New Book on M-Series Macs
My latest book is out, Take Control of Your M-Series Mac. This is a title I conceived of after spending a couple months with a new Apple silicon M1 MacBook Air, which is a shockingly fast machine. In some ways, the M1 Macs feel like they fell out of the future, because they leapfrog performance and battery life, two intertwined concepts that are hard to push forward at once. It’s nearly my favorite Mac ever, and I am constantly astonished by how responsive and fast it is at every task.
However, Apple made a huge number of small and large changes in their switch from Intel-based processors to their own ARM-based silicon. This has a lot of advantages, including simplicity, because Apple controls the chip from stem to stern. For instance, there are about a dozen startup modes for Intel Macs, and about five on the M1. (Note I use the term M-series in the book’s title: we expect an M2 and so forth, just like Apple has an A-series and other chip runs for its other products.)
But it also means us old dogs need to learn new tricks. From restarting in recovery mode to access features, to sharing a Mac’s disk with another Mac, to understanding how Intel apps run in a special emulation mode (Rosetta 2)—it’s a new ballgame. There’s no longer a last resort internet recovery mode built into ROM, but an entirely different revive and restore option that requires another Mac, and which either fixes or resets the firmware on an M1 Mac.
The book is aimed at people who already own an M1 and want to learn how to make best use of it and control all its features, or are considering which M1 to purchase and want both some buying advice and details on what to expect.
Also today, we released an update to Take Control of Securing Your Mac, which now incorporates more information about M1 and Intel differences, and adds some details about encrypting external volumes—particularly noting that you can’t encrypt an external startup volume for an M1 Mac.