I HATE APPLE

Apparently there's some sort of Akamai fiasco that's making everything today worse.

be careful out there folks

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/11/16/big-sur-bricking-macbook-pros/

please excuse my rant in advance...

my replacement laptop came yesterday, and boy am i having a fun time with migration assistant and time machine.

one of these tools managed to erase the time machine backup it was supposed to restore.

on the first attempt with migration, the process hung. i could see that no data was being transferred on my NAS dashboard (via my wind0ze desktop), so i cancelled it.

after subsequent attempts (and hangs) the time machine folder simply vanished from my disk.

customer care told me it was a bad idea to cancel.

here’s a wild idea: don’t put a huge CANCEL button there if it’s unsafe to cancel whatever your program is doing. especially if your program is prone to long idle periods without UI indications thereof.

another wild idea: tell the user they must reinstall the OS after a failed attempt to migrate, before allowing another try.

the OS reinstall failed twice after this. there was a kernel panic and on reboot it looked like it was bricked. fortunately the machine could be booted into recovery.

and this is a brand new machine. (or more precisely, every major component besides the screen was replaced at the apple service center in Texas—which took twice as long as promised—hence the need for restoration from backup.)

sensible warnings and restrictions in the UI for a critical utility they offer would of course be too much to ask from a trillion-dollar company.

i’ve fallen back restoring from a backup disk i made in april. it’s been hanging for two hours and the light on my HD is not indicating. apple told me not to touch it for at least 24 hours. if successful, then we can talk about restoring the deleted backup which has my last six months’ data.

in conclusion, i hate apple right now just a little bit.

My ancient Win 7 is still fine except *sometimes* crashes when streaming audio or video; should I get like a $379 etc. 2019 iPad for the sake or reliability, or would a Samsung tablet for half that, or a Fire for even less, work about as well? Just need it for the streaming.

i've enjoyed having the lowest storage ipad for streaming, but the android tablets might do just as well, i don't have any recent experience with them. if you're in the usa, micro center does usually have the ipads for cheaper than list price, $280 right now.

I’m scared to go into micro center because there’s no way I’m getting out of there without spending $$

the $330 ipad is cheaper than that in practice (certainly next week) and is the best tablet for the $, but tbh if you're just streaming then whatever is fine.

So I have an external drive I use for Time Machine backups. It's plugged into my monitor, which serves as a hub. There is no way that I'm aware of to automatically unplug a drive after a TM backup, so I've grown obsessive about checking to see if the backup is done so I can eject the drive, so that I don't damage it when I unplug from the monitor.

I do, of course, forget sometimes. Like today. And I always run First Aid on the drive afterwards, and everything has always been fine. Except today.

Just ordered a replacement, and seriously considering writing a utility to check Time Machine status via the menubar menu, and eject the drive when a backup completes.

This can't be an uncommon use case!

lukas, i would strongly recommend keeping a backup of your backup. over the weekend i lost six months of work due to apple's backup tools overwriting my TM backup, catastrophically. i'm kicking myself for not having a second backup. and i hate apple.

that's awful! and yes, totally right.

I keep a TM backup and a separate "flat backup" (no time rollback) using rsync. It's a bit belt-and-braces but I have been burned oh so badly.

I've been under the impression these days that the idea that you'll kill a drive by unplugging without unmounting is archaic. It was probably time for the drive to go anyway.

why do you unplug the drive anyway? I keep it plugged in but has just started using Time Machine Edit again to cause it back-up less often.

I unplugged it so I could take my laptop elsewhere. Also, I had the idea that by keeping it mostly unplugged/unmounted, I'd extend the life of the drive! Ha ha!

i finally realized yesterday that many of the new big sur features were driving me crazy and making me feel less productive. so i decided to put an hour into setting all of the various preferences so that my mbp would work how i remembered it working before i upgraded

and then i found myself on the apple support forums, going absolutely insane looking for "documentation". and no matter how much i looked, i couldn't find anything that explained in writing the specifics of how anything worked, what to expect when i picked each option, etc.

then, magically, i stumbled onto this: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/whats-new-in-macos/

wow! finally i had found something that looks like the documentation that used to come with computers and software when i was first learning to use computers (30+ years ago)

so i guess what i'm wondering is when did basic documentation become specialized developer knowledge? has this been going on for a long time, or was there a discrete point at which people stopped bothering to explain how the things they sell work? did it start w/ apple (it must have, no?) and has it since infected the entire industry or is this just an apple-specific thing? how do young people figure things out nowadays? watching videos? trial and error? word of mouth?

i'll be honest, i stopped looking at OS documentation awhile back (probably in the early 2000s when i first switched from PC to mac?) and so when i finally started looking again for information on how stuff worked i was really surprised at how hard it was to find!

The end of documentation started with the beginning of modern computing - unix predates the first instance of the man page by two years. To operate a personal computer of any manufacture successfully you usually had to buy a thick book from a third party (I will never forget The Macintosh Bible, RIP). Programmers hate documentation a lot and everyone’s favorite bugaboo capitalism hates documentation even more, so here we are: people ask questions for free, get partial or useless answers for free, and the vendor has an intern close out the issue. Don’t grep readme

Watched a documentary tonight (GAMEMASTER, 2020) about making board games and there was some good discussion of how to write instructions - they have to be for children and old folks, they have to be redundant, they can’t be too clever or creative, and even your favorite version of your instructions will invariably confuse people unless you playtest the shit out of them. Good documentation is very, very hard to do.

