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Before we begin, we’d recommend your first step is the same thing that we at Mac Aid always do before tinkering around on anyone’s Mac, and that is back it up! This is something we should all be doing anyway on a very regular basis of course, but as we see all too often it’s something that is easily missed or forgotten about.
Maybe you have noticed your Mac isn’t running as fast as it used to, perhaps you’ve slowly gotten used to it becoming increasingly sluggish, so you’ve just been given a not very subtle reminder it’s time to do something about it, like this:
If this reminder has popped up, clicking on ‘Manage’ will take you to the next step. If you aren’t quite at the point of your Mac yelling at you yet, here’s how to check just how much storage you’re currently using and how much you have remaining:
You will then see something like this, although hopefully, you’ll have much more free space!
From there, click on ‘Manage’, and it will take you here:
There are some quite straightforward options like ‘Empty the bin Automatically’.
When it comes to deciding to ‘Store in iCloud’ we do recommend exercising caution and being sure you understand all the implications before you decide to head down that road. Setting this up incorrectly could result in data loss!
‘Reduce Clutter’ is a super helpful thing to look at, it instantly lets you view items in the following categories: Large files, Downloads, Unsupported Apps, and File browser:
Let’s face it, it’s not worth dedicating any space on your Mac to the Tom Tom you haven’t used since Google maps became available on your phone or to the Scanner you threw away several years ago.
Spend some time going through all the different options here. Click around, you might be surprised at the things you find that you not only no longer need but are from so long ago you don’t remember having them in the first place, and sorting by date can be helpful to get you literally to the bottom of things. Look for installers for applications you have already installed – the installer file is no longer any use to you.
Unsupported apps may be taking up a lot of your space. The shift to 64 bit in recent versions of Mac OS means that your Mac may be littered with old 32 bit applications that will no longer run. They are of no use at all to you now, and are taking up space, so delete them.
We often see clients with a huge amount of unnecessary data stored in their Downloads folder. If you download files and intend to keep them, then put them in the appropriate folder on your system. The rest of what you will find in Downloads is probably unnecessary and deleting it all can save you a ton of space.
Another thing to try if your Mac has become sluggish is to Boot in Safe Mode and then back to normal. One of the things your Mac does when booting in Safe Mode is delete temporary files in various caches which have amassed over time and could be slowing down the performance of the OS. Depending on which OS you have, and if your Mac is Intel or M1, the instructions vary slightly, you can view the instructions here, just make sure you select the correct OS from the drop-down menu first https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh21245/mac
Hopefully your Mac is now running faster than it has in a long time, and should have the free space it needs to do what you want it to do, but let’s not stop there, do your emails need a declutter? Depending on the setup, emails may not be taking up a lot of space on your Mac, but even if they aren’t, there may be size limits from your email provider, or they might have just got out of hand over time.
Let’s start once again with the Bin, does it auto empty? Has it ever been emptied? If you are inundated with emails, the search function will be your friend here. Are you still signed up for updates from every store you’ve made an online purchase from, or for a million different newsletters that are no longer of interest, but instead of unsubscribing, they just sit there unopened and ignored?
In the Search bar, try typing “unsubscribe,” every email you can unsubscribe from will show up. There will be some you want to keep, of course (like the Mac Aid newsletter!), but the ones you no longer want can easily be found, unsubscribed from, and deleted. There may be other keywords or names you can search for and delete in bulk. Don’t forget to empty the Bin when you’re done!
If you have done all you can to reduce the clutter and clean up your Mac and are still finding it isn’t running as it should, there are more heavy-handed options that might require some support from Mac Aid. Depending on the age and spec of your Mac, there might be options like upgrading your hard drive to an SSD, or replacing your current SSD with a larger one, or adding additional RAM. Or maybe it’s finally time to move on up to the latest and greatest. If you do decide that it’s time for a new Mac, stop to consider what has caused you to move on from your current one. Do you need a bigger SSD, extra RAM or a more powerful system?
If you are interested in discussing more options to optimise or upgrade your Mac, call or email us today.
