Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • What the Cloud?

    My work includes quite a lot of explaining about how cloud backup can be configured and updated and how much it should be trusted, among other questions related to redundant server-based data storage. I want to make one thing crystal clear: There is nothing inherently different between the way servers operate and the way your machines operate at home, beyond layers of redundancy, variant OS, and complexity of filesystem organization.

    The truth is, at least under the average data storage and bandwidth use of a household, a custom-designed personal server is often perfect for daily needs and once it’s set up it can be just as reliable in so many ways. One perk is that you don’t pay a monthly or annual fee (beyond upgrading / replacing hardware, updating the OS and paying for internet service) and you are able to directly manage and configure all hardware and software without as much restriction and dependence on the IT staff of a cloud-based storage company.

    Some folks are intimidated by the concept of setting up a server in their own home, but remember that we are here to help! Some NAS (Network Attached Storage) drives we’re currently selling include the “Drobo 5N”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/82506/drobo-5n-network-drive-array, the “Seagate 8TB NAS”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/82934/seagate-business-storage-nas-4-bay-8tb-array. If you’re serious about having a long-term solution and willing to make the investment in a server rack, we could help you design a system of 1U servers that could theoretically rival the performance of many cloud-storage solutions, especially if your internet connection is strong enough. Plus, you’d be able to share access with trusted individuals in the same manner that iCloud or Google Drive allows you to.

    I’m not saying that services like iCloud or Amazon Cloud Drive or Dropbox or Carbonite or Google Drive are at all inferior to a home-based server. In many ways they outperform and can withstand far more catastrophic failure than many local alternatives. It’s a bit like apples and oranges – understanding that they each have their place, and neither will ever be fully secure or indestructible. Redundancy is key, but so is security and organization. These may be unreachable goals at their farthest theoretical extent, but we must do what we can to adapt to the entropy and loopholes of the universe and attempt to keep data both safe and accessible while keeping our tech as intuitive as possible.

  • There’s a lot of behind the scenes effort and training that goes into our service department. Small Dog Electronics is an authorized service provider for Apple computers, and this authorization comes with a lot of training and safety measures within our service department. Every computer that is checked into our service department goes through a checklist of Apple diagnostics and processes to accurately determine how to best resolve the issue that the machine is experiencing. Additionally all of our technicians go through a fairly intense and lengthy training processes before they begin working on customer machines. Even once a technician is certified as a Apple Certified Mac Technician their training does not end. With each new computer release technicians are required to take exams and training sessions on any new machine prior to working on that unit. We’ve recently had two new members join our South Burlington service team and they are currently going through our training process and certification steps. They begin their training at our service counter doing check in and check out of computers coming through our service department. We’re looking forward to having two more members in our service department trained and ready to help keep our service department running smoothly and efficiently.

    As a customer one of the most frustrating repairs that computers can need are battery replacements. To try and help customers get their computers back as efficiently as possible we’ve set up new processes and procedures within our service department over the last few weeks to get these machines back as quickly as possible. We know that down time for computer repair is a huge inconvenience for many users so we do our best to get machines back to our customers. If you feel that your computer is in need of a battery replacement and you want to find out more about pricing and turn-around time send an e-mail to “support@smalldog.com”:mailto:support@smalldog.com

    Our first flower bloomed this week at our main office in Waitsfield and the grass has begun to turn green. It’s really starting to look and feel like spring in Vermont.

    Thank you for reading!
    Emily Dolloff
    “emily@smalldog.com”:mailto:emily@smalldog.com

  • Oh boy! Baseball, basketball and hockey all going on at the same time. I don’t watch much hockey but the Blackhawks are my team so the playoffs are interesting. But how about those Boston Celtics. As Tommy Heinsohn said the other night, “the line at the betting window for the Celtics to win the east was very short” and yet they did it and will face the Bulls in the first round of the NBA playoffs.

    And of course, watching baseball is fun because I can do a lot of stuff while watching the game and the Cubs are favored to repeat but have a long season to prove they are worthy.

