The M-series transition: An update.

I waited a very long time to do this! I lingered on the last Intel machine for three years... Here's where I'm at. Executive summary: It's gone pretty well.

Upgrading to the M2 required a forced upgrade to MacOS 13 (aka Ventura). This was almost as worrying to me as the hardware change. I used to upgrade to the latest-but-one MacOS eagerly each year, but not for about the last five years...

Since then, MacOS upgrades have added only dumb features and bloated the CPU, disk, and memory usage with endless logging and shovelware daemons. One example of dozens: There is now a "News" app that you cannot uninstall and that constantly runs in the background to fetch news stories, just in case you launch the app. Infuriating.

Anyway, after multiple rounds of updates to bring Ventura to version 13.6.7, the OS mostly stays the hell out of my way, which is the most I can ask of it. A lot of that garbage still runs in the background and when I find myself going mobile more often I'll need to start weeding it out.

Now for the state of the software I consider vital:

• Bartender 4: I use this mainly to re-compress the menu bar widgets that I frequently use (iStat menus and Little Snitch) so they take up less space, like they used to on pre-Ventura operating systems. It also helps deal with the damned notch. Apparently there's a "version 5" that's required for MacOS Sonoma and later, which has been rewired by a different developer to install an invasive certificate and send out telemetry and crap. So, if I ever have to move past Ventura, I'm going to have to abandon Bartender and look for something else.
• GitX: Runs fine; native build. I like its history view more than any other visual Git tool.
• iStat menus: Works fine and is just as awesome as ever.
• iTerm: Brilliant program. Works as before.
• 1Password 7: Still works. It's the last version you can license forever, rather than paying a f*@%& monthly fee. I'll use this version until it breaks and then abandon 1Password entirely. No way in hell I'm paying a monthly fee just for software to sit on my computer. That's insanity.
• Little Snitch: This is pretty essential. So many other apps out there waste my bandwidth and violate my privacy by sending stuff out behind my back. With this I can catch it, and shut it down if I choose. Now if only phones had this sort of thing. Since I'm on Ventura I'm using 5.7.6, which is just fine.
• Lunar: Runs better, since now I can over-crank the display up into HDR mode when outdoors, since I'm now on an HDR display. As before, I can under-crank it down to almost nothing in dark rooms.
• Visual Studio Code: Runs great. Brilliant extensible development environment. My bread-and-butter. Aside from the standard "official" type providers for Python, C++, PHP, and so on, my favorite extensions are GitLens and Merlin32 Assembly by Dagen Brock.
• VLC: Flexible video player. Runs fine.

Software I need occasionally:

• Audio Hijack: Sometimes you just want to record what another app is generating, to grow your weird sample collection. This does that, and can also do other stuff like transcribe the spoken-word notes I often rant to myself when I'm driving.
• BackupLoupe: Native build; runs fine. I use this to inspect Time Machine backups and pick out individual files for restoration.
• CoconutBattery: Native build; runs fine. This is just to satisfy my curiosity, really.
• DB Browser for SQLite: Sometimes you just gotta open a DB file and poke around inside. Runs fine.
• DEVONthink Pro: Runs great. This is where I organize all my paperwork, going back decades. Great features and interface, and I get fine-grained control over what synchronizes to the phone. It's many gigabytes of data, and goes directly over local wifi rather than passing through iCloud, which is what I want. The pro version was expensive but worth it. I have every piece of paperwork relevant to my life available on the phone and searchable, even if there's no cell signal. It never goes into the cloud, so it can't be stolen from there.
• Eagle: This is a fast and flexible clip art manager. Organizing clip art in Lightroom or Aperture quickly became awkward and slow, so I moved it all here. It's great, with one exception: It sends telemetry to some kind of Google API as you use the app. I block that with Little Snitch.
• Gemini 2: Just a bulk duplicate file finder with a decent interface. Runs fine.
• GIF Brewery 3: Still probably the best way to make an animated GIF... What a world. Runs in translation, but fine.
• HandBrake: Excellent and very flexible media transcoder. I use it to make very small video files for UI demonstrations. Runs fine.
• Hex Fiend: Sometimes you just need a hex editor. Runs fine.
• MacJournal 7: Works as before, no apparent differences. I use this program for long-term notes that are only relevant to a certain day or range of days. It can handle thousands of entries with no slowdown, and has way more features than I'll ever use.
• Microsoft OneNote: Works fine, no apparent differences. Free to use, and syncs with the phone version. I use this to organize work-in-progress journal entries, recipes, and all kinds of information about my "stuff": Car, house, etc. The primary strength here is that it synchronizes easily and you can edit easily in both places. (Apple's own "Notes" app is glitchy, much less flexible, and a storage hog. I only use it for brief notes which I then move elsewhere.)
• Podcast Archiver: Runs fine. Want to download the entire available archive of a podcast? This is your thing.
• MP4tools: Handy utility for converting video files to MP4 format from other container formats like MKV and AVI. Can transcode if necessary, and can combine and separate streams, including subtitles. Runs fine.
• Rubitrack: I use version 5, since it's the only version you can get the so-called "pro" features for without paying a damned subscription fee. It runs just fine via the Rosetta translation layer.
• Signal: Works fine, no apparent differences.
• Slack: It's bloated and I'm not a fan of it, but it's essential for work. Runs fine.
• XLD: An audio transcoder that's lightning fast. Runs fine.
• YouTube To MP3 Converter: This can turn any YouTube video or playlist into a sequence of audio files on your computer. I use it to download all the White House press conferences for bulk listening, since the White House has decided to decommission their podcast version of the press conference.
• Zoom: Runs fine; native build. Getting a bit bloated, but what can you do?

Virtualization and emulation:

Parallels:

This is where things get tricky. Once I switched to M-series hardware I could no longer create a "virtualized" environment for running any Intel-based operating system, including old ones by Microsoft and Apple. I had a sample and sound editing environment running in Windows XP that I wanted to preserve, and I wanted some means to run old versions of MacOS in order to use old hardware interfaces.

Waiting three years did it: Microsoft eventually anointed Parallels as an official virtualized environment for running the ARM-based version of Windows, and Windows itself contains an intel translation framework that allows it to run old stuff quite well, including graphics-heavy games. To my surprise, I can start up Windows 11 and launch and play Ultima 9 - a 25-year-old game that is notoriously graphics heavy - and it runs perfectly.

What's more, even though I can't utilize the eGPU any more or boot directly into Windows, I can still install Skyrim in the virtualized environment, and it seems to run about as well as it did on the old Intel laptop with the eGPU attached. That, ladies and gents, is astonishing. Same with Civilization VI.

But what do I do when I want to run an older OS?

Time to use UTM:

This is not virtualization software, it's an emulator. It's interpreting code for other CPUs a piece at a time and recompiling it on-the-fly to native code. So, it's way slower. But the good news is, the M2 I'm using is so fast that emulation is a practical approach. With a lot of tinkering, I've been able to assemble emulated environments for:

• Windows XP (a bit glitchy)
• Windows 98 SE (not very useful)
• Windows 95 (for launching absurdly old software, mostly as a curiosity)
• Macintosh OS 9.2
• OS X 10.4 "Tiger" PowerPC version
• OS X 10.7 "Lion" Intel version
• OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" Intel version

The machine can run the PowerPC version of Tiger fast enough to drive my Epson scanner to scan 35mm slides. (The scanner is over 20 years old, and Epson's M-compatible scanner software can't even see it.) While it's scanning, the machine uses 24% of one CPU constantly, which is pretty ridiculous considering it's just driving a USB2 device. But the M-series chip is so dang small the machine doesn't even get warm from it.

Same deal with the "Quad-Capture" external USB audio interface. The drivers for Tiger still work. The thing is just old enough that Roland decided to abandon it, and draw the support line at the "Octa-Capture" instead.

So, things are pretty well settled out. I barely even miss the eGPU, which surprises me a lot.