So, you’re excited about the M1 processor, and so you should be! The huge improvements in performance and battery life far outweigh anything we have seen before. You’ve held out this long, and you want a new M1 Mac, great! But before you jump in head first, here are a few things you need to think about.
How old is your current Mac? What O/S are you running?
If you are using Sierra (10.12) or older, migration might not be as simple as usual, and some manual tweaking will be required.
What apps do you use? While in general, migrating to an M1 Mac is hassle-free. If you are using any exotic or particularly old apps, it’s worth checking if they are 64 bit, as M1 Macs and Mac OS Bug Sur are 64 bit only. The transition from 34 bit has been coming for a long time, so most app developers are well and truly on top of it, but there are still some stragglers out there, and that is something you’ll want to know before you find you can’t run a much-needed app.
What do you plug into your current iMac?
Most M1 Macs are USB-C or Thunderbolt only. Are you using an external hard drive for Time Machine backups? It is probably USB-3, so you will need an adapter or hub to be able to connect it. Or perhaps you might get a new USB-C cable to connect to it.
Another easily overlooked consideration is how old your printer is. If it is quite old, it may be time to upgrade for compatibility reasons. Printer manufacturers do not release updated drivers for old printers, so you may find that your old printer may not be compatible with your new M1 Mac.
Futureproof your M1 Mac.
Lastly, it’s important to note that the newer Macs are not upgradable. You will need to make sure you get the correct machine with enough RAM and a big enough SSD for your current needs and what you think you may need in the years to come.
If you’re unsure about this or any other aspects of upgrading to an M1 Mac, why not reach out to Jeffrey, our Accounts Manager. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about Macs, he was even so excited about the recent Apple event, that he set his alarm for 3 am Australian time to catch all the details as they went live. Jeffrey’s vast Mac knowledge will ensure you end up with precisely what you need to meet your needs. Whether it be one of the standard spec Macs, or a custom MAC with additional RAM and a larger SSD, making sure you get the most suitable and futureproof Mac for your home or office.
Let’s start with a quick rundown of what Apple announced at their Spring Loaded Event. The Apple TV4K, the long rumoured Air Tag, and the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini are now available in purple. But the thing we are most excited about, Apple’s M1 chip has come to a brand new 24-inch iMac and 11 and 12.9 inch iPad Pro!
From home to office, these are amazing machines, the M1 processor is all about power, efficiency and performance.
This news follows the initial release of the breakthrough M1 chip in November 2020 in the Mac mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air ranges. Talk to anyone that has got their hands on one of these, and even the most non-technical person is going to rave to you about the lightning speed and astonishing battery life improvements for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
The M1 iMac also features a brilliant 4.5K Retina display and the best camera and speakers ever in a Mac, as well as studio-quality mics. For those of us old enough to remember back to 1999, when fruit coloured iMacs appeared for the first time, it blew our minds! And caused a lot of arguments about choosing colours. Well, after a long hiatus of interesting computer colours, they are back in full force with the new iMac. The 24″ iMac comes in 7 beautiful colours with matching coloured mice keyboards and even power cable. Don’t worry, it’s still available in silver if fun colours aren’t your thing, but, after the year we just had, maybe we all need a bit of positivity and colour in our lives! Depending on the specifications ordered, shipping is expected to start in 3-6 weeks.
The M1 iPad Pro is a giant leap forward, offering 50% faster CPU as well as 40% better GPU than its non M1 predecessor, and now connects via Thunderbolt, not to mention its outstanding battery life, meaning you could surf the web for up to 10 hours before needing to plug in for a recharge. The new iPad Pros now feature 5G connectivity in the cellular models. The 12.9″ iPad Pro now features a Liquid Retina XDR display bringing extreme dynamic range and a breathtaking 1,000 nits of brightness.
2020 was a year of craziness that no one really expected. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that it seems we’re through the worst of things with covid-19 and all its impacts. We’re hoping so anyway, and things are seeming upbeat at Mac Aid and for our clients.
