 The Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gav, Episode 847 for Monday, December 7th, 2020. Welcome to the Mac Observers, Mac Geek Gav, the show where you send in your tips, your questions, your cool stuff found. We take it all. We pass it back and forth all week. We mash it together and we fight about it. And then we turn it. We don't really fight, but, you know, we lobby for the things that we think should be included in the show. We form it into an agenda. And the goal is we go through it. We, you know, answer your questions, share your tips. And the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single week when we get together. Sponsors for this episode include Business Wars from Wondery, BetterHelp.com slash MGG, a new one for us, TextExpanded.com slash podcast and BB Edit and such from Barebones Software of Barebones.com. We'll talk more in depth about all of those later. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Triple Connecticut, this is Jonathan Frahn. You sound fantastic this morning, Jonathan. Frahn, how are you doing? How do you feel as good as you sound? Yeah, once I once I got my energy drink, there you go. Pept me up here. Yeah, a little pep is good. That's good. I like it. All right, let's let's keep the peppy going. And we'll do we'll do quick tips first, because those usually go quickly, although we've proven we can we can fail at that fail spectacularly. In fact, at that quite successfully. All right, Simon says, after the recent iOS 14 update, I was really annoyed that we had gone backwards. We had lost the hour and minute scrollers that had always that had helped to always type in the time. That was until my 13 year old daughter laughed, called me old and showed me the error of my ways. You can press and hold the hour or minute in the time to scroll the time as before or click in and type in the exact time that you want. I was humbled, but I'm happy again. Yeah, I agree, Simon. It was it was not my kids who pointed it out to me, but you're right. Yeah, there's there's more to the time picker that looks less functional. It turns out it's even more functional, because, like you said, you can tap and type in the time and and that, you know, can be helpful. So yeah, very good, Simon. Thanks for thanks for sharing that. It's probably you are you and I are not the only ones that saw it that way. And and we're frustrated at first. So yeah, pretty good thoughts on that, John. Now there's much that is hidden in iOS 14. Oh, yeah, that's not a bad way of putting it. Yes. All right. Andrew says, um, well, I'm not sure if any of this is well, it definitely is a quick tip. It says that while listening to MacKicab via overcast, I was rudely interrupted and pressed pause on my ear pods. When I resumed, I realized I didn't hear what was just said. And I thought it was going to be a hassle to listen again. I was wrong. I held down the button on ear pods to conjure up a Siri and told her rewind 15 seconds. Voila, I was in business again as it took me back to exactly where I wanted to go. I found that I could move forward and back in whatever time increment I wanted to move. I suspect this can be done while listening to anything, but I discovered it in overcast. So it's possible more likely that overcast parses Siri that way. And I don't I know overcast has its own audio playback engine because Marco went nuts and like built his own compression engine. And also like not just to normalize the audio, but he cuts out silence too. So the pace of the audio in overcast is fluid, which is really great. I love it. You almost don't even notice it, which is the beauty of it. And you can turn that off, obviously. So it may not be doable in every audio app. But I I think there are many that that would allow you to do this. He says on the same train of thought, I wanted to listen to my notifications. So I decided to tell Siri, read my notifications. At first, she told me my phone needed to be unlocked, which is always a bummer. But then once I unlocked it and told her again, she went through all my notifications and read them to me without me having to swipe or flick. So yeah, there you go. You can always ask Siri to help. And sometimes she'll even be helpful. So there you go. Yeah, it's pretty good. Anything to add to that, my friend? Yeah, I don't use Siri too much. I think I asked once to do a system operation and she actually did. So yeah, so that's kind of nice. Like I forget if it was like brightening the screen or lower the brightness or something like that. Yeah, that's pretty good. Do you use Siri on your Mac, John? Not really. Yeah, I have it turned off on my Mac and and anytime, you know, there's an operating system update where Apple wants to ask, are you sure you want to turn on Siri now, right? And I always uncheck it. So I'd actually be curious. Anybody out there that finds that using Siri on your Mac is, you know, helpful. I do use it quite a bit on my phone, but but I just haven't integrated it on my Mac. And it doesn't I've never I don't run into those scenarios where I feel like, oh, I'd rather do this with voice than, you know, with my fingers. But I realize that that's quite likely, in fact, not just possibly more about habits than it is about. Productivity. So I'd be curious to hear from you folks. Feedback at MacGeekGab.com would be the place for us to to hear about that from you. Did you say feedback at MacGeekGab.com? I said feedback at MacGeekGab.com. Yeah, man. Yeah. That's right. All right, Scott brings us. He says there are some obvious ways of finding your phone. If you've put it down somewhere and just don't remember where. Call it, use the Find My App. And if you've got an Apple Watch, scroll up from the bottom to reveal the control center and notice the icon of the watch buzzing. That will send an audible signal from the phone that will help locate it. But what if your phone is on the other side of the house or in the car and you can't hear the ring or the watch signal? Wouldn't you like to see where it is? Well, you almost can. Or at least you can see what your phone is seeing by using an app on your watch. Go to the camera remote app on the watch and look at the view shown in it. You might have to choose the front or rear camera to defend depending on which way the phone is facing. But you'll see what you would otherwise see if you were looking at the phone screen, if it was in camera mode. Even if it's pointed at the ceiling, you'll often get enough of the surrounding view to determine which room it's in. This is I consider this both a really helpful quick tip and a cool stuff found rolled into one. I agree, Scott, what that I that is so ingenious. I love that idea. Really smart, really smart. Very cool. Oh, I like it. Pretty good, right, John? There's there's another quick tip that I will add to this when you swipe up from the bottom of your watch, you know, you have the the the icon that Scott talked about that rings your phone, right? It causes your phone to go ding, ding, ding, and then you can look around the house and find it. Well, that's if you tap that icon. If you hold down on that icon, not only will the phone ring, ring, ring or ding, ding, ding, it will also flash its light, which can be really handy for, you know, if it's buried in the couch cushions or somewhere like that, you know, or outside in a pile of leaves, which happened to us recently here. So, yeah, very, very handy to have that light kind of flashing on there, too. So, yeah, we want to we want you to find your things. It's good. We want to find our things is really what it comes down to. And we're happy to share the share of the love. Speaking of the Apple Watch, Christy wanted to share a solution to her tale of woe. She had something happening with her Apple Watch where let's see, she has a series six watch and uses sleep tracking at night. She says, I use voiceover as the screen reader for Apple's products for, which is what, you know, those of us who are blind or visually impaired use. She said, when I woke up, the watch was muted, including the Mickey Mouse watch face, which says the time out loud, even when voiceover is not enabled, because the watch was muted, voiceover was not reading my screen. So I wasn't able to power down and restart my watch to see if it would go back to normal. Luckily, my boyfriend was able to restart it and everything was normal again. I called Apple's accessibility technical support number and they told me how to hard reset my watch if the issue happens again by holding the side button and the digital crown in at the same time for a few seconds. This is better. So I don't have to worry that I might accidentally swipe the, you know, call emergency SOS bar there since it is very close to the power off button and I wouldn't know exactly where to press. I don't know if anybody else, whether they are fully sighted or not, if they have run into the same issue, but that's the tip that Apple gave me. They also told me to let them know if the issue occurs again, of course. And I just wanted to share the tip. So thanks, Christie. Yeah, that's a good tip. Holding in both buttons on the watch will force it to do a reset. And and as you point out, that does bring back the the voiceover and it kind of brings it out of sleep mode as it should. So it's pretty good. Thank you, Christie. I'm glad you were able to get it solved and I'm glad we were able to share. Pretty good, my friend. Yeah. And he anything to add to that one or. Keep on rocking here. It's not yet. OK, all right. And then our final quick tip of the day is from listener Brian who says I found something that might be helpful for people who have an Apple Watch series three and have run into space or storage