this breach in a well-written blog post is just one of the reasons I love Panic so much.

Would this have happened to Steven if Handbrake, like so many other powererful Mac Apps, was restricted from the Mac App Store? If Handbrake had been in the Appe Store and protected by Apple’s review process Panic’s source code may have never been protected. I think it is unfortunate Apple is prioritizing the protection of Mac App Store users who prefer simple apps and games over the power-users and developers who require apps that push the Macintosh platform forward.

Yesterday Apple updated several of its Mac and iOS apps, making them available for free on Mac OS and iOS.

MacRumors has the story:

iMovie, Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and GarageBand for both Mac and iOS devices have been updated and are now listed in the App Store for free.

Previously, all of these apps were provided for free to customers who purchased a new Mac or iOS device, but now that purchase is not required to get the software. Many Apple customers were already likely eligible to download the software at no cost if they had made a device purchase in the last few years.

Hackintosh users will no doubt take advantage of Apple’s generosity even if using these apps on commodity PC hardware is against the terms of the license agreement. The real winners though are schools and business who won’t have to worry about managing these essential iApps using apple’s confusing Volume Purchase Program.

Yesterday NVIDIA revealed they would be releasing Mac OS drivers for their Pascal microarchitecture GPUs. “This comes despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a Mac Pro that can officially accept a PCIe video card in almost half a decade.”

So why is NVIDIA releasing a Mac driver to a market that, officially speaking, is essentially dead? Ryan Smith writing for AnandTech explains:

Instead it’s the off-label use that makes this announcement interesting, and indeed gives NVIDIA any reason whatsoever to make a Pascal driver release. Within the Mac community there are small but none the less vocal user groups based around both unsupported external GPUs and not-even-Apple-hardware Hackintoshes. In the case of the former, while macOS doesn’t support external GPUs (and isn’t certified as eGFX complaint by Intel), it’s possible to use Macs with Thunderbolt eGFX chassis with a bit of OS patching. Meanwhile with a bit more hacking, it’s entirely possible to get macOS running on a custom-built PC, leading to the now long-running Hackintosh space.

As a Hackintosh user I am surprised by this announcement. Hackintosh and eGPU users are a small but vocal percentage of the Mac OS user base. I honestly didn’t think NVIDIA would commit to supporting their latest GPU architecture on unsupported systems, but then again maybe my line of thinking has been clouded by an Apple state of mind.

Before NVIDIA’s announcement I was in process of selling my main Hackintosh with a Pascal-based GTX 1060 installed. Now I might consider changing my plans, unless someone makes me a decent offer first.