Mac Aid are still here and doing pretty well, and we would like to take this chance to thank you all for sticking with us this year though the ups and downs and challenges of lock down. We hope that we were able to help you deal with whatever IT curveballs 2020 threw at you.
In many ways IT support is well positioned for working remotely, and so we were still able to do much of our work, even through lockdown. Not everything is as easy or quick when done remotely, so thanks for your patience with getting things done this year.
In many ways 2020 was an interesting experiment in just how much can – or cannot – be done remotely. Like many of our clients, we’ll be making sure that shapes how we do our work in future.
Much of our work this year was about helping clients with their own sudden shift to remote working. Despite the challenges that involved, it seems to have worked well. Many of our clients are adopting remote work whole-heartedly going forward, and almost all are continuing with it to some degree.
Previously a niche newcomer to video conferencing, Zoom became everyone’s new favourite – or most often used – app during 2020 as we all grappled with staying in contact through lockdown and quarantine.
Zoom themselves didn’t seem particularly ready for such mass adoption, with their app suffering from security weaknesses and odd design quirks when the rush hit in early 2020. They quickly moved to polish things up, and Mac Aid did a lot of work with clients to get Zoom working securely and dependably for them.
Remote working accelerated the shift that was already happening with Mac Aid clients moving to cloud based file sharing, rather than dedicated servers on premise.
We migrated a lot of clients to DropBox this year and the flexibility of that solution seems to have worked well.
Many Mac Aid clients are planning to have more staff returning to their offices in the new year. If that’s you, remember to stop and consider the process of re-consolidating all the data your people might have collected on their own devices while they were working at home. And in doing that, maybe it’s time to stop and consider your approach to file sharing and backups generally?
Another problem that many of our clients and Mac Aid ourselves faced was how to deal with office phone systems with workers scattered to remote locations.
While there are solutions to getting remote access to your phone system, our suggestion in this case is to consider Unified Communications – that means incorporating your phone system into your computers and mobile phones.
We’re doing this using Microsoft Teams at Mac Aid and are rolling this solution out to clients as well. This is one of those changes that anyone running IT for a business will wish they’d done years ago. It incorporates your phone system into your main IT systems, so all can be managed as part of your regular IT maintenance and support.
Unified Communications makes a lot of sense for users too, with phone calls closely linked to emails and contacts on your devices. If you’d like to look at how Unified Communications and Teams Calling could work for your business, we’d be happy to talk to you about it.
Despite the gloom and doom, Apple was on a roll through 2020 and delivered a lot of great new stuff.
The iPhone 12s are a great redesign, which have been very popular, as has iOS 14. While not radical update, Apple Watch 6 is a nice refresh, which was well received by Apple Watch fans. And Apple Watch SE brought current generation Apple Watches down to a lower price point. And for those with a taste for “luxury audio”, Apples AirPods Max arrived just in time for Christmas.
MacOS Big Sur arrived in November. Even though we’re always cautious with advising our clients against adopting new OS releases too early, generally it has been a solid release. It’s a great new iteration of Mac OS with a fresh new look and lots of innovations under the hood.
But the most exciting Apple news this year was the release of the long-awaited Apple Silicon “M1” Macs. Many were sceptical about Apple’s bold performance claims about the new M1 based MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, but had to eat their words when they performed beyond expectations. Apple have managed to migrate to new processors of their own design and at the same time achieve the biggest ever performance and battery life improvements ever in a single new generation of hardware.
The M1 changeover is accelerating with major software makers like Microsoft and Adobe releasing new M1 optimised versions of their apps. It will be great fun to see what new Apple Silicon Macs Apple release next year.
Mac Aid will be closing for the Christmas new year break on Wednesday 23rd of December and reopen on Monday 11 January.
Our main number 03 9428 4999 and the support@macaid.com.au email will be monitored over the break. Please leave us a message if you have any urgent enquiries and we will contact you as soon as we are available.
In the rush to put 2020 behind us and take a well-deserved break, remember to make sure to put things in place for secure backups of your data and systems over the break, divert office phones or update messages, and set up Out Of Office messages for email. If in doubt about any of that, Mac Aid can help.