    Jezebel, my Olde English Bulldog is growing up fast and I have been spending a lot of time training her. She is going to be a big dog, she is 5 months old and already 45 pounds so training is important. Fortunately, she is a smart girl and has learned a lot. Walking around the neighborhood I have taught her to sit at crosswalks and not pull on the leash. But when she sees we are going to the dog park here in Key West, all bets are off. She pulls with all her strength no matter how many times I make her stop and sit and just cannot wait to run around in the large park by the ocean. There is a dog beach here, too, and we took her there and while she did seem a bit tentative she was swimming around with her life vest on.

    I just cannot imagine life without dogs in it.

    Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Lions and Tigers and Bears and Digital and Analog, Oh My!

    From time to time in Kibbles articles I’ve written, I’ve talked about the differences between digital and analog circuits, but it’s almost always in passing and tertiary to something else. I decided this week that it was worth doing a whole article about it. Some of this will probably be a bit of a refresher, but that’s ok. We have to start somewhere.

    People generally seem to understand that computers, smart phones, smart watches, even calculators…all that stuff is digital. We commonly refer to those things as digital, but we don’t often explicitly describe what ??makes?? them digital. First of all, the word “digital” isn’t what I would’ve chosen if I was choosing to name that class of circuits. We call them digital because they function entirely based on binary digits (0 and 1). This is fine, but if given the chance, I would’ve called them “discrete” circuits because this is more generic and more descriptive of the actual architecture itself. When I studied computer science in college, we actually had special math classes we had to take, totally separate from the mathematics department. These classes were called “discrete mathematics” and they revolve entirely around the specific types of mathematics relevant in so-called “digital” circuits and the higher level “computers” they make up. This includes things like boolean algebra (easy), graph theory (harder, but interesting and useful), set theory and combinatorics among many others. Discrete mathematics eventually prepared you for things like computational theory. By far the hardest thing I had to learn in those later classes was linear algebra. The one common thread in all of these classes though is that the units were discrete. There were no gradations, fractions, derivatives or integrations that you’d find in almost any other math class.

    The reason for the difference is the fundamental difference between digital and analog. Digital circuits can by definition only operate discretely. They are completely blind to anything that occurs within their discrete ranges. This doesn’t mean that digital circuits themselves can’t do analog tasks, or do things involving real numbers, but their operation does not use these things.

    Analog circuits on the other hand exist over an entire domain. Analog circuitry can be described by conventional mathematics (primarily algebra and calculus). Much like digital circuits are not ideal at perfectly replicating analog systems, analog systems are poor at functioning in discrete terms. A single digital circuit can be configured to calculate any number of different things and can even be reprogrammed for new tasks. Analog circuits can also “calculate” things, but they do so in a very different, specialized and limited way. I remember asking this question when I took an electrical engineering class. Why create some complex circuit that effectively calculates the integral of some signal when a digital circuit could be programmed to do the same thing? The answer is that digital circuits have a lot of overhead and take time to calculate something (due to clock cycles). The time they take is totally dependent on the efficiency and accuracy of the programming. An analog circuit doing the same thing would be accurate every single time and would do so at the speed of electricity (the speed of light). It would also be simpler in construction.

    An example of an analog circuit that’s performing a function would be an amplifier. The amplifier’s job is to take an input signal and boost its amplitude. A digital circuit could be programmed to do this, but to do so at virtual instantaneous speed and accuracy would be a tall order. The analog circuit would also be able to follow the input signal exactly at every single infinite point on its waveform. A digital circuit, because it’s discrete and slave to a clock, would miss all the pieces of the input signal that occur in between its clock ticks.

