A lot of stuff ends with sudo too.

Still, it’s marginally safer than logging on as the root user.

In reply to a post by billford:

Yes, backups are always a good idea before messing with the OS

Not sure whether I'll bother- my main machine won't upgrade beyond MacOS26 anyway (Intel hardware), and the Neo was mostly bought out of curiosity and as a (not too expensive) temporary backup machine if I ever needed it. The only half-serious work it's been used for is a bit of DVD ripping and transcoding with MakeMKV and Handbrake.

At which it was pretty quick, I must say.

Fair enough, according to Mac forums there is another way of doing it

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/10/05/apple-intellige...


what do you use for DVD ripping? i find Mac music is pretty slow, certainly slower than my PC. I do have To flac converter2, which is okay, still a little slow, but it is Flac only

I'm no Mac expert so I'm distinctly nervous at the command line at the best of times* and, even on a "secondary" machine, with something like this I'd make damn sure I knew how to recover if it all went pear-shaped.

A good position to take. I used to be a unix admin and a space in the wrong place on an rm command I managed to wipe out the whole box - had to restore it from backup (luckily I also managed the backup so was able to do it with no-one being the wiser).

I could probably do this on a spare machine, with lower risk, should anything go sideways or I make a mistake. But as it’s not really pressing (for me anyway) I’d prefer to wait and see until Apple does anything with a future update - there’s enough attention being drawn to this and they want to appear to be on the users side when it comes to ‘imposing’ AI on them - so let’s see…

If they don’t come around, then I may roll the dice, but I’m not missing 12-13GB so desperately that I need to roll the dice now.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I’m not missing 12-13GB so desperately that I need to roll the dice now.

I agree with that - 15GB is nothing nowadays. But the problem is that Apple still sell new computers with only 256GB storage. That is woefully inadequate nowadays. Even the 1TB of my Mac mini would be pushing it a bit if it weren't for the ease of adding fast external storage. That, as has been said, is not such a convenient prospect on a laptop.

Apple should not be selling a laptop nowadays with only 256GB storage. It's like selling a computer with 4GB RAM and no prospect of upgrading it.

Laptop / desktop I personally won’t buy anything with less than a TB in storage. Trouble is prices have become crippling in the last 12-15 months on RAM and storage. There are savage supply chain shortages and the prices are insane.

Much of this is unseen, with a modest vanilla sort of spec. But anything more than this is a rude awakening to RAMageddon and the supply chain trashing that the AI hypercalers have inflicted on us all. Rant over.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

what do you use for DVD ripping? i find Mac music is pretty slow, certainly slower than my PC. I do have To flac converter2, which is okay, still a little slow, but it is Flac only

I was ripping video DVDs, not audio, into m4v format for iTunes and Apple TV. Handbrake used to work fine on its own but later versions won't look at DVDs with copyright protection. After a bit of hunting around I found MakeMKV, which will and does what it says, but the aforementioned apps won't read mkv files (and anyway they're HUGE!) so I still used Handbrake for the m4v conversion.

I haven't ripped any audio CDs for years, not since the days of iTunes, but from memory I just imported them direct. Time wasn't really an issue- if it looked like being a long job I'd just start it off last thing at night and go to bed .

Legality is still marginal of course, but it's for personal use only so more or less OK.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I’m not missing 12-13GB so desperately that I need to roll the dice now.

It's not a complete showstopper for me either, even on the Neo, it's the principle of having something large on the disc that I didn't ask for, don't want (with a degree of passion ) and can't get rid of .


eta- but like you I'll probably give Apple a chance to listen to the users.

Edited by billford (Tue 06-Oct-26 10:25:04)

In reply to a post by ian72:

luckily I also managed the backup so was able to do it with no-one being the wiser.

A good sysadmin always knows how to cover his tracks

A really good sysadmin leaves no tracks to be covered. No-one knows about the day I managed to infect the main file server with a virus.