Apple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't work.
Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process. It's far more reassuring to see things happening than pressing the power button and being "left in the dark" waiting at a black screen for a few tense moments as something happens.
[1] The satisfying "clunk" of the power switch, to the fans and hard drives spinning up, the latter doing their initial seeks once they've reached full speed, the beep of the POST, the buzzing of the memory test, and then the sounds of the disks loading the OS. It's all very information-rich, and once you get used to the normal routine, it's easy to notice when something changes unexpectedly.
For sure I take your point about seeing POST information. When I switched from Debian to OS X (10.0) I installed an app which gave me that POST info on boot. It looked pretty cool. I was used to seeing it in Linux for years, and it make me happy to have it on OS X.
> Apple has always chosen form over function.
But this isn’t true, and there’s substantial evidence against it. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “Design is not what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.” Under this mantra they prioritized function over form for decades.
Now, sure, they screwed up sometimes, e.g., the previous generation of laptops absolutely prioritized form. Jony Ive got all excited about making something thin and minimal, and ended up dramatically compromising obvious functions, like the very thin but very shitty keyboard.
But that’s an outlier. Mostly their stuff is very high quality. Judge it by longevity and resale value, if nothing else.
This “encouraging learned helplessness” you talk about is in fact the opposite. You clearly care about computers and how they work. Most people don’t. Most people want to treat them like cars — they should work all the time, and when they break they should be taken to professionals to fix. This is nice and predictable for most non-technical people.
Then to compete well in that market, computer manufacturers need to make things which are durable and long-lasting, and with good support. Apple does exactly this.
And if you’re still not buying it, consider that the primary computer for most people today is a mobile phone, and those things need minimal maintenance outside of accidental physical damage. The rest of maintenance is handled by software updates, where again Apple does better than anyone.
Having used an M1 MacBook Pro and iPad Pro I can't say I agree with you on this.
Apple silicon MacBook Pro's are incredible - powerful, long battery life, fan-less most of the time, they are the breath of fresh air and kick in the butt the laptop/pc industry out of the stale state it was in.
The iPad Pro is an impressive device for digital art and other creative applications, giving Adobe and Wacom a bit of much needed competition.
I know many small business owners who use iPhone due to its stability and ease of use out the box.
Apple have many issues but I feel they have an impressive lineup of computing products of which are very functional.
I don’t think that this is from over function. It’s just not carrying over the entire legacy of the PC boot process. Eg when Sun came up with device tree, they were thinking about how to make high quality hardware, not how to have form-over-function mobile devices. I find I am less reassured the more I learn about the PC boot process.
They tend not to upsell you much at the Apple Store… Last time one of my MacBooks was well and truly stuffed, they ended up eventually just giving me a new laptop that was four years newer (it was the Nvidia graphics chip fault in the 2011 MacBook Pro, before the official repair program started. They tried replacing the logic board twice but when the second one failed they just swapped the laptop for a brand new 2015 model for no charge).
When that laptop’s battery started to fail almost six years later, I was surprised that it wasn’t much to fix (about US$200 for the battery replacement). I only replaced that laptop, almost eight years old, a few months ago!
I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.
What diagnostics would even help an average user repair any issue that isn't resolved by a DFU revive?
Even for a PC all the POST failure guides don't have any branches that depend on what's happening or anything the screen says, it's all "well try jiggling things, reinstall Windows, update BIOS, and swap hardware components until it works"
> Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process.
I was having some issue, that I can't recall, a while ago on my iMac. So, I turned on the "verbose boot", which dumps the messages as the OS is starting up. I can't say what's POST and what's not. I think these messages are, umm, post POST.
But, here's the experience.
First it starts with an, essentially, 80x24 window with a 12pt font in the middle of the screen. Quickly, that screen vanishes, and the text shrinks down to at least 1/2 of that size (or, perhaps its still a 12 point font, but now it's on a 5K screen, and not scaled). The tiny text scrolls along on a drive in theater size screen, essentially, for me, unreadable due to both size, speed, and volume. It's not quite "Matrix" indecipherable, but it's close.
