 The Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, episode 734 for Monday, November 5th, 2018. Thanks, folks, and welcome to the Mac Observers' Mac Geekab, the show where we take your questions, your tips, your cool stuff found, we mix it all together, we answer your questions, we do what we can so that every single one of us, every single time we get together, which is every single week, learns at least five new things. Sponsors for this episode include PDF pen from the good folks at Smile, capterra, we're at capterra.com slash mgg, you can get the free, free cool thing that will tell you about ring.com slash mgg. We will tell you about a new thing they're doing and a new sponsor, Ops Genie. Now from Atlassian at OpsGenie.com, we'll talk more about all of those shortly here, but for the moment, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton. And here in Fearful Connecticut, this is John F. Brunt. How are you doing this morning, Mr. John F. Brunt? I say this morning because for you and me, it's morning, I accept the time-shifting nature of things, especially this week with the time having shifted for many of us, at least here in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. What's that? The pain in the neck, settle my clocks. Yeah, you know, less and less, I have to do that. So I have to change my grandfather clock, which, you know, of course, is mechanical. I do have to change all of my mechanical watches, which, you know, the struggle is real. But and I have an old Radio Shack realistic clock radio next to my bed that I have to change. But but other than that, like all my thermostats now and most of my thermostats, I should say, I have a couple that that I haven't switched over to electronics yet. But everything in the cars, you get to switch over. But everything else kind of just, you know, does it? Oh, the cuckoo clock, too. I did that this morning. I like I like my mechanical timepieces, I suppose. And that, you know, there you go. Yeah. So I got a terrible email this morning. What did your email say, John? CCC backup task backup failed. That CCC being carbon copy cloner for those of you playing along at home. So what what caused the failure? Correct. And of course, you can have carbon copy cloner email you when things don't go well. And here was the error. It says the destination volume is present, but could not be mounted. Oh, that sounds like a dead hard drive, man. Or dying. Yeah. Yeah. Fair, fair. Yep. So I had it plugged in to the the Mac directly into the Mac. Okay. Sometimes, you know, cycling power works. Absolutely. In this case, it didn't. I plugged it into my USB three hub and then it mounted. So something, I don't know if there's something with the mini or the drive. I suspect the drive may be dying. It's an old rotational two and a half inch drive. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you know, I decided to do like, you know what? And then I came across a tweet from the folks over at TechReview. Yeah, the MGG gym. So there you go. Yeah. Yep. And apparently, Amazon has a one terabyte sand disk, Alter 3D SSD for the amazing low price. I was shocked at how little it was. 144 bucks. 145 today. 144.99. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. SSD. Yeah. So yeah. So I'm going to, you know, retire those old rotational drives back up. But both my machines, I do a CCC backup. Smart. Either automated or manual. So I figure, you know, retire those drives before they die. Yeah. I mean, it's already done in backup. I do a time machine backup of both machines as well. Sure. Sure. Well, it's good to have multiples. And I don't want to gloss over the backup notifications, right? Because I do the same thing. I have Carbon Copy Cloner. I've got a couple of different things running. But Carbon Copy Cloner clones no less than three machines for me each day. The IMAX here in the studio and office and then my wife's IMAQ over at the house. And I actually have it set to email me for both success and failure. And the reason I do that is because if Carbon Copy Cloner stops running for some reason, I will not know because it won't be there to email me that it had a problem, right? So I am very used to and I have it filtered in my email so it goes into a certain box. But I know that at some point, if those stop cloning themselves, first of all, all three would have to stop cloning for no email to be in that filtered place. But even if that were to happen, I would pick up on that within about a week. You know, be like, hey, wait a minute. I haven't gotten my successful backup notifications. What's going on? And it's really simple. I wake up every morning and just delete them. And if I've been traveling and I haven't looked, I can go delete three days worth. It's just not a big deal. But that way I am, you know, it's just part of my routine to delete those emails. And it makes me feel more comfortable because like I said, I at least know that they're happening and I think I'd pick up on the fact that they were not. So there you go. Backup notifications are a good thing because you want to know if you're backup. I mean, it's also good to test your backups yourself. But it's especially good to know if your backup software thinks there's a problem. So, yeah, good on two counts. Yeah, that's one. One thing where time machine isn't that great. I've had occasions where on my mini, you know, if you click on the time machine menu, it'll tell you the last time I did a backup. And there was one time where I looked and it was like a week ago and I'm like, dude. Yeah. I think I had to remove and then re-add the destination to the time machine. Oh, yeah. It's just the preference. And then, yeah, I don't know why I got confused. Because it's time machine, man. That's why. All right, let's go through some of your, we've got a question and a couple of tips. We'll start with them. And then we get to talk about new Mac hardware. That's pretty cool to me. So, let's go. Alan, he writes, can either of you explain how the mobile documents slash iCloud folder works? If I navigate to home library mobile documents, I can see a folder with that name. But if I click on the folder, suddenly the finder displays the top of my iCloud drive. What's the difference? So, really, there is no difference, right? That behavior is as intended and it is simply a change or an intentional remapping or a re-display that the finder shows you, right? Because that iCloud folder is just iCloud in name and function. But it is actually home library mobile documents. It is iCloud drive and iCloud drive syncs everything to home library mobile documents on your Mac. I haven't dug into a jailbroken iPhone, but it wouldn't surprise me if home library mobile documents is where it also syncs that stuff on your iPhone. Because it's at the core, very much the same OS. Apple, like I said, just coded the finder to display iCloud so that casual users would not be confused saying, hey, why is the contents of my iCloud drive here in this mobile documents folder, right? So, they are one and the same and you don't need to worry. But it's a good catch, man. Like, I like it. It's good. That's why I wanted to include it in the show. Good stuff. Thoughts on that, John, before we move on to a couple of tips here? Yeah, I guess it could be confusing. Another kind of related thing is that if you go into iCloud, iCloud and then click on iCloud drive and then options, there's also something that may be kind of weird for some people. And there's the desktop and documents folder checkbox there. And if you check that, your documents folder will move. Or at least that's what I found. That's right. You're talking about the checkbox to tell iCloud whether or not to sync your desktop and documents folders, right? Yeah, but it doesn't just sync them. It moves them. You're right. Yeah. Yeah, it actually puts it in. Yeah, because it kind of threw me when they introduced this feature. Because I had my documents folder in my sidebar and all of a sudden, when I did this, it went away and I'm like, well, where to go? Where it goes is it goes to iCloud Drive, documents, and then within that, another documents folder. Interesting. Okay, so that then, because I don't do the desktop and documents syncing. So those folders now for you live inside of this home library, mobile documents folder, is that right? Yes. So I put a different... So I recreated the shortcut to the documents folder. In the sidebar. In my sidebar. Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Smart, yeah. Cool, cool. Oh, thanks for that. Yeah, I totally forget about that. You know, it's easy to lose sight of the things that you don't use every day. So, cool. All right, listener Kevin says, back in the Primo hobby days, I had my Macs configured with the dark doc and dark menu bar, and I really liked that. I agree, actually. He says, when Mojave came out, I gave dark mode a try, but it was just too much for me personally. He says, I didn't love the look of apps like mail, but I didn't hate it either. He says, I just couldn't handle switching between apps like mail, which does all the text in dark mode, at least the non-HTML text in dark mode. And Safari, where 99% of the websites have a white background. He says, it was just too jarring for me, and I agree with you. This is why I turned off dark mode. Almost as soon as I turned it on. He says, so I switched back to light mode, but I didn't like the white menu bar and light doc. He says, I didn't want to have to pick between the two. So I came across an article at OS 10 Daily, which we will link in the show notes. He says, via a simple terminal command followed by a log out and log back in. He says, then making one change in system preferences, I can have my dark doc and menu bar back without full on. Dark mode just like high Sierra and before life is a tad bit better. And I wanted to share this with you and our fellow listeners. It says in hopes of making someone else's life a little bit better too. And so yeah, there's a, I'm looking at this article here. It's a, it's a defaults right command. And I'm not even going to try to share it here because you won't remember. I certainly won't remember, but we'll put it, excuse me, in the show notes. And there you go. So have you messed with what are your thoughts on dark mode, John? No, sir. I tried it and I'm like, yeah. Same, same. He actually articulated it really well. The male, if you live in male and safari all day, having this, you know, light background in safari and dark background in male is just, it's jarring switching back and forth between them. I grok why safari has to have the white background on web pages because that's how web pages are coded. And in male jumping from message to message, you get for text messages, messages that are actually sent as text and don't have any formatting, you get black background or dark background and light text. But as soon as you jump to a message that is HTML formatted, you get whatever that's supposed to be, which most times is light background with dark text. So it's just, it's too much. I wish with male specifically I could turn off dark mode for that. I might feel differently about dark mode if I could control it on an app by app basis. And with some apps, you can actually third-party apps, you can male. It's not a third-party app and doesn't seem to have that setting. So very cool, Kevin. Thanks for sharing that. That's good. We've got that in the show notes for everybody there. So very, very cool. And then we got a note from Johnny, who is the author of Dataman Pro, and he wanted to make sure we knew that Siri, so Dataman Pro lets you totally manage and see how much data you've used, sell data, Wi-Fi data on your phone and iPad, so that you can manage up to your data limits if you're not on an unlimited plan or otherwise need to be aware of that. And he says now Siri can automatically turn cellular data on and off when you're in danger of exceeding your data cap. He says this is made possible by using Dataman Pro in your custom shortcuts. So I love this stuff. I really like seeing that sort of thing. I would love to see it all back on the watch with shortcuts, but, you know, that's just how it goes. So pretty cool, Han-John. You have a limited data plan, so do you use Dataman Pro nowadays? No, I used to. Yeah. And told Verizon decided to create a widget that tells me how much data I have left. Aha. There you go. Oh, that's, yeah, that's even better. Actually, I'm looking right now and it says you're low on data. I have 0.45 of two gigs, meaning. Oh, when is your reset date? Oh, okay. All right. Oh, so it's not the first of the month or anything. So you'll do all right. You'll make it. You'll make it. Yeah, I should be okay. Usually when I travel into Manhattan is when I consume data because I don't have the Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi around. Yeah, yeah. I have here. All right. So I have. Oh, go ahead. And then what they do also, and actually this happened to me once, and it's not terrible, but what Verizon does, I think you can, I think they call it safe mode. But what happens is if you deplete your data, I think they'll knock you down at 3G speeds, so you won't get LTE. Okay. So you don't have, you don't get overage charges. You just get throttled, essentially. I chose to get throttled, but they'll also let you buy more data if you want to. Of course. They're like, oh, you're getting close. You want to add a little data this month? That's really slow, though. Wow. Or do you just want to have 3G speeds until next month? Right, right. Yeah, until the reset. Huh. Cool. Hey, all right. So in the chat room here at mackegub.com slash stream, listener Alex looked and helped, and he found an article on howtoisolve.com entitled How to Turn On and Turn Off Dark Mode for Email and Mail App Only on macOS Mojave. So there is, I'm looking, you launch the app, you go to preferences, you go to viewing action. Ah, there is an option in mail. Who knew? Well, evidently these people and not me. So if you go to preferences, viewing, this is in mail. There is a checkbox that says use dark backgrounds for messages. Turn it off and boom, it goes away. Oh, this is pretty good. Nice. Thanks, man. Very good. All right. So I might try dog mode again. Cool. I will try it when I am back from from Mac tech, which I am leaving for actually the day this show releases. So if you're in LA, come say hello, because it would be great to see it Mac tech. And on Thursday I'm speaking about mesh Wi-Fi because it's fun to get geeky about it and that's a geeky crowd. So it should be good. Anything more to add on any of this stuff here, my friend? Not at the moment. Not at the moment. All right. I would love to talk about our first sponsor if that's okay with you, my friend. Okay. Our first sponsor today is our newest sponsor and that is Ops Genie now by Atlassian. So Ops Genie is an engine that empowers your developers and your operations teams to plan for service disruptions, which are going to happen, and to stay in control during those incidents. Ops Genie gives teams the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues. I think if it weren't for unplanned issues, Mac geek up wouldn't have existed. So we know from those. 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This is a real account, not a trial account, no credit card required. You go sign up for an account. You now have a real account and you can have up to five team members, five users on that account for free, not for free for a little bit, not for free to test it out, for free forever with that account. Visit OpsGenie.com to sign up for this free company account. Add up to five team members. I'll say it one more time. OpsGenie.com, never miss a critical alert again with Ops Genie, or thanks to both Ops Genie and Atlassian for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is PDF pen software that is near and dear to my heart. I run a business that is super mobile. I am all over the place. I think I'm on an airplane at the moment this actual episode releases. I am always on the move and I need to keep the business moving. PDF pen on my iPhone, on my Mac, on my iPad. It's all the same. It lets me do all of the things that I need to do with PDFs right there. Signing contracts. I did this on Wednesday. I can't remember what day it is anymore. Had a big deal come in last day of the month. It's always nice to have something come in under the wire, but I had to get some signatures done and I was out running some errands because, you know, things happen. I'm also a human being. PDF pen. Let me get all this stuff done. In fact, I had to make some changes. I had to edit a PDF. I had to tweak some the way some pages were and move some things around, make some notes on it in addition to my signature. I was able to do that all from my phone with PDF pen right there. Very, very cool stuff and it got this deal done. You know, if you listen to this show, but especially if you listen to our small business show, you know, time kills all deals. So having the power to get it done right there on your phone, no matter where you are, could be the key between success and failure. You got to check it out. Go to smilesoftware.com slash podcast. That's the link. I know it sounds generic. Yeah, I guess it is generic, but it's intentional. Makes it easy for you. Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Go and check it out. Go get PDF pen. You can do all your manipulation. You can even get PDF scan plus that allows you to scan things and all of that good stuff. Go check it out now so that you have it when you need it so that you're prepared like I was prepared and you won't get caught. Check it out. Smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Our thanks to Smile, the great folks at Smile, including the new ones and PDF pen for sponsoring the show. All right, John, now we get to talk about something that's exciting to me. New Mac Minis, new MacBook Air, new Mac hardware. This is a good thing, right, my friend? Well, especially in the case of the mini, because they haven't rolled out a new one in quite a while. Same with the MacBook Air. It's like, you know, it needed an update. It was in a weird spot in the product line. So, but let's talk about the mini first. So, here's an interesting thing. We got this email from listener Lee who says, okay, Dave and John, I have a choice to make. I have two options. I can option A. I can buy a 2018 Mac mini with a 3.2 gigahertz 6-core i7, 32 gigs of RAM, and a two terabyte SSD all direct from Apple for $3299. Okay, he says, or option B, I can buy a 2018 Mac mini with the same processor and only eight gigs of RAM and only a 128 gig SSD from Apple for $1099. Plus, from OWC, I can get a two terabyte Mercury Xtreme 6G SSD for $529, plus a 32-gig memory kit from OWC for $330, plus for $20, an external drive enclosure case with USB-C for that two terabyte SSD for just $20. He says, and then take my girlfriend on a seven-day cruise to the Western Caribbean with the remaining $1,321. What should I do? Listener Lee says. So, in addition to being not only accurate, but entertaining, Lee brings up a great point about these new Mac minis. They have user-serviceable RAM, user-replaceable RAM. It looks like it's not the easiest job, but it also looks totally doable and Apple appears to be sanctioning this, which is awesome. So, so awesome. So, I think that's definitely the way to go because with a Mac mini, you're not, you can replace the RAM so great and you, it's not a mobile computer for at least not for most of us. And for most of us, stacking a hard drive on top of it behind it, next to it, whatever is also not a big deal. And so, you, it doesn't matter if the boot drive is connected internally or externally, you know, as long as you get a fast enough drive with the right interface and all that, which he's specced out here, you're in great shape. And it means that you can replace it when you need to and all of that good stuff. So, this is, I'm really stoked about this new Mac mini. It's, you know, it's almost, almost, I know I'm gonna yell that for saying this, John, but I'm gonna say it anyway. It's like the Mac Pro mini, right? Because it's got quite a bit of, quite a bit of juice in it. We'll talk about the CPUs in a minute here. I went nuts. I dug in. I figured out what CPUs Apple's using. And we can talk about comparisons, but we'll get there. So, I'm curious because you're a Mac mini user, like you have a Mac mini, John, and I'm curious what you think about this new thing. Oh, that basically, you know, boosted everything. Yeah. So, where's mine? So, it has USB 3, so that's nice on HDMI, which I already have. And that's the nice part. In addition to, like, the laptop line and now the iPads have moved to all USB-C, but this Mac mini has USB-C and, as you pointed out, USB 3. So, it's got USB-A ports as well as USB-C ports, which is cool, I think. It makes it really easy to plug stuff in. You don't need as many dongles or any. Yeah. Here's the weird thing. Yeah. So, two USB 3 ports, a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. I thought they were banning those, but... No, no. They still have one on here. HDMI is the same as before. Yeah, USB-C slash Thunderbolt 3, I think this one is only Thunderbolt 2. Right. And then you can get 10 gig ethernet, faster ethernet. And then also the processors, of course, the RAM and the processors, they boosted those as well. Yeah. I think it's what people were... Yeah, I agree with you. It's, yeah, I mean, they kicked it up a notch. It's... It can be, if you have the money, it can be... Yeah, yes. ...a lot of power and power. Well, and that's sort of the beauty of it, right? Because PricePoint starts at $7.99. Now, I'll jump to sort of the next topic on our list, but it's not really the topic. I just have to open up a new email because Wes asked us, can you give us a short course on the difference between all the Intel processors in this new Mac mini, the i3, the i5, the i7? So for $7.99, you get a Mac mini with a quad-core i3 processor and the 8GB RAM and the 128GB hard drive that Lee mentioned. And that, I think, we'll talk about the specifics of these processors in a minute, but in general, I think the low-end one is totally fine, like for what most of us do. In fact, most of us are probably using machines with processors far less capable than that right now. Then you can, for 300 bucks, you can boost up to a 6-core i5 processor. And then for another... Well, this is weird. Wait, why? If I'm at the... So this doesn't make any sense. So I can go, oh, because the i5 on their thing comes with a 256GB SSD. So for 300 bucks, you can either bump up to an i5 and double the size of the SSD. Or for 300 bucks, you can just bump right up to the i7, which is also a 6-core processor, but a far more capable 6-core processor. So this is where it gets interesting on a pricing thing. I would spend that 300 bucks on the CPU all day long and not on the additional SSD, because as Lee pointed out, you can get lots more SSD externally. And as you pointed out earlier in the episode, John, you found a 1TB SSD for 145 bucks. So this is simple math. So let's talk about the differences between these processors here. Because I think this is where it gets interesting. So there are options. The i3, the i5, and the i7. If you go to Intel's page, as I did, you will find there are many, many, many options when it comes to each of the i3, i5, and i7. There's probably 20 or more, just slightly different things. And where these differences matter are in three places. One, the speed of the CPU, which is pretty obvious. Number two, actually it's more than three places. The number of cores, but those are pretty obvious. They're right there. Then there are some features that are not quite apparent. And that's where my number three came from. So there's hyperthreading, which there's hyperthreading, there's turbo boost, and there's level three cache. So hyperthreading means that your processor can use double the amount of cores that it says it has for some things. You won't quite get, it'll appear in like iStat menus as double the number of cores. But it's not quite working that way. It's, you know, think of it as maybe 50% more of the cores in terms of the types of operations that can take advantage of hyperthreading. Turbo boost is essentially where the processor can overclock itself when it needs to. So it can run slower, which saves power. It saves battery, too. And then when it needs to, it can, you know, if it's if it's maxed out, it just cranks up its own processor speed, which is cool. And then level three cache is the RAM that's baked into the chip. The way CPUs work is they take, they read data from, you know, two places, they do a calculation and they spit the data out. If they can get that data from RAM that is stored on the CPU, that is faster, so that speeds things up. And the more RAM you have, the more data that can be stored in there. And you're not limited by having to go out across the motherboard bus to the actual RAM and get the data from there. I know that's an oversimplification, John, but did I get that mostly right? Is that just to kind of set the stage here? Yeah, I think that's right. And visually, so the good folks at Intel and I, you know, I think we'll, well, you're going to post a link to this. Yeah. But Intel actually has comparison charts for each of the processors summarized nicely in a PDF for each of the families. So if you're curious about the differences, Intel has the info on their page. They have a desktop comparison and then on the bottom of that, if you want to know about the mobile processors. So they break out their processors into two classes, mobile processors for, you know, for portable computers and then desktop processors. And this is, of course, a desktop. The mini is a desktop of a very tiny, it's still considered a desktop computer. So here's the thing. The i3 can support hyperthreading, but this particular model that's offered in the three, in the Numac mini, does not support hyperthreading. It also does not support turbo boost as no i3s do. So this 3.6 gigahertz four core i3 is a 3.6 gigahertz four core chip. That's it. And it's got, you know, a decent amount of level three cache, but the five and the seven have more. The five is a three gigahertz six core i5. The i5 line, and this is where things get weird, does not support hyperthreading on any of the chips, including this one. So in that sense, it's