Editorial policy
The rules this site holds itself to, including the ones that stop articles from being published.
The standard every article has to clear
Before an article is written, the target question is searched and the top results are read. The article is only started if it can carry something those pages do not: a measurement we took, a failure we reproduced, a comparison we ran, a diagram we drew from our own understanding of the system. If no such thing can be named in advance, the angle changes or the topic is dropped.
That test is applied again after drafting. If every factual claim in a finished draft could be found on a page that already existed, the draft has failed and it is either rewritten or discarded. The topic being common is not a problem. The evidence being borrowed is.
What may not be the substance of an article
- Summarising or paraphrasing other articles.
- Restating documentation or a changelog.
- Aggregating specifications from vendor pages.
- Anything attributed to unnamed reports.
- Anything a reader could get by opening the first search result.
Citing sources is expected and every article that draws on one lists it. Building an article out of sources is a different thing, and it is not done here.
How testing works
The hardware, the tooling and the method are described in full on the how we test page. In summary: measurements are taken on machines we own, more than once, with the run count and the conditions published beside the figure, using utilities that ship with macOS so a reader can repeat the test without installing anything. Every article carries the exact OS build it was tested against.
Numbers
No benchmark, quote or statistic on this site is invented. If a number is needed and we cannot produce it, the sentence is restructured to not need it. Where a figure comes from someone else it is attributed to them and is not presented as ours. Where our result disagrees with a published figure, we say what we think explains the gap rather than implying anyone acted in bad faith, and we publish our conditions so the disagreement can be examined.
Results that would make a better headline than the evidence supports do not get published. This costs us headlines regularly.
Images
Every screenshot on this site was taken on our own machines. Every diagram was drawn for the article it appears in. No image is hotlinked, and no image found in a search result, in documentation, or on another site is reused here. Diagrams that would lose no meaning if deleted are cut rather than kept as decoration.
Use of AI
Drafting assistance is a tool and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What matters is that no measurement, no screenshot, no error message and no result on this site was generated rather than observed. Every figure published here came off the machines listed on the how we test page, and every command printed in an article was run before it was printed. Anything a language model cannot do, which is all of the actual testing, was done by a person.
Corrections
When something here is wrong it is corrected on the article, with a dated note saying what changed. Articles are not silently edited to remove an error, and a corrected article is not backdated.
Three things are treated as corrections rather than updates: a factual error, a measurement that does not reproduce, and a claim that has become false on a newer OS build. The first two get a note immediately. The third gets a re-test, a new version stamp and a note describing what changed between builds, because a figure shifting after an update is a finding rather than an embarrassment.
Reports of errors go to hello@itstechx.com. Including your machine, its chip and your exact macOS build makes a reproduction report far more useful.
Independence and conflicts
TechX has no relationship with Apple Inc. or with any manufacturer. No hardware on the test rig was supplied by anyone but us. No article is sponsored, no article has been paid for, and no third party sees an article before it is published. Guest posts, paid placements and link exchanges are not accepted.
If this site ever carries advertising, it will be clearly marked as advertising and it will have no influence on which topics are covered or what a measurement is allowed to show. Advertisers get no advance notice of articles and no right of reply before publication.
Ownership and responsibility
Every article is written, tested and published by Teja Pagidimarri, who is responsible for everything on this site including its mistakes. One byline, one person, no editorial desk to escalate to.