    People don’t often contrast analog and digital circuits this way, but I find it to be very accurate: digital circuits are flexible and generic, analog circuits are simple, fast and specialized. Different situations call for different circuits, which is why decades into the digital age, analog circuits are still incredibly useful. However, as digital electronics become faster, cheaper and more robust, they become able to approximate the specialized analog circuit performance at more and more acceptable levels. You can already see this happening in some applications. In 1971 you could buy a Dodge Challenger with a 6.98L Hemi V8. A powerful and complex engine in its day, it would have relied completely on analog electronics to run, to the extent it even used electronics at all. A carburetor doesn’t need a computer to help it mix fuel and air. Starting in 2011 the same car was available with a 6.4L HEMI V8. This engine uses computer-controlled fuel injection as well as a fleet of sensors measuring everything at every level of operation. The sensor data is fed to a computer that can adjust inputs to the engine allowing it to run cleaner and produce more power. Without the computer, the engine would barely run at all. The computer is actually able to work fast enough to deal with all of the inputs and create an accurate output in a timely fashion.

    Hopefully this was an interesting dedicated look at the differences between digital and analog circuits. If you have any suggestions for topics, or questions that you’d like to hear me answer about electronics, electricity or its applications, send me an email!

  • Notes!

    I have been a fan of Notes for years! I started out using the Notes program on my mac and used it for everything, and sadly, I mean ??everything?? including usernames and passwords. Thankfully I learned many years ago safer means of account login storage and abandoned my sticky note ways on my Mac.

    What I missed most about my sticky notes was a quick and all in one location for things I needed to jot down, hello and welcome notes! Notes has been out for many years and it’s certainly nothing new on iOS or macOS. Notes is an incredibly versatile program and one that I rely on heavily as another tool for keeping me organized and in order. I’ve written in the past about reminders, but I admit, try as I might I just can’t get away from Notes and find its versatility in features to be something that reminders just can’t compete with. There are several features within the notes program that go beyond just taking a simple note, and I want to share some of my favorite features.

    **Syncing**

    I think the ability to sync my notes across all of my devices is hands down the number one reason I use and just can’t break away from this handy little app. I can write a note on my computer and it automatically sends the note to my iPad and iPhone. With iCloud turned on and note syncing your notes update across all devices that are logged into your iCloud account. There is one catch to the auto syncing that is new in the last year or so. In order for your iOS devices and your Mac to get your notes you do need to make sure that in addition to to iCloud being turned on, all of your devices need to be running the latest OS. Last week I had an issue where my notes were syncing from my iOS devices to my Mac, but not from my Mac to my iOS devices. A quick look at my devices revealed I hadn’t run my most recent software updates.

    **Drawing**

    Did you know that you can draw within the notes program? Notes allows you to actually write a note in your own handwriting, but also allows you to draw and there is even a handy ruler so you can draw straight lines. There are a variety of colors to choose from to put a pop of color in and you have a choice of a pencil, and two marker options. The details aren’t as responsive or detailed as that of say the iPad Pro. But this little feature allows for handy on-the-go creations. You can easily and quickly sketch out an idea via e-mail, text and even social media. This feature only really works on the iOS, you can do some similar actions on the Mac via Mark Up.

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    **Mark Up**

    Within notes you can insert a pictures from your photo library (on the Mac you can just drag and drop the image into your note) and then you can mark it up! You can draw over the image, add text, shapes and more. I recently used this feature specifically when I was working to re-model and paint a room in my house. We took pictures of the room and used the mark up feature to finalize what colors and changes we were going to make in the room.

    **Locking Notes**

    Another cool feature with the notes program is that you can lock the notes. The only information that is viewable in the note is the title. A passcode must be entered on the computer or iOS device in order to see what is in the note. This is a great way to keep things just a little bit more secure on your devices. While you should keep things like passwords and account information securely stored in your keychain, this is another option. Admittedly if you’re given a code or access to something and need the information temporarily, it’s more practical to jot it in Notes and lock it. Likewise if your a busy mom or spouse and you find yourself making notes about a special event or gifts it’s nice to know you can keep wondering eyes away from your information and keep the surprise.

    Notes, the little app that does so much!

