So yesterday evening, coming back from a trip (yes, I had one of those), I wanted to check a few things on my main machine, an almost fully specced out late 2015 27’’ iMac (i7 4 Ghz, 24 Gb RAM). This is a tremendous machine which has been chugging along for five full years, but I made a tragic mistake: it was already a huge investment for me at the time so I chose a 256 Gb internal SSD, which keeps choking the machine with various temp files, despite moving all my work data on an external 4 Tb SSD. And this limitation is strangling the machine for all the work I’m doing (working on multiple Gb Scrivener projects, producing podcasts, coding). There are numerous occurrences where I can’t update Xcode, where I run out of disk space and everything crumbles or gets weird. I have been holding off to my the next M1X MBP and Mac Pro, with great difficulty but still clenching my teeth…
So, switching the machine on last night, I could not anything. The mouse would move on the desktop, but nothing would react to anything. Reboot. Same thing. Reboot. This time, I notice there’s a bunch of apps asking for privileges they are supposed to have (disk access, accessibility for things such as BTT, Bartender and so on). Reboot. This time, I stay on my toes and click as fast as I can to close the host of dialog boxes before (I suppose) they conflict with one another, and I manage to get to Finder. I’m surprised that these apps ask for permissions they’re supposed to have, and I try granting them again, but no luck. Disk access, accessibility, screen recording permissions all stay blank and will not accept any apps.
Reboot. No luck. I’m starting to sweat (this is my work machine), I have backups, but working on anything else is a pain in my current setup and I’m starting to think I will have to move on to my MBP for work this week. Reboot – finally macOS sees reason again, all apps are granted permissions again, and I’m good, it works as it should.
Still, that’s 1h30 wasted between looking online, attempting fixes and so on – fortunately I did not have to do this on Monday morning.
This is the straw that breaks my back – I’m on Apple gear because I want (and need) things to work and this iMac is struggling to keep up with what I’m asking it. I’ve been running it a bit too long and there’s a good chance I could still run it like this in a year when I get to the new Mac Pro, but I’m starting to lose way too much time with it and I’m never entirely sure it can be rebooted safely.
So I bit the bullet and ordered a fully specced-up M1 Mac Mini this morning (16 Gb RAM, 2 Tb storage, 10 Gb Ethernet). I am planning to replace my NAS with a Mac Mini server at some point anyway so when I get to the M1X / M2 Mac Pro, this new M1 machine will be demoted to Plex / file server (and it will probably last two decades in that role…). Added a CalDigit TB3 dock to compensate for the lack of ports (and basically plug in there all my current USB-A gear without wondering about anything). My current iMac will go to my father as his work machine, and it will be an amazing computer for him (considering that he only does email / word processing / Internet browsing).
Now, of course, I can’t wait to get my hands on my new daily driver (10 days!), to put it through its paces, to use the internal storage to move in entirely to iCloud and ditch Dropbox, and so on.