Category: Apple

There was a time when I used to understand macOS's underlying disk structure—admittedly only on a rudimentary level—but now even that is long gone.

The illustration above is so much voodoo and black magic to me.

The other day while in Adobe Bridge I noticed there was a disk icon appearing on "Macintosh HD" called "dev". Not remembering ever seeing this before, I became kind of alarmed. I had unsuccessfully attempted to install the McAfee Security Suite available through Cox (yeah, yeah, I know), and while I thought I'd managed to get it all ripped out afterward, I was concerned that this "dev" drive was an unwelcome remnant.

Interestingly, I couldn't touch it, and it was only visible in Bridge. Even toggling all files visible in Finder it didn't show up. I could log in as Root and manually find it through Terminal, but was still untouchable. I had a full backup from the night before, so I just resolved to restore the entire machine when I got home that night.

Booted into the backup clone drive and lo and behold, it was even there on that drive, a drive that had been completely disconnected when I was messing around with McAfee. Okay, I thought, it's obviously been there a while, leading me to believe it was a glitch with the latest version of Bridge I'd installed a couple days earlier.

I uninstalled Bridge 2020 and reinstalled Bridge 2019, and guess what…it was gone. If I toggled hidden folders in Bridge it showed up, but was otherwise not visible.

Mystery solved. It's a glitch in the Adobe Software. A glitch in a piece of Adobe software?! Color me shocked.

Further research into exactly what this "dev" volume was what led me to the diagram above. Realizing I'd never fully understand why it's there, but knowing it's supposed to be there, I walked away and got on with my life. Much like theoretical physics, the new volume structure in macOS is something I'll never understand.

Are you trying to make me fall in love with you again?

The company announced its new 16-inch MacBook Pro yesterday, and reviewers were uniformly orgasming. While still not a perfect machine (the ports are never coming back, fellas), Apple has fixed everything that was wrong with the previous generation—most notably the keyboard.

Current financial restraints prohibit me from rushing out and grabbing one of these bad boys (the base model would more than serve my needs, but even that clocks in at $2399), but six months down the road (maybe sooner) will be a different story. By that time the rest of the line should've been updated as well. I'm hoping for a 14-inch to replace the current 13-inch models because—while it would be nice to have a much larger screen than I currently do, Ben has the current 15-inch model and It seems much heavier than mine. I'd also need to get a new shoulder bag and yada, yada, yada.

If one of these new 16-inch models were to fall into my lap, however, I certainly wouldn't turn It down.

Plus, six months will give the inevitable "gates" time to rear their ugly heads because as sexy as this new machine is, it is new, and will undoubtedly have its fair share of issues. Hopefully the newly redesigned scissor keyboard won't be one of them.

…how much I fucking HATE the keyboard on this MacBook Pro?

…but it was a slow day at work and I had a full backup from the night before, so I figured what the hell? I could always restore from the clone when I got home if it hosed everything.

And I know that every year I say I'm not going to upgrade and yet—without fail—after months of trash-talking the betas, I do it on the very first day the new OS is officially available.

Well, after using it for the past several hours and checking most everything out, I have to say I'm more than pleasantly surprised. I don't know how many overnighters the Mac team at Apple had to pull since I was cursing out even the most recent beta only a few days ago but it would appear that everything that I experienced as broken only last week is now fixed.

While most of what Apple did was behind the scenes, there are lot of subtle graphic improvements, tweaks that make doing things easier, and a general speed increase that is noticeable. I also appreciate that the ever-bloated iTunes has been split into three separate programs. My biggest worry in upgrading was that I'd lose all the carefully curated album art I'd assigned (an issue brought up in the forums in regards to the betas). Admittedly, it took a couple hours for it to repopulate, but all the custom artwork is present and accounted for. Another minor inconvenience was that initially the "Recently Added" group only showed albums I'd added within the past twenty four hours.* A full accounting of what's changed is beyond the scope of this blog, but there are several excellent reviews available online in case you're interested in knowing more. I had been preemptively warning friends not to upgrade, but I may have to reassess that in the coming days.

*Letting it sit overnight repopulated everything in the proper chronological order.

I'm in a horrible funk today. I need a break from all the horrific news swirling around us. So here's something that's not horrible.

