Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / You’ll see the Mac Studio’s blinking orange SOS light if you try to change its SSD modules. Here’s why. (credit: Luke Miani)

Apple’s new Mac Studio desktop began arriving in customers’ hands last week, and some of those customers wasted no time in taking the machine apart. Among the more interesting discoveries was the sheer size of the M1 Ultra and its voltage regulator modules (VRMs); in addition, it seems that the Studio includes removable storage rather than the soldered-down NAND chips that most Macs use. In theory, this could make the Mac Studio the first new Mac (outside of the Mac Pro) to support upgradeable storage in quite a while.

Because the Studio’s SSD slots aren’t compatible with regular M.2 SSD sticks that you might use in a PC, YouTuber Luke Miani decided to test the Studio’s removable storage by swapping storage from one Studio into another. He found that, while the drives are physically swappable, his Mac Studio wouldn’t boot after the fact—the desktop’s power LED would only flash an amber-colored “SOS” pattern. This persisted both when he tried to install the second SSD module in the Studio’s second storage slot and when he tried to install an SSD from one Studio into the other Studio’s main SSD slot.

“What Apple is doing here with the Mac Studio is simply inexcusable,” Miani concluded. “Apple does not care about your right to repair, make no mistake. What we’ve seen here today is that Apple is intentionally, deliberately restricting your access to your own device. In my opinion, this is actually worse than soldering the storage onto a logic board.”

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is finally releasing a “delete history” feature, which will wipe out the last 15 minutes of search queries, for the Android Google Search app. “Delete history” was announced at Google I/O 2021 in May and made it to the iOS app two months later, but for some reason, it took almost a year to come to Android. It’s finally rolling out now, though, according to a statement Google gave to The Verge over the weekend.

If you want to wipe out the last few minutes of your search history, open the Google Search app via the app icon (other entry points, like the search bar widget, won’t bring up the right UI), tap on your profile picture in the top right and you should see a new “delete last 15 minutes” option at the top of the pop-up menu. If you don’t see the setting yet, try swiping the app away in recent apps and opening it again, which will load the newest configuration from the cloud.

Wiping out your search history is sort of like wiping out browser history, but Google stores search history to your account in the cloud. As the app explains, Google Search history tracks “the things you search for, results you click, and stories you read” while using the Google app or Google.com. Google also captures your location, plus audio recordings if you run a voice search. The search terms are used to show more relevant ads, of course, but also for future search predictions and to display content in Google Discover.