Death By a Thousand Cuts

Back in September, after months of playing around  the macOS Mojave beta on an external drive and then installing the final beta on my main drive (and then almost immediately removing it), I wrote about my reluctance to upgrade when the final product was released.

Well, you know me. Is early-adoption/masochism a thing? The day it came out—despite everything I'd bitched about—I went ahead and upgraded, thinking that I'd eventually be able to live with its quirks because, you know…new and shiny!

After three months, I'm here to say I can't.

The further I got into it, the more annoying all those little quirks became. Yeah, I got over not being able to use cDock, but having to choose all dark or all light in the UI became intolerable. The fix I'd found for letting you have a dark menu bar and dock while leaving everything else untouched? That is what was causing Adobe Bridge to come up with a solid black screen, and the only way to fix that was to totally uninstall and reinstall Bridge!

Even after the 10.14.1 update came out a couple weeks ago the window transparency problems I'd written about weren't addressed, leading me to believe this is what Apple wants. (In prior versions of the OS, when you turned off transparency in System Preferences, it shut off everywhere. Now it only turns off parts of windows.) I like my wallpaper as much as the next guy, but I don't want to see blurry splotches of it coming through on stacked windows above it, and I don't want to have to live with a solid dark grey background for the life of the OS just to force things to behave the way they did previously.

Speaking of wallpaper, prior to Mojave, whatever wallpaper you had chosen was lightly blurred on the initial login screen so you could easily see everything  in front of it. In my opinion, it was a beautiful effect. The blurring is now gone, with no way of getting it back.

You can no longer use any quartz-based screensavers like my favorite, Minimal Clock.  You can't delete (without disabling SIP and resorting to a bunch of terminal commands) any of the preinstalled bloatware they ported over from iOS (Voice Memos, Stocks, News, and Home).

And the spinning beach balls. Don't even get me started.

When selecting a different wallpaper, it now took forever for the app to generate the thumbnails that you'd choose the wallpaper from. Prior to Mojave, it was near-instantaneous. Wallpaper. It's always fuckin' wallpaper. Problems with wallpaper are the reason I finally left Microsoft for Apple nine years ago.

Death by a thousand cuts.

By yesterday morning I'd had enough. I know for the most part my complaints are all little, UI-related issues, but the UI is the forward-facing part of the OS, and for me these issues made what used to be a pleasant experience nearly unbearable.

First world problem, I readily admit.

I knew from my previous attempts at going backward with anything Apple related would be a pain in the ass. Even though I had a current backup, I wouldn't be able to use Migration Assistant to restore my data after I rolled back the OS to High Sierra. So I performed my due diligence, made sure everything that I would have to manually restore was at the ready, and reinstalled High Sierra.

Everything went fine until I opened iTunes.

"You need to upgrade your OS in order to use this iTunes library."

FUCK. ME.

My heart sank. 11000+ songs, carefully curated. Inaccessible. Oh, the files were still safe, but my playlists, history, metadata…couldn't be accessed. I briefly thought about manually reloading the files, but realized that wouldn't solve the problem. The playlists would still be gone, as well as the yearly history of when the songs had been originally added.

At that point—frustrated and very, very angry at Apple—I wiped the drive and booted off my Cloned drive. I started the process of restoring the whole thing back to Mojave. Access to my music was more important than the UI annoyances.

By this time Ben had gotten home and after venting my frustrations to him, I sat down in the living room while the restore proceeded, and pulled out my phone, Googling "restore iTunes library."

There was a solution.

Of course there was. Ten minutes after wiping a day's work.

So I stopped the restore, wiped the drive again, and started reinstalling High Sierra. I needed to step away from this clusterfuck for a while, so we went to dinner. By the time we'd returned my little Mac was sitting there waiting for my input to finish the install.

The first thing I did was check the fix I'd found online. It worked. (I'm missing a lot of album art, but I have that backed up too, so it will just be a matter of manually restoring whatever's missing.) And then for the next five hours, I reinstalled all my apps and manually transferred my data from the backup drive.

It was during this whole fiasco that I realized that Apple truly has become Microsoft. Not just any Microsoft, but the Microsoft of 2009 that sent me fleeing to Apple in the first place. Once upon a time, Apple did "just work." You'd be able to restore your drive with a minimum of fuss, but—and I hate to say this, because it's almost a meme at this point—since Steve Jobs' death, quality control at Apple has gone to shit and some days it seems nothing works. Apple is now all about pleasing 12-year old rose-gold iPhone girls with winking emoji and candy colors everywhere, leaving their once-core customer base twisting in the wind, making it as difficult as possible for them to do anything other than what Apple has decided is in their best interest.

Remember Microsoft Vista? Remember how the howls of outrage actually got someone's attention in Redmond, resulting in Windows 7, probably the most stable OS that company ever produced?  I believe that's where we are with Apple. Mojave is Apple's Vista. The question is if anyone in Cupertino is actually listening, or even cares…