Since it doesn't outright fail with a message stuck saying "here's where it broke", the display is, honestly, not particularly useful.
I can see if the crisis is so bad that if it does, indeed, just stop and stick on some very interesting line, then it may be useful. But as a waterfall of messages, it wasn't helpful with my problem, and I'm betting, for many, it's likely not helpful to them either.
In the end, all of these messages are logged and better viewed at your leisure after booting, again, assuming you get that far. But even if it did fail, it's such small text, my fear is that the it would print something out, go "oh that's bad" and restart before you could even make sense of it.
A modern OS is spectacularly complicated, necessitating a very messy boot process. It does not surprise me that anyone would want to hide that.
I just happen to have read Asahi Linux's description of the boot process on Apple Silicon yesterday, and I would disagree: indeed the tl;dr would be that it seems that components are highly segregated and unable to communicate with each other, for security and trust reasons.
IIUC this translates to the inability for a hypothetical POST stage to access anything to perform something resembling an actual POST, and even if it did, it would be unable to transmit any result to the later stage.
When I work with a computer I really don't want to think too much about POST or how the power on button sounds. I simply want it to turn on and work. The functioning of my computer system is mostly orthogonal to my work. I don't distract myself by obsessing over POST messages when I have a backlog to work through.
For your other points, my visits to the Apple Store do not result from learned helplessness. Most problems with Apple products can be resolved using their knowledge base, or if you must, a couple minutes of chat. Apple even has free technical support reachable by phone if you have a real technical issue (like mail issues with your Mac.com address, which came to me as a surprise that they would even do this).
When I do go to the Apple Store the few times that I do, quite frankly it feels like I'm going there to rip them off. Their prices are fair and when you have Apple Care+ they bend backwards to get you up and running. I almost want to apologize to the poor overworked genius after an Apple Store visit.
This is an experience completely different from that from a more conventional PC manufacturer. With a home built PC or one from a gaming vendor like iBuypower, you're pretty much left with the manuals for your components, which are sparse and hardly updated. Even if you get pretty POST beeps it's not reassuring that these problems have little recourse other than "buy more crap to fix your problem" or "flash this shady bin." There is no Apple Store equivalent for regular PC either, if you need help with a regular PC the geek squad is no better at Googling your issue than you are, and very few insurance plans will rebuild your computer for you without a huge copay. "Big" vendors like Dell are even worse, whose support can be summarized as "fuck you pay me" even when the problem is entirely their fault.
To summarize, getting help with a regular PC is a game of passing the buck around by vendors. With Apple there is no one to pass the buck to, so you have them pinned.
All that stuff is worth way more to me than some clunks and beeps.
I'm surprised the article didn't tell how to run diagnostics on an M1 Mac:
Shut it down, hold the power button until you get a screen with some buttons, hold down Command-D until it brings up a diagnostics screen, and answer a couple questions (your language, run local, etc.). Then it takes a minute and posts results. And lastly you click Reboot.
POST really doesn't make sense in many embedded systems and most modern devices I've worked on or with don't use them. The general approach to boot has been to just try and boot but have a safe failure path. That is, if DRAM times out/a bus error is raised, fail out to an embedded bootloader which can boot over USB/SWD. If flash doesn't respond, fail out. This is exactly what Apple is doing with DFU. It makes sense too; why waste time explicitly testing when you can just "test" it by booting?
Sure, maybe if you're building something that has life and limb risks, POST it up before coming online, but most consumer electronics have no need.
sigh I wish Macs were better for accessibility. But nope, Windows still rules for blind people. VoiceOver's awful support for web apps really shows how...
Safari not responding.
bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which my job depends on pretty heavily.
I hope Apple's renewed focus on the Mac means a renewed focus on MacOS as well, and definitely accessibility.
