ICYMI: A selection of the best Mac articles from 2024
There has been at least one fresh article about Macs and macOS published here every day through 2024. Here’s a small selection of articles that you might have missed the first time, or that repay a second reading. Enjoy!
macOS Sequoia
Boot volume layout and structure in macOS Sequoia
Sequoia introduces pinning to iCloud Drive with a detailed account of xattr copying and persistence flags
How Sequoia has changed QuickLook and its thumbnails and why some may no longer work
Using and troubleshooting Spotlight in Sequoia: summary
Apple silicon Macs
Why you shouldn’t try cloning your Apple silicon Mac’s startup disk
How virtualisation came to Apple silicon Macs
Inside M4 chips: CPU core management with links to all the other articles in this series
Security
Securing the modern Mac: an overview
Controlling System Integrity Protection using csrutil: a reference and all about SIP
What do XProtect BehaviourService and Bastion rules do?
Practical tips
What to do when offered a new FileVault Recovery Key
What performance should you get from different types of storage?
How big a backup store do you need?
Is it worth storing Time Machine backups on a faster drive? with a detailed account of I/O throttling policy
Planning complex Time Machine backups for efficiency
Explainers
Ownership means two different things in Macs: how to tell them apart permissions and LocalPolicy meanings
Where has Safari gone, and why are macOS updates larger for Apple silicon? and all about cryptexes
Why % CPU in Activity Monitor isn’t what you think
History, general
The World According to Macintosh (in 1994)
Graphing Calculator and Grapher
Miscellaneous, fun
Mints version 1.18 now shows floating-point numbers in hex