  • Beats X Wireless Earphones

    The new Apple AirPods are cool and I made a bet with a friend of mine about whether she would get a job interview or not for the Green Mountain Care board. I knew she would but she was skeptical so AirPods became the currency of the bet. Well, she got the letter from the Governor so I’m getting some AirPods but I have to tell you that I will probably not use them because I discovered the ultimate wireless earphones, the Beats X!

    I wear high-end hearing aids that stream my phone calls and can also stream music but the sound quality for music basically, well, it sucks. So, as I was contemplating my upcoming motorcycle ride to the big easy, I needed a solution. I grabbed a pair of Beats X and they have exceeded my expectations in every way.

    Unlike the AirPods, the Beats X are connected to each other. This was important to me as I didn’t want one AirPod flying out of my ear and down the road while I was riding. They are connected with a very comfortable Flex-Form cable and come with variety of eartip and secure-fit wingtip options offer further personalized comfort and stability. I found that the stock eartips fit perfectly.

    Pairing is simple, press the button on the right side which is also the on/off switch for 3
    seconds and a message pops up on my iPhone to connect the Beats X and then they were available and paired with my MacBook Pro, my Apple watch and my iPad. I have a lot of Bluetooth devices so in my case, I have to press the button for 5 seconds so that my iPhone knows I want to use the Beats X instead of my hearing aids.

    p{text-align: center;}. !http://blog.smalldog.com/images/5033.jpg!

    The Beats X last a full 8 hours of play time – I have tested that! Not only that, if you plug them in for 5 minutes you get 2 hours of charge! Apple has named that Fast Fuel. This is another reason that I installed that USB charger on my motorcycle. They charge with a USB charger and come with a very convenient short USB/Lightning cable.

    Much of this is made possible by the Apple W1 chip. Yes, these Beats X earphones feature the same Apple W1 chip as the AirPods. The W1 is custom Apple-designed silicon. In addition to standard Bluetooth 4.1 streaming and advanced power management, the chip adds a host of key features including balancing all of that sophisticated syncing (between the two earpieces, the case for AirPods and the audio source) with the sensor inputs (automatically pausing music if you remove one from your ear). The W1 chip also makes better use of power and enables the Fast Fuel rapid charging.

    Okay, so they are comfortable, they pair easily and they sip power slowly. How do they sound? I am not a audiophile but I have tried a lot of earphones in my day. I used to go to the big shows in Hong Kong with my friend Jason Wu and we would spend the entire day trying on earbuds, looking for some that would meet our Hammerhead standards. We did a few tests, cranking up the volume to see how loud they go and how distorted the sound was, making a phone call to see how that sounded and trying both music and dialogue. I became very very picky and have never found the right earphones but Beats X are the ones! They go plenty loud to enjoy the music over the roar of my motorcycle, they sound great on the phone and are perfect for watching that movie on the airplane.

    One other feature that I find very useful is that the earbuds are magnetic so they lock to each other when not in use making them even more secure when I stop for gas or need to talk to someone. They come with a variety of sizes of ear tips and a nice little carrying case. Beats X are my favorite earphones and are of course, in stock at Small Dog Electronics.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Spring is teasing its way into Vermont as friends send me pictures of daffodils making their way through the remaining snow and mud that is not quite as deep on the back roads. It seems like fall down here as some of the trees are shedding their leaves but the temperatures are rising and so is the humidity.

    We have made the very difficult decision to close our Rutland, Vermont store. This store in a very small community was unable to sustain the level of sales necessary to support the overhead. We tried hard and while we are leaving Rutland for now, we may come back some time in the future. It was a beautiful store and we enjoyed support from the town, our landlord and other Rutland businesses. We have completed some great renovations in our other three stores including HomeKit demo sections.

    Out Key West store has also had some changes and we have had a change in leadership there. Joe Lytton, who was with us from the start has moved up to Georgia to be closer to his family. He led the effort to renovate this store and did a remarkable job. Tommy Allen is our new store manager and Joanne Marius has been promoted to assistant manager.

