Last Year on My Mac: miniest mini and more

In the year that we celebrated the fortieth birthday of the original 128K Mac, Apple has ensured we’ve got plenty more to remember in the future. Just as we were starting to get to grips with its third cycle of Apple silicon Macs, it leaped into the start of the fourth, in the first M4 models. We’ve also just about survived the annual purgative macOS upgrade, and even updated the firmware in our Magic Keyboards.

For once, the release of Macs featuring the next family in the M-series was heralded by their appearance in iPads in May. By that stage I had just about worked out what had changed in the CPU cores of the M3 from the previous November. Perhaps my most lasting impression is that code running in a virtual machine on an M3 host is often faster than running native on an M1 from four years ago.

Apple then delivered the smallest Mac ever in the Mac mini, a product line that didn’t even have time for an M3 version. Perhaps inevitably, I and a great many others recognised a new classic in the making, and my Mac mini M4 Pro has displaced my Mac Studio M1 Max from its connection to my Studio Display since it arrived on 8 November. Since then I’ve been stealing a little time to look inside its CPU core management, and have been surprised at how different it is from all the previous Apple silicon Macs I’ve examined.

I’ve also been delighted at how many using older Macs, some as far back as High Sierra, have decided the time is right to migrate to an M4. Leaping forward through all the changes in macOS over those seven hectic years isn’t straightforward, and learning that every one of your apps needs to be replaced must be disquieting. Those of us who have endured the annual pain of architectural changes brought by each new version of macOS can see how concentrating all that into a single migration is going to be intense agony. It’s like having your blisters treated with tincture of benzoin and its couple of minutes of excruciating pain, compared with the prolonged discomfort of leaving the blisters to heal naturally.

While Apple distracted almost everyone with its delayed introduction of AI tools, macOS Sequoia brought plenty of new and changed features that have had greater immediate impact.

Virtualisation of macOS on Apple silicon Macs has for too long been almost wonderful. Sequoia has nudged it slightly closer, but left it even more tantalisingly close, with the addition of limited support for what’s now known as Apple Account. The most obvious missing feature in macOS VMs has been support for App Store apps. Given Apple’s emphasis on their value, it’s extraordinary that VMs can enjoy good iCloud support, but still can’t run any third-party App Store apps. The underlying reason is most likely the authorisation scheme for the use of App Store apps, a tragic example of Apple’s business model thwarting its engineering aims. As far as I can tell, VMs aren’t eligible to use AI either, although for some that may be a blessing.

Sequoia lays the foundations and builds the first storey of a password manager that deserves further development. Its success is going to depend on whether Apple can integrate a modern solution for the login and other traditional keychains, a problem that the Keychain app currently ducks and leaves to Keychain Access, but hiding that still essential utility away in CoreServices won’t make it go away.

iCloud Drive has at last gained the ability to ‘pin’ files and folders to prevent them from being evicted from local storage. However, what at first sight appeared perfect paled when we discovered its idiosyncratic human interface that behaves like nothing else in the Finder, if not the earth. Hopefully an engineer will be along later next year to improve that.

In other ways Sequoia wasn’t so marvellous. One of its smaller changes that has rightly offended many has been the removal of support for third-party qlgenerators, responsible for QuickLook thumbnails and previews of custom document types. Apple had deprecated them way back in Catalina, so we had been warned, but quite a few good apps have lost QuickLook features as their developers haven’t yet implemented the App Extensions required to replace their now non-functional qlgenerators.

There has been a great deal more going on underneath the interface of macOS. As I’ve already explained in more detail, 2024 has been the year of XProtect, not only for its new update mechanism, but for Apple’s heavy assaults on malware including Adload, the subject of a hefty campaign of new detection signatures back in April.

In May, following unsubstantiated reports of the reappearance of old files, there was speculation as to the effectiveness of one of macOS’s more recent boons, Erase All Content and Settings, or EACAS. As so often happens, the rumours failed to stand up to careful scrutiny, and many former owners of Macs breathed easier that they hadn’t passed on all their personal data when they disposed of their previous Macs.

Notable by their absence over the whole of the year have been RSRs, the Rapid Security Responses we had been led to believe would spare us urgent macOS security updates. Although they may have fallen out of favour, the cryptexes they rely on have proved more useful in other ways.

Finally, the fortieth anniversary of the 128K Mac has been marked in another nearly unique event, a firmware update for Apple’s Bluetooth Magic Keyboards that was so stealthy most of us aren’t aware that our keyboards were updated, or maybe they weren’t and it was all a dream. And I managed to get to the end of this review of 2024 without looking in detail at AI. I’m sure there’ll be time for that next year.

I wish you all a peaceful and prosperous New Year.