{"id":41067,"date":"2023-11-14T17:26:09","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T22:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=41067"},"modified":"2023-11-15T07:35:03","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T12:35:03","slug":"computers-are-magical-computers-are-awful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/14\/computers-are-magical-computers-are-awful\/","title":{"rendered":"Computers Are Magical; Computers Are Awful"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Heer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I was reminded of Nikita Prokopov’s classic post<\/a> today — “People Expect Technology to Suck Because It Actually Sucks” — in much the same way I think of it many days but, and especially, today. These are all things which happened today from when I woke up[…]<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

None of the problems above are life-changing, but this list is representative of the kinds of hiccups I experience more-or-less daily. It could be a different mix of things with less or more impact than those above, but these problems often require I spend time trying to diagnose and fix them. Sometimes I can; sometimes, as with the Adobe Audition problem, the tools just suck and I have no recourse.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It is amazing what I do every day with the computer on my desk, the one on my lap, and the one in my pocket. But I wish they did everything more reliably, predictably, and consistently. I am prepared to fix things sometimes. I do not understand why I am tending to these things daily like they are made in a shed instead of by some of the world’s most valuable corporations. We, the users, deserve better than this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I used to run into no recurring daily issues with my Macs, but the last several releases it’s been the same bugs almost every day<\/a>, with Finder and external storage particularly bad.<\/p>\n

On the day I read this post, I temporarily missed an iMessage that my mother sent from the hospital. For some reason, it was only received by my iPhone, which was in a dock with the screen off. Days later, it never arrived on any of my Macs or my iPad, even though I have Messages in iCloud enabled, and even though I toggled that as well as iMessage on my various devices to try to force a sync.<\/p>\n

Later that day, I tried to update one of my Macs to macOS 14.1.1<\/a>. The partition had 80 GB reported as free before the update, but the update failed due to lack of free space. I thought that meant that it just failed to prepare (as it often does) but hadn’t actually made any changes. Instead, when I restarted the Mac, it looked as though it was starting to apply the update, then failed and left the Mac in an unbootable state. I rebooted in Recovery but then remembered that Apple had removed the feature to roll back<\/a> to a snapshot from before a system update. I ended up booting from another partition, making a Super Duper clone, erasing the container, reinstalling macOS, migrating from the clone, reauthorizing everything<\/a>, and then installing the update again (which again failed several times to prepare).<\/p>\n\n

Juli Clover<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Apple briefly paused work on upcoming iOS 18, macOS 15, watchOS 11, and tvOS 18 updates last week in order to make a serious effort to address bugs in the future iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac releases, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman<\/a>.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi has been making an effort in recent years to ensure that software bugs are addressed, sometimes resulting in features that need to be delayed. Sources that spoke to Gurman said that with the upcoming software updates, the software engineering management team working under Federighi found too many bugs that were missed in internal testing, leading to a week-long sprint to address the issues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t say that I’ve noticed this effort, except perhaps that there are fewer new<\/em> bugs. The overall count of issues that I run into seems to be increasing, not decreasing. I think they need a couple of years, not a week.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n