like the i3 that Apple chose. Turbo boost, however, is supported on this i5. And that can make things very interesting. And I'm looking up the specs here. Turbo boost up to 4.1 gigahertz. So it's a three gigahertz six core. Those six cores can turbo boost up to 4.1. And it has nine megs of level three cache versus the six on the i3. And then comes in the i7. This is a 3.2 gigahertz six core i7. When you look at that three gigahertz six core i5, 3.2 gigahertz six core i7, you'd say, well, why would I spend the money on the i7? When I'm finished, you'll say, why would I spend the money on the i5 when it's really not any different to go to the seven, especially if you're smart about the way you get RAM and CPU or RAM and storage. This i7 is a six core i7. It does support hyperthreading. So it means that it can do six additional virtual cores, getting up to 12 cores for some operations. Turbo boost is available. That turbo boost goes up to 4.6 gigahertz. And it adds three more megabytes of level three cache to get to 12. So I would skip the i5 just because of the way Apple's packaging it and putting it all together. I would skip the i5 all day long. You're either going to get the 3.6 gigahertz four core i3 and you're going to be happy. And most of us would be. I want to state that again. But if you're someone that thinks about keeping your machine for like 10 years or you do a lot of work on that computer that is CPU intensive, and to be frank, most of us do not. But if you do and you want sort of the Mac Pro Mini for that reason or again for longevity, then this six core i7 is a no brainer to go up to. Just the way Apple has packaged them, the i5 just doesn't make any sense. So for most people, there might be some scenarios where you're like, well, no, I want all this stuff in here and the i5 is actually cheaper and blah, blah. Yes, okay, fine. Great. But otherwise, I think you're going with the four core i3 or the six core i7 with hyperthreading and turbo boost. And there you go. I think that gets us there. Man, it took me like an hour, John, to pour through all of Intel's documentation and compare it with Apple's and find the chips they were using and which ones did which things, but we're there. We're good. So I'm stoked about this. I may go many... You should have found their comparison chart. But their comparison chart, the comparison chart was the same. You still have to narrow it down. The comparison chart is on their website. It's the same data is on their website. You just have to look and find. And it's all right there. But yeah, it's pretty good. I mean, the only consideration. So yeah, I think my reflection on my current mini, there are some things that I cannot do. Okay. So the one thing that I was wondering about when they re-roll the mini is, are they going to do integrated or discrete graphics? And it's integrated graphics. It's Intel, UHD graphics 630. Right. Will that do what you need? Maybe, yes. Integrated graphics are typically wimpier than what we're going to call discrete graphics, which is a separate GPU from NVIDIA or someone like that. If you're doing a lot of graphics intensive work or you're a big gamer, integrated graphics may not do it for you. That's true. Yeah, there was one game I looked at one time on Steam, where they're like, nope, nope, nope, sorry. This game will not run satisfactorily or at all on integrated graphics in your Mac mini. Sorry. So you could, though, with Thunderbolt 3 ports, you could add an external GPU and run your game graphics. That, yes. They actually point that out. That's neat. I saw that on their page. Like, well, what can you do with these ports? Well, you could do an eGPU. So I want to circle back to something you said just before we get too far away from that. You pointed out correctly that all of these CPUs support internal graphics, and it's the Intel UHD graphics 630. UHD is what the rest of the industry calls the thing that Apple has decided to name Retina. So it does support, obviously, Mac mini doesn't have its own monitor. You need to get one. But it does support Retina displays. And there's that mono price display that I used down in the office that's Retina that's awesome. And it was like 300 bucks or something. So just bear that in mind that, yes, now this does support Retina. So it's important. And you can do up to three displays, depending on how you want the resolution or up to two displays, if you really want to go nuts with one of them. So that's all detail on Apple's Mac mini specs page. But yeah, I'm stoked about this thing, man. That's pretty good, I think, anyway. Yeah, and I think the other thing is I don't think you'd be able to replace the SSD. I mean, it says it's a PCI. Yeah, I don't think so. No, you just do it externally. I wouldn't even bother trying. Because it's a Mac mini. Yeah, why bother replacing it? Just add an external one. It's save. I mean, it's 20 bucks to put a case around the $145, one terabyte you found. Then you just plug it into one of the USB-C ports and you're done. You're good to go. Yeah, because they do kind of nail you on their S system. Well, that's the thing. That's why Lee is able to take his girlfriend on a seven-day Western Caribbean cruise, man. You could either give the money to Apple or to Royal Caribbean. You know, I don't know. I might go Royal Caribbean on this. But that's just me, you know, that's just me. Actually, I think there's one of the PR reps from Apple just moved to Royal Caribbean. So maybe that's why Lee mentioned that. Who knows? Yeah, while we're here, let's talk about the new MacBook Air because this has been sort of interesting to me. It took me a little bit to wrap my head around what this machine is because the new MacBook Air sits in a weird spot price-wise, right? You get the 13-inch with Retina display, which is awesome. Like, finally, a Retina screen on a MacBook Air. Great, all-day battery life, great. But I started looking and it's like, okay, wait a minute. Let me pull up this data here because I want to make sure I have it right, my friend. You look at this and it's $11.99 for the 13-inch MacBook Air. Really though, if you want to go up to and of course, with a laptop, buying your RAM and storage from Apple is super important because you can't replace it and you don't want to have external storage on a laptop that you have to drag around with you. 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, which I think is the right configuration for many people. You might be able to get away with 8GB of RAM. I don't think you're going to get away with less than a 256GB SSD on a portable machine. You might even want more. But certainly 16256, I think, is a good baseline for most of us. So the 13-inch MacBook Air, which is a 1.6GHz dual-core 8th-gen i5-1599. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz dual-core 7th-gen i5-1699. It's like, wait a minute. For $100, wouldn't you want to boost up to the MacBook Pro with a better CPU? And here's the thing, John. I started doing some digging and I am not convinced that the MacBook Pro's CPU is better. And the reason is, if you look, that CPU that they have chosen for the MacBook Air, they're calling it a 1.6GHz CPU. And I have no doubt that's what it's clocked at, of course. But it also says on the TechSpec page, and I'm going to pull this up just to make sure it hasn't changed and I haven't screwed anything up, that the CPU turbo boosts up to 3.6GHz. That's a lot of turbo boost for a 1.6GHz CPU to turbo boost all the way up to 3.6. So much so that it seems weird. And if you look at Intel's specs, it is weird. Because the only i5 that matches all of their other specs there is a 2.3GHz CPU that turbo boosts up to 3.6. So I think the CPU in the MacBook Air is a 2.3GHz CPU that they have downclocked to save battery life. Nothing wrong with that. But leaving all that headroom there up to 3.6GHz if you need it. So this is a pretty powerful CPU in that thing. And it's lightweight. And it's got good battery life. And, you know, it's got those Thunderbolt 3 ports. It also, John, has a, it's got two Thunderbolt 3 ports, which are USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3. It's really the right way to think of it. And it's also got a 3.5mm headphone jack. Because, you know, you pointed that out before, so I had to check. So initially my thoughts about this MacBook Air were a little lackluster. But the more I come around to it, it's like, oh, actually, that's kind of a sweet little machine there. And it's thin and lightweight and all of that stuff. It's not that much lighter than a MacBook Pro, but it's a little lighter than a MacBook Pro. So if you don't need the, and you get a touch bar, right? With this, which you don't with that particular base model MacBook Pro. So this is a very interesting machine. It makes me wonder about the 12-inch