As some of you may already know, I use LLMs (Large Language Models) for what they’re really good at, but I’m pretty skeptical about whether they’re truly intelligent or can solve any problem, as the folks at OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta keep telling us every day. They’ve invested a ton of money in LLMs, and they obviously have a big stake in getting everyone to use them all the time.
I’m not the kind of guy that longs for the “good old days” which, in truth, weren’t that great anyway. Life expectancy was twenty years shorter than it is today, infant mortality was high, and those who survived aged faster – people in their fifties already looked elderly. Food may have been more natural, but it was scarce, forget year-round meat and fish. In some parts of Italy, winter diet consisted mostly of polenta and little else. Homes were cold in winter, and cars turned into ovens in summer. And the list could go on.
– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.
A couple of months ago, I listed some more or less serious bugs in Sonoma that I noticed while getting familiar with the latest version of macOS, first on the new Mac Studio M2 Ultra and then on the household Mac Mini M1.
At that time, I was using macOS Sonoma 14.3, which I soon updated on the Mini to version 14.3.1. With this minor release, Apple fixed a couple of the bugs I described, specifically the one about emptying the Trash into a random Space and the issue that prevented giving decent names to PDF files generated by the Print function.
– Source: Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash.
The transition is complete: since a few days, all the computers I use for work are running on Apple Silicon ARM processors. This includes a Mac Studio M2 Ultra, which I’ve already talked about extensively and which sits on my office desk; a Mac Mini M1 with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD – previously neglected on a shelf for reasons I won’t go into here – now in my home office; and a very basic MacBook Air M1 (just 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, half the specs of my wife’s) for light use and when I’m on the go.
– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.
I use my Mac for work, so I’m always reluctant to update macOS too quickly. I usually prefer to wait until the current version matures, and sometimes I skip it entirely, maybe because I’ve read particularly negative reports or because I wasn’t convinced after using it on a friend’s or colleague’s computer (as I did with Sierra, Catalina, and Ventura).1
And here it is, the Mac Studio. I had to go through a long bureaucratic process to get it, but I finally managed, and now it’s right here in front of me.
The first thing you notice is that the box is heavy, very heavy. The specs state that the Mac Studio is large and weighs about as much as three Mac Minis stacked on top of each other (19.7 x 19.7 x 9.5 cm^3 and 3.6 kg for the Mac Studio versus 19.7 x 19.7 x 3.6 cm^3 and 1.2 kg for the Mac Mini). I’ve never held three Mac Minis together, but the box gives a strong impression of solidity, which is definitely a positive for such an expensive device.
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