    I was struck at how poorly United Airlines handled their customer service issue last week. From the beginning, Hapy and I have had the philosophy of empowering our employees to make customer service decisions. Often times we would get asked about a situation and rather than making the call we would simply ask the employee, “what would you do?” and let them make the call. We keep our eye on the true life-cycle value of a customer. The profit we make from a single sale pales in comparison to the value of a loyal customer. Some time ago, a woman that came to work for me handed me a book entitled “Customer Satisfaction is Nothing, Customer Loyalty is Everything”. The book sucked but the concept is sage knowledge. Building customers for life is our goal with every interaction.

    This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is an iPod sale! The iPod is Apple’s almost forgotten hit but many of us love our iPods. I use one on my motorcycle for tunes and I have another in my shop to blast rock and roll as I work on my bikes. This week only for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can take “$5 off any iPod Shuffle”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002651? and “$10 off any iPod nano or iPod touch!”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900002650?

  • Flood warnings in the Mad River valley as the snow melts and my neighbors report that Prickly Mountain road is a mess of mud. Down here in Key West, it is getting warmer each day. Jezebel was chasing a big iguana around the yard who decided to hang out on the wall for awhile. I hope that the iguana had a traumatic experience because they are real pests. I learned that they are not native to the Keys but the result of pets released to the wild who thrived in this climate.

    As our legislators struggle with how to deal with health care. I have a hint for them. Look at prescription drug prices. I have diabetes and most of my drugs that I take have been covered by Small Dog’s health insurance but now since I am on Medicare and buying my own prescription plan I am much more aware of the costs especially as I find myself in the ridiculous “donut hole” each year. The costs of life-sustaining drugs such as insulin and others have skyrocketed. I was shocked to see that on prescription was $6700 for three month supply. It is no wonder our health insurance costs keep going up while pharmaceutical company’s profits soar.

    Okay, off the soapbox, Don.

    Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,

    _Don, Emily & Hadley_

  • Reviewing The New iPad

    I’ll start this article by saying some of this information might come as a bit of a surprise to some of our readers, but I’ve passed up multiple iPad revisions and releases and have been using outdated technology for years! Normally when something new comes out from Apple, that product lands in my hands fairly quickly after the release. But for various reasons, I’ve stuck with my **original 16GB iPad mini** and passed up several generations of upgrades.

    We just started getting shipments in small batches of the 9.7″ iPad and I got to thinking that it’s time to upgrade my old faithful mini and officially pass it along to my youngest daughter. I’m a huge fan of the size of the iPad Mini and debated for several days if I wanted the iPad Mini 4 or the iPad with 128GB of storage. Ultimately I decided to go back to the larger screen and upgraded to the new iPad 9.7″ as I’m now using my iPad more for video watching.

    The reviews of the new iPad are mixed, it’s heavier than the iPad Air 2 it replaced and is slower than the iPad Pro. When I first took mine out of the box the weight was the first thing that I noticed; it does feel heavy. I held it up against the iPad Air 2 and it’s amazing that such a small difference seems so significant. Coming from a background of using a mini for the last several years it’s no surprise the weight was a temporary negative for me when I was unboxing the iPad.

    My reasons for upgrading were primarily speed of the iPad in everyday use and storage. With more and more streaming options and the ability to download and view content offline I found the battle of storage to be never ending. My first big test of the iPad was using Safari, running different apps and accessing my iCloud drive. Knowing this release was in some regards just a minor bump and refresh of the mid-range iPad family lineup this was an important trial for me. For someone going from an older and outdated iPad to this unit, there is a huge difference! Where I saw delays in just the apps themselves opening or just opening a new browser window on my old mini I experience none of that with the new iPad. Even something that seemed insignificant like how fast the screen rotates from portrait to landscape suddenly seems lightning fast, I actually debated turning off that feature while playing around with the iPad.

