Mac Power Users 736: Maintaining & Caring For Your Apple Hardware

Join Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users as we offer advice on how to best care for Macs, iPhones, iPads, and more, from cleaning to battery management and beyond. Then, we reflect on recent news, including the new MacBook Air and the death of the company’s car project.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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M3 MacBook Air has Faster SSD Speeds

A bit of good news from iFixit on the teardown of the new M3 MacBook Air: they have now switched to two 128 GB storage modules. You may know that in the first two iterations of the Apple silicon MacBook Air, the base storage models were significantly slower in read-write speeds than the other models in the line because they only used one socket for storage, significantly cutting down the bandwidth. With the M3 model, the device gets SSD write speeds approximately 33% faster and read speeds approximately 82% faster.

There was a lot of hand-wringing when the M2 model didn’t make any changes to the SSD problem. It could just be that the manufacturing timeline didn’t give them enough time to fix it. I would argue that they should have caught this problem before releasing the first one. Regardless, I’m happy that Apple did respond, and now customers of the lower-end MacBook Air will get better SSD read and write speeds.

Focused 199: Repotting and Retirement, with Jim Eagar

Jim Eagar joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about how to navigate the four phases of retirement with meaning and purpose.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

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Who’s Responsible For Age Verification?

There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing going on about age verification between software and hardware developers. Facebook (and now Tinder) argue that it’s up to the hardware seller to verify a user’s age. (Ben Lovejoy covers this over at 9to5Mac.) In a lot of ways, that makes sense. When you register your iPhone, it should know how old you are. That could give Apple the ability to prevent underage children from downloading dangerous social media apps. Of course, it’s not illegal to have these apps for underage children in every jurisdiction.

Likewise, the seller of these dangerous apps that can harm children should take more responsibility than just finger-pointing at the device manufacturer. There are plenty of ways for Tinder and Facebook to know when they have an underage user. And they, too, should be taking steps to protect these children.

And of course, don’t forget the parents. Some parents will want to grant their children access, and others will want to lock the devices down. In my opinion, the only way we’re going to really solve this problem is if the parents, the hardware and the software people all get together on this. I absolutely would like to see Apple take a more active role in this, but I don’t think it’s solely responsible for the solution.

The New M3 MacBook Air

Recently, Apple released new M3-based MacBook Air computers in 13- and 15-inch sizes. In addition to the faster processors, the new machines can run two monitors simultaneously. Specifically, they can run one 6k and one 5k monitor, provided the lid on the MacBook Air is closed. These new computers are very similar to the configurations on the M3 iMac released late last year, and this is a nice upgrade to the MacBook Air line.

Apple’s M3 MacBook Air is here.

If you’ve been waiting for a new MacBook Air, now is the time. I’ve frequently stated that the MacBook Air really is the laptop standard at this point. I don’t recommend getting a MacBook Pro unless you have good reason for one since the MacBook Air is such a capable computer, and now with the additional 15-inch size, it is even more so.

It’s interesting that these got released via a press release. Normally there is an event around this time of year where Apple releases several new products and it would seem like a new MacBook Air would fit within such an event. This makes me wonder if the other rumored devices like an M3 Mac mini and new iPads will also be released the same way, and Apple will skip a Spring event.

We’ll see.