I don't get this comment, modern PCs still undergo POST and motherboards have gotten progressively better at displaying POST outcomes (from beep patterns to seven-segment onboard displays).
Macs have POST rituals, detailed (alongside other boot routines) to an almost extreme extent in this article.
No, POST as in the actual test, not just the sound. The article speculates that unlike “other models that have mute boots”, here there might literally be no power-on self-test: “there are no accessible records of any POST taking place on Apple silicon Macs, no other evidence that they do, and even if they did it’s hard to see what they might achieve.”
And the pun in the headline being 'The Last Post', the bugle call played at funerals. (To American ears, it may sound like a slow mournful version of 'Taps').
[+] [-] userbinator|2 years ago|reply
Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process. It's far more reassuring to see things happening than pressing the power button and being "left in the dark" waiting at a black screen for a few tense moments as something happens.
[1] The satisfying "clunk" of the power switch, to the fans and hard drives spinning up, the latter doing their initial seeks once they've reached full speed, the beep of the POST, the buzzing of the memory test, and then the sounds of the disks loading the OS. It's all very information-rich, and once you get used to the normal routine, it's easy to notice when something changes unexpectedly.
[+] [-] sonofhans|2 years ago|reply
> Apple has always chosen form over function.
But this isn’t true, and there’s substantial evidence against it. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “Design is not what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.” Under this mantra they prioritized function over form for decades.
Now, sure, they screwed up sometimes, e.g., the previous generation of laptops absolutely prioritized form. Jony Ive got all excited about making something thin and minimal, and ended up dramatically compromising obvious functions, like the very thin but very shitty keyboard.
But that’s an outlier. Mostly their stuff is very high quality. Judge it by longevity and resale value, if nothing else.
This “encouraging learned helplessness” you talk about is in fact the opposite. You clearly care about computers and how they work. Most people don’t. Most people want to treat them like cars — they should work all the time, and when they break they should be taken to professionals to fix. This is nice and predictable for most non-technical people.
Then to compete well in that market, computer manufacturers need to make things which are durable and long-lasting, and with good support. Apple does exactly this.
And if you’re still not buying it, consider that the primary computer for most people today is a mobile phone, and those things need minimal maintenance outside of accidental physical damage. The rest of maintenance is handled by software updates, where again Apple does better than anyone.
[+] [-] throwaway_ab|2 years ago|reply
Having used an M1 MacBook Pro and iPad Pro I can't say I agree with you on this.
Apple silicon MacBook Pro's are incredible - powerful, long battery life, fan-less most of the time, they are the breath of fresh air and kick in the butt the laptop/pc industry out of the stale state it was in.
The iPad Pro is an impressive device for digital art and other creative applications, giving Adobe and Wacom a bit of much needed competition.
I know many small business owners who use iPhone due to its stability and ease of use out the box.
Apple have many issues but I feel they have an impressive lineup of computing products of which are very functional.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|2 years ago|reply
When that laptop’s battery started to fail almost six years later, I was surprised that it wasn’t much to fix (about US$200 for the battery replacement). I only replaced that laptop, almost eight years old, a few months ago!
[+] [-] nickvanw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctor_eval|2 years ago|reply
I'm gonna reboot. And if it keeps failing, I'll take it to a shop.
If I take a Mac to the Apple store, they will run their in-house diagnostics and tell me what's wrong.
If I take a PC to the PC store, they will run their own diagnostics and tell me what's wrong.
So what benefit does this messy POST give me?
[+] [-] brigade|2 years ago|reply
Even for a PC all the POST failure guides don't have any branches that depend on what's happening or anything the screen says, it's all "well try jiggling things, reinstall Windows, update BIOS, and swap hardware components until it works"
[+] [-] pram|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whartung|2 years ago|reply
I was having some issue, that I can't recall, a while ago on my iMac. So, I turned on the "verbose boot", which dumps the messages as the OS is starting up. I can't say what's POST and what's not. I think these messages are, umm, post POST.