    I also spent some time both taking pictures and transferring some photos from my iPhone 7 plus. I was very impressed with both the image quality of the photos that I took and the viewing quality of photos that I moved from my iPhone. For an iPad and comparing it against some older models there’s a significant improvement with the photo quality. I then spent a little bit of time comparing sound quality from the iPhone 7 plus and the iPad and that one is a tough call. In our unofficial testing here at the office there was slight disagreement over which sounded better, so I’ll leave that final decision as undecided.

    Ultimately I went with the new iPad and my only regret is that I couldn’t get it in Rose Gold to match my watch and iPhone. This revision is not meant to compete with the iPad Pro in my opinion, but it’s a huge upgrade and an impressive unit for hold outs like myself. Apple has reduced the pricing and increased the storage capacities of their mid level iPads and I think that’s huge for the everyday iPad user like myself.

  • Mac Pro Revised

    On Tuesday Apple announced some revisions to the Mac Pro. The former $3,999 model is now the $2,999 base model, while the previously built-to-order 8-core model with dual D700 GPUs is now the high-end stock configuration for $3,999. Both models are equipped with 256GB PCIe-based flash storage, four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.

    The former quad-core model with dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs and 12GB of RAM now has 6-cores with dual D500 GPUs and 16GB of RAM, while the 6-Core model with dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs is now 8-cores with dual D700 GPUs and 16GB of RAM. There are no other hardware changes–not even Thunderbolt 3 ports.

    This is the first revision in 3 years and came with an apology of sorts from Apple for neglecting the Mac Pro. Surprisingly, and unlike Apple, they also indicated that all new Mac Pros will be coming in 2018 that will be modular, a common complaint about the current model is that it is not modular. They also announced that there will be new Apple displays to accompany the new Mac Pro.

    They also hinted that new iMacs would be coming that would cater more to the “pro” market.

    We thank Apple for this peak at the future. Knowing the roadmap does help us serve our customer’s needs better.

  • What's Slowing up my Mac? Look Closely with Activity Monitor

    Does it seem like your Mac is running slowly? It’s always possible that you need more RAM, a speedy SSD to replace a slow hard drive, or even a new Mac. But you might just have a rogue app that’s hogging your Mac’s CPU.

    Activity Monitor shows the processes that are running on your Mac, so you can manage them and see how they affect your Mac’s activity and performance. Activity Monitor is a kind of task manager that allows you see how apps and other processes are affecting your your CPU, memory, energy, disk, and network usage.

    Activity Monitor is bundled with every Mac. Open your Applications folder and scroll down until you see the Utilities folder. Open that to find and double-click Activity Monitor.

    The processes shown in Activity Monitor can be user apps, system apps used by macOS, or invisible background processes. Use the five category tabs at the top of the Activity Monitor window to see how processes are affecting your Mac in each category.

    * CPU
    * Memory
    * Energy
    * Disk
    * Network

    Activity Monitor can seem daunting because it lists every “process” running on your Mac. In many cases, a process is the same as what you think of as an app, so you’ll see processes for apps like Mail and Safari. However, some apps use multiple processes, and macOS itself relies on a ton of processes too. You can limit the processes you are looking at with the View menu. There you have the choice of limiting your view to:

    * All Processes
    * All Processes Hierarchically: Processes that belong to other processes, so you can see the parent/child relationship between them.
    * My Processes: Processes owned by your macOS user account.
    * System Processes: Processes owned by macOS.
    * Other User Processes: Processes that aren’t owned by the root user or current user.
    * Active Processes: Running processes that aren’t sleeping.
    * Inactive Processes: Running processes that are sleeping.
    * Windowed Processes: Processes that can create a window. These are usually apps.
    * Selected Processes: Processes that you selected in the Activity Monitor window.
    * Applications in the last 8 hours: Apps that were running processes in the last 8 hours.

    Those views show the impact each process has on those aspects of the Mac. For now, we’ll focus on the CPU view that’s the default, but if you were trying to figure out why your MacBook Pro’s battery was draining so quickly, you’d look in the Energy view.

