The OSX/Apple support thread

[PushedDover]

And whilst in the thread.

Any ideas why Siri will no longer put things in my reminders / shopping lists, without prompting me to "First you must unlock your iPhone". ?


Used to be a very handy thing to do without touching the phone.

[Zirconia]

2013 iMac with fusion here and it boots reasonably quickly but is still very sharp on the go with regular use apps.

I have an app I am comfortable using myself but would not want to give advice on its results to anyone incase major or minor fubar. Called EtreCheck. It is on the App store.

It checks what is loading and running in the background and what could be causing issues. Used to be a free use option for several goes, not sure if they still do (I bought it after the first issues spotted). But I find it handy to look at what is loading at start up every now and then, get a feel for what might be an issue but I use it with my limited knowledge on the full understanding I could really male a mess.

[JiggyJaggy]

PushedDover said:

mmm-five said:

Is your machine equipped with an SSD or a HD.

If it's the latter, then that's why it's so slow.

Catalina is deathly slow on a spinning HD, and just about usable on a fusion drive (the SSD/HDD hybrid). It flies on a SSD though. I ended up changing my dad's iMac to boot off a 500GB Sandisk Extreme SSD (USB3-attached) and it's much quicker at about 500MB/s (about £90 now).

There is a Pro version available too, which is about twice as fast, for about 30% more (£125).

You can still keep all your data on the internal drive, but as you're only using 250GB of it, it will all easily fit onto the external - maybe just use the internal as a recovery drive or for backups?

Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 5th May 10:00

Thank you - it is (I believe) a fusion drive - and to be honest rather disappointing to hear that within three years it struggles to boot - it also explains why older MBA manages to outperform it....
The work around of the External drive is interesting as an option. And I am open to ideas on that and future proofing. Wouldn't connection via the Thunderbolt be preferable ?

Is there any easy way to load Catalina and Operating software onto an external hard drive? May look to do this as a low cost option to some of our older work iMacs

[K12beano]

mmm-five said:

Catalina is deathly slow on a spinning HD, and just about usable on a fusion drive (the SSD/HDD hybrid). It flies on a SSD though. I ended up changing my dad's iMac to boot off a 500GB Sandisk Extreme SSD (USB3-attached) and it's much quicker at about 500MB/s (about £90 now).

Well now, that's the most useful tip I've read in a long while.

I have a late '14 5K with the Fusion Drive - and I love it for the screen size and resolution, but it's starting to become a grumpy old bd in its maturing years (or is that just me?) even with a regular dose of CleanMyMac X. I don't really want to replace it - was more thinking of using my newer MBP and maybe updating to the latest iPad too and using the '14 as a secondary screen (Luna Display on order to see how I can get better use of what I've got)......

But I hadn't considered that booting off an external SSD would potentially be an easy and quite cost-effective idea - thanks for the tip!

[mmm-five]

JiggyJaggy said:

Is there any easy way to load Catalina and Operating software onto an external hard drive? May look to do this as a low cost option to some of our older work iMacs

In my case I just attached & formatted the SSD (as MacOS Extended) and partition it (as GUID), then selected it as the installer location.

This Macworld article should tell you everything you need to know.

There's issues if you have a later machine with a T2 chip, as you have to turn off some security features in the Recovery screen to allow booting from external devices (and to disable the default-on Filevault encryption).

[PushedDover]

Do we think 2017 Fusion machines already need to hive off the OS to a SSD already this young in their life?
Isn't the point of the fusion to be the SSD for the OS and fast?

[mmm-five]

PushedDover said:

Wouldn't connection via the Thunderbolt be preferable ?

Only if you bought a drive capable of benefiting from Thunderbolt throughput.

• Sabrent Rocket can get 2300MBps
• Samsung 970EVOplus NVMe blade has 3500MBps
• Corsair MP600 can get 5000MBps

For each you'd need to get a TB3 enclosure for it. So can easily double the price. If you need the speed then it's a no-brainer.

The drive I mentioned has USB-A and USB-C connectors, so can be attached via either the TB3/USB-C (but only up to 10Gbps/1250MBps as it's using USB protocols) or USB 3.0 (5Gbps/675MBps) ports.