issues. When I recently attempted to upgrade my Apple Watch, it said I didn't have enough space. I don't load any additional software on my watch beside the preloaded software. So it shouldn't be low on space. I did some work on Apple's discussions, discussion boards and found that this was a common issue with this model. And here's the solution. Unpair your watch, then repair it. Trying that, it seems to have fixed the problem. Then he linked to some discussions about it, which, of course, we will pass along in the show notes at macgeekab.com. So yeah, very, very good, very, very good. Thank you for that. Lots of watch stuff, lots of, you know, lots of everything stuff. It's good. We have some Wi-Fi stuff to get to, John. We have you did some some MagSafe math and testing and have some reports for us. And then we have some some questions and answers and tips about migrating your Mac, too. So we will get to all of that. I promise the the next thing that I want to do, though, Mr. Braun, if it's all right with you, is I want to talk about our first couple of sponsors here. Please do. Awesome. All right. Cool. Look, you know us here. We like our tools. We like our toys. We like our tech. But we also like to get it right. And we like to do it quickly, efficiently. This is something that's difficult when it comes to writing text, because usually you either get one of those. You either get it right or you get it done quickly. Well, TextExpander, our sponsor here, allows us to do both. You know, those things where you're like, oh, I've answered this question before. Let me dig through my sent box and find where I did that. Oh, great. There it is. And then you copy and you paste. 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Our thanks to TextExpander for sponsoring this episode. Listen, BB Edit 13.5. We've been talking about BB Edit since as long as this show has existed. And guess what? I think BB Edit is almost twice as old as this show is. They know what they're doing. They've added some cool things. I know it's a text editor. It sounds crazy to get so excited about it. It's open on my Mac right now. It's open on my Mac downstairs in the office right now. It's open on my laptop right now. I use this for so many different things, not just programming, but definitely programming, but also just for manipulating text for doing different things. It's always really handy to have a true text only editor there right in front of you. You want to do a word count. You want to compare two documents. You want to do like the other day, I had a list of domains that were separated by spaces and I needed to replace all those spaces with commas and I needed to know it was done right. I did that and BB Edit took all about. Well, it took less time to do than I spent explaining it to you. And then you want to learn grep. Like BB Edit is the best tool to learn how to use grep regular expressions because they have their pattern playgrounds and grep cheat sheets. Of course, it's ready for Mac OS Big Sur and Apple Silicon. You've got to check it out. Just go to barebones.com download your 30 day free trial. After that, a lot of the features will continue to work. And if not, then you just buy it because, you know, that's what we do. So go check it out. Barebones.com BB Edit 13.5 are thanks to Barebones for sponsoring this episode. All right. John, are you trying to say something over there? John, John, it looks like you're talking. But I believe you are muted, my friend. Yes, I'm muted so you don't hear my bottle. But anyway, Steve, I just got this coming across the wire. What's this wire? I don't know exactly. Barebones, I got some news for them. We just got a notification that they are now offering a BB Edit and Yo Jimbo holiday bundle for just fifty nine ninety nine. You get both BB Edit and Yo Jimbo. It's a good gift for a friend or maybe you. That's awesome. And the good news. And remember, BB Edit 13.5 is ready for both Big Sur and the new M1 machines. Oh, right. Yes, of course. How awesome. Wow. I'm glad you caught that. I would have missed that. That's great. Sweet. So thanks to Barebones again. Sweet. All right. Cool. Exciting. Thank you, man. I'm glad you caught that. All right. And I'm glad we got you unmuted so that you could hear it. So everybody could know that's good. Yeah. All right. Let's go to Wi-Fi, John. Shall we get stuff? And now I need to find this. Why you threw me off with all this? This is exciting. I like it. I like it. I like it. David asks, he says, about a year or two ago, you were discussing worthwhile routers on the market and you mentioned one or more that you liked, which had the capability to manually allow or block individual Wi-Fi connections. Does that ring a bell? I've used Apple Airport routers going back to the spaceship. So I'm kind of spoiled in terms of not having to do much in the way of setup or maintenance. But of course, they're out of the router business and I've gladly, I would gladly trade some of their simplicity for the ability to control things a bit more. In particular, I'd like to be able to shut off individual devices from having Wi-Fi access through the router when needed. As it is now, I have to globally disable service for everyone or change the password for everyone to accomplish this. And clearly those are not ideal options in our modern connected homes. Do you still have any routers you'd recommend which have the features I'm talking about? And aside from that basic question, I'd also like any router upgrades to include Wi-Fi 6 capability, I don't especially need a mesh system right now, although I would certainly consider a router that can be expanded to include other access points in the future. Okay, so this is an interesting question. Most routers these days have the functionality that you're looking for, either in user controls or parental controls or sometimes in both, depending on how it's all pointed out. And so, yeah, you can turn off access for specific devices in many routers. You can even schedule it like these devices are offline from whatever, 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. or however you wanna do it. Most routers have those features. Given that you don't need mesh, but still want Wi-Fi 6, there are a few options. There is the Amplify Alien from Ubiquiti. People who have these love them. And I look forward to testing one. I have not had the pleasure yet, but I'm very curious about these because everybody really likes them. They're not overly cheap, but they're not terribly expensive either. It's, you know, and if you only need one, well, then this truly might be the best option for you. It's got three radios in it and both 4x4 and an 8x8 antenna setup. And so it doesn't surprise me that people love this. I would expect this to perform very, very well. And the cool part is you can buy a second one and mesh them together to get, you know, that kind of coverage spread around your home. So that's, you know, for the type of thing that you're looking to do, it sounds like you're gonna wanna do maybe even a little bit more. The Amplify Alien might be a good one for you to look at. As for other Wi-Fi 6 stuff, the Netgear Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 line is probably something to look at. There are lots in this line from Netgear. Something like their AX5400 would probably work well, but there's other beefier and more expensive options too. You know, but the Netgear, like the Nighthawk Wi-Fi 6 stuff is a good place to go. I've tested some of the ASUS Wi-Fi 6 stuff as well. They, in fact, they were the first Wi-Fi 6 routers I tested here and they do a good job with their stuff too. They've got a lot of the features that you're gonna want. You know, when it comes to standalone routers, it's easier to find these things. So there you go. And let's see, there is Nighthawk mesh from Netgear. Would be worth considering if, again, if you did want to mesh things. And then of course the Netgear Orbi is now up to Wi-Fi 6. I just started testing that. I don't know if we'll, I want to stick with kind of the standalone router thing here for a little bit because we've got some questions about it. So we may talk more in depth about the Orbi perhaps next week or something. But I've got some good data from it and it has, you know, those long-haul speeds on that thing are amazing as they always have been on the Orbi. So, so there you go. We have a question in the chat room at live.mackicab.com from, it looks like Phoenix, Arizona, who asks, can you please explain the difference between four by four and eight by eight? Yeah. So, when we're talking about routers, we often, with these numbers, we're talking about the number of antennas that they have and the number of antennas dictates the number of simultaneous streams that a router can do. With Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11ac as a good sort of baseline to talk about here, each stream has a maximum speed of 433 megabits per second. So if you can do two streams, you can get 866. And of course you can do the math and get up. This is how the router manufacturers, by the way, come up with their numbers, like, you know, we are an AC 5400 router. They add all the streams together and this is what the router is capable of. It is almost impossible to find a client device that would be able to leverage all of that simultaneously. It's not meant to be leveraged simultaneously. This is the capacity of the router. So that's what these things mean. Now, your iPhone, for example, is a two by two device, meaning it only has two send antennas and two receive antennas. Now, if you've got a router that's a four by four device and an iPhone that's a two by two, it is the connection of your iPhone