MacBook, which for the same config would be just $100 less, $14.99. And that's a 1.2GHz dual-core older series processor. I think this MacBook Air starts to look nicer and nicer the more you dig into the details, which is, again, interesting. It's what we like to do here. So I'm curious to your thoughts on this, John. Um, I've never been really, I'm just not an Air type of person. It's just, so maybe, maybe now it would be good. That's what I'm saying. Pro person. Understood. I get that. Just because the Air, to me, always seemed kind of underpowered. Well, that was true up in a week ago when we released our last episode. That was true. Yes. Yeah. But I agree with you also now is that now I think they're creating some confusion because now there's an overlap between, you know, it's like, well, why should I get the Air versus the MacBook versus the Pro? Right. Right. Yeah. I think if you're going for a dual-core processor, you know, again, well, the Air is definitely something to consider. There are reasons to jump to the Pro. You get better graphics in some of the Pros, right? You can get, you know, more, I don't know, actually, can you get more RAM? I don't know that you can right now. You certainly can get the touch bar in the higher, you know, higher-specced-out Pros. Of course, with the 15-inch, you can go to four cores. That's totally different, right? You know, but from a 13-inch laptop standpoint, that Air puts itself in a very, very interesting place. And actually, you can get the quad-core in the 13, too, if you go up to the highest 13 that they have. So that, you know, certainly if you want that, great. But if you're looking at dual-core, I don't know, you know, like that MacBook Air. It's got the touch bar. It's got all that stuff. That's a very interesting machine. It's got great battery life. So, I don't know, it gets confusing. The Thunderbolt 3 on the quad-core MacBook Pros, it has two extra ports, and I'm 99% certain that those are on a separate bus, too. So you could balance things out and make that better. Whereas with the MacBook Air, it's just one bus, which is the same as the dual-core MacBook Pro, right? You get two ports, and they're on one bus. In fact, you get exactly the same ports on the dual-core stuff. So if dual-core is your jam, thinking the MacBook Air is a pretty good-looking machine, except today, and by today, I mean generally right now. And the reason for that is the MacBook Pro is available on Apple's refurb store, whereas the MacBook Air, the new MacBook Air, is not yet available on Apple's refurb store. If timing, if past performance is an indicator of future predictions, I would say that it will be January, late January, early February, before we see the new MacBook Air is starting to pop up on the refurb store. So if you can wait until then, do it. If you can't, you pay 15% to have the computer for three months longer. Any more thoughts on that, John? Hmm, I'll seriously consider it when I need to upgrade my MacBook Pro. Yeah. Yeah. I know. And I am in need of a new laptop. My son is also in need of a laptop, and I think it's time to replace my wife's iMac, too. So there might be several purchases. I'm really curious. Every time in the past that I have gone to buy a MacBook, sorry, a Mac mini, I have specced it all out, and then I've looked at the iMacs and said, actually, that's a better deal since I have to buy a screen anyway, and I bought an iMac every single time. So I'm curious if that happens this time. I will keep you posted. For now, though, John, I would love to talk about our second group of sponsors if that's OK by you. Please do. All right. I'd like to thank Ring for sponsoring Mackey Geb today. You've heard of Ring before. We've talked about them a lot. In fact, they're the company that really made it possible for me to wrap my head around the whole smart home thing and really see the value in the smart home thing. And this is true. 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It's, it's, I love having sponsors that have great products and great service behind them and all of that stuff. It makes everything easy for us and for you. So Ring Alarm really is a smarter way to protect your entire home. And the Ring Alarm Security Kit is available at ring.com and retail stores across the U.S. So go to ring.com slash MGG to learn how you can get whole home security for just $10 a month. Again, that's ring.com slash MGG. As always, our thanks to Ring for doing what they do, for making life so easy, and for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is Captera. You know, when you're trying to get something done, a client asks you to do something, your boss asks you to do something, your spouse asks you to do something, or you simply need to do something for yourself. But you're not sure of what software to use to get it done. Sometimes you write to us here at Mac Keycap, right? 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And as I said, in case it wasn't clear, it's absolutely free. So you won't have to ask for money or spend any money to do this. Whether you're looking for a new project management tool, recruiting software, email marketing solutions, Captera's Big Book of Free Software has something for you. Did I mention it's free? Visit captera.com slash mgg today to get your free copy of The Big Book of Free Software. Again, captera.com capterra.com slash mgg. That's captera.com slash mgg. Our thanks to Captera for sponsoring this episode. All right, John, you want to go on to some questions? How about some photo stuff? Does that sound like a good thing to dive into here? Well, the one thing I noticed. Yes. Did you notice the Easter egg in the Mac mini video? Which Easter egg? If you looked at the video, they're showing it kind of like a spaceship and stuff, and there's a rotating ring of light below it. Yeah. With dots and dashes, Dave. Really? You know, maybe that's a code. Was it Morse code? Yes. It was. And it says hello. Just like the first Mac. I thought that was really clever because I'm looking at it. I'm like, is that Morse code? That has to be Morse code. And it was Morse code. Did we write that up at TMO? I tweeted about it. Dude, you should write it up as cool stuff found. Definitely. Dude, that's awesome. I love that. That's great. Yeah, I saw someone else in my feed notice it, too. Yeah. I just thought it was something that most people wouldn't notice because it looked just like pretty lights. Right. Well, it was pretty lights, but it was also a hidden message. Yeah. Oh, dude, that's awesome. I love it. Pretty cool. I had to look up the Morse code, though, because Morse code is... I only know a few. Yeah. I've only memorized a few. Mine's pretty rusty, too. Yeah, it's not so good. Very cool. Nice find, man. Nice catch. All right. Jumping to the MacGeekab forums over at macgeekab.com slash forums, Dan Thurston asks, he says, I recently bought a Synology NAS and I want to migrate from Apple photos to photo station on the Synology. My original photos are all in the cloud as I have optimized storage selected on my Mac and all of my iOS devices. What would be the best way to migrate all of my photos to the new Synology? Okay, so this is interesting. I've done this several times, in fact, and I've done it different ways. One way is that, frankly, I think this is the best way, install DS Photo, which is there. Now, we're talking about photo station. I'm also going to talk about moments separately here, but if you want to use photo station, which is the old way of doing things there, you would install DS Photo on your iCloud connected iPhone and let it do the download then upload work, right? Because that's what's going to need to happen. These photos are stored in the cloud. One of your Apple devices is going to need to slurp them down from the cloud and then upload them to your Synology. So doing that with your iOS device is, frankly, the simplest way to do it. I've tried all three of these and that it just works. It happens kind of automatically because your iOS device says, I need that photo. And then in the background, iOS says, aha, I should go get that photo. And it does. And it's all good. Everything works really well. The same exact thing works if you want to use Synology's Moments app, which is really what I would, frankly, recommend because Moments seems to be the future there. It's more like a Google Photos type of solution where it's doing a lot of auto processing for you instead of you having to manage all of your libraries and albums separately. It kind of auto creates albums and does all of that stuff that none of us actually want to do. But it works for the other one. If you want to do this on your Mac, there are two ways to do it and neither are great. Because you don't have all your originals downloaded to your Mac, you need to do that. You can