[Zirconia]

PushedDover said:

Do we think 2017 Fusion machines already need to hive off the OS to a SSD already this young in their life?
Isn't the point of the fusion to be the SSD for the OS and fast?

Mine is older than ours and from your description, mine runs way faster, I would expect yours to be a tad quicker. (if we are all fusion).

[craig1912]

Zirconia said:

Mine is older than ours and from your description, mine runs way faster, I would expect yours to be a tad quicker. (if we are all fusion).

Mines a 2012 mini and don’t have any issues (1tb fusion)

[Leithen]

JiggyJaggy said:

Is there any easy way to load Catalina and Operating software onto an external hard drive? May look to do this as a low cost option to some of our older work iMacs

Look for SuperDuper by Dave Nanian.

Straightforward bootable clone backups. Very simple.

[PushedDover]

Zirconia said:

Mine is older than ours and from your description, mine runs way faster, I would expect yours to be a tad quicker. (if we are all fusion).

Thanks. I guess after moons of Widoze machines, I have since assumed that Mac's maintain themselves well.
If I were to put it on a cleanse / diet / speed up - where would I look first please?

[mmm-five]

craig1912 said:

Mines a 2012 mini and don’t have any issues (1tb fusion)

I've read similar threads on Mac forums (and have personal experience) where identical machines perform completely differently when upgraded to Mojave or Catalina.

In my case, my dad's machine was slow but usable, but my uncle's (8gb RAM compared to my dad's 16gb) was faster starting up and running - but my dad's runs more apps (Word, Excel, VMware Fusion, light video editing) than my uncle (MS Word & internet for facebook).

It will obviously depend on specific usage patterns, but lots of changes to big files on APFS is much slower on a HD than using HFS due to the way the copy & write is optimised. You wouldn't notice the slowdown on a fast SSD (because it's so fast), but you do on a HD that could be 5-20 times slower.

Being a single-user machine, doing an odd Word document, or browsing the internet shouldn't cause much of a problem on any machine made in the last 10 years. My old 2008 MacPro is still in the family and has 4 user accounts on it - although that stopped being upgraded at El Capitan I think. That has a SSD boot drive and 2 x 2TB HDDs for storage.

When you start using your start-up drive as a scratch disk for large Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign files, or have to load/unload lots of audio samples you'll easily see the difference.

[CoolHands]

mmm-five said:

Is your machine equipped with an SSD or a HD.

If it's the latter, then that's why it's so slow.

Catalina is deathly slow on a spinning HD, and just about usable on a fusion drive (the SSD/HDD hybrid). It flies on a SSD though. I ended up changing my dad's iMac to boot off a 500GB Sandisk Extreme SSD (USB3-attached) and it's much quicker at about 500MB/s (about £90 now).

There is a Pro version available too, which is about twice as fast, for about 30% more (£125).

You can still keep all your data on the internal drive, but as you're only using 250GB of it, it will all easily fit onto the external - maybe just use the internal as a recovery drive or for backups?

Edited by mmm-five on Tuesday 5th May 10:00

you seem to know what you’re talking about, could I do the above with a late-2009 mac? The big bd one with a huge screen. It still works fine but is slow starting up etc. So don’t want or need to replace.

Or should I just replace hardrive with ssd. I already upgraded the ram to Crucial max possible16GB a few years ago.

Edited by CoolHands on Tuesday 5th May 20:22

[Escapegoat]

If you're brave enough, go in and change the HDD to SSD. Faster than using a Firewire-limited external connection (about 90MB/s maximum).

I've got a 2012 iMac with SSD inside and it's plenty fast enough (except for Blender, but that's no surprise).

[Zirconia]

PushedDover said:

Zirconia said:

Mine is older than ours and from your description, mine runs way faster, I would expect yours to be a tad quicker. (if we are all fusion).

Thanks. I guess after moons of Widoze machines, I have since assumed that Mac's maintain themselves well.
If I were to put it on a cleanse / diet / speed up - where would I look first please?

