My Take On This Week’s Mac Updates

Since I’m without even taking a proper break, I haven’t been able to take part in the blow by blow as Apple “phoned in” the Mac updates this week, but I still have feelings about them.

I must confess I have zero enthusiasm for the iMac update. But I did chuckle at Nilay Patel’s take on Apple’s latest work of art in the unlabelled charts space, and think it is a very good example of how Apple’s marketing can be completely out of touch with reality:

Excel productivity with the M4
the unit is probably VLOOKUP()s per second

But re-focusing on the hardware, I found most of it meh. For starters, the iMac is not for me anymore (even if I did find the “desk cam” feature very neat), and the new Magic Mouse is still… .

My years of using iMacs since the original, lovely G4 Luxo-like “lamp” and from then through the G5 and the 27” Intel i5 (which is gathering dust in a corner) have shown that the iMac is a flawed machine if you value long-term maintenance–and any sort of upgrade ever since the M-series machines took over.

The MacBooks are… nice, but mine is plenty good enough for quite a few more years, even if Apple Intelligence evolves apace (like I wrote , it is very far from either useful or impressive).

the new, more compact mini
Power button included, but not shown because it was designed by the folk who did the Magic Mouse...

The new mini, though, is the thing. The M4 Pro models almost nail the sweet spot a few notches below the Mac Studio (which will, of course, move the goalposts again when it comes out), and I am very tempted to get one once I can scrounge up enough money to spare, since my M2 Pro is starting to feel a bit “tight” in terms of CPU and storage.

However, the mini remains a hostage of the Apple tax on storage and RAM.

I know how much 1TB of decent SSD storage costs–in fact, for roughly €200, and it just stinks that Apple still charges through the nose to have a decent base amount of storage built in and gimps the entry-level at 512GB.

The real story, though, is the baseline amounts of RAM–starting at either 16Gb or 24GB (for the Pro), they simultaneously remove the stigma of the 8GB entry-level and make the available upgrades (48GB for €460, for instance) seem like a rip-off.

This was definitely a conscious decision to make the base models more attractive while ensuring they will fully support Apple Intelligence (which will likely require your machine to have local models permanently loaded in-RAM), but the SKU tiering is still a bit too rich for my taste.

And, of course, having to pay a premium for a 10GbE network interface (with mini-PCs and €100 SBCs shipping with 2.5GbE) just sours this particularly cute Apple.

But hey, at least the Mac mini got a real upgrade, unlike the . It is finally a machine free of most of its previous compromises, and if it weren’t for the power button being on the bottom, it would be perfect.

Back to the Grind

As of today, I am back at Microsoft Consulting–or, as it’s known these days, Industry Solutions Delivery, in the role of a Principal Program Architect.

And even with today being a local bank holiday, I already had two calls and have a deadline for Monday.

I completely re-vamped my office, and I pondering about how moving to consultancy and advisory was something that didn’t really sit all that well with the engineer in me.

I know I will go through all of those mindset changes again– this time simply because I need to get my kids through college, although it does come with the bittersweet benefit of working with people whom I’ve known for a long time now.

The scenario is a marked change, again: Instead of doing niche technical stuff in the telco industry (AI-centric, but with very tightly focused use cases), I’m going back to large-scale, cross-technology program management.

And instead of doing it with US engineering and product teams for a global market (in the telco industry), I will be doing it with Western European folk for the “local” market–but cross-industry and focusing on improving our customers’ business, which seems like a great way to leverage the soft skills I’ve picked up in the intervening years doing startup advisory at Bright Pixel and the odd bit of industrial systems design.

So yes, there is going to be a lot of Excel (and Powerpoint) in my life again. And calls. And discussions about governance, processes, timelines, people and outcomes, with tech going back to being “just” an enabler and having to field a fair chunk of sales madness and constant, short notice pivots.

And it is going to drive the engineer in me absolutely crazy, because I really liked the engineering bits of my old role and I’ve .

But things change, and these days you can’t just commit to doing bleeding edge technology in a niche. I’ve always been and , so even though I would love to do pure ML/AI work in a few very specific use cases where I know it makes a difference the truth is that there just isn’t an opportunity to do it outside the US.

And sticking to a single industry (especially one ) isn’t a good survival strategy, so this would ordinarily be a good thing.

The Travel Thing

Except that I am currently freaking out about the fact that, somehow, we’re back to the completely stupid idea that we need to have to take an assorted set of meatbags, fly them thousands of kilometers across a continent to a single location by leveraging the most time-wasting and environmentally-unfriendly processes known to our civilization (at which airports still excel), and then fly them back home after a set of meetings that could have been an email.

This is the bane of consulting, especially since it is still done at too short notice and without even considering the meatbags might have a life–and personal plans, and a family, a pressing need to unwind, daily, in the face of a stressful occupation, or just health issues that make flying (and disrupting their personal routines) an ordeal.

So yes, it seems that face-to-face meetings are back on the menu, and I am going ballistic since I happen to both hate traveling for business purposes and the hypocrisy of building vapid pseudo-relationships.

It’s as if a part of the industry has forgotten we’ve spent the past five years being almost supernaturally effective working remotely and sharing information much more effectively through video calls (and never mind that audio conferencing has been with us for many, many decades).

It is not an auspicious (or even sane) way to start a new role, and I am already dreading the first time I have to fly somewhere for a meeting that could have been a Teams call, seniority be damned.

Making the Radxa X4 Even Cooler

Back , I went to some trouble to go over its thermal characteristics and how well that massive heatsink worked.

At the time, I resorted to using my own thermal pad to get the best possible contact between the CPU and the heatsink, but apparently that was not enough, because the board still ran a bit hot under load.

This weekend I decided to do something about that–I took one of the SSD copper heatsinks I had lying around, verified that it was thin enough (it was exactly 1mm), cut it to match the heatsink contact plate, and applied some thermal paste:

Copper shim in place
Checking the shim size after cutting. I also padded out the VRM "trench" to ensure they had some cooling.

And behold, the X4 booted to a nice, cool 28°C:

# sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +28.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 0:        +29.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1:        +29.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 2:        +29.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 3:        +29.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

To verify that this was not a fluke, I ran the same load test I had used in my original review, and the temperatures peaked at 48°C, staying well below the 96°C I got last time:

temperature chart
A vastly improved result over the initial benchmark

Even better, the board had a steadier CPU boost to 3GHz at the start, and held up nicely at 2.5GHz for the duration of the test, without the slight throttling I had observed before:

MHz chart
Average MHz across cores

I’m quite pleased with these results, and I’m going to leave the shim in place to (finally) do some testing with Windows. It’s a simple, effective solution that doesn’t require any permanent modifications to the board, and it seems to work quite well.

Caveats

I should note that the original testing was done in August and at higher ambient temperatures (even if, according to my office thermometer, by only about 4°C), but even then the difference is quite noticeable. I’m not sure if the thermal pad I used was sub-par (it was what I had on hand that bridged the pretty wide gap between the X4’s CPU and the heatsink), but the shim definitely seems to have done the trick.

Also, I kept the heatsink fan, but I’m not sure it’s even necessary anymore. I’ll have to do some more testing to see if it makes a difference in practice (I suspect it will, but I’m not sure how much).

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