is naturally gonna be limited to that two by two. But here's where the benefit comes in. Those antennas are all aimed in slightly different directions. So when your router is four by four or in the case of the alien eight by eight, you have a much better chance of getting an antenna that's aimed more directly at you. This is what beam forming is all about, is picking the right antennas. It's not like the antennas are moving around on the device. It's just that the device and the client are picking the right ones to use for any given connection to give you the best speed possible. So hopefully that explains it. Did I blow it, John? Do you have anything to add there? No, I think that sums it up. Cool, all right, cool. Good. Anything more on the Wi-Fi six standalone router parental controls thing before we move on? Don't cross the stream. Don't cross the streams. No, no, you can't cross the stream. That's bad. I like it. All right, so let's go to Brent here. And Brent asks a similar question, but I'll set it up here so that we kind of kind of look at this in a different way. Brent is asking, which standalone router should I buy today? He says I was hoping for a Wi-Fi six router from Synology, but I don't really like the current gaming style of Wi-Fi six routers that are currently out there. And you will get that with a lot of the Wi-Fi six routers. And so he has a Netgear R8500 router, which he says he's had for years with no issues. He's been running it with its most recent firmware and it's been fine, but recently in the last week or so I've noticed network going down and it seems like the R8500 is just rebooting. And he's asking, what should I do? He downgraded the firmware that seemed to help, but then it didn't seem to help. It may well be a hardware problem inside that R8500. That is a fantastic router, by the way. I ran one of those here, John, for years. I mean, that router is, don't take this the wrong way. It is old, but they over-engineered the crap out of that thing. So for a Wi-Fi five router, it still holds its own with anything because it's, I've got four by four antennas in it and a processor that was faster than it ever deserved to be out of the gate. And it could do all the hardware, like, what's the right way to say this? The hardware NAT stuff so that it could be really fast with gigabit connections and actually pass those through while still doing the packet manipulation that routers need to do. And it was the hub of my quasi mesh here in the house until real mesh showed up. So that you can tell how long it's been. But yeah, you know, but I always ran that DDWERT firmware on there. So that would be one thing for Brent to do. But if, you know, if money were no object and or, you know, you were someone like me that had routers show up all the time, I would still recommend that Synology RT2600 AC router. That is, it's not an expensive router. I'll explain why I said if money were no object in a second. It's a great router. It is a four by four Wi-Fi five router dual radio. Excellent, excellent coverage and so many great features with in so easy to use the inbound VPN and of course parental controls. You can do all the stuff we were talking about. But it doesn't do Wi-Fi six yet. And Synology, at least as of a couple of weeks ago when I pestered them about it, said they didn't have anything to announce yet about Wi-Fi six. So they do have an event this week. Maybe there's more coming. We don't know, at least not as of when we're recording this but, but Synology, if, you know, assuming they don't still have a Wi-Fi six router then their router is Wi-Fi five. But this is where the money is no object part comes in. You can turn off the radios in the Synology router and just use it as a router. And then you can turn off the router in your favorite Wi-Fi six mesh product and use that just as your Wi-Fi mesh and marrying the two together. Like for example, you know, the Synology router with an Eero in bridge mode. Well now you've got Wi-Fi six mesh with a Synology router. That's pretty cool. It's pretty crazy, but it's pretty cool. Um, you know, so there's other ways to go there but that would be one of them. So that's, there you go. That's, yeah, it's still my favorite standalone router. Although that Amplify alien is an interesting thing. I'm curious to see how well that firmware really opens up for us. So, yeah, there you go. Anything more to add there, John? The other one, so I was poking around online. So, before I had the Eero, I had the TP-Link Archer C whatever. And at the time it was a very capable one. I'm looking again now online and believe it or not, Dave, TP-Link has a Wi-Fi six router. And actually the price on this looks pretty good. The Archer AX1800. Okay. $99. So 1800, if we go back to our previous conversation means that that's the maximum speed of the router. That seems pretty, pretty slow for Wi-Fi six. Do you know how many, I'm assuming it's only a dual radio device and do we know how many streams the antennas have? I see four antennas. So. Okay. Interesting. Yeah? Yeah. And then they have another one. And of course I could be interpreting the AX1800 incorrectly. I don't think I am. I think it's, yeah. So they're saying that you get 1200 megabits per second max on the five gigahertz band and 574 max on the 2.4 gigahertz band. So, yeah. So I mean, it's, it might not be a four by four router. They call it the Archer AX20. Interesting. Yeah. And then I see they have a couple others. So they have the Archer AX3000, which is a four stream. And then they got the Archer AX6000, which is eight stream. There you go. And they all look pretty reasonably priced. Like a couple of hundred bucks maybe. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I'm looking to see if there is anything in here about this AX1800. But yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. So yes. I think the AX1800, if I'm having to guess it would be a two by two router, but that is truly a guess. I'm looking at their tech specs and it doesn't say anything about it. But there you go. But again, you know, I mean, if you're using Wi-Fi six devices, these speeds are fantastic. Wi-Fi five devices are going to be a little bit slower. If they are, they will work with a Wi-Fi six router. It's all backwards compatible, maybe not obviously, but it is, trust us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cool. Nice find. We'll have to check those out. That's, that might be, that really might be the answer to this question. So yeah. Oh, pretty good, John. I like it. You want to take us to Russell, my friend? No. No, this was a fun one. Okay. All right. Russell says, hi. I noticed on Fing, so Fing has a desktop application. I noticed on Fing the other day that what appeared to be a neighbor's ring camera had an IP address on my home network. Does this matter? My first instinct was to block the MAC address. I guess it might use a fair amount of data if it were on a lot of the time. Maybe I answered my own question. And looking at the screenshot here, so here's what I think misled him. So the MAC address of a device which is a unique number that's I think 48 bits long. There's a secret, Dave. The first six characters of a MAC address tell you which vendor makes something in the device. And for example, this one came up and it said Texas Instruments. Now, that may seem kind of weird. I mean, while it's identifying a ring camera, what does a ring camera have to do with Texas Instruments? And you can probably guess. So at first, Dave, I was like, you know what? I'm concerned how they got on your network. If you're friendly with your neighbors and you let them use your network, which I certainly wouldn't do. Whatever the case, I would block the device and maybe change your password on your main Wi-Fi and your guest network if you got one of those. You know what I consider a thing box? Cause those tend to, it complements the thing desktop and it'll tell you when there's a new device on the network and let you manage it accordingly. Either saying go away or not. And then we got a follow up, which kind of surprised me here. So Dave, he blocked the MAC address listed for the device in the FING app. However, just before he changed his password, he happened to notice that his carrier HVAC thermostat was no longer connected to Wi-Fi. Oh. It reconnected when I unblocked the MAC address. So here's what happened. FING basically got it wrong, which you can't blame them. I mean, they do their best. I mean, so one way to tell something about a device is to look at the MAC address. Another way is you could look at open ports. I think you mentioned, Dave, some devices have a DHCP client ID, which may identify what it is. Like, you know, an A-Lady device I think will, you know, it'll publish that. But there are a couple of buttons in there that I think will let you edit it or I think actually submit information to FING to help them with their identification. Yeah, interesting, interesting. Huh, that makes sense. Yeah, like you said, you can't, unless it's like a MAC address that's assigned to the vendor that actually made the product, there's nothing to be done, right? It's just, that's how it goes. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they're using a Texas Instruments chip probably for the wireless connection. Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah, okay, yeah, right, okay, yep. Oh wait, now there are, okay. So FING has an edit button and a recognize option and I think going through those will let you correct it and maybe submit that information to the FING folks. Right, right, yep, yep, makes sense, makes sense. Yeah, good. All right, well, for those of you on the live stream, it looks like the YouTube stream has gone down. YouTube has been having trouble with streaming all weekend, we have noticed. So the Facebook stream is still live and of course the audio stream and the audio recording is still alive. So it's all good, it's weird because in Memo Live, YouTube John is telling me that it is happily blasting data to YouTube and I can see it going out. So something is a milk on the YouTube end. I know I watched a stream of a band on Friday night and their Facebook was fine and YouTube was crap. So seems like YouTube's not the, maybe we need to move to Twitch. I know they're better for streaming. So no, seriously, like, yeah, that may be a thing for us. All right, we will keep trucking along here and probably in the article, we will probably put a link to the Facebook video not the YouTube video for this exact reason. Alrighty, well, let's stick with cable modems here. Mark asks, oh, let me put these away here because otherwise I have trouble later. Mark asks us a cable modem question. He says, I'm looking for a DOCSIS 3.1 modem. Which ones do you have at home and what would your suggestions be? So it depends. If you are looking for a combo cable modem router, I've really always had great luck with the Netgear units. They do a fantastic job. I've got one of those in my daughter's apartment at college and they just, you know, they build a great router into the cable modem. And neither one of those things suffers because it's bundled with both. In fact, essentially what I've got her in her apartment is the Netgear R8500 router bundled with a cable modem. And it's great because it's only one device and you know, space is a premium in a college apartment. So yeah, it's a great thing and you can manage it. And you know, you don't have to worry about firmware updates because firmware updates to cable modems come from your cable company, not from you. So they'll keep it up to date and all of that stuff. So yeah, Netgear's combo cable modem routers are great devices. So I would definitely put those on the list. However, for standalone cable modem only units, which is what I prefer to run because if I have a problem with one thing, it doesn't mean I have to throw away all the other things. It makes troubleshooting easier and also faster. I also like Netgear. That's the one I'm currently using. I'm using their CM 1000. I don't know that you can get the CM 1000 anymore because they've introduced newer products. If I were buying brand new today for standalone, I would probably go with Netgear's CM 1100 or the CM 2000 just to be super future-proofed. The CM 2000 allows you to do multi gigabit on the cable modem, which is, you know, handy. So if I wanted a built-in router, the C7800, that's the one I've got in my daughter's dorm room is the one I'd go with. And they also have over at Netgear an Orbi Wi-Fi 6 with cable modem built into the router of the Orbi system. But stand-alones would be the CM 1100, CM 2000 for sure. But there are two other brands that make DOCSIS 3.1 cable modems that I would go with. The Motorola MB8600 and the Eris surfboard. I've used the SB8200, but the Eris S33 was just released, I think just last week. And that could actually be a really good one to look at because again, this can do multi gig. It's got a 2.5 gigabit per second ethernet port on it. So you can, you know, the DOCSIS 3.1 can go faster than one gigabit per second. In fact, which is what typical gigabit ethernet is limited to. In fact, if you have Comcast or Xfinity, I guess you're supposed to call it. If you have Xfinity's gigabit cable modem connection, that's actually 1.21 gigabits per second. I always want to say 1.2 gigawatts, John. For obvious reasons. But that's 1.2 and those of us with routers that have single gigabit ethernet ports are not taking advantage of those extra speeds. So this is looking at one of those. And like that new Eris one, I think is like $179. So I mean, you're not breaking the bank and then you're super future-proofed. So that's, you know, there you go. That's what I would think about. Any thoughts from you, Mr. Braun? You're not, you're still not running D31 yet or are you? I know you were. I don't know if, I don't know if my guys here at Cablevision offer it. Well, but you don't, so here's, that's the thing. I would not, I would buy D31 no matter which service I had, even if your service is only DOCSIS 3.0. And the reason is the D31 modems are much better with their buffer bloat protection. They have a better queuing algorithm is mandated by Cable. So yeah, so maybe I'll check with them because I bought mine. So I have an Eris right now and it actually says optimum on it. It's like, you know, co-branded. Sure. But, OK, because I have my service is 200 down and 35 up. Sure. You know, I think with this modem, you can get close to gigabit service, but not quite. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, the gigabit service all requires most cable companies don't want you bonding the number of channels that would require on a D30 modem to get even anywhere close to gigabit. Right. They just don't want, you know, they don't want to have to support that. Whereas with DOCSIS 3.1, you can bond one channel and get gigabit on the downstream. And I think when I looked at, yeah, no, that's a good point because when I looked in the manual for this modem, it actually indicated that the provider would have to license this feature. Interesting. Or activated. Is that OK? Out of the box, you can do this many streams. But if you pay us a little more money, we'll we'll open up additional streams on this type of modem. And that makes sense. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, interesting, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So so there you go. Yeah, I would I would I would. I'd go with I'd go with one of the multi gig ones. Like I said, I mean, they're, you know, less than 200 bucks. You'll make the money back pretty quick versus the price of renting one from your from your provider. So. Yeah. All right. Where are we here, John? Yeah, let's keep. We have a kind of sort of Wi-Fi question. It fits. We might as well answer it here from listener Scott. Who asks us? I'm having issues with my ERO network while using Zoom. When using a laptop, it seems that Zoom always reports a bad internet connection unless I first turn off Wi-Fi and turn it on again before I start the Zoom call. I do not have this problem on desktop, Max. I have the original ERO three pack and I have a Verizon Fios 75 megabit connection and the ERO reports my speed at 82. So I know it is not the internet connection. I've been thinking, perhaps I need to replace the ERO setup with either ERO pros or something else, any thoughts. So that's my guess is based on what you're telling us, we're turning it, you know, disconnecting from Wi-Fi and reconnecting from Wi-Fi. You know, let's look at what that does when you're when you when you go through that connection. Obviously, on the surface, it does exactly what we think it disconnects you from Wi-Fi and reconnects. So what could be better about reconnecting to the same Wi-Fi unless we're not reconnecting to the same Wi-Fi? What if we're connecting to a better closer and therefore faster and more reliable access point? You're saying you're not having this issue on desktop, Max. Well, here's the thing, desktop Max don't move. So desktop Max don't have to worry about roaming from one access point to the other. And it may be that based on your setup for whatever reason, your device, your Mac, your laptops are not choosing to roam to the closer access point. However, when you turn off the Wi-Fi and turn it back on, well, then it looks for the best one and it says, Oh, I'll pick the best one. And it does. So that would be my guess that maybe your Mac, you know, if your laptop, if it moves around or whatever, you might be connected to the, you know, a further away access point. Maybe it's dropped down to 2.4 gigahertz from five, and it just hasn't gone through that motion of re-syncing and getting the roam happening to the new access point. You can turn on and it depends on the version of Euro software that you have. But if you go into, it's usually either in advanced or in advanced Euro labs in your settings, you can, you can turn on fast roaming that may or may not be the right thing to have on. It's, you've got to test it with your network. Some devices do not do well with fast roaming, but, but that might help or it, or even turning, if it's on, turning it off might actually help. So try that. And if you don't have the setting, it's because you have the version of the firmware where Euro has just like baked it in and, and it's no longer controllable. There's different versions of Euro firmware that we all get at, at different times. They have to do stage rollouts. And I know there's a lot of changes coming with, you know, because they've got their new Euro Pro 6s and things like that out. So, yeah, that's a way, I don't know. That would be my thought on that is that it just, you know, roaming and needs to be re-synced. Do you have any other thoughts or things to add, John? Um, here's something I noticed with the Euro software. I don't know if you've noticed this, Dave. Yeah, they have an activity section that'll show your download speed, your upload speed. But then I noticed something extra the last time I looked here. And actually I'm looking right now, data usage. It'll show how much data you used during the week. But then if you put, if you hit that, it'll then break it down by device, which I think is pretty cool. That's really handy. Ooh. So here it's saying, OK, well, last week, your, your Tivo used most of your bandwidth, then your Mac mini, OK, understandable. And then the rest