Not going to be much help I am afraid and not wanting to take form the other help here, some others here are better at digging. I am OK digging into mine and accept I will be making mistakes and don't want to mess someone puter up but that Etrecheck I mentioned, might be worth a run to see what is loading up. It just reports and does not do anything other. Try the free version.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/etrecheck/id14237159...
I use it to keep a check on mine, there are a few that it highlights that sound iffy on mine but I know what they are and not an issue.
Snippet from mine. Nothing much doing there.
Actually, just spotted a file I thought I had deleted further on.



Most of the cleaners get a bad review looking through the various forums. Some can do more harm than good and make it worse says the various experts on other forums.
Worth a shifty for you perhaps.
https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/imac.91/
https://forums.macrumors.com/forums/macos-catalina...
https://discussions.apple.com/community/desktop_co...

Edit. Worth looking at activity monitor to see if there is anything going on and any external hard drives connected or cloud sync? Encrypting a disk can also slow things up and take a while.

Edit. To add. Diskutil can be run to first aid the disk. It is part of MacOSX. Fortunate mine finds the odd issue that it can deal with. No experience when it goes south.

take it you have checked with Malwarebytes, and a good free virus checker? I use Bitfender on the odd occasion, it doesn't load anything and runs stand alone, others incorporate into your startup.

There is another app I use but definitely a dangerous app if not used carefully but the maintenance routines that the mac uses to keep your system healthy (in theory) can be forced from this app or it can be forced from the terminal if you have a little care.


Edit. Backup. Backup several times. Important stuff just in case. Then back that backup up.

Edited by Zirconia on Tuesday 5th May 21:27

Edited by Zirconia on Wednesday 6th May 06:28

Edited by Zirconia on Wednesday 6th May 06:35

[craig1912]

mmm-five said:

I've read similar threads on Mac forums (and have personal experience) where identical machines perform completely differently when upgraded to Mojave or Catalina.

In my case, my dad's machine was slow but usable, but my uncle's (8gb RAM compared to my dad's 16gb) was faster starting up and running - but my dad's runs more apps (Word, Excel, VMware Fusion, light video editing) than my uncle (MS Word & internet for facebook).

It will obviously depend on specific usage patterns, but lots of changes to big files on APFS is much slower on a HD than using HFS due to the way the copy & write is optimised. You wouldn't notice the slowdown on a fast SSD (because it's so fast), but you do on a HD that could be 5-20 times slower.

Being a single-user machine, doing an odd Word document, or browsing the internet shouldn't cause much of a problem on any machine made in the last 10 years. My old 2008 MacPro is still in the family and has 4 user accounts on it - although that stopped being upgraded at El Capitan I think. That has a SSD boot drive and 2 x 2TB HDDs for storage.

When you start using your start-up drive as a scratch disk for large Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign files, or have to load/unload lots of audio samples you'll easily see the difference.

Don’t doubt what you are saying but three users on mine and lots of photo editing

[Diplomatico]

Was very annoyed to find out that my AirPod pros don't work with MS teams.

[K12beano]

Diplomatico said:

Was very annoyed to find out that my AirPod pros don't work with MS teams.

I found that out the hard way - until I found a setting somewhere, MS Teams seems to just ride roughshod over system settings. But on a call, after about five minutes of fumbling and struggling I found out that if you go into settings it then will appreciate you're on Bluetooth headset. bd Program!!

[JiggyJaggy]

Escapegoat said:

If you're brave enough, go in and change the HDD to SSD. Faster than using a Firewire-limited external connection (about 90MB/s maximum).

I've got a 2012 iMac with SSD inside and it's plenty fast enough (except for Blender, but that's no surprise).

Is this difficult to do and how much should say 512gb SSD to install internally cost?

[Diplomatico]

K12beano said:

I found that out the hard way - until I found a setting somewhere, MS Teams seems to just ride roughshod over system settings. But on a call, after about five minutes of fumbling and struggling I found out that if you go into settings it then will appreciate you're on Bluetooth headset. bd Program!!

So did you get it to work?