Have a great Christmas and New Year, best wishes from the team at Mac Aid
As expected, Apple released new Apple Silicon based Macs at a virtual event on Nov 10. While an updated MacBook Air and 13 inch MacBook Pro had been widely rumoured, Apple surprised by also releasing an Apple Silicon based Mac Mini. All are based on the new Apple “M1” SOC (System On Chip), a beefed up variant of the A14 Bionic being used in this year’s iPhone 12 and iPad Air.
https://www.apple.com/apple-events/november-2020/
All are externally identical to the existing/previous models, with all the changes internal. Apple’s stated performance specs and the battery life improvements for the M1 processor are very, very impressive. And initial reviews are showing these Macs to be every bit as powerful as Apple says they are.
This model replaces the Intel version entirely – and is stated to be 3.5 x the CPU speed, with 5 x as fast graphics performance with new improved SSDs which offer twice the speed. Battery life is stated as up to 18 hours of video playback and 15 hours of wireless web, which is an unprecedented jump in one generation. The display has been upgraded to a P3 gamut panel as well, although it’s not quite as bright as the screen on the MacBook Pros.
So from that description this should be a very impressive MacBook Air. MacBook Air has moved to a fanless design in this update, which will make it a silent laptop, which is nice, but there might be some impact on performance due to throttling for heat management under sustained load. Only time and experience will tell how that will affect the over-all feel of the machine. But this sounds like a great upgrade – and the price has remained the same too.
Since the MacBook Air hit its stride in it’s second iteration in 2011, it’s been a great compact, all-purpose Mac laptop, the “perfect Mac laptop for most people”. So if this Apple Silicon M1 version is all that Apple says, and it seems that it might be, it should be the best iteration yet, and a great choice for general computing. We’ll be testing one at Mac Aid soon.
The Apple Silicon upgrade to the 13 inch MacBook Pro also sounds very solid, with the new M1 based version replacing the previous entry level model. Given the larger chassis, and the fact that the 13 inch MacBook Pro retains a fan for heat dissipation, this should be a fast, capable laptop.
The M1 processor in the 13 inch MacBook Pro is said to be 2.8 times as fast as the previous model, with graphics up to five times faster. There’s a Touch Bar, and two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports. Battery life is stated as up to 20 hours, which is a vey nice upgrade indeed. Apple says that’s 10 hours longer than the previous model and the best battery life ever on a Mac.
The big surprise was that Apple also released an M1 version of the Mac Mini. This should be a great little Mac, with significant performance increases. And the price dropped for the M1 model too.
M1 based Mac Mini reverts to a silver finish, and boasts substantial performance improvement with up to 3× faster CPU performance and up to 6× faster graphics. It includes 2 Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, two USB‑A ports, HDMI 2.0, Wi-Fi 6 and Gigabit Ethernet.
Mac Minis are used in many and varied settings, as servers, workstations and media centres, and it sounds like this version will be a great little performer in any of those roles. The price-to-performance ratio for the Mac Mini has never been better, with the M1 version being described as “a barnburner of a miniature desktop PC”.
You’ll get the best performance on these Macs running apps built for the M1 processor. But all of your existing applications should run fine using Rosetta 2. Apple says that some applications are actually faster under emulation with Rosetta 2 than they are on the Intel processors they were programmed for, and early reports are bearing this out. Your own real world results may vary of course.
The M1 also brings the ability to use your favourite iPhone and iPad apps directly on macOS Big Sur, although reports on how well this really works are mixed.
These are substantially upgraded Macs, and sound very impressive, particularly given that they are all entry level models in Apple’s line-up. And so it will be interesting to see what Apple has in store for Apple Silicon versions of their higher performance models like the iMac, 16 inch MacBook Pro and Mac Pro.
As exciting as this all sounds, remember that these are a first generation product, so it might be wise to hold off for a little and let someone else road test them first. Mac Aid have an M1 Mac Mini already and are about to start putting it through its paces. We will report back once we have some real-world experience to relate.