of the devices. So, uh, yeah, they're always had nice little things there. That's a super handy thing. Yeah, huh. Nice find, man. That's great. You know, that's, uh, that's really going to be important for those of us along the Eastern Seaboard that use Comcast because Comcast Xfinity, uh, thus far has allowed many of us in those states or many states in this area, I should say, to not be subject to data caps. And so for people like me that, you know, I stream a podcast from the house here, uh, and I do video now. And so I have, I believe my account because it's just a regular residential account has a one terabyte cap. I use about two and a half terabytes a month because of the way our, you know, backups and, you know, we have a family of people living here and there's all kinds of streaming in both directions and all that stuff. So, um, we are about to, in January, I believe, is when they start kicking in those caps for us. So, um, we will need to be aware of what devices are using that data, quite frankly, we're probably just going to need to buy more data from, from Xfinity. I mean, I don't see any way around it, but, but, you know, we may be on the, the outliers here, maybe not, but, um, but knowing which, you know, not just knowing here's how much your network used. Well, hey, you could compare that number to Xfinity's number and make sure it's, it's in sync, but then being able to drill down, like you said, by device and be like, Oh, why is the, you know, why is this camera blasting data out 24 seven and using up all kinds of, you know, that's, I like this. All right. Good. That's great. I mean, it's not great. I don't, I don't like, I don't like data caps that are coming, but you know, it seems to be a seems to be a thing, Mr. Braun, um, all right. Where are we here in the show? You know what I want to do, John? I want to take a minute and talk about our next two sponsors. If that works for you, my friend. Absolutely. All right. Look, if you're listening to this show, it's because you like tech. Well, what if you like to hear the stories about tech? Tech entrepreneurs are in an all out race to cash in on our collective addiction to social media. It's a fight that started in Silicon Valley that's now gone global and in the newest season of Wondery's business wars, TikTok versus Instagram, they track the war between these two social media giants. Because within the last couple of years, TikTok has become one of the most popular apps around the world. It's even garnered the power to completely reinvent the music industry, right? And despite political constraints, the app has recently faced, TikTok has still managed to pose a serious threat to its American counterpart, Instagram. And this season of business wars will touch on the history behind and the founding of both apps and what they've done in recent years to become two of the largest social media platforms to exist. I got to listen to the first episode of this. Dude, this is great. It's so good hearing about. I don't want to spoil anything, but hearing the story of how on the beach, Instagram was the spark was there and it truly was a pivotal moment. I mean, like in so many ways, anyway, you got to go listen. You're going to love it. Listen to the latest season of business wars, TikTok versus Instagram on Apple podcast Spotify or listen to AdFree by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app are thanks to Wondery and business wars, TikTok versus Instagram for sponsoring this episode. Listen, things aren't always going to go right all the time. And that's been especially true here in 2020. One of the other things that's true about 2020 is that talking with someone means, you know, there's additional things to consider like going to an office and sitting in a waiting room and that sort of thing. Well, that adds to the anxiety, maybe not even helping. And this is why there is better help available at betterhelp.com slash M G G because better help will first assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. And then you connect in a safe and private online environment so convenient and you don't have to like go to the waiting room and all of that stuff. And it's not self-help. This is truly professional counseling and you can start communicating in under 24 hours. Once you're all set up, you can send a message to your counselor anytime and you'll get timely and thoughtful responses. Plus, of course, you can schedule those weekly video or phone sessions. So you do it either way, all without ever having to sit in that waiting room, right? Because better help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches. And they've got licensed professional counselors specializing in like depression, of course, anxiety, stress, anger, family conflicts and anything you share is confidential. We want you to start living a happier life today. So as a MacGicab listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at betterhelp.com slash MGG. Join over a million people who have taken charge of their mental health. Again, that's better help H-E-L-P.com slash MGG. Our thanks to Better Help for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you did some MagSafe stuff. My friend, you want to, uh, you want to take us Yeah, cool. Yeah. So, uh, as most of you may know, but if you don't, the iPhone 12 series, uh, supports a newer, um, charging technology that they call MagSafe. It's still Qi and what is Qi is basically inductive charging. Okay. Um, and I wanted to, you know, I just wanted to see, um, and it'll charge this, this particular phone, the iPhone 12 mini in, in like an hour. And you know that it's engaged because you get a special icon on the screen if MagSafe is engaged. So I wanted to do a little, uh, calculation, Dave, and see, uh, you know, how efficient it was. So I got my little USB power meter and, uh, you know, plugged it into, put it in line in the charger. And it said, Oh, okay. You're, you're getting about 16. I'm generating 16 Watts and I'm like, Oh, okay. So that must be the, uh, that must be the rate at which the battery is being charged than the phone. And I think you pointed out when I posted something about this and no, no, no, there's loss. Well, there's heat loss, right? I mean, there's heat loss with everything, um, especially, I think it's mostly that it's inductive. Um, I mean, it doesn't get terribly hot, but yeah, some of the energy is wasted with heat and some is wasted just because induction versus a direct connection. Sure. So, uh, so here's what I did though. It's like, how do you know how many Watts are actually going into the battery? And this is where our pal, I amazing comes in, Dave. I amazing, um, will it lets you interrogate the phone and look at all sorts of pieces of information. And one piece of information is the wattage of the charging signal. And in this case, so the charger was saying 16 Watts. Um, but I amazing was saying, well, you know, actually, it's 11. So if you want to do a calculation, that's about 30% loss, which I think you had indicated that some chargers can be, can lose up to 50%. Yeah, that's about what I've seen. So, so I'd be curious for you to check your G chart, your state, your not MagSafe charger and see, are you losing more than you are with MagSafe? Like, is MagSafe more efficient because it's using those magnets to perfectly line up the cheek oils? That, I mean, that, yeah, interesting, interesting. Now a direct connection, just to offer a contrast here. Yeah. So a direct connection, I did this calculation. The charger was generating 13.2 Watts and it was still putting 11 into the phone. So that's about a 17% loss. So it's OK. So wired is always going to be more efficient, I think it's safe to say, right, versus Chi, right? That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, when you're you're getting these numbers from IMAZING, you're getting them over the Wi-Fi and reading them on your Mac. Is that right? It's yes, it's connecting. Yeah, so it's connecting to the phone via Wi-Fi and gives you and is somehow magically able to interrogate the phone and give you all sorts of information about it. Yeah, right. OK, so so it's possible. I mean, so this this is Apple's information that that, like you said, IMAZING is able to figure out. So it's possible, whatever we're getting reported from Apple is also not correct. But it it almost doesn't matter because it's at least consistent, right? Whatever we're whatever we're getting from Apple is what we're getting from Apple and it it it's the same. So then we can look at the other data and say, OK, yes. Like you said, wired is more efficient than wireless. So now I want to know is Chi or is MagSafe more efficient than Chi? I'm guessing you're going to find that answer to be yes. But, you know, we don't have to guess. We get to tune in, find out. Yeah. Oh, nice. I'm glad you did those tests. That's great. I like it. I like it. I like it. Yeah. And the thing that made me nervous, but fortunately, it wasn't a factor is that I have a case. And as long as your case is not metal, you should be OK. But it was able to go through my my clear case, the spec clear case just fine. Did you test the relative efficiency with and without the case on? OK, so I'll have to give that a shot. OK, yeah, yeah, because I'd be curious to know, like, what is the case? What impact does the case have? I would assume the case would make it less efficient. But I mean, again, we don't have to assume we get to tune in next week for the follow up. All right, this is great. Cool. And the other thing, Dave, is I've never had this happen before. But I have had so many people. I think it's due to the phone being blue, which is, you know, not a usual color. Right. People expect for an iPhone, but I've had so many people say, hey, is that the new iPhone 12? And I'm like, yes, as a matter of fact, it is. That's great. Yeah, I love that blue color. I wish I could have. Oh, you have the blue of the 12 of the not pro blue. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, I think they're different flavors of blue. Right. Right. Interesting. Well, let's yeah, let's look. So we will we will go to apple.com slash iPhone. And let's see what they have. So the 12 is a different flavor of blue. Right. Because I got the I got the project red with with blue on it. Right. OK. So there's there's the blue and what they call that blue. They just call it blue. OK. And then the 12 pro is the Pacific blue, I believe that that and that Pacific blue. That's what I got on the 12 pro that that my my daughter has now commandeered because I have spoiled children. Well, yeah, primarily because I I have the I like the mini better. Yeah, there's that Pacific blue on the 12 pro. Yeah, that's cool. So yours is even a brighter blue. Wow, that's really pretty. I like that. That's good, man. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah. And I also when I got the new iPad air, I also got blue. OK. Oh, so you got it. Yeah, you're going. Yeah. All right. Cool. Match set. Yeah. A match set. Yeah, that's great. Cool. All right. Where are we on time here? OK. You know, John, I'm actually going to detour us here. I changed something this week for years because I started this way. I have been of the displays. I have multiple monitors on most of my Macs. And I have been a I have been one that goes into the settings of newer operating systems and turns off in mission control where it says displays use separate spaces or whatever the name of that setting is. I'm trying to pull it up here. But yeah, displays have separate spaces. I've always turned that off because I liked one space for both of my displays. And that meant one menu bar for both of my displays. The default has been for many years for each display to be a separate space and have a separate on its own menu bar. The dock only exists once, of course. Well, I ran in. I was watching my son do something and we set up a thing that I'll mention is a cool stuff found here in a minute. But we we set up a second screen for him. And I noticed how he was moving through things. He has his code editor and one window and browsers and others. And I was like, wait a minute, you can go full screen on one of your screens. But then the other screen can be in windowed mode. And he's like, yeah, that's right. And it was like, OK, wait a minute. There's a benefit here because sometimes, you know, you'll have something that you want to go full screen on or something that I will have something that I want to go full screen on one screen. But I then my other screens, I don't want to be just in blackout mode. It's like now I get the limitation. So I have now switched all of my Max John in mission control, system preferences, mission control. I turned on displays, have separate spaces. Of course, it tells you have to log out and log back in, which I did. And and it has been other than having the menu bar at the top of the alternate display. There's there's really no functional anomalies that I'm encountering as a, you know, as I as I address my change resistance here, that's really the only thing. And then the benefit is I can go full screen. For example, the other night, I mentioned that we were trying to watch this thing was from the band Fastball and the YouTube stream was fine or the YouTube stream was choppy and problematic. The Facebook stream was totally fine. My TV, my LG TV has a YouTube app, but not a Facebook Watch app. So it was like, crap, how do I watch the Facebook thing on the TV? Well, we use AirPlay because thankfully my LG TV has AirPlay too. Well, the problem with that was I wanted the TV to be full screen, but I still kind of wanted to use my laptop. I wanted to participate in the chat room and do this other stuff. And it was like, oh, right, I got to turn on displays, have separate spaces. And then I was able to make my AirPlay display full screen while still having my Mac and Windows mode. It was almost as if I wasn't even like it was just the TV was separate, even though it was my Mac driving the whole thing. So if you are like me and you have resisted this, I encourage you to test it because you might find that there are more opportunities than not. And even doing the show here, like being able to swipe between, I haven't started this yet, baby steps. But I could have on the separate monitor, separate spaces that I can swipe through, one with the audio mixer, one with, you know, the whatever, right? And not changing my main view in front of me here. So I'm beginning to see the light, John, is what I'm trying to say. So and I promised a cool stuff found and it is cool. The View Sonic VG 1655. It's a portable 1080p monitor. We talked about this when I saw it at virtually saw it at PEPCOM or actually, I guess it was a showstoppers. I don't know. It was one of them. But I think maybe I saw it at both. But this thing is pretty cool. It's a 15 inch display, John. It is flat, like super razor thin, and it's built to travel with. It's got an HDMI port on it, but it's also got two USB-C ports. I plugged it in to my MacBook Air, my new one, and also my son's MacBook Air, so a 2018 Air, and it didn't need anything else. The computer was able to power the display. And now you've got a second display. It's got a little kickstand built in to the display and kind of a fold over cover like the little thin iPad covers, right? So this thing, USB-C cable, throw it in your bag and you can travel anywhere. And now you've got a 15 inch second monitor that is truly a wired monitor. It's not sidecar, you know, so you're not dealing with any of those weird latency or limitations of that. It is it is a separate monitor. And like and, of course, if you use it at your desk, like my son is currently doing as we're testing it here at the house, he, you know, you could you could plug it into your dock. And then then it doesn't matter. You know, you have one thing to plug in and you're good to go. So it's pretty cool. And it's like it's less than 200 bucks. So I I'm I'm very impressed. It is it is a 1080p display. So it is not a retina quality display, right? It doesn't have that that pixel depth. But you can when you set it to you probably wouldn't want this to be at 1080p if you want your windows to be the same size as the windows on your max screen. So you do get to kind of increase the artificially increase the pixel depth a little bit there, you know, by leveraging all those pixels. So yeah, it's pretty cool. You can scale it, I guess is the right way to say it. But yeah, I don't know. I we were we were all blown away when we got our hands on this thing here at the house, so I wanted to make sure we shared. Yeah, I know, it's pretty cool. Oh, I plan on using it when I travel, you know, when we're allowed to do that again. So yeah. Yeah. I like being able to use a sidecar when I need to because the original sadly, the original iPad Air is too windy to support that. Right. The current one is more than able to handle that. Yeah. Yeah. Sidecars is I've used sidecar many times in a hotel room. The weird part is there are some limitations because it has the the latency that comes from it being Wi-Fi. Like I don't know if you could watch a video on it. FaceTime calls got weird when I had sidecar enabled. I don't know if they fixed that. So so there are some I mean, it's look if you're traveling with your iPad, no matter what, being able to just put it up there and be like, yep, now it's sidecar. It's it's an amazing piece of tech and it's very handy for those. You know, take a chat window or something and put it over there and just use it as that second display. I do it all the time. But there are some limitations of of having a wireless display versus a wired display in that sense. So yeah. And you could do both, I think you could have these two displays and then a sidecar display and really bask out in your hotel room. And so, yeah. Or you could plug into the TV in the hotel room, too, and and go that route and have lots of displays. Anyway, all right, it's they allow you to do that. Right. Yes. I remember traveling in the past, I looked this up. So yeah, I wanted to use the the TV as a monitor for my computer. So, you know, I saw that they had a think a HDMI port on the back and I had the cable and I plugged it in and nothing. Then I wrote down the. Then I wrote down the model number and I researched it. I hope the people that make TVs don't still do this, but they had a specific hotel model that would disable some of the inputs. Yes, because. They want you to buy the movie from the hotel, not watch your own, right? I think is the reasoning behind that, right? Well, no, my guess, John, my guess is it's it's less selfish. It's not that kind of selfish. My guess it's a support thing because if you're in there, then you know what you're doing and you change to the other HDMI input and you're fine, right? And then you leave and you don't set it back to the first one. Now a new guest checks in and it's like my TV is broken. I have no picture. Why? Because the input was changed or, you know, their kid is over there pushing buttons or, you know, they out and had a few too many and they're pushing the buttons. Who knows? Like, you know, like I think that's that's how I always interpreted it. Like they just want this TV to work. Now, there are often not always, but often there are remote control codes like cheat codes, but they put it into management mode that does allow you to utilize those extra ports. So you can a little bit of googling you. I have been able to not every time there have been hotels where it's like, no, this this shall not work, but but a little bit of googling can get you there. Sometimes, sometimes I notice. Oh, there was one hotel. I forget where I was. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But the TV was like speaking of Google, it was like it was a Chromecast in the TV that somehow the TV was tied into the network. And they're like, look, just take your device, cast it to this and you're good to go. And I'm like, great, Plex supports Chromecast in the app, even though it's an iPhone app, you know, your your iPad doesn't natively support Chromecast, but apps are certainly able to. So I was like, OK, great. And so I started watching a movie and, you know, my iPad, I got it set up. I hit the little, you know, share button and and it the TV showed up and it was like, yep, that's the one I want to use. And I had to type the code in that appeared on the TV so that I wasn't like Chromecasting to my neighbor or whatever. It was fine. OK, great, no problem. And and I, you know, and I was watching the movie. And then without thinking about it, I grabbed the remote and hit pause and it paused the movie. But that's interesting. And then I realized Plex was no longer running on my iPad. I had been doing other things on my iPad and Plex had been jettisoned. I like, wait, so I look at my Plex server status and my Plex server was talking directly to the hotel room TV. It said playing on, you know, this this TV at this IP address or whatever. I was like, whoa. So somehow with the magic of of Chromecast and Plex, it essentially let me start this process from my iPad, but then handed it off and and it was, you know, made it more efficient that Plex was just talking directly to my TV and it was happy to do that and everything was fine. Even though I wasn't signed into Plex on my TV, like sometimes you can do that, right? You can put the Plex app on the TV and sign in. That was not the case. It was because of the Chromecast magic, which was pretty cool. I was like, oh, so now I'm not going like doing the double Wi-Fi ricochet to turnaround thing. You know, I just had to had to do it. Anyway, anyway, Alan 567 in the chat room at live.mackykeb.com says on Samsung hospitality TVs mute mute one one nine enter. But you have to bring your own personal Samsung remote for that to work. So that makes sense because it has been the Samsung TVs that I have not been able to get around. So anyway, all right, we have some stuff to talk about here with migrating our Macs, John. And I feel like maybe we should talk about these. Listener Bill has a question. So let's let him ask that. Hello, John and Dave. This is Bill from Menlo Park, long time listener. Although I've gotten way behind because my commute time changed and I don't catch up as much. Anyway, I wanted to share a recent frustrating Mac experience and ask a question. My MacBook Air purchased in spring 2016 started to give me that most dreaded of screens. A folder with a flashing question mark, which means that the startup disk is no longer available or doesn't contain a working Mac operating system. I did everything Apple suggests. Disk utility until any errors were repaired, reinstalled the OS from the internet and it worked for a while. Then back it went. I ran hardware diagnostics, all good. Repeated it all, still bad. Eventually, after making sure my time machine was up to date and backing up a bunch of files to an SD card, I did the more drastic reformat, reinstall the OS, then migrate my files back from time machine. Looked like it was working. I left it running with backup and sync from Google running, but nope, the dreaded flashing question mark was back. No genius desk appointments were available at either of my local Apple stores for at least 10 days and I needed a contemporary Macintosh. My 2011 MacBook still runs, but it's too old to support Zoom, which is an essential tool these days. So I bought a MacBook Pro last week, 13 inch, 1.4 gigahertz quad core i5, two USB-C ports, 8 gigabyte RAM, 500 gigabyte SSD. My question, how can I figure out what did in the air? If it is the SSD, I'm game to follow why fix it, instructions and order an SSD from OWC and replace it. If it's the motherboard, it's off to the recycler. How do I know which is going on? Yeah. Something else. Good question. Okay, based on what he described on it, to me it sounds like the SSD. What do you think? Yeah, when you see the question mark, the other thing that occurs to me is if a startup disk is not defined, I've had that happen rarely. So one troubleshooting tip, or use the startup manager to manually select it. And I think that's holding down option when you boot the machine. On an Intel Mac, that's true. Yes. Yeah, we'll show you all the bootable volumes. So that could have been it, that whatever keeps track of the startup disk may have gotten corrupted or, but other than that, yeah, I would vote for, I mean, some tools, I think even Apple's tool, you could look at the SSD lifetime. Oh, yeah. A lot of SSDs, I think even using, yeah, let me double check this, but I'm pretty sure if you go to system report, then look at your disk, let's see here. Controller. I'll let you find that. I'm gonna share two things from the chat room here. Okay. Kiwi Graham says, try target disk mode to see if disk utility from a working Mac can reformat the whole drive, which is a great idea. Or booting from an installer USB, like a separate boot disk would be the thing. Allen567 says, boot in recovery mode. If you can, and that may not work if the drive is dead, although you could boot into internet recovery mode, potentially, so, but if it were mine, I would try the SSD, like I would go the root of getting the iFixit thing and trying it out. But you could, using that USB boot stick, that would be a good, or the recovery, or the target disk mode. That would be a good way to confirm that the SSD is, you know, not reporting or otherwise toast, so. Yeah. Did you find where it is, John? No, I don't think the Apple tool reports it. Okay, okay. Yeah, but another tool I've used, yeah, SSDs will keep track of their usable lifespan. Right, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure, okay. All right, well, listen, while we're on the kind of new Mac migrating thing, listener Rick says, I'm currently using a late 2009 iMac as my main computer. Yes, late 2009, without a single issue, except for the original internal hard drive started throwing intermittent read errors, and so I replaced it with a two terabyte SSD. And I'm using carbon copy cloner to clone the drive I'm using, back plays for remote backups and time machine alternating between two, just to have backups. What I'm beginning to run into is many of my installed apps are not able to update or install because minimum requirements for the OS need to be at least at Catalina 10.15. I'm also coming across some other apps I'd like to install, but again, 10.15. So I now have come to the conclusion that I need to replace this computer sooner than later. When it comes time to replace this old horse, hopefully before it dies, yes, do you have any recommendations on how I should transfer all my files to another Mac? So you're right, Rick, we do get this question a lot, but it's worth talking about. And I think you're right, that these days that 10 to 11 year mark seems to be where Macs get to the point where they just start to be less useful for exactly these reasons. They can't run the latest OSs because of hardware limitations. They're slower at doing things, but it used to be three years where we would get to this point. Now it's literally a decade, which is great. Transferring, as you probably know, you have two options, migration assistant or build from scratch. The problem is migration assistant is really good. And it's possible we could wind up having Macs that haven't been set up from scratch in 20 years. As we move from Mac to Mac, then we just let migration assistant do what it does because it really is really good. The problem is you inherit your own cruft when you do it because migration assistant doesn't know what apps you aren't gonna use or what data you have out there that is no longer relevant to you. And you can find a lot of this stuff running things like clean my Mac space lens or Daisy disk or Omni, whatever it is. Omni disk sweeper, sorry. Disk sweeper. Thank you. So the question really comes in, is every 10 years a good opportunity to wipe the cruft and start from scratch? And the answer I think is yes. But it's not the easiest answer. I will say though, with so much of our data and our lives and our settings being synced to the cloud, it's not as bad, nearly as bad as it used to be. In fact, it's a pretty relatively painless process I've found setting up from scratch. But you do have to dedicate, I was gonna say a day, maybe not a day but certainly an afternoon or a good long evening to getting it to the point where you feel comfortable using it again and then expect over the next week or so to be like, oh, that's right, I need that app. And finding those little hiccups. So if you're pressed for time, take migration assistant but just know that if you're doing it now you are kicking that can down the road for 10 years unless you're really disciplined and you come back when you have some time and start from scratch. But the temptation will be to not do that. So that's my two cents on this. I don't know, what do you think, John? Yeah, I'm a big migration assistant fan. Yeah, it works really well. I know what's the problem. I mean, every now and then what I will do on one machine or the other is use the search capability