Based on my own experiences after doing some cursory testing and poking at it since July, I've been wanting to sit down and write a lengthy rant about how Apple's next operating system, Catalina, was still—even on beta 4—a hot mess. For all the years I've been playing around with these betas, it's never been this bad this close to the supposed release.

I learned my lesson with Yosemite about never installing a beta—no matter how stable it may seem—as your daily driver, and in all the years since I've been installing these betas on an external USB drive.

Because of the lackluster experience I'd been having with Catalina thus far, a few weeks ago I gave up on it, erasing the external SSD and swearing I wasn't going to waste any more time with it until the Gold Master arrived—and maybe not even then.

But in the Forums lately I'd been reading (hey, just because I'm not actively participating at the moment doesn't mean I'm not still interested) about people who'd installed it on a separate partition on their internal drive with great success. So the other day at lunch, curiosity about how to actually do this led me to a video explaining how Apple's file system actually works, and how each hard drive is just an object within the larger APFS container. Furthermore these objects can shrink or grow as necessary within that container so I didn't have to commit to losing a fixed amount of drive space up front. (At least I hope I'm understanding that correctly.) Since I had about 150GB free on my internal SSD I thought I'd experiment a little bit and create another drive just to see how it worked. It worked. Maybe too well for my own good. Totally separate, and yet fully accessible to the main drive. (Like a separate partition, a "D" drive in Windows parlance.) When I was done experimenting, I deleted it with no ill effects.

Yesterday my masochistic tendencies must've kicked in, and since it was slow at work I thought I'd try the installing the beta—now ticked up to release 5—on the main SSD in a different object. And that's what I did. And you know what?For the most part it worked flawlessly.

The problem I ran into was that while most of the applications I use on a daily basis would run just fine, the Brave browser and several "mission-critical" apps (I'm looking at you, Adobe) wouldn't even install. I could copy Brave and its settings (as well as Photoshop and Bridge) directly over from the main drive and they'd run, but you couldn't install them directly because the installers wouldn't load, being blocked by the new software-must-be-signed-by-Apple (SIP on steroids) security features of the OS. Attempting to run Acrobat DC directly from the old drive produced another, different error, telling me it needed to be reinstalled. 1Password wouldn't integrate with Brave, and well…the list went on.

It was an interesting exercise. this latest iteration of Catalina now seems stable and almost ready to take the stage (a marked change from my last experience with it), but the major supporting players are still struggling with their lines.

September's gonna be interesting…

It seems a lot longer.

"Apple has expanded the existing keyboard repair program for all Apple laptops containing the butterfly design keyboards (including even the brand new MacBook Pro models they just released today, which is interesting, but should be reassuring for those purchasing new Mac laptops)."

What I find most disturbing about this is that the brand. new. models. are included on this 4 year replacement program, indicating that Apple itself doesn't have much faith in whatever changes they made to the now fourth generation butterfly mechanism.

"It just works!"

And it's obvious.

While it's been nearly a year since my last keyboard replacement and—knock on space gray aluminum—I've had no issues since then, apparently even the "new and improved" third generation butterfly design Apple introduced in the 2018 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are still breaking down. We all know what "a small number of customers" means in Apple-speak.

News for you, Apple: Steve is gone. We are no longer subject to his personal reality distortion field.

Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal absolutely excoriates Apple for issues she's having with her 2018 Air—to the point of writing an essay that by default is missing the letters her keyboard refuses to type. It's accompanied by an equally engaging video.

It's a brilliant move that is sure to have the folks in Cupertino downing bottles of Tums—and rightfully so. It's well past time for these butterfly keyboards to be retired. In my fantasy Apple would recall the lot and outright replace the machines once a truly better design is implemented. That will never happen of course because it would involve Apple admitting that they actually screwed up—something that they will never do. The most we can hope for is that in its place their current program of replacing the keyboards/top cases/batteries for 4 years from date of purchase is expanded to include the 2018 models.

And when a new keyboard is introduced (and you know one will be, because this replacement program has got to be impacting the company's bottom line in a not-insignificant fashion), they'll herald it as "revolutionary" and worthy of worship—even if it's simply going back to the more reliable scissor mechanism that's currently being used in their stand-alone keyboards.

I have to admit I agree with pretty much everything he says.

I was missing more album art than I'd thought.

Curiously, they were all images that I know I didn't save.