either, assuming you don't want to make any changes to your existing user account, you could create a separate user account. I've done this and you set that user account to download originals to this Mac. If you don't have enough room on your boot drive, no problem. You can create a separate photo library on an external drive. You just hold down option when you start photos and it will do it. And then from there, set that as your iCloud library and it will just slurp everything down to that on the external drive. Then you will have them there. You'd have to show package contents to go into that and go copy the master's folder over to the Synology however you like and point either photo station or moments at that. And then it'll slurp all that data in and you'll be fine. A little more work but you can do it on your Mac. The third way is to use Safari to download all of your photos from iCloud photos on the web. You just go to iCloud.com, go to photos, download your photos to a folder and then slurp that into the disk station. That for you might be easier because it doesn't mean setting up a separate user account. So there you go. That's that. That's what I've got. Oh, as Warren in the chat room, John says, couldn't you just make the Synology the external drive and skip that step? Yeah, you could for the downloads. For your photos library, even with the separate user account, no. You cannot store a photos library on a network attached storage device. It has to be stored on a disk that is directly connected to your Mac. Either internal or external photos will choke. You can sort of force it to do it and you will regret that choice every day that you live with it because it won't be good. I've tried it. I used to do that with iPhoto and it was mainly manageable but not so with photos. So I think you've been through that too, right, John? Not recently. Yeah, yeah, for good reason. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So any other thoughts on this, my friend? No, I'm pretty happy with the iCloud photo library, which I accidentally turned on one day. I was resistant to it. Well, the thing is, you've got to fork over a month. You've got to have enough storage. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, and I got my entire library going back many years and it's like multiple gigabytes. Yeah, it's a lot of data to move around. iCloud photo library makes it really, really easy if all your devices are Apple devices and compatible and all that stuff. Yeah, maybe I'll give this a spin when I get my new technology. Which is on the way. Oh, yeah, you've got that 918 Plus on the way, huh? Well, I went to their event and suggested it'd be a good thing for them to give me a slightly newer one because the one I have here is a 713, which was made in 2013. Sure. It's kind of dated and kind of wimpy. Sure. No, that 918 would be good. It's great for storage, but you can't really do... There's a lot of other things you could do with the Synology, virtualization, as you pointed out, Plex and stuff like that. We talked about the 918 last week, right? I mean, that's basically become our top choice for folks looking to get into the Synology realm that really want to do some level of heavy lifting with it. It's got that hardware transcoding engine in addition to a relatively powerful CPU. Those two things together open up, like you said, a lot of doors. That DS 918 Plus, very interesting. I'm curious, really eager to chat with you next week and hear what you think about it out of the gate. That's pretty cool, man. Pretty cool. I think you're going to make me jealous, but that's good. We're good for that for each other. And I can use their new file system. That's another thing that... Yeah, yeah. Are you going to? Yeah, it's a BTRFS, I think they call it. Yes. It's their next generation. It's their current generation. Whereas, yeah, EXT4 was the previous one. But there's arguments against BTRFS, too, right on a NAS. I mean, I think it does a lot of things that APFS does as well. Correct. It's wheeling and snapshots. They described a lot of the next generation features. I think, in theory, I could do it with my current unit, my 713, but I'd have to reformat it. They don't have a tool to reverse the file system. At least Apple has a migration tool. So, I will point you to BTRFS versus EXT4 on NAS. There's an article that, now, to be fair, it's an article from QNAP. So, they have a vested interest in this. But there's no reason they could use BTRFS. This is not something that Synology has exclusive rights to or anything. But they point out a few things. They point out speed, which we've certainly seen with APFS, that there's greater IO latency. And so, APFS, in general, is slower for bulk transfers than HFS+. On your desktop machine, that doesn't really matter as much. You want some of these other things, like snapshots and that. And most of us don't really care about getting the ultimate performance out of our devices. But with NAS, you sort of do. And so, BTRFS, they say that EXT4 is 61% faster than BTRFS. They also point out that because, like you said, BTRFS supports snapshots, but because of that, it can't separate volumes for storing data and snapshots. Snapshot files live on the system storage space, and that, according to them, increases the difficulty of storage management and puts some of that data at risk, because it's all in the same spot. And performance, you know. So, anyway, I'll put a link to that, and you can all read that. Yeah, I haven't made the transition, not because of this, but because I don't want to have to reformat my drive. But this makes me feel better about not having yet done that. So, but I don't know. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that occurs to me is that if you do certain types of raid, that kind of gives you a performance boost. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So, I think that having a raid may mitigate some of the performance loss. No. No, because they're testing. I mean, that 61% faster was BTRFS on a raid versus EXT4 on a raid. No, no, no. No, it definitely slows it down. And that's not surprising. Again, and again, in the raid scenarios where you would want that speed. So, I don't know. I'm curious what you think after you go through that. And I will ask you next week what you chose. And I won't, like, I don't know that there's really a clear answer here. So, so anyway, you know, it's interesting. Makes life interesting. I know it throws a curveball at you. I felt the same way when I kind of got the same curveball. I was like, oh, crap. I thought this was, I thought this was a no-brainer. Like, I thought I definitely wanted to do this, but no. Let's see. Let's go to, let's go to Felix here. Felix says, in my photos app, I am getting an error that basically any time he says, it's weird. He gets a big triangle inside photos that, like, when he clicks on a thumbnail, he can't see the actual photo. He says, most of my photos are coming in via iCloud from photos taken on my phone. He says, I have ample storage space, almost 600 gigs available free on his system, where his photos library is located. And he says, I have 200 gigs free in his iCloud account. He says, would this have anything to do with the nearly full symbol next to the iCloud tab? Which, I don't know that I'm seeing anywhere. But, oh, I see what he's saying. No, that's actually, actually that's not, it's not showing nearly full. It's showing nearly downloaded. It is a, when you are, when you are looking at iCloud drive on your, in the finder, it will show you how much of that it has synced. And his has not finished syncing. So it's showing a little sliver of the pie free. And that's not good. Yeah. So it looks like almost done. It's almost finished. Yes. Right. And so it seems like something with iCloud is just not syncing properly on his, on his Mac. I think, and that goes beyond just photos. It looks like his iCloud drive is suffering from this too. That said, you could try repairing your photos library. I mean, these two things might only be coincidental and not actually related, right? So it is worth doing that. We'll link to a knowledge-based article that describes what you can do to repair a photos library. But essentially it involves holding down option and command while clicking to launch photos. So quit photos, hold down option and command, and then launch it or launch it and hold them down real quick afterwards after you click it. And then it'll give you options, including one that allows you to repair the library. As always, make a backup first. It just goes without saying. I know you have your photos stored in iCloud. Maybe that's enough of a backup for you. That's your decision to make. But feel like you have a backup before you start repairing the library. Failing that, you know, the next thing actually that