in the finder and look for stuff by date. Yeah, chances are every now and then when I had some hiccup on my Mac mini here I'll find things that are like really old. Yeah, and sometimes they cause problem. You know, like audio plugins. I think one time I had an issue or quick time plugins and stuff. So yeah, that's the problem. So maybe a good exercise every now and then is, yeah, search by date for system stuff and jettison the things you don't think you need anymore. That's really smart, man. I like that idea. Yeah, all right, cool, cool. While we're on migration, Judy writes in and says, just thought I'd let you know that I ordered a brand new M1 MacBook Pro, 16 gigs, one terabyte SSD. I might get it the last day of 2020. I'm gonna be upgrading or migrating, but it is upgrading from a 2014 MacBook Pro. Right now she says I'm running Catalina. I heard you talk about your experience in initially installing Big Sur. Should I upgrade this 2014 to Big Sur before the new one comes? I'm planning on using migration assistant any tips. So, and congrats, first of all, Judy, on the new M1, you are gonna love this thing. They're crazy fast and no heat and oh, it's great. Anyway, it continues to blow me away, this thing. Anyway, if I were in your shoes, which I basically was, I would upgrade to Big Sur ASAP and then migrate from that to your new Mac. And because your new Mac has to run Big Sur, it will come with Big Sur. You cannot run a OS older than that. So you must run Big Sur on the new Mac. You will be running Big Sur on the new Mac. Let's just look at it that way. And, you know, migration assistant is perfectly capable of migrating from your old Mac to your new Mac, you know, and across different OS versions, it does it. And I have no doubt that, you know, it's been tested that way, certainly from Catalina up to Big Sur. However, some things in Big Sur are different from a user experience point of view. And I would recommend getting yourself used to Big Sur before you migrate to this new hardware, which might also, it shouldn't come with too many differences in terms of user experience, but there will be some. And so, you know, getting yourself to Big Sur, getting comfortable with it will allow you to migrate to this new Mac a little bit easier because you're essentially doing it in steps. If there are issues with some of the apps you run with Big Sur and you need to fix those and tweak those, well, now you've got some time before that new Mac arrives. Also, you'll have a really good feel for how fast Big Sur runs on your old one versus your new one. And that might be kind of nice for bragging rights too. So, I don't know, that's my thought. What do you think, John? Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it matters a huge amount, but you know, since you asked, we like to dig in deep here. It's what we do. Yeah, I'm still a little bit hesitant about migrating, upgrading the mini to Big Sur. No, actually you said it probably won't be an issue. Yeah, you mean because it's your podcasting machine, right? Well, there's always a concern with audio. Does all the audio stuff work? But I'm pretty sure Memo Live would work. They say Memo Live works on Big Sur. Oh, okay. And Audio Hijack. They have a Big Sur, I think it's a beta, but I know Kelly Gamont has been using her M1 MacBook Pro with the beta versions of Audio Hijack for Apple Silicon and all of that stuff. It's a record Mac observers daily observations and it's working fine. So, yeah, I don't see an issue there. Yeah, you're not doing anything sort of, what you're doing is pretty straight down the path of what those apps are built to do. So, I think you're fine to go to Big Sur. I mean, keep a clone, obviously, if it all falls apart. Yeah, maybe I'll do it some point during the week and we'll just make sure nothing's broken. Right, that would be a good idea. If it is broken, go back to the last clone. And yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think you're gonna be okay with it. Just make sure your apps are up to date. Mac Updater, this is, Mac Updater has become my favorite app to run again because, man, it like, I have found, John, I used to have Mac Updater set to ignore things that were Mac App Store apps because I figured the app store is gonna keep updating those for me. On my, I noticed on my M1 Mac that that wasn't the case. Like I knew there were updates and if I went to the store to the app, not to the updates section, but if I went to the app, it would say, do you wanna update? And I would just hit the button and it would update. I found that on all of my Macs. There were tons of Mac App Store apps that were not showing up in the updates list in the Mac App Store. So I now run Mac Updater, showing me everything. And it keeps, there were many things that were not kept up to date. It seems that once, I think it has to do with that receipts and package system. It seems like some receipts just got lost. And so it didn't know to check for them when doing that particular check. So, but once I downloaded the update, then the next update showed up in the thing. So I don't know what I did over the years. Maybe Migration Assistant didn't pull them over the right way. So, hey, there you go. Mac Updater, I put a link in the show notes. It's one of our favorite little apps, so. I have one more tip to show. Oh, go ahead, John. Yeah, go ahead. Well, no, I had this happen. So, small cubed mail suite, we all love, or at least I use, mostly for the signature management is what I use it for. But I was having a bug several months ago where it just was not, on this machine, was not working for my podcast signatures. It would come up and it would just say none. Yeah, and I'm like, well, no, I indicated it. And I set it up right. It just wouldn't work. And I think Scott, I think it's Scott and Scott there. He tried, he's like, here, install this version and it'll log this stuff and we just weren't able to figure it out. It was okay because it works fine on my MacBook Pro or I can manually choose the signature but it was just this obscure bug. Weird. And then the other day, like a lot of programs now including MailSuite came up and said, yep, here's an update for Big Sur. And I'm like, okay. And then I tried it again and it works on this machine. Okay. So interesting. So I guess the core, yeah. So I guess either the app itself or the core library or something like that, whatever the update, updated, fixed that obscure bug. Good. On my Mac mini, so thanks guys. Yeah, that's great. That's good. That's good. Cool. All right, we're basically out of time but there is one more thing that sort of relates to our migration discussion that Peter sent in and he said, I was having problems, the same problem that we've been talking about where if you nuke and pave an M1 Mac, you know, here's the problem. And he said, Mr. McIntosh at Mr. McIntosh.com has a solution that I will just link in the show notes here. There are many different things that are doable. Oh, I got my mouse. My battery's died in my trackpad today, John. It's not good. It's not good. But he's got a good article from Mr. McIntosh on potentially fixing this. So I will get this link right and I will put it in the show notes. So yeah. So thank you very much, Peter, for that too. So hopefully Apple can fix this stuff and we can actually nuke and pave our M1 Macs without being worried about killing them because you wanna be able to nuke and pave without your Mac dying. So anyway, using a USB installer with Big Sur 11.0.1 is Mr. McIntosh's big tip. So hopefully. Hopefully that can get it done for all of us. Thank you for that, Peter. Thank you everybody for hanging out with us. But I think, John, it's time. I think we gotta do it. All right, man. Well, if I can find the end of the agenda here. You got anything else to add, my friend? Mr. Braun, anything else to add? I think I lost your audio, John. Are you muted? No. You know what? We don't wanna lose John for the end of the show. Let me see if just reconnecting you is the key. Who knows? That's a weird one. We've seen this before. And I can't remember which one of us the problem was. Why can't I find John? Where are you here? There's John Memo call. Let's see what happens. He's back. Can I hear you? No, I don't hear you. All right, well, we will do this. I bet, I bet it's this. Did that change it, John? It did not. Interesting. Now can I hear you, John? No, no sound, Mr. Braun. Interesting, I don't know why we lost you. I don't know what happened. You did an upgrade to Big Sur in the middle of the show. Fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. Can I even see your audio, John? No, I don't see audio coming in from you. Zero audio. Huh, that is bizarre. I don't know why we lost you. Yes, we will wave goodbye to Mr. Braun. Folks, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for sending in all your questions and your tips and your cool stuff found. Thanks for visiting all of our sponsors, of course, and just thanks for being you. It's good stuff. I don't like being alone here, at least not audibly. I can see Mr. Braun on our video streams. Very strange. We'll have to figure it out. This is good. I mean, I'm glad it happened at the end, but I didn't want it to happen ever. Our sponsors, of course, techsexpander.com slash podcast, barebones.com slash holiday bundle. That's that new link that John found. Go check that out. Business wars from Wondery. And of course, betterhelp.com slash MGG. I hope you have a good week, folks. I hope you enjoy yourselves. I hope you stay safe and all of that in these weird days that we have. And I hope that we can figure out how to have this not happen to us. And I hope that you don't ever get caught next time.