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…

Mojave

For the past couple months I've been playing around with the beta versions of Apple's latest OS, "Mojave." I smartly installed it on an external SSD drive instead of mucking up my main drive like I did years ago with Yosemite. The problem with this approach is that my external drive won't hold all my data, so I'm kind of limited in what I can test.

Since Mojave is currently up to Beta 9, and based on Apple's history, the final version will be probably be released in the next couple weeks, last night I backed up my main drive and pulled the trigger.

All this little exercise did was confirm my initial impression that this may be the first macOS update that I skip.

There's just something off about it. I can't put my finger on any one thing, but it just feels wrong. It's not dark mode, the fact that you can now change the highlight color to a virtual rainbow of tones, the convoluted way of making screen shots, the dynamically-changing wallpaper, or any of the other new "features" in and of themselves. It's the sum total. To me, none of these things are wanted or needed, and once again, in Apple's infinite wisdom, they chose to remove features I actually used.

The laptop also ran slower. "Oh don't worry about that. Everything will return to normal as soon as Spotlight if finished reindexing your files."

(Warning: First World Problems)

With the full implementation of dark mode, they've taken away the ability to have a dark title bar and dock while retaining the regular light mode everywhere else. This is something I've used for years, since most of my wallpapers tend to the dark side (Do I hear mechanical breathing?), and in my opinion it just looks better. But now it's gone. All dark or all light is your only choice and I don't care for the all dark mode in its current iteration. There is a workaround via a Terminal command that will restore that dark title/light window functionality—to a degree—but it really screws with the shading of the light windows once in place: none of them seem to match any more.

Because Apple.

I used a program called cDock for years to customize the appearance of the dock. Since Yosemite I've hated the default Apple dock. Among other things, cDock allows you to kill the dock background altogether; to make it "transparent." It also has dozens of various other combinations, each of which can be tweaked to get the exact look you desire. To be honest, ever since Apple implemented SIP it's been a bit of a pain in the ass to set up, but at least by temporarily disabling SIP you could install the program, re-enable SIP afterward, and it would run fine. Now SIP needs to be permanently disabled (which isn't a good idea from a security standpoint) in order for cDock to run at all.

Because Apple.

Safari initially refused to load the AdBlock plus extension which really pissed me off, but when I finally got it running, it nagged that it would slow down my browsing.

Because Apple.

Adobe Bridge came up…with a completely black screen, something it never did when I was running Mojave from the external drive.

I'm not going to bitch about that too much because this is beta software and I'm sure that particular glitch will be worked out before release day.

But it was at that point that I'd had enough of new-and-improved. I shut the machine down, rebooted, wiped the drive, and restored my backup. I'm such a Luddite.

Hardware

The last MacBook I owned that still had a removable SSD was the MacBook Air in 2012. Yes, it was prohibitively expensive to replace the drive with a bigger one, but at least I knew I could do it if I ever wanted to.

Beginning in 2013 however, everything was soldered in place. I was okay with that, since I was now on a regular backup schedule so in case anything did go south at most I'd lose a day's worth of data.

I learned recently from getting lost in Louis Rossmann videos (yes, I watch more online than guys banging each other) that up until the 2018 models, all MacBook Pros with soldered-in SSDs had a special port on the system board that would (at least theoretically) allow a technician to transfer data off a SSD even if the rest of the system board was toast.

Well, Apple has now removed that since everything is now encrypted as it passes through the T2 chip. Better pray that you're backing up nightly and you don't have any issues with said backup.

Remember when everything "just worked?" Yeah. Good times.

While it looks like the butterfly keyboard issue has been resolved (we won't know for sure until the 2018 models age a bit more), there's no chance Apple will ever go back to their much-loved previous design. And that's the crux of a lot of my beef with Apple these days. They will never admit they made a mistake on anything and go back to earlier tech that worked perfectly well. Build a MacBook that's 1mm thicker so the old keyboard design can be put back into use? NEVER.

So why do I keep buying Apple products? Because I like their design and overall build quality enough to justify their premium price. And despite what I just wrote about Mojave, I do still prefer the Mac OS over anything else out there. And lastly, I trust Apple with my offsite data a hell of a lot more than I do Microsoft. I realize they are not the same company they were in 2009 when I initially joined the legion of fanboys. They're far bigger, have many more customers, and frankly, screwups happen. But they can't coast on goodwill forever if these type of QA and design problems continue.

