All external hard drives are physically the same, whether or not they're marketed as being Mac-friendly or not. Mac-ready drives usually cost a little more for the same piece of hardware that you'd otherwise get. So, if you buy an external hard drive that is formatted for Windows, you need to ...
Internet Recovery Disk on 2010 Macs now boots to Sierra instead of Lion
If you have a 2010 or Early 2011 model Mac, and have current firmware updates applied to it, you can boot it into Internet Recovery. This would allow you to install 10.7 Lion, but only if you'd previously downloaded it from the Mac App Store. But I've discovered that these older computers instead ...
Installing old versions of macOS
Usually, you want to be running the latest version of macOS, which at this moment is 10.12 Sierra (version 10.12.3), available for free from the Mac App Store. But, sometimes, for one reason or another, you might want to install an older version of macOS. Here's how you get them, and some of the ...
Save your SSH passphrase in your Sierra keychain, like you used to be able to
One of the Mac’s best features for tech types has been disabled by default in Sierra: being able to save the passphrase for an SSH public-private key pair in the macOS keychain. If you don’t know what that means, then you probably don’t need to worry about it. But if you do, it means that you’ll ...
Brand new Mac models have special builds of OS X and require special cloning
So you've got a new MacBook Air 2013 with the all-day battery and the superfast PCIe based SSD interface, and you want to clone over from your existing Mac that you used to love but now feels underwhelming. And you wanna take advantage of the fact that, unlike other any other operating system I can ...
Thunderbolt triumph when setting up a Mac Mini Server
Unlike most Macs, Mac minis and Mac Pros that are sold to be servers are supposed to come with Screen Sharing (VNC) turned on in OS X, so that you can set them up from another Mac even if you don't have a screen and keyboard attached. This Apple Knowledgebase Article explains how. Except we've now ...