A new Mac mini was announced sporting new M4 and M4 Pro chips packed into a tiny form factor of only 5 by 5 inches. The new M4 chips give the new mini a CPU performance bump of 18x and GPU increase of 2.2 over the M1 model.
Mac mini with M4 Pro
Thunderbolt 5 is the new way of moving data in and out of the new Mac mini. The Mac mini with M4 Pro ships with three of them on the back. Running at up to 120Gb/s they support up to three 6K displays. On the front are two USB-C ports at USB 3 speed. And a first ever on a Mac, a forward facing headphone jack.
Inside is where the M4 Pro shines. With availability of up to 14 cores you should see a marked improvement in multithreaded performance. And with the M4 Pro GPU offering up to 20 cores, you will see a 2x improvement over the M4 chip.
Apple Mac mini front facing ports.Apple Mac mini rear facing ports.
Mac mini wth M4
Three Thunderbolt 4 ports arrive on the Mac mini with M4. These support up to three also displays–two running at up to 6K and one running at up to 5K. Like the M4 Pro, you get two USB-C ports on the front offering USB 3 speeds and the same front facing headphone jack.
There’s a lot more to these new machines. Follow this link to read Apple’s Press Release for the nitty gritty details.
Pricing
The new Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 with 16GB of memory while the Mac mini with M4 Pro starts at $1399.
The iMac, a perennial favorite all-in-one computer, has just been refreshed with the latest M4 processor, 12MP Center Stage camera, and Thunderbolt 4 ports in a thinner design and an updated color pallet and ready for Apple Intelligence.
iMac with macOS Sequoia running Safari and Excel
iMac with macOS Sequoia running Photoshop
iMac with macOS Sequoia running Civilization 7
The M4 processor is the star
The new M4 processor brings a generous performance boost to the new iMac with improved up to 1.7x speed bump over the M1 chip. Graphics speeds improve up to 2.1x faster than the original M1. Best of all, the new iMacs now start with 16GB of memory. This can be maxed out to 32GB.
A rainbow of colors
M4 iMac colors
The newly enhanced performance of the iMac is wrapped in a new case that is slightly thinner than previous designs in refreshed shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and silver. The latest colors are a little more muted than the previous pallet.
Fewer ports, more speed
Back Green 8-Core M4 iMac with 2 Thunderblot/USB-4 ports
Possibly the most significant change on the latest iMacs is the I/O connectivity. Gone are all legacy ports, analog audio i/o, legacy Thunderblot, USB-A, Thunderbolt/USB-3, and Ethernet. In their place is either 2 or 4 Thunderblot/USB-4 ports, depending on configuration. If you’re setup requires any legacy ports, there’s a dongle for that.
You also receive WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 radios for fast, secure, cable free connections.
New Keyboards and Mice
Green Thunderbolt/USB-4 Magic MouseGreen Thunderbolt/USB-4 Magic Keyboard with Touch-ID
Shipping with the new iMacs are new keyboards and mice in hue matching colors. These new peripherals arrive with USB-C ports for charging. The new keyboards also include Touch-ID that allow you to lock/unlock your computer, make online purchases with ApplePay, and they support Fast User Switching making it easier to change profiles for those who share a computer.
Be the center of the stage
Also arriving with the latest iMac is a new 12MP Center Stage camera which is capable of automatically adjusting pan and zoom as more faces appear in the frame.
Configurations and Pricing
The new iMacs can be ordered in 8 and 10-core configurations:
Apple’s announced the new iPad Mini with the A17 Processor to be available as of today.
The new Mini offers a boost in performance and comes ready for Apple Intelligence. It will ship with iOS 18, WiFi 6E and USB-C supporting data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps.
It also gets a 12MP back camera supporting Smart HDR4. The new Mini also gets a base storage capacity of 128GB and can be optioned with up to 512GB. But the USB-C port allows for unlimited storage with SSD drives.
Starting at $499 for the WiFi model and $649 for WiFi + Cellular.
Firmware version 2C301 (up from previous version 2B68) adds a feature announced a year ago.
Prior to this update, Beats Studio Pros were not compatible with Audio Sharing as seen in this screen grab of the list of compatible headphones.
List of Audio Sharing compatible headphones as of 08.28.2024
As of today, this changes. With your Beats Studio Pro headphones connected to any device running iOS, or iPadOS 11 or greater, the update will automatically get pushed to your cans.
The update is not immediate and no progress indicator is provided. To know if the update has been applied, visit Settings and tap on the entry for your headphones. The firmware version is displayed as ‘Version’.
I’ll post the results of a test pairing my Studio Pros while my wife wears her AirPods.
Back in July Apple dropped a press release announcing updates to features in Apple services. Buried in it was a nugget about a change to the AppleID.
What’s an AppleID
The AppleID is the key to all things Apple: email, photos, storage, streaming, workouts, and more. But this is only the most recent iteration in a history of online services. How did we get to the AppleID?