I would do is I would go in to iCloud system preferences and completely log out of iCloud on your Mac, restart your Mac, log back in. I feel like there is an iCloud problem going on. You want to solve that thing that's happening with the Finder as well. Once you do that, if you still continue to have problems with photos, then we've trouble shot it and now we know it's a photos library problem. You could delete your photos library on your Mac. Really, you could just create a new one and have it sink down to that. And once that's all happy and successful, then you could throw away the old one. That would be one simple way to do it. It would take a little bit of time, obviously, for the download and all that. Or if you really believe that there's a problem with your photos library and you don't want to go through the whole redownload for whatever reason, you could use something like power photos to try and merge everything that you have into a new library. And hopefully that, you know, rebuilds whatever ain't right about the caches or, you know, file links or anything like that. Any thoughts on that, John? No, I think you covered it. It's yet another case of turning it off then on again. You fixed the problem. I knew that that was going to be one of the things you would suggest. Well, with iCloud, it really is the simplest way to do it. Obviously, it's a needle in the haystack problem, right? Man, like, you know, there's something wrong. And if you knew exactly what it was, you could go in and manipulate that one little file and either rebuild it or fix it or change it or whatever. But it sure is faster. Unless you already know exactly what it is, it sure is faster. And the problem with iCloud is there's so many different layers of the sync process, right? It's not like there's, you know, the cloud's version and then just the version on your hard drive. That's what it seems like. But with some iCloud data, there's also a cache of the cloud's truth on your hard drive that then syncs locally. So the cloud's truth syncs separately. And then once you have that locally, then that syncs. So there's actually two sync processes happening. And that can get to be a big major headache. So, I wonder if this could have happened during, I think you may have noticed, as many of us did, that a while ago there was an iCloud meltdown, I'll call it. Oh yeah, that's true. Oh, sure. Yeah, and how do you know about these things? Well, I'll tell you, Dave, if you want to see if iCloud is having problems, Apple has a link to service system status. It's apple.com slash support slash system status. And you'll see a little dot next to all of their services, whether it's working or not. Actually, I'm looking right now and it says iCloud mail resolved issue. So if you're having a problem with your iCloud mail, could be because they just resolved the issue. Depending on when you're listening, of course. Yeah, when I saw this page, oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know if it was like a week ago or something, but yeah, it was like everything was like yellow or red. It had iCloud next to it. Look like the departures board at O'Hare during a snowstorm, huh? Yeah, yeah. Not pretty. All right. And then one last photo is one again from the forums over at mackeekab.com slash forums. Flyleaf writes, my wife and I currently keep our full resolution photos on our respective MacBooks, but this has gotten to be too much data to keep storing on our internal SSDs. So we want to move our personal photos libraries to a shared Mac mini where they will be stored on one very big external hard drive, which itself is backed up to two time machine drives that take turns being offsite backups. We will most likely use either photo stream or iCloud photo library to get all the new photos onto the mini. Makes perfect sense. In either case, he says, I believe this means that we need to run two separate user accounts on the mini, each one being logged in at all times with the photos app running. But how do I force both user accounts to reopen automatically at system boot, for example, after a power outage? With photo stream in particular failing to reopen the second user account for too long could lead to lost photos. So I'm not saying it's likely, but I can imagine not noticing or forgetting, and then the second account needs to be logged in manually. Alternatively, is there a way to keep both photos libraries automatically syncing from a single user account on the Mac? No. And he says to be fair, I don't want to merge two libraries into one. Yeah, you're right. So your thought process is totally valid here. Getting one account to auto log in is no problem. It's the second one where that would be an issue. And so I'll throw that out as a geek challenge. I don't know how to get a second user account to auto log in. Trying to think, no, I'm trying to think if there's automation software that comes to mind that would do that. And no, because once you have to log out to do that, what you could do is use something linking to... You could have Keyboard Maestro do something, or even just have an app that launches at startup. Like set one user account to auto log in, right? And then build an Apple script or an automator or anything that auto launches and triggers something like, say, Boxcar to notify your iPhone that the Mac has rebooted and logged in. And now you need to go back to the Mac and log in as the second account. That would be one way to do it. Yeah, but I don't know about anything else. And you're right, the user accounts do need to be logged in for iCloud Photo Library to sync and also for Photo Stream. I'm certain that with iCloud Photo Library, though, the Photos app itself does not need to be running. That syncing happens in the background. It's been too long since I've run Photo Stream, but I seem to remember that Photo Stream also would sync in the background of a logged in account. I could be wrong about that, though. It's safer to just have Photos running. Yes, I'm pretty sure of that. Pretty sure of which part. Stream, the Photo Stream. Photo Stream auto downloading, whether without Photos running or it needs to be running. No, my experience is that it doesn't. It doesn't have to be running. Okay, that makes sense. If I open my... Yeah, sometimes I'll take a screenshot and then if I go to another machine and open Photos, it's there already because it's doing its thing. As we've discussed in the past, Photos likes to do things in the background, sometimes to your disadvantage. Oh, yeah, it's crazy, man. Well, that's why I use App Timmer. It's like it's taking all my processor. And it's like, yeah, you look and you see Photos D, I think, or some other process. Photolibrary D or something, yeah. No, I use App Timmer to keep that at bay, which is awesome because you can say, no, no, no, if it starts using more than whatever, 15, 10, 20, 30, 60% of your processor, whatever you choose, boom. Just, no, throttle it down, hold it steady there and let it do its thing, but don't let it consume my entire system. Makes a huge difference on... I've got a couple of 10 and actually, I think even 11 now, year old IMAX at the house that otherwise would just be bogged down by all these new things that are running. So there you go, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, very cool. But yeah, as long as you can have those two user accounts logged in, you can get that done. That's good. That's good. Brian Monroe in the chat room points out that you can and I would actually sort of presume that they would use optimized storage for the photo libraries on their respective MacBooks so that they have access to them, but the data itself is being stored offloaded to the cloud when necessary. So yeah, very cool. Good, good stuff. John, I want to take a minute and thank all of our premium contributors who contributed in the last week. As you well know, macgeekup.com.com is where you go. If you are willing and able and interested in supporting us directly and if you are not, that's okay too. Go visit our sponsors. As I always say, our job is to get you to want to learn more about them, whether or not you purchase is really truly between you and them. It does not. We don't get a cut of the take of any of that stuff or anything. It certainly looks better for us if you wind up buying, but we don't expect you to buy something that you're not interested in. But we do hope that we've generated some interest, at least in finding out more. So there's that. But if you're interested in premium, macgeekup.com.com is where you can go. The folks that have contributed, whose contributions have come in in the last week include Lee M with a $100 one-time donation. And then on the monthly $10 plan, we have Joe BP, Tony Z, Ev the Nerd, Robert D, Nick S, Beth B, Ward J, Olga P, Jason A, and Steven A. And