There’s a long list of iPhones with some degree of trade-in value if purchasing a member of the iPhone 12 family. Almost every iPhone from the 11 Pro Max right back to the iPhone 6. The exception is the 2020 SE. I’m assuming it’s off the list because it’s this year’s model.
img_0176

Here is the recent video comparing a 16” MB Pro with a 2020 iMac: https://www.youtube.com/watch
And don’t forget that for videoconferencing, the iMac now comes with a 1080p iSight webcam.

//

sumudu.me.

I recommend you check out Luke Miani on YouTube, he recently made a similar comparison. Ultimately though, do you need a portable Mac to be powerful or just use a 13-in on the go & an iMac at home/office?

//

sumudu.me.

Posted a spare MacBook Pro charger to a friend who needs one, we still can’t drive more than 5 km from home. Useless postal mob claim to have delivered it but it hasn’t appeared at my friend’s place.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Apple Silicon Macs. The upcoming event is for the iPhone 12 variants, likely a smaller & cheaper HomePod, maybe an updated Apple TV.

//

sumudu.me.

I have an energy-saving app called Endurance (via Setapp) on my MacBook Pro, it’s set to activate when power drops to 70%. Then various things happen, such as Turbo Boost being turned off. When the power is reconnected you can continue with Endurance active or off again to restore full power.

screen shot 2020-10-09 at 4.08.34 pm

I let Geekbench 5 loose on it with Endurance off & with it on, the results were quite significant.

screen shot 2020-10-09 at 3.56.41 pm

screen shot 2020-10-09 at 4.00.42 pm

At one stage of the Geekbench testing I’d used the app for three minutes. When I powered up again & turned the app off, it reported that I’d saved eight minutes of battery.

About 6 weeks ago I bought a Nescafe Dolce Gusto coffee pod machine because of the nice range of hot chocolate that the thing can dispense. but I’ve been let down by the local retailers, only one stocks a basic version of hot chocolate, none of the ones I really want. So I have bought some directly from the Dolce Gusto Oz website, I’m getting a mix of Nesquik & extra-rich chocolate pods. The package is expected next Tuesday, the postal mob are at 50% staffing due to Covid restrictions. It’s way better than the 25% level they maintained for the previous six weeks, though.
At that time, packages that normally took two or three days to arrive were taking up to 15 working days, that’s three full 7-day weeks.

Seems like the boys at DiskWarrior have given up trying to support APFS, for the last three years they’ve offered the pathetic excuse on their website that the next version of DiskWarrior will support those file types. DiskWarrior works on & fixes (or used to) the Directory structure of HFS+ drives. I’ve lost track of the number of times it has salvaged a recalcitrant HDD. At least it still works with Time Machine drives.
There is another utility app that CAN fix Directory issues on APFS drives, that’s TechTool Pro.
Today I had troule when Time Machine refused to make a backup, saying there was an unexplained issue with the destination drive. Aha, says I! Time for DiskWarrior. It tried but then went on a go slow when it consumed 15.5 GB of my 16 GB of RAM in the task. So I stopped the app with the Time Machine drive partially fixed but unmounted. Disk Utility was unable to remount the drive, so I disconnected the USB cable & reconnected it. I then logged out, & back in again, this freed up some more RAM. I decided to give TechTool Proi a go at it, but it refused to unmount the now-mounted drive.
Right. I opened Onyx app & freed up some more RAM then gave DiskWarrior one more try. It was able to unmount the drive, make its repairs & remount it. After which Time Machine was once again able to perform its backup duties.

The main reason I prefer Diskwarrior over TechTool Pro for fixing Time Machine drives is because it’s much quicker at doing the job. But DW can’t work with APFS drives whereas TTP can.

20 GB was of unremovable cache files, the remaining 20 GB is what is saved by having lower resolution versions of the 28 GB iCloud Photo Library on board.
That is, the Photo Library on the Mac is shown as occupying 28 GB, but really tthat’s how big the iCloud library is. The local version with lower res pics is around 8 GB in reality.

matigo.ca.

One thing disappointed me after the clean install of Catalina on the MacBook Pro: while it had regained a lot of drive space, there should have been more. Then I twigged: I’d set the Photos app to hold full rresolution photos after the rebuild, before that I’d chosen to optimise the Mac’s storage of photos, keeping the full res ones on iCloud and lesser ones on the Mac.
Full res pics come down if I edit a photo.
I’m seeing 156 GB of free space, it was 117 GB before the rebuild.