Louis Rossman: How the genius bar handles data during customer repairs sucks.

As you've no doubt heard by now (if you follow tech news at all), last week Apple surprised nearly everyone by releasing new versions of the 13- and 15-inch  Touchbar MacBook Pro. Amid the other upgrades and improvements was the addition of the Third Generation Butterfly Keyboard "to decrease the noise level" of the previous generation. Not as Apple was quick to point out, to increase the reliability of the keyboard itself. Because you know, the problem with the previous generation of keyboards was reported by only a very small number of users. That's why they're replacing even out-of-warranty keyboards free of charge now and refunding the folks who've forked out money to get them repaired in the past.

It has nothing to do with all the bad press and multiple class-action lawsuits. Um. Yeah. Whatever, Apple.

As the folks at iFixit quickly discovered, Apple's redesign includes what I call a keyboard condom; a extremely thin layer of silicone polymer between the key mechanism and key cap that not only cuts down on the sound of the keyboards, but also does it's best to keep out the detritus that can render the previous keyboards inoperable.

While this will affect me in no way whatsoever because Apple has categorically stated these new parts will not be used to repair the previous generations, ("We're going to replace pieces that break with more pieces that will break!") it at least it restores my faith enough that I wouldn't hesitate to buy a new machine if/when the need arises.

I just got mine back from repair yesterday afternoon.

Via The Verge:

Apple has officially acknowledged that there are problems with its "butterfly" mechanism built into the keyboards of the recent MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The company is now offering an extended keyboard service program for computers affected by the issue, via iMore.

The extended warranty covers replacement of one or more keys or the whole keyboard, depending on the extent of users' problems, and it covers eligible laptops up to four years after the computer was bought at retail. (Every MacBook and MacBook Pro model with the butterfly switches seems to be included.) That's dramatically longer than the limited warranty the computers ship with or even Apple's extended AppleCare Plus.

According to Apple's service page, the program covers the following issues:

●  Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly
●  Letters or characters do not appear
●  Key(s) feel "sticky" or do not respond in a consistent manner

Complaints from users about Apple's recent laptop keyboards have grown in the past weeks and months, with people saying that the keyboards tend to fail entirely when encountering dust and the fragile design makes them difficult to repair. And while it's certainly taken longer than most users would probably have liked, it's good to see Apple is finally taking steps to solve the problem.

A few weeks ago my buddy Mark (I know far too many Marks) in California was telling me he was ready to throw his MacBook Pro (mid 2012) through a wall.  It had gotten slow and unresponsive to the point of being unusable.

He couldn't afford to upgrade to a new one—something I strongly dissuaded him from doing anyway based on my own experience over the past year—and instead suggested he increase the RAM and swap out the spinning hard drive with an SSD since his was the last year of "upgradeable" MBPs and it would be a relatively easy process.

He didn't feel comfortable doing it himself, and since I have always been his hardware go-to guy but now lived 700 miles away, he asked, "Can they do that at the Apple Store?"

"Probably, but you're better off just buying the parts and sending it all to me. It will be cheaper in the long run and you'll know all your data will be transferred properly."

"Tell me what I need to buy."

So last Thursday the machine arrived, along with 8GB RAM and a new 512 GB Intel SSD.

And for once—a rare instance for my experience with Apple these days—everything just worked. It took only about two hours to swap in the new parts, load a fresh copy of the O/S (I had it on a USB thumb drive that I'd created for work a few days earlier), and restore his data from the old drive.

Working on this "old" Mac reminded me just how much we've lost in Jony Ive's unrelenting quest to build a Mac no thicker than a sheet of paper. Never mind the loss of ports or the stupid fucking keyboard on the latest models. It's the little things like MagSafe and that slowly glowing (but otherwise invisible) indicator on the right side of the bottom case that showed the machine was sleeping when the cover was closed) that initially made me such a fan of Apple. And of course this:

Having the two machines side by side, however, did highlight how much better the display has gotten over the past five years, even leaving out the fact that Mark's wasn't a retina display and mine was. The brightness and color saturation were so much better on my 2016 it was ridiculous.

But c'mon Jony…how about bringing back a little of that "surprise and delight" factor Apple used to be known for?

And I can't tell how often over the last twelve months I wish I'd just paid to get it fixed instead of replacing it.