For Adrian

Have you had any WiFi issues with your M2 Pro?

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Have you had any WiFi issues with your M2 Pro?

I don't use Wi-Fi. What issues are we talking about?

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I don't use Wi-Fi.

Very wise. It has its uses for some bits of kit I'll admit, but otherwise it's a device of Beelzebub

Oh that's not a problem, then.

Mine was having a hell of a problem staying connected to the 5GHz channel (ridiculous lost packet levels), and a combination of a bit of Googling and a moment of inspiration led me to ID the culprit as an old HDMI cable - any lateral pressure on the plug and it set off a tsunami of interference that only affected 5GHz but made it unusable.

At the moment it is fixed by being very careful how I insert the plug. A new cable can wait until a new monitor.

So if you find yourself having to use wifi make sure all plugs are straight and snug. Also nature's way of telling me to wire up the house.

IMO it's a design defect in a machine that is otherwise an absolute screamer - seriously, it points at Photoshop and say "Ha! You call that complex?"

In reply to a post by billford:

Very wise. It has its uses for some bits of kit I'll admit, but otherwise it's a device of Beelzebub

I use Ethernet for as much as I can, if it has an Ethernet connection, then I will use it, even my printer.
Sometimes we have to use Wi-fi, most of my smart home stuff use Wi-fi, in fact I would say all of it apart from the Philips Hue and smart thermostats hubs.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Oh that's not a problem, then.

Mine was having a hell of a problem staying connected to the 5GHz channel (ridiculous lost packet levels), and a combination of a bit of Googling and a moment of inspiration led me to ID the culprit as an old HDMI cable - any lateral pressure on the plug and it set off a tsunami of interference that only affected 5GHz but made it unusable.

At the moment it is fixed by being very careful how I insert the plug. A new cable can wait until a new monitor.

So if you find yourself having to use wifi make sure all plugs are straight and snug. Also nature's way of telling me to wire up the house.

IMO it's a design defect in a machine that is otherwise an absolute screamer - seriously, it points at Photoshop and say "Ha! You call that complex?"

strange, it could be a ground problem or the shield of the plug, depends on where the antennas are.

I got to sort out the cables and make them better, put some longer ones in so I can pull them properly. I was going to use where the TV aerial co-ax goes from this room into the living room as I have never used the extensions since they were installed, they are not even connected to an aerial anyway.


not sure what you are on about with photoshop.

I suspect it's just and old and slightly worn cable + antenna positioning.

Didn't happen with the Intel mini, but occasionally the screen would just go fritz and need the plug pulling and reinserting to clear it (but so infrequently that it didn't enter my mind when trying to diagnose the M2.

I'm just saying it finds even the highest resolution, multi-layer images a breeze to deal with. The AI stuff that would have taken 10-15 minutes on my old box range from instant to 20 seconds on the M2 Pro.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

I suspect it's just and old and slightly worn cable + antenna positioning.

Didn't happen with the Intel mini, but occasionally the screen would just go fritz and need the plug pulling and reinserting to clear it (but so infrequently that it didn't enter my mind when trying to diagnose the M2.

I'm just saying it finds even the highest resolution, multi-layer images a breeze to deal with. The AI stuff that would have taken 10-15 minutes on my old box range from instant to 20 seconds on the M2 Pro.

I don't why you don't get a new cable, they are cheap enough, mine is a Rhino one, cost £7 for 3 meters.

Oh yeah, I am amazed at the power of this small machine, it does things that even my power hungry ryzen machine would struggle with.Ok so my Ryzen machine is getting on now, but even a more modern Pc would struggle unless I go for something like a R9 and some powerful video card, and then they would still take more energy to do it.

As it is running at the moment, just writing this, it is taking around 8 watts, my Pc took around 80 watts or so doing nothing, that is crazy. It went up to around 70watts when rendering a video.

I am not turning into a Mac fanboy as I have never been a fanboy of anything, I use what works for me and I don't normally get stuck on a brand as people would see if they came into my house. But I must admit I did prefer Corsair memory and drives to others., but even then the drive in my dock for the mac is a Maxtor. I have room for a NVMe drive in there as well, so will get one at some point, but not going crazy in price.
So as I said I am not a MAc fanboy, but I do love this machine, even some of the apps that comes included are good and as people will know I am not one for having built in apps, but numbers and pages are good. It is a bit annoying that there are apps I don't need, and I can't get rid of them, like the news app and Apple TV app, but I will just have to put with them being there.