It all started with iTunes
Apple iTools landing page
Back in 2000, Apple launched their first foray into bundling services as a subscription with iTools. iTools was a collection of services including Mac.com email; Homepage personal websites; iCards, greeting cards using your iPhotos, and personal online storage with iDisk and a few other oddities.
Apple’s eWorld
Note: eWorld, which preceded iTools, was a subscription service. However, eWorld was Apple’s answer to America Online and not a bundled services solution.
Shortly after .Mac arrived
Apple .Mac landing page
Just a few years later ‘iTools’ was rebranded as .Mac. .Mac offered access to mail using IMAP, larger iDisk storage space, the ability to share calendars with iCal, Virex anti-virus, and Backup, a means of archiving your iDisk.
The rise of MobileMe
Apple MobileMe landing page
The iPhone brought on some significant change to Apple’s online services. Where MobileMe mail pulled data when a user opened their mailbox, the iPhone’s 24/7 connection to a cellular network introduced ‘Push’ services to the fold.
With ‘Push’ enabled mail, you didn’t have to open your mail and wait for the lasted mail to be pulled (downloaded) into your mailbox. Push allowed mail to be constantly updated in the background while your phone was locked, or sitting on your desk charging. Opening mail, or your calendar now presented you the latest messages and events.
MobileMe also saw the replacement of Homepage with iWeb, a feature introduced in a software suite loving known as iLife. iLife brought the ability to edit video with iMovie, “Rip, Mix, Burn” your tracks into iTunes and burn them to CDs. iMovie would later allow you to burn DVDs.
MobileMe is reimagined as iCloud
Apple iCloud landing page
Change being inevitable, Apple once again revisited their subscription bundle and felt the inevitable was necessary. 2011 brought on the introduction of iCloud.
iCloud received a raft of changes which include not just the ability to sync your files across devices, but now per application. This change brought us, the ability to stream our iTunes purchases with iTunes in the Cloud and the ability to upload our entire library of ripped music into iTunes for an additional fee. One key feature of iTunes Match is the replacement of your MP3’s to the very 256kbps AAC files from Apple’s music library.
Even more with Apple One
Apple One landing page
On September of 2020, during the height of COVID, Apple launched a new suite of services on top of iTunes. Apple One added streaming original content with AppleTV+, workouts with Fitness+, streaming games with Apple Arcade+, and enhanced news with Apple News+.
With this a renaming of the AppleID.
Back when iTools was introduced, the AppleID was associated with you ‘.Mac’ email account. Today, the AppleID is your key to passwords, the credit cards in your Wallet app, health data, fitness data, TV and music streaming services, and for some an Apple-branded credit card.
To acknowledge this and prepare for future services, the AppleID will become your Apple Account. You can expect to start seeing the change in iOS and iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11, as well as the website.
Changes like this give rise to phishing emails suggesting something is amiss with your account. Message of this nature suggest that if you don’t act right now, your account will be cancelled or deleted.
Trust your gut if you encounter such and email and immediately reject the urge to click on any links. Instead, visit Apple’s website directly and either call, chat, or use the support links to contact Apple to learn if in fact your account is in jeopardy.
Applies to Sophos Home for macOS when running macOS Ventura
What is happening
We have been working with Apple for several months on support for Ventura, testing the beta builds and providing feedback to Apple.
After testing the Release Candidate that went live on October 20, there are some issues we want to make you aware of in case Apple does not fix them before officially releasing macOS Ventura to all users (expected October 24).
Main Known Issue
When upgrading to macOS Ventura, Sophos Home will report healthy (green) but the Scan extension will not have full disk access until manually re-added. This is due to an Apple permissions issue when upgrading to macOS Ventura. Our team is working on finding a workaround should Apple not resolve the problem on their end soon.
If you upgrade to macOS Ventura while Sophos Home (10.4.0) is installed, or if you re-install Sophos Home on Ventura post upgrading to it, you will need do the following to re-enable the antivirus protection:
Click on the Apple logo > System Settings
Click Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access
Click com.sophos.endpoint.scanextension and use the “- ” sign to remove it
Wait for com.sophos.endpoint.scanextension to reappear
Click on the slider next to com.sophos.endpoint.scanextension to switch it to the blue position
Video steps:
Note: This will not happen if you install Sophos Home FOR THE FIRST TIME after upgrading to macOS Ventura. However, existing installations, including re-installations will be affected. This is due to an issue with macOS Ventura not properly allowing Full Disk Access configurations from previous installations, and we have filed a bug with Apple, currently waiting on their input.
Other Known Issues
There are a few other minor issues with macOS Ventura, noted below.
After updating to macOS Ventura, you will need to reboot – a second time – for the Sophos Network Extension to be enabled
Our Transparent Proxy is not working on virtual machines. It is fine on real hardware, but there is no web protection or web control on virtual machines with the current release candidate version of Ventura
In System Settings, there is a network panel that attempts to allow the user to change the filter state or remove them altogether. The interface is functional but does not affect the Sophos Content Filter or Transparent Proxy – Any changes users make in there will not affect their protection, as they will automatically revert.
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