Tag: macos

Sluggish new Mac

Recommendations for Macs that have plenty of memory and should otherwise be performing beautifully. I’m looking at you, Chrome 👀: 

  • Restart weekly.
  • Pare down extensions in browsers, especially Chrome.
  • I know I just said pare down extensions, but there’s a really cool extension for Chrome called OneTab. You can use it to quickly send all your tabs to a single page of links. And you can share those pages to yourself so you can open them in other browsers. 
  • Try using different Profiles in your browser and switching between them to close windows you don’t need right now.
  • Strongly consider switching to Safari.
    • Try starting mostly fresh, but do configure Profiles first and perhaps export specific folders of bookmarks from Chrome. OneTab can help with this.
    • I just searched “fastest browser 2025” and confirmed my guess that at least a couple people would rank Safari as the most performant and private, at least for Apple users. It’s not ’cos Apple is just better, but they are of course able to optimize for their platform. And they are also making their bones off maintaining privacy, which (to this non-programmer) feels like it cuts back on the cross-page cookie tracking whatever nonsense that is the bane of the modern web. (One of the many banes, I should say.)
  • Check out Activity Monitor on your Mac (in /Applications/Utilities), but when things feel sluggish, look at the Memory tab in there and see what the culprit is. If there is a non-zero number next to “Swap Used:” try closing/quitting as many apps and tabs as you can, and restart.

AI Notetaking for Meetings

We are considering implementing an AI solution for meeting notes. Do you have any recommendations?

There are now a bunch of tools for this. I stopped employing any of the cloud solutions, to protect client privacy and security, but I am considering a solution to do it locally. Here’s my experience so far:

  • Apple Notes on the phone or Mac is now actually pretty good at recording and transcribing audio. This is my current go-to.
  • Notion is superpopular and if you pay for it, it will AI the heck outta any text your throw at it.
  • I have used Fathom and thought it was cool but didn’t want to pay for it.
  • I just ran into Krisp.ai.
  • I’ve started using MacWhisper a bit for all transcription, and it’s quite slick.

This page is a nice rundown from a trusted source of the current cloud-based offerings.

The benefit to using a cloud-based doohickey is that they’ll have a plug-in running on your Mac or in your Zoom or Teams account, ready to capture any meeting and do all the work for you.

Notes and MacWhisper, on the other hand, will do the trick, though one has to be up for a little manual work: <nerdery>getting or extracting the audio and feeding it into those apps manually. Major upside is they’re running on your Mac, so free and kept entirely local. I am considering recording calls on my iPhone (which is now a thing) and/or using Audio Hijack on the Mac to route audio from multiple apps into a single recorder, and then having Hazel and/or Shortcuts automate from there.</nerdery>

An option well worth mentioning is to build your own custom automation with an excellent tool like Zapier. These have become the new backbone of business operations. I’ve transitioned the main of my work to building them for other folks. In this case, for example, we might have an automation run like:

New Teams recording triggers:

  1. Get the audio
  2. Send to GPT Whisper for transcription
  3. Send to GPT or Claude for summarization, and also separately to list the individual action items and determine/guess the assignees from context
  4. Turn each of those action items into tasks in Asana, with assignments

That kind of build might take an hour or two, plus $240/year for Zapier — which could then do alllllll kinds of other things for you.

Live Text is OCR everywhere

When it comes to scanning and/or printing documents, what is OCR?

Humans and their acronyms! OCR is fortunately real easy: “optical character recognition” meaning the computer turns a picture of text into copyable text. 

I use it on all my scans of documents, so I can just boop! copy and paste from the scan into an email or Word or wherever. Also, my Mac can then search for text inside scans. 

This used to be rarified magic, but now all of our phones and Macs are doing it on all of our pictures. You can even search your Photos library or Notes app for text that’s inside photos! And look for the little “live text” icon on your phone  when you open a photo or take a screenshot. That will let you select text, tap a phone number to call it or an address to map it, and even translate!