    At the bottom of the CPU view is a graph of CPU load, and numbers that correspond to how much of that load comes from the system and how much from the user (apps you’ve launched). As long as the sum of those numbers stays under 100% most of the time, you’re probably fine. But if you’re near or at 100%, you’ll want to hunt for rogue processes.

    To identify them, click the % CPU column header to sort the process list by CPU power. If necessary, click again to change the direction of the sort so the arrow next to % CPU is pointing down, so those processes using the most CPU power are at the top. Be aware that the percentages in this column are by core (unlike the graph and numbers at the bottom), so a runaway app on a 4-core iMac could claim to be using as much as 400% in the % CPU column.

    Now watch the list for a while. If one process is sucking CPU power, you’ll see it at the top of the list. If it matches an app you’ve launched, quit that app to give other apps a chance at the CPU. That often solves your problem quickly. In the most extreme case, the process name will be in red, which means it’s not responding, at which point you can force quit it by selecting it and then clicking the X button at the left of Activity Monitor’s toolbar.

    You can use Activity Monitor to quit a process, even if it’s in a loop or not responding. You can also send a signal to a process to terminate it. If you attempt to quit a process you don’t own, you may be required to authenticate as an administrator.

    # In the process list, select the app or process you want to quit. An unresponsive process is marked with (Not Responding).
    # Click the “Force quit” button in the upper-left corner of the Activity Monitor window.
    # Choose one of the following options:

    * Quit: This is the same as choosing File > Quit within an app. The process quits when it’s safe to do so. If quitting the process could cause data loss or interfere with another app, the process doesn’t quit.
    * Force Quit: The process quits immediately. If the process has files open, you may lose data. If the process is used by other apps or processes, those apps or processes could experience problems.

    To see if a process is used by another process, choose View > All Processes, Hierarchically.

    Equally likely, though, is that the top process will be one you don’t recognize immediately, like backupd (Time Machine), mds or mdworker (Spotlight), photolibraryd or photoanalysisd (Photos), or kernel_task or WindowServer (core macOS functionality). You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) quit those processes manually, but at least you’ll know that things are slow due to a Time Machine backup running, Spotlight indexing new files, or Photos analyzing the images in your library. If one of these processes has gone nuts, the best solution is to restart your Mac.

    You might need more memory. To see how your memory is being utilized you would go to the Memory tab of Activity monitor where you can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac. The Memory pane displays how much memory your Mac is using, how often it is swapping memory between RAM and your startup disk, and the amount of memory provided for an app and how much of it is compressed memory.

    * Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs.
    Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory, and file cached memory.
    * Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.
    * Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used and the amount that’s immediately available.
    * Cached Files: The size of files cached into unused memory to improve performance.
    * Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.
    * App Memory: The amount of space being used by apps.
    * Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be cached to disk, so it must stay in RAM. This memory can’t be borrowed by other apps.
    * Compressed: The amount of compressed memory in RAM.

    When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. The Compressed Mem column indicates the amount of memory being compressed for an app.

    The key to understanding whether you need RAM is the Memory Pressure graph. The Memory Pressure graph lets you know if your computer is using memory efficiently.

    * Green memory pressure: Your computer is using all of its RAM efficiently.
    * Yellow memory pressure: Your computer might eventually need more RAM.
    * Red memory pressure: Your computer needs more RAM.

    If memory pressure is yellow, red, or has spikes, check to see if an app is using up memory and causing the memory pressure to increase. If you no longer need to have the app running, you should quit the app.

    Your computer’s memory pressure is accurately measured by examining the amount of free memory available, the swap rate, and the amount of wired and file cached memory to determine if your computer is using RAM efficiently.

    Activity Monitor is a powerful tool and we will talk about Energy, Disk and Network panes in a future issue. But if you are finding yourself staring at the beach ball a lot your first step should be to check out CPU and Memory panes in the Activity Monitor.