in the biannual $25 plan, we have Mike H, Charles K, Robert R. Wait a minute. I am. I'm thanking people from two weeks ago, too. That's okay. Robert R, RunKMC, Keith M, Thomas S, Chuck J, Janes H, Mark W, Lou R, Stevie D, Wayne B, Tony C, Trent N, and Doug A. So I didn't wind up clearing the queue. But that's okay. I'm happy to say thank you twice to some of you. And that's totally fine. Thanks, in fact, to all of you who either have contributed in the last week or are premium members who have contributed at any time in any way. We really, really appreciate it. Then thanks to all of you who have contributed your questions and your tips and the folks of you that visit the forums at mackeycab.com slash forums. It's all truly fantastic. So really, really good stuff. John, do you have anything to add here? I know we've got all kinds of other questions that we're surely not going to get to, but we could go to. We could do maybe one more or not. We're right up right about at our end, Mark. So, what do you think? Mr. Braun, did I lose you? Oh, okay. I don't know. I'm here. All right, good. Maybe one more. All right, you want to go to Mike? That's sort of a fun one, huh? So Mike sent in this question. He said, for the last couple of years, my mid-2010 MacBook Pro has been spontaneously restarting. It says, I'm current on software. I've done nothing but in-place upgrades of macOS since I got the first, since I first got the machine. It says, I was hoping that Mojave would contain the patch for my problem, but it is not available for my pre-2011 MacBook Pro. It says, I've compared several panic logs, but I can't make sense of what it's trying to tell me. Can you give me a hand? He says, what do the logs suggest might be the source of the problem? It says, I'm not using the same app at the time of these kernel panic attacks. He says, the most recent one, I was an automator, which I run only for a few minutes once a month. Any help would be appreciated. All right, Mike. So we, and Mike sent us a zip file of four or five different panic logs from times that this happened. So there's lots of data in these kernel panic logs, folks, and a lot of it is completely irrelevant to us as end users. But it is good, especially when you have problems and you can look and start comparing between them. And I started to do that. And I really narrowed it down. These are like three page long reports, maybe longer, but there's two lines in each one that for him seemed to really matter. The first, I look at where there's breaks, like text breaks, you know, line breaks in these reports. That can often be, it's the start of a new section. And sometimes the line at the beginning of the section is helpful, but also sometimes the line at the end of the section is helpful. So that's why I focus on those areas first, John. And at the top of each of them, there is a line that has lots and lots of stuff, but at the very start of it was the problem and it says GPU panic. Then there's a second line that's sort of at the bottom of that first section in his panic reports that says BSD process name corresponding to current thread. On his, these process names were all different in all five reports. One was Finder, one was Pages, one I think was Automator, didn't matter, but they were all different, but they were just the names of apps. So to his point, he was correct. It wasn't related to any specific app that was running, but it could have been. It could have been something in the background. That would have actually been good because unfortunately the one thing that's consistent between all of his reports, John, is those two words or that line that starts with GPU panic. And I hate to say it, but I think your GPU is failing. That's your graphics processing unit. It is your graphics chip for lack of a different term. And to be perfectly honest, John, I don't know about your experience, but mine says that that is the most commonly failed motherboard component on Macs these days. And not just these days, but for the last 15, 20 years. If something on the motherboard is going to overheat and fail, it is the GPU first in most cases. Unfortunately, on that machine, it's all soldered to the same place. There's not a separate GPU. There's not a separate CPU that you can take out and replace. So you're probably looking at a motherboard replacement. And that's not an inexpensive repair. And it really may, to borrow a term from the auto industry, it may total the machine. You just might not be worth buying that in lieu of buying a separate machine. That's my thought. I mean, you can do something like resetting the SMC and that wouldn't be a bad thing to try. There's these few little Hail Mary things and reset the SMC and reset the NVRAM or the PRAM. We'll put links in the show notes to those for sure for you. But I'm not hopeful, unfortunately. Thoughts, John? Yeah, I remember it was a past MacBook that I had that actually, when I sent it to Applecare, and they returned it to me. One of the things they did was replace the, or they replaced, or I think they replaced the motherboard because there was a GPU issue. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Yep. And it was no issue because they actually, yeah, I think it was NVIDIA had some sort of problem and so Apple would nail them for the repairs because at some point they had a bad batch of GPUs. And the machine is too old to have a repair program for that. Right, right. Or if it did, that time has passed. So you got a good run. Yeah, unfortunately, I think that's right. I mean, I had this iMac that's in front of me here years ago, you know, right about Christmas time, it's GPU failed and we replaced the power supply and all that. It was a crazy repair. And then they replaced the CPU, which has the GPU on the board. It's a separate GPU, but it was all in one, you know, one part that Apple would replace. And they replaced it with the wrong CPU speed, the slower version. So that was a fun thing. Some of you may remember. Long time listeners. But yeah, it's kind of how it goes. Unfortunately, my brother for years had a philosophy, especially when, you know, when buying Macs, you sometimes and you used to more frequently be able to choose between the low end graphics card and the high end graphics card. And for this reason alone, he would always buy the high end graphics card. And his theory was I don't do much with graphics. So I'm not going to tax this new card and I'm going to tax it less than I would the lower powered card. And so hopefully it won't overheat as much and I will get more life out of it. And I have to say, I don't know if that was that turned out to be the reason, but his Macs never had problems with their GPUs. So there you go. Yeah, and I'm going to, I'm going to link to... Apple has an article here, which we're going to link to, which actually has some advice. And it says, if your Mac spontaneously restarts or displays a message that it restarted or shut down because of a problem. That's the title of the article? Yep. Wow. And yeah, it has a whole bunch of things to help you determine. Is it hardware? Is it software? Things like that. Sure, sure. Check that out if you ever have... Crazy, crazy. Doing crazy stuff. Yeah, that's nuts, man. That's a long title, but you know, descriptive. So there you go. All right, folks. Let's see. We want it. We didn't have him told you how to contact us. We did mention all of our premium subscribers. If you are a premium subscriber, premium at macgeekyab.com is the address to send things into. If you are not a premium subscriber, that's okay. Like we said, feedback at macgeekyab.com is the address to send things into. Um, did I hear you say feedback at macgeekyab.com? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I said feedback at macgeekyab.com just to get it right there very much so. And if you'd like to leave us a message, you can call us 224-888-Geek and John Geek is... 4-3-3-5. As always, I want to thank the folks at Cashfly, C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com for providing all the bandwidth to get the show from us to you. And of course, I want to thank all of our sponsors, of which there are thankfully quite a few this week and actually coming up and all of that stuff. It's great. The ones that we had in this episode, of course, Opsgenie, O-P-S-G-E-N-I-E.com. PDF pen at smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Ring.com slash M-G-G. Kaptera.com slash M-G-G. The good folks at Barebone Software at barebones.com. And of course, Otherworld Computing at maxsales.com. Very, very good stuff. All through the Backbeat Media Podcast Network. John, you got us started with this mess today. What do you have to say to get us out? What I have to say to get us out is advice that you should all follow no matter what you do. And that advice is don't get caught.