Glenn Fleishman - Take Control of Your M-Series Mac

This book both teaches you about how the M-series chips work and the differences they have from Intel processors, and offers insight into areas like battery life, backups, security, and recovery. You can read most of the book in any order.

• Its useful to understand how the M-series chips work and how Apple baked security right into the chip; see

• Learn about the extended battery life with M-series Macs and how to measure and manage it; see

• Understand how backups work in Big Sur with an M-series chip; see

• Get to know recoveryOS, the new special boot option for reinstalling macOS, controlling security, and more; see

• Figure out whether FileVaults extra protections work for you; see

• Learn about Big Surs extra protections for system files; see

• Modify system security for specific purposes; see

• Most iOS and iPadOS apps can be installed and run on an M-series Mac; see

• You can run a pre-release version of Windows that works on M-series processors today; see

The new M-series chips are profoundly different from the Intel generation they supersede. For those who have read up on the architecture of an iPhone or iPad, the M1 Apple silicon will seem familiar; those who havent may feel at sea. In this chapter, I explain how a system on a chip (SoC) works, whats different from the Intel world, and how Apple bakes security into hardware in their own silicon.

You dont have to be a chip-head or a hardware expert to understand the details that follow, nor will there be a test at the end. The idea is to give you a sense of whats newand sometimes extraordinaryinside the M1, and how special features enable entirely new capabilities.

Tip: If you find chip-based technical detail not quite as interesting as I do, skip ahead to , which is more critical to understanding parts of the rest of the book.

A traditional CPU-based system wastes a lot of time and energy moving data between it and other chips across a circuit board. Every time memory is manipulated, a security coprocessor needs to perform encryption tasks, or graphics operations have to be offloaded to a GPU (graphics processing unit), theres a huge amount of signaling and voltage that consumes power, delays actions, and generates heat.

A computer will often also have separate chips for each type of controller, a combination of firmware and processor that manages communication with hardware devices. That includes standards like Thunderbolt, USB, and PCIe that connect your computer to printers, displays, and drives. (PCIe is typically used to connect expansion cards in computers with slots.)

Note: Some controllers come in multiples to create separate data paths, or buses, for different ports or sets of ports. The M1 Macs apparently have two controllers for Thunderbolt 3/USB 4, allowing two buses with up to 40 Gbps of throughput on each.

A computer also needs radio chips for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (and sometimes cellular), as well as storage chips packaged as solid-state drives (SSDs).

On an Intel-based Mac (or an AMD- or Intel-based computer of any kind), the processor is a generic model available to any manufacturer. The rest of the chips required to make up the computer are largely commodity items, sourced based on cost and features. Apple uniquely has often designed or had made to its spec some secondary chips to provide a specific set of features or meet certain performance criteria.

But taken altogether, every CPU-oriented computer is a Frankenstein, however nicely assembled and however well every part works together.

In contrast, a system on a chip combines nearly every function into a single hunk of silicon. It is more like an organism designed in the lab and produced from scratch, in which each part is designed to work with each other. Instead of lumbering along and occasionally delivering 100-page soliloquies (Go read