But, here's the experience.
First it starts with an, essentially, 80x24 window with a 12pt font in the middle of the screen. Quickly, that screen vanishes, and the text shrinks down to at least 1/2 of that size (or, perhaps its still a 12 point font, but now it's on a 5K screen, and not scaled). The tiny text scrolls along on a drive in theater size screen, essentially, for me, unreadable due to both size, speed, and volume. It's not quite "Matrix" indecipherable, but it's close.
Since it doesn't outright fail with a message stuck saying "here's where it broke", the display is, honestly, not particularly useful.
I can see if the crisis is so bad that if it does, indeed, just stop and stick on some very interesting line, then it may be useful. But as a waterfall of messages, it wasn't helpful with my problem, and I'm betting, for many, it's likely not helpful to them either.
In the end, all of these messages are logged and better viewed at your leisure after booting, again, assuming you get that far. But even if it did fail, it's such small text, my fear is that the it would print something out, go "oh that's bad" and restart before you could even make sense of it.
A modern OS is spectacularly complicated, necessitating a very messy boot process. It does not surprise me that anyone would want to hide that.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lloeki|2 years ago|reply
IIUC this translates to the inability for a hypothetical POST stage to access anything to perform something resembling an actual POST, and even if it did, it would be unable to transmit any result to the later stage.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...
[+] [-] tremere|2 years ago|reply
For your other points, my visits to the Apple Store do not result from learned helplessness. Most problems with Apple products can be resolved using their knowledge base, or if you must, a couple minutes of chat. Apple even has free technical support reachable by phone if you have a real technical issue (like mail issues with your Mac.com address, which came to me as a surprise that they would even do this).
When I do go to the Apple Store the few times that I do, quite frankly it feels like I'm going there to rip them off. Their prices are fair and when you have Apple Care+ they bend backwards to get you up and running. I almost want to apologize to the poor overworked genius after an Apple Store visit.
This is an experience completely different from that from a more conventional PC manufacturer. With a home built PC or one from a gaming vendor like iBuypower, you're pretty much left with the manuals for your components, which are sparse and hardly updated. Even if you get pretty POST beeps it's not reassuring that these problems have little recourse other than "buy more crap to fix your problem" or "flash this shady bin." There is no Apple Store equivalent for regular PC either, if you need help with a regular PC the geek squad is no better at Googling your issue than you are, and very few insurance plans will rebuild your computer for you without a huge copay. "Big" vendors like Dell are even worse, whose support can be summarized as "fuck you pay me" even when the problem is entirely their fault.
To summarize, getting help with a regular PC is a game of passing the buck around by vendors. With Apple there is no one to pass the buck to, so you have them pinned.
All that stuff is worth way more to me than some clunks and beeps.
[+] [-] manv1|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pulvinar|2 years ago|reply
Shut it down, hold the power button until you get a screen with some buttons, hold down Command-D until it brings up a diagnostics screen, and answer a couple questions (your language, run local, etc.). Then it takes a minute and posts results. And lastly you click Reboot.
[+] [-] sweetjuly|2 years ago|reply
Sure, maybe if you're building something that has life and limb risks, POST it up before coming online, but most consumer electronics have no need.
[+] [-] devinprater|2 years ago|reply
Safari not responding.
bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which my job depends on pretty heavily.
I hope Apple's renewed focus on the Mac means a renewed focus on MacOS as well, and definitely accessibility.
[+] [-] yreg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaudat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verandaguy|2 years ago|reply
Macs have POST rituals, detailed (alongside other boot routines) to an almost extreme extent in this article.
[+] [-] aendruk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm445|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quercusa|2 years ago|reply
I wonder what the official phrase behind "DFU" is?
[+] [-] Raqbit|2 years ago|reply
https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/DFU_Mode
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] detaro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjvc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply