I will guarantee you that the single greatest bottleneck in terms of speed on the base 4K iMac is that slow spinning disk drive. People who spend $1299 for a 4K iMac in 2019 deserve not to see a spinning beach ball—but they probably will. This is one case where Apple should either take the hit on profit margin or just raise the price if it has to.

Jason Snell, Six Colors, “The iMac and spinning-disk disappointment“

The 2019 iMacs have at their core incredible Intel processors, large amounts of RAM, market-leading displays and powerful 3D cards. These are machines that can game with the best, display beautiful movies and photographs with incredible color fidelity, and rip through even the most complicated processing needs in a bare minimum amount of time.

And they also ship by default with old, slow 5400rpm hard disks that came to the marketplace in 2007 in 1TB capacities. When Hitachi released the first Deskstar with 1TB that year, at a whopping price of $399, they boasted a cost-per-GB of $0.40. Now you can have a SATA SSD for less than $0.25 per GB, and an M.2 SSD for $0.35 per GB.

Sure, some of the newly released 1TB drives in the iMac are mated to small SSDs, yes, but the Fusion Drive isn’t a substitute for full-size SSD. The speed just isn’t there. The maximum throughput of a spinning disk is around 1.5Gbps. That’s rarely achieved under all but the best conditions. Most of the time it’s under 1Gbps for a 7200rpm drive, let alone a 5400rpm drive, which will top out around 800Mbps under perfect conditions. A SATA-based SSD can do four to six times that throughput. topping out at 6Gbps. Those are available from OWC at these prices, retail:

If you move up to an M.2 SSD, similar to the kind that are using the in 2014-2015 MacBook Pros, the prices increase. So does the speed, up to about 16 times the average read and write speed of the 5400 rpm drives, topping out at 16Gbps. The current generation of MacBook Pros tops out closer to 20Gbps.

Apple has a hard job, to serve a wide clientele with varying needs, from home users, to education marketplaces, to corporate fleets, to small businesses and more. However, I can’t imagine that a 5400rpm drive on the desk of an Apple Executive, senior or otherwise, would last more than an afternoon. Why should it land on the desk of your average staffer, when they’re often the heart of an enterprise’s productivity? Why should it land in our schools’ computer labs, or on a creative’s desk?

We live in an era of unrivaled external and internal storage options and speed, with external disks coming in faster/better/larger/stronger, and cloud storage available without limits. An era where there are not 1, but 2 40Gbps buses on the back of the 2019 iMac ready to plug into a 1TB SanDisk SSD available for under $200.

But we also live in an era where every iMac’s base configuration has a 5400rpm drive still at its heart, just like 2007. Apple is giving us a sports car with a monster V-12 to people, only they’re disabling six of the cylinders to save a few bucks.

Three-toed sloth is a photo by Magnus Bråth and used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

This past week, I traveled to Seattle, Washington to join the Apple Admins of Seattle and the Greater Northwest at their monthly meetup, and to record an episode of the Mac Admins Podcast with my friends Chris Dawe, Jonathan Spiva and Vi Lynk, as well as my new friend Ashley Smith. The topic was fairly simple: let’s talk about career paths and career trajectories and all the crazy things a life in IT can bring.

We talk a lot about technology in our jobs, but we don’t talk a lot about our jobs in technology, and it was great to sit down and chat about how we’ve gotten to where we are, where we’re headed, and what we’re learning about working with people, machines, and applications. In particular, I found Vi’s conversation about relationships mattering in IT to be illuminating. How we fit our departments and businesses into each other is so important. It made me go watch her talk from Penn State again, to remind myself of who my internal folks are, who my external folks are, and so I can close the loop with so many of those people again in the near term.

Ashley Smith reminded me of the importance of being willing to do the legwork on a topic when you don’t know the answer, and that the best response to a question you don’t know the answer to is “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” We grind so many people through the grist mill of Tier 1 support, but we don’t spend time letting them learn, in favor of metrics that likely don’t have a good backing in objective reality. As part of managing service desks, we need to make sure that we’re not blindly adhering to metrics over the development of our people.

This week’s episode is a break from the minutiae of the job, in favor of some of the bigger picture. It’s worth your time to listen in the browser, or out on Overcast.

Seattle was a marvelous city to visit, even in the midst of winter, and I had so many incredible meals (Seven Stars Pepper! Harbor City! Jack’s! Arctic Club! Beer Star!) and conversations that it will remain in my heart. My thanks to organizers of the event, and to everyone that I got to see while I was out there for three days. Getting out to meet people in Mac IT all over the country is the best part of my job, and I can’t wait to do it again in March.

This Fall, Apple announced a service program for the non-Touch Bar MacBook Pros (also known as the MacBook Escape, for the hardware Esc key that they still have), specifically around the solid state drive that stores the operating system and user data. Think of a service program a lot like a car’s technical service bulletin program: designed to identify a potential failing of a given make and model of machine, and resolve that defect before it turns serious.

The Apple documentation for this repair is clear: the machine will have all of its data wiped during the firmware fix. Apple states: “Prior to service, it’s important to do a full back up of your data because your drive will be erased as part of the service process.” This means that you must backup the data before you take the machine to Apple. In our case, where Time Machine backups exist, we will perform a final update to the backup before the machine goes in. Where one does not exist, we will use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to a disk image.

Today, I got to watch as a technician completed this process on a client computer, and I wanted to catalog what happened, as there’s not a step-by-step guide available for admins. In this case, I had three affected machines, and a Genius Bar appointment. Two of the machines failed the diagnostic portion of the firmware fix, and one was successful, which gave me a look at both cases of the SSD Firmware Update.

The Basics of the Solid-State Service Program

Before the process began, each of our machines was inspected and made sure to be in operating condition. After a brief check to determine OS level and functioning status, the machine was restarted, its PRAM zapped, and then it was run through standard onboard diagnostics (ie, hold Shift-D at boot). Our friendly Genius also reminded us for the third time that all data should be backed up at this point, or forever hold your peace. Now the machine was ready for the next step.

The firmware update process was handled in a NetBoot environment, as these machines are not T2 machines, and thus can be NetBooted. A specifically-created NBI was used by the Genius to boot the machine to a single-use tool. The appearance of this tool was very similar to booting into recovery, where a standard window appears and offered a single tool, the SSD Firmware Update.

The actual process of running the SSD Firmware Update is quick. I clocked it at well less than three minutes. If there’s a failure, it’s even faster.

In The Event of a Failure

If the mechanism doesn’t pass muster, a failure dialog is displayed, and it advises that the machine’s SSD needs to be replaced. This is not something Apple was ready to do on the spot, and said it would need to go to depot for repairs. There was a silver lining here: the existing volume was preserved with its information. This allowed us to take the machine back and do a direct transfer of data to an alternate loaner machine and schedule the depot repair at our convenience. In short, the machine’s ready to go back to use for the time being, and you’ve got a good backup.

In The Event of Success

If the mechanism does pass muster, you will get one last confirmation before everything is wiped from the drive. This is the fourth time I was asked if there was a backup of the volume. There was, we proceeded.

After a short period — three to five minutes by my recollection — the firmware was updated and we could proceed. It was then booted into Internet Recovery, and we used Disk Utility to create a new APFS volume on the otherwise-vacant SSD. After the firmware update, there was nothing on the disk, not even an empty volume. In order for the OS to be reinstalled, a volume had to be created first.

Once that was completed, the OS was reloaded, and twenty minutes later we had a working machine again.

Summary And Opinions

The process here was, thankfully, fairly painless. The machines that failed the upgrade weren’t erased and can go gingerly into the hands of their users until we can identify sufficient loaners. The machine that succeeded is now deemed cured and shouldn’t have this problem again. But that takes us to the problem’s mere existence. We had 40 MacBook Pros that fit the description of the warranty program, and something like 22 of them have to go to Apple in the coming months. I feel particularly awful about the company where 11 of their 18 machines have to go in.

The effect of this service program occasionally requiring a depot repair is also deeply unfortunate, because how many loaners is a 15-person company supposed to keep around? In this case, it should be possible for an org to arrange to just have these machines replaced in their entirety. Machines that have this defect can just stop working in their entirety, leaving a trusted member of your staff facing a nightmare scenario of recovery. Worse, depot repair is 5-7 days.

To bolster good will, I would hope that Apple would consider a new machine swap for these machines to get them transferred in a way that was more respectful of the time of Mac Admins and Apple customers in general. It is also quite frustrating to arrange with Apple to do these firmware fixes en masse. It takes an hour to prepare the machine, an hour to transport it to Apple and wait in the store, and then another hour to two hours to restore the operating system and user data to the machines. In addition, this service program requires Apple to participate. For shops that are using internal technicians who are Apple-certified, this tool is apparently not available via Global Service Exchange or GSX. That means you either have to find an AASP who will help you, but still require you to bring in the machines to their bench, or you have to make Genius Bar appointments for these machines.

All of them.

This isn’t a good experience for the companies that pay to be part of GSX, or the organizations that can’t participate on that scale. And these machines are fairly popular, as they represented a good balance between cost and functionality in a world where the Touch Bar is still a bit of an unknown quantity.

Yes, this is a special situation. It’s unlikely that any future machine will need this fix, due to the migration of the storage controller into the T2 silicon that Apple uses for its storage controllers. That, however, underscores the need for a better customer experience to fix this issue in the longterm.

We now have to go back to users and request their permission to disrupt them again in the future, and that’s not a fun experience. Just swap out the defective hardware for new, and populate the refurb store with the difference. It’s the least Apple could do.

Overall, I’m a pretty healthy person. My blood pressure’s normal, my resting heart rate is in the low 70s, my cholesterol is normal, my blood sugar is normal, and I can go for a good long bike ride or walk without feeling winded. I’m heavy — my BMI is obese — but I’m in good health overall. (General reminder that BMI is BS.)

I bought my Apple Watch Series 4 when Apple announced it this summer, an upgrade from my Series 2. I was attracted by the fall detection (I’m an award-winning accident prone fellow) and also by the new ECG feature. I have a family history of atrial fibrillation, and I’m now 40, so some precautions seemed wise.

This afternoon, I was helping a client move offices, mostly just deconstructing a simple network rack and moving access points into new space. I was doing some physical work, but nothing anyone would mistake for exercise. But, then I felt it. My heart was pounding. I got dizzy. Tunnel vision. I had to sit down.

I took my heart rate on the watch and it was over 200. I spent five years as a competitive swimmer, and to my knowledge I never got above 195. Even riding up Box Hill on Zwift didn’t get me over 170 this winter. 200 is scary territory. I remembered the ECG functionality, and googled how it worked. I took a reading.

I didn’t know how to read it, and I knew I was in a bit of trouble, so I had a coworker take me up to MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a mile or two away. Triage saw me rapidly, and I unlocked my phone to show the nurse. She was setting up a more complicated EKG, but because my heart rate had dropped back toward normal, it might not have any clear result they could read beyond just normal operation.

As soon as the tele-doc came on screen, the nurse rotated my phone and put it up to the camera to show the doctor the rapid rhythm from half an hour earlier.

“Oh, that’s an SVT,” he said immediately.

I didn’t see what it had to do with Ford’s Special Vehicle Team, but he clarified that he meant Supraventricular Tachycardia. They wanted to make sure labs were taken, and that nothing abnormal in my blood work showed a more troubling cause. But the diagnosis was there in an instant, thanks to my wrist watch.

Both the attending and her supervisor wanted a look before the day was done, and I was sent home with instructions to go see my doctor (don’t worry, I’m going on Thursday), but now I’ve got something to show my medical team, as well.

Sure, a lot of the time it feels like we live in a dystopian version of the future, and I’m still not sure where the flying cars are, but today I used my wrist computer — list price $399 — to take an ECG before arriving at the emergency room, where a doctor, appearing in my room via video conference, was able to read that medical diagnostic and make a snap judgment that I was probably going to be alright for now.

Apple remains a company that exists five to ten years into the future, building bridges back to the present. Touch ID and Face ID. Secure Enclave. Device Enrollment Program. Apple Watch Series 4 Health Tools. Perfect? No. Better than the rest? By miles and miles.

Thanks, Apple. My heart is in your hands, it seems.