Is Mac Os perfect? no, but it is certainly better than Windows and I wish I had listened to Mac owners before, but you live and learn.,

I think I may be trying to motivate myself to shell out on a new colour calibrated screen (also the existing cable is one of the DVI-hdmi jobbies that were rare enough to begin with). At the moment I just don't want to disturb anything because it's working well )

In reply to a post by ian_c:

I think I may be trying to motivate myself to shell out on a new colour calibrated screen (also the existing cable is one of the DVI-hdmi jobbies that were rare enough to begin with). At the moment I just don't want to disturb anything because it's working well )

I got a calibrated monitor a few years ago, an Acer, it is a good monitor.
What are you on about a DVI- HDMI cable is not rare, I have one here, not really used now, it is connected to the second monitor just in case.

I don't like disturbing things if they are working.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

What are you on about a DVI- HDMI cable is not rare, I have one here, not really used now, it is connected to the second monitor just in case.

I've got a few of them, such as this one.

VESA's DVI is a legacy standard, but is usefully electrically compatible with HDMI, whereas DisplayPort (DP) over either original, mini-DP or USB-C connectors is a electrically very different.

Lots of 2010 to 2016 or so era screens did not have HDMI ports due to the royalties the owner (rumoured to be Intel) charged, so VGA, DP and DVI were common on many makes of screen from Dell, Acer, ASUS, and others.

I just did a testing the Lightroom's new AI-driven Denoise tool. Same photo (the Intel has an archive of my library)

Intel Mac mini (2018) 8GB RAM. 7 minutes.

M2 Pro (2023) 16GB RAM - 25 seconds.

Wow, that is amazing, ok so there is a 5-year difference in the age of the machines, but that is still impressive.


i am hoping I have solved a annoying thing. I have a dock that has a hard drive in, but now and again it would vanish, which was annoying if trying to get a document from it. I would either have to unplug it from the mac and plug it back in or reboot the mac.
what I have done is moved the user directory onto it, hoping that because the mac uses it a lot, it will keep it alive. It is not slowing down the computer at all, so we will see. At the moment the activity light is flashing like hell, so it shows how much the mac access the user directory.

What is strange is that it don't happen with the large 8TB external drive I have connected to the hub on the monitor and then in turn to the mac, that will keep going with no problem at all.

Just a question, do you turn your Mac mini off or put it to sleep?

That seems a bit of an extreme solution to me. Did you do the basic troubleshooting of running Disk Utility's first aid over the volume? A volume not mounting is usually a sign of problems with the volume. I'd be twitchy about putting my user directory onto a disk I'm not convinced about. What format is the volume? APFS or HFS+?

(BTW, only format a new drive with it plugged directly into the Mac. Doing it via hub can do irrecoverably bad things to a new drive.)

For all I love about the Mac, I've always had issues with USB drives getting disconnected randomly (across four different Macs and lots of different drives/caddies). Sadly I don't know how to fix that issue.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

That seems a bit of an extreme solution to me. Did you do the basic troubleshooting of running Disk Utility's first aid over the volume? A volume not mounting is usually a sign of problems with the volume. I'd be twitchy about putting my user directory onto a disk I'm not convinced about. What format is the volume? APFS or HFS+?

disk utility would not make any difference, the drive is fine, it is in a dock that is connected to the USB 3c. something like what is in the picture via this link. Space inside for two drives, a SSD and NvME.

it will mount, but if it is not used for a while it will just vanish.

The idea did not work anyway, it works fine while the machine is in use, but when in sleep mode, the drive still don't come back

(BTW, only format a new drive with it plugged directly into the Mac. Doing it via hub can do irrecoverably bad things to a new drive.)

The drive connected to the monitor hub have been reformatted as extFat, but was done via the plugging it into the dock and it is fine

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

For all I love about the Mac, I've always had issues with USB drives getting disconnected randomly (across four different Macs and lots of different drives/caddies). Sadly I don't know how to fix that issue.

The one connected to the monitor is a large spinney drive, so has it own PSU. the dock also has a PSU, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. You would have thought Apple would have sorted out that problem by now.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

You would have thought Apple would have sorted out that problem by now.