I’m also reminded of an old Gamasutra article that quoted a videogame developer who pointed out that the existence of a significant third party market for strategy guides indicated a problem in the industry - that studios were reliably putting out things that were supposed to be fun, but basically required an extra guidebook to enjoy properly. Obviously this person had never heard of GameFAQs, but that just reinforces my point above: documentation is for user groups to make for themselves after the purchase.

people ask questions for free, get partial or useless answers for free

new borad description

Anyway it’s definitely not an Apple-specific problem because people have had blogs and blogs about this shit for Windows, plus geeky open source user groups out the wazoo since before HTML was even a thing.

I love man pages tbh, always mad when some hot new tool doesn’t ship with a man page.

yeah that's interesting context re unix and a good reminder that most of the documentation for my early computers really was third party stuff now that i think abt it (practically had a half shelf of o'reilly books just for stuff bundled with the pc - "wordperfect in a nutshell" etc lmao)

stackexchange is the gamefaqs of work

aka word of mouth

Macintosh Bible 3rd Edition was the bomb. I read it to destruction before I even had a Mac

Oh man, I just found out Arthur Naiman died last year.

I know it’s beating a completely decomposed horse at this point, but fuck apple earbuds forever

Latest headache, my keyboard and trackpad suddenly stopped responding, with no warning. An external keyboard and mouse works, which probably means through a little investigation it's ... a known issue with the connection ribbon on my specific early 2015 13" retina model. Since I've already determined that Apple itself won't work on my machine, that means ordering the $10 part and doing it myself. Again. Hopefully it fixes the problem, and while Apple can be assholes when it comes to proprietary parts, connections and screws, it could have been worse: apparently previous years placed the trackpad ribbon *under* the glued in battery.

I mean there’s two sides to this. People complain they can’t open things up and replace parts, but the fact the new MacBook Air is sealed and has no moving parts except the hinge and the keyboard make it less likely stuff is going to break via mechanical shock or dust or whatever. The ribbon under the battery might be less likely to break is what I’m saying.

This is a Pro, not an Air. Designed to be opened, not sealed like an Air or iPhone.

The same one with a glued in battery that makes it so hard to replace Apple just replaces that entire half of the computer.

I understand. I’m making a general observation that the new MacBook Air which has absolutely nothing user serviceable will likely be the most reliable piece of hardware apple ever made, and that’s because it isn’t user serviceable.

my new mac mini just arrived a few minutes ago :D

If the choice is between “doesn’t need service” and “easy to service” I’ll take the first one.

Gluing the battery in seems spiteful though, I’ll grant you that.

I'm cool with not designed to be serviced. Not cool with can't be, or prohibitively hard to be, serviced, especially when combined with shitty or overpriced components. I wonder what Apple would charge to replace the failed (and known to fail) ribbon cable I probably have? The one I bought was $10.

I have bad news for you about electric vehicles.

Pretty easy to avoid owning one of those.

$10 replacement ribbon arrived in the mail about 24 hours after ordering it, took me 10 minutes to install. If I were less ethical I would open a repair store that preyed on old people called Let Me Google That For You.

Well now. What documentation would you or anybody else here rec. to an Apple-ignorant geezer who might be getting an iPad (not a Pro, not a Mini etc., just the latest gen original, or last year's)?

Get double the storage you think you need

Yeah, can't go wrong with storage. Also, check out the Apple refurbished store.

really? maybe i'm spoiled by having really fast internet available at all times (good broadband at home, never leave the city, work at university, etc) but the only apple device i have that is anywhere near full is my 64 gb 6s. i use streaming services all the time but i feel like i'm way more likely to listen to a CD or watch a DVD than i am to actually download an mp3 or something in the year of our lord 2020

anyway i hope this stays true because i bought a 12 pro 256 today instead of a 512, i just couldn't figure why i'd need 512 gb when i'd made it so far with 256 and i'll be keeping my photos and such on icloud w/ 5g etc

made it so far w/ 64 gb i mean

also my car doesn't have airplay, just a usb jack, so really looking forward to digging back into the dusty old CD collection again!

oh wait, i just remembered the 12 still has a lightning port, ignore me

I think the reasoning (or at least my reasoning) is that should you need to or want to you just can't upgrade the storage on an iPad. So better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right? That said, I honestly don't know their current capacity. I think my phone is 128gb, and I've never come close to filling it. But my MacBook was 256, and after riding the slimmest space margin for the longest time I finally put in a 512 GB drive, which has worked out well.

I would get the most you can afford in a Mac but 90% of people will be fine with whatever the smallest storage option is for an iPhone or iPad.

adults yes. kids will fill them up with games in about 2 days regardless of size.

Gene From kiss in Decline 2 said that what money gives you the opportunity to do is not think about money. Same goes here. What storage gives you is the freedom to not think about storage

adults yes. kids will fill them up with games in about 2 days regardless of size.

I pretty easily use about 128gb on my phone, between my mp3 library, games, and apps a lot's covered. Also agree to go with more than you need; in the worst case you don't use it and your phone is worth a little more when you trade it in or resell.

When I say 90% of people can use the minimum storage I’m allowing for the fact that most people don’t save music or movies on their iPhone/iPad. Minimum storage obviously doesn’t work if you have a biggish music collection and don’t use Spotify or Apple Music or whatever.