I’ve seen people claiming that macOS High Sierra and its new file system, APFS, makes copying files lightning fast. This is not true. Here’s why.

In short: most of the time spent copying files is the physical copying of bits from one place to another. Unless you can avoid doing that, you’re, at best, going to be a few percent faster.

The longer version relies on the slightly hidden caveat: “unless you can avoid doing that.”

This was originally posted to Medium in 2016. Reposting a couple of weeks ago would have made more sense in hindsight…

Apple event invitations are famous for providing clues about announcements that will be made at the event. Who can forget the square shapes on the invitation to last years keynote effectively predicting the arrival of the new Apple TV? Or the circular patterns a couple of years ago that presaged the cylindical shape of the new Mac Pro?

Expectations were low. No new hardware they said. New software they said. And yet, even with expectations so low, they failed.

What did we get? In short, nothing that we’ve not already seen from Google or Amazon or Microsoft. Sure, they did it with a bit of flair but, as we know, marketing is all that Apple are about these days. As Schiller said only three years ago, “[Apple] can’t innovate anymore.”

How does switching email hosts disable your Bluetooth headphones? Read on to find out.

As many people did recently, I got The Email from Google telling me that my Apps for Domains (Legacy) account is going away and that I should either pay up or move away.

I’m not averse to paying. I use email a lot and I have my own domain, so I appreciate that I’m not a typical consumer. But I do object to paying Google because it feels like they’re double-dipping: both data mining my information and billing me for the service¹.

Like Spotify’s complaint before it, yesterday’s “App Store Principles and Practices” document from Apple got me thinking.

Apple talks a lot about free apps not paying anything (which isn’t entirely true of course), and it’s always pitched as a feature.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a bug.

This effectively means that all paid apps have to subsidise all free apps. Is this what’s preventing Apple from reducing the 30% fee?

So here’s the thing that drives me crazy.

Having had a hard disk die on me a few years ago, I’m a little paranoid about backups. I have three:

1. Time Machine, over WiFi to a Synology NAS
2. Backblaze, “cloud” backup over the internet
3. SuperDuper clone to an infrequently connected USB hard disk

Time Machine and Backblaze run all the time, nice, seamless and hopefully pretty complete. I do the SuperDuper clone occasionally and every few months I try to reboot and check that the clone actually works.

As I’ve done for the last few years, here are a few quick thoughts about today’s new iOS release, version 11.

I’ve been using the iPad version since the beginning of August and the iPhone version for only a couple of week but I think I have reasonable picture of what you’re going to see.

## Good

• Multi-app support on the iPad. Wow! It’s quite different. You might need to give it a while before you get used to it. I also found that I needed to rearrange my dock so that apps I use to multitask are quickly available
• “Swipe up on the iPad keyboard to get symbol characters.” Such a time saver
• The voice synthesis of Siri is way better. But I agree with Gruber, if I could have dedicated engineering resources to Siri that wouldn’t have been where I would put them
• iCloud sync for Photos. No more training each device to receognise each person!
• Lots of nice, minor changes. The “Now playing” lock screen widget, the “play” button at the top of playlists/albums in the music app
• Control Center is improved (but see first item in the “ugly” section below)

## Bad

• I’m guessing this has something to do with the iPhone X, but the one 3D Touch gesture I used all the time was the hard-press on the left side of the screen to trigger the app switcher. That’s gone in iOS 11. This is going to take a lot of getting used to
• It won’t work on older devices. I get the “why” but it always sucks when they get left behind

## Ugly

• Why did the WiFi button is Control Center change to be “disconnect” rather than “switch off”?!
• Not sure about some of the animations, especially on iPhone.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted a “big” iPhone as I was perfectly happy with the 4” form-factor. But if I was going to get a new phone and the new ones are bigger, I reasoned, I may as well go really big and go for a 6s Plus. On paper it made perfect sense.

Then I played with one in an Apple Store and I laughed. In practice it was comically big. I really didn’t want a phone I could only realistically use with two hands.

Share price movements are kind-of-sort-of-rational but not always intuitive. For example, when Apple has a big keynote and announces some significant product, everyone expresses surprise that the share price goes down straight afterwards. Even many smart people get this wrong (“It isn’t based on logic and reason” – The Talk Show episode 53). I hope to explain why the price dropping actually does make sense in this post.

In doing so I’ll likely make some errors. Some of those will be deliberate simplifications. In other cases I’ll probably just be wrong. But either way, I think the gist, if not the details, should give you a good idea of what’s going on.

Preamble: In pre-Swift and pre-ARC days of development on Apple’s platforms, it was necessary to “manually” retain and release objects as you used and discarded them. One common, but incorrect, pattern that kept reappearing was the idea that you could use the retainCount method to ascertain whether an object was still being used.

## When to use -retainCount? Never!

There’s pretty much never a good reason to use -retainCount. Here’s a short and mildly abusive explanation why.