It's been happening to me intermittently for at least the last 3 or 4 versions of the OS, the same number of computers (all iMacs) and any number of hard drives (mostly WD) both with and without hubs. Doesn't happen often, but when it happens I find power cycling the drive gets it back again. Doubtless other ways would work, but on my setup that's the easiest one to get at

Edited by billford (Sat 22-Apr-23 22:29:11)

In reply to a post by billford:

It's been happening to me intermittently for at least the last 3 or 4 versions of the OS, the same number of computers (all iMacs) and any number of hard drives (mostly WD) both with and without hubs. Doesn't happen often, but when it happens I find power cycling the drive gets it back again. Doubtless other ways would work, but on my setup that's the easiest one to get at

Not really possible to power cycle the drive in the dock as there is no switch apart from unplugging it.
I have tried something in the terminal to change how long it takes to put the drive in sleep mode, changed to a maximum of 1410065408 something or other it may work. I put the user folder back as default
I checked the cables, the PSU, it all works. so we will see

My feeling is that there's a flaw (if it can be called that) in the way Apple handle USB. Some reading around suggests that they may implement the USB protocols 100.00% to the letter, but of course this means there's no flexibility and as not everybody else is quite so pernickety this can lead to some interesting effects... not usually to the benefit of the user

True? No idea, but it could explain a lot.

Yeah, the Setachi and Quiizlab version have had a lot of positive feedback among the Youtuberati.

The only times I've ever had that issue was when the drive was crapping out or the connection was dodgy.

Disk Utility is a prudent precaution and you should do it from recovery mode (hold the power button down when starting up). (Sidenote: it is entirely safe to reinstall the OS from there as well). If it is an HFS+ drive you could also use Disk Warrior, but alas they have been able to update that brilliant app for APFS.

You do have your Admin user account on the internal drive, don't you?

It is a shame the dock is not thunderbolt, but after spending £1,300 on a computer, I did not want to spend a lot more.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Yeah, the Setachi and Quiizlab version have had a lot of positive feedback among the Youtuberati.

The only times I've ever had that issue was when the drive was crapping out or the connection was dodgy.

Disk Utility is a prudent precaution and you should do it from recovery mode (hold the power button down when starting up). (Sidenote: it is entirely safe to reinstall the OS from there as well). If it is an HFS+ drive you could also use Disk Warrior, but alas they have been able to update that brilliant app for APFS.

Mine is a Hagibis, which looks identical to the Quiizlab one in every way, but was cheaper. I did also look at the Setachi, I like the indent idea so the mac sits in it, but it it is NvME only, i wanted to use a SSD drive I already had, the Hagibis can accept both. The drive is APFS, since it is not going to be used with any other machine.
i used the following commend to change the drive sleep time, sudo pmset -a disksleep 1410065408.
So far it seems to have done the job, i left the machine alone for about an hour or so this morning as I was helping my brother sort out the wheels on his trailer and I can still access the drive. It is a SSD, so don't really need to sleep,

Thanks for the info, I know about the recovery mode, the way to get to it is different from older Macs, can also use Time machine from there as well.

You do have your Admin user account on the internal drive, don't you?

Yes, I have put it all back as it was as the computer got confused when coming out of sleep

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

what I have done is moved the user directory onto it, hoping that because the mac uses it a lot, it will keep it alive. It is not slowing down the computer at all, so we will see.

Don't do that.

That would have been a reasonably sensible thing to do on a traditional Unixy OS, on a fixed internal drive. It isn't a good idea on modern macOS, especially with an external drive.

While the underpinnings of macOS are still very Unixy, it has moved further and further from its Unix roots over the years. Things that were sensible to do in the past with filesystems are not necessarily sensible now.

Conveniently Howard over at The Eclectic Light Company (well worth adding to your RSS reader if you want to know about how Macs work) wrote about this today.

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/04/26/freeing-space-on...

In the past, one powerful solution has been to relocate your entire Home folder to external storage. This used to be done by copying the whole Home folder to the external disk, then changing Advanced Options for that user in the Users & Groups preference pane, but that’s an option no longer available in System Settings.

This has become increasingly precarious since Catalina brought the Boot Volume Group, and growing expectations that your Home folder would be found on the Data volume. Unless you really know what you’re doing, can spend the time getting it right, and have plenty of backups, I wouldn’t recommend that you try this, at least not in Ventura.

Also, get a copy if Daisy Disk if you haven't already

https://daisydiskapp.com

Edited by andynormancx (Wed 26-Apr-23 09:38:14)

One feature I find useful is Disk Images - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/d...

You don't really have to worry too much about the file system used on the device as long as the Mac can write to it.

I use one for iMovie so 1Tb of DV footage can be edited without using up my limited onboard storage.

In reply to a post by smouty:

One feature I find useful is Disk Images - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/disk-utility/d...

You don't really have to worry too much about the file system used on the device as long as the Mac can write to it.

I use one for iMovie so 1Tb of DV footage can be edited without using up my limited onboard storage.

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

It can if on an SMB share

In reply to a post by smouty:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

cheers for that, Mac can't write to NTFS, without some fiddling,

It can if on an SMB share

Yersah, i realise it can do that as I have an external hard drive on my Nas for back up and that can be read by the Mac