
Thank you Apple - zdw
http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.html
======
miles
_It had surprised me when Lion came out that the installation was done by an
"app", not as a bootable image. This is an unnecessary complication for those
of us that need to maintain machines. Earlier, when updating a different
machine, I had learned how painful this could be when the installation app
destroyed the boot sector and I needed to reinstall Snow Leopard from DVD, and
then upgrade that to a version of the system recent enough to run the Lion
installer app. As will become apparent, had Lion come as a bootable image
things might have gone more smoothly._

Lion and Mountain Lion installers contain images which can easily be converted
to ISO:

[http://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/201209130700_convert_dmg_to_iso...](http://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/201209130700_convert_dmg_to_iso.html)

and there are many more options and approaches:

[http://www.tech-
recipes.com/rx/2628/install_os_x_from_dmg_fi...](http://www.tech-
recipes.com/rx/2628/install_os_x_from_dmg_file/)

<http://0xced.blogspot.com/2009/08/booting-from-dmg.html>

[http://blogchampion.com/2011/03/12/how-to-create-a-
bootable-...](http://blogchampion.com/2011/03/12/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-
drive-installer-from-a-dmg-package-in-mac-os-x/)

~~~
dchichkov
Yeah. I remember going through Snow L -> Lion. I wanted a clean system so had
to make an ISO. Process reminded me a linux install from USB from 10 years
back.

And I lost iPhoto. Because suddenly my Macbook Air stopped being eligible for
free iPhoto.

~~~
aidos
I had an annoying scenario recently.

I reinstalled Snow L on an older machine and then could no longer reinstall
iphoto. I'd paid for it on my app store account but there was no way to
install the older version (and I couldn't upgrade to the newer version).

Once again reinforced the danger of the cloud hosted licensing model; software
I paid for wasn't actually mine to keep/use.

------
arrrg
(This does not in any way excuse anything he encountered. That is and will
always remain inexcusable.)

Apple is aware of those problems and hard at work fixing them. All current
Macs, for example, now come with Internet Recovery, meaning it is possible to
boot them into the recovery manager (and from there it’s possible to run Disk
Utility, the Terminal or the installer), even with a completely empty HDD. All
the iLife apps you get with your Mac (and all apps you buy in the App Store)
are automatically tied to your Apple ID, meaning you can download them as
often as you want. You cannot even buy any software on CDs from Apple anymore
(the lone exception to that is Logic Studio).

I assume (hope!) that all Time Machine bugs have been fixed, but do not know.
It seems weird that even the latest version of OS X Lion would come with those
bugs, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. At any rate, the experience he
had is unacceptable.

~~~
tolmasky
I have a "non current" macbook air that I've been wanting to do a security
clean install on forever but it doesn't qualify for internet recovery for some
reason. Its a 2010 Macbook Air. How do I do a secure wipe of the drive and
reinstall ML on this thing?

~~~
arrrg
It’s pretty easy: <http://eggfreckles.net/notes/installing-mountain-lion-
clean/>

I have used this procedure many times, it works like a charm.

However, I do want Apple to provide a more obvious way of doing just that. It
would be great if their tool for creating a bootable recovery manager worked
just with the OS X install app as a source.

But to be honest, I do not think that doing a clean install is a good idea for
the most people and for defect HDDs, new Macs at least come with internet
recovery (but the older ones are still a problem).

------
js2
I think there's one thing he didn't try that would've saved him some work. The
path he took was (skipping some early steps):

1\. Backup under Snow Leopard via Time Machine

2\. Replace drive

3\. Install fresh copy of Snow Leopard

4\. Upgrade to Lion

5\. Attempt to use Migration Assistant to restore from the Time Machine backup
taken in step (1).

This failed at step (5) and he ended up having to do lots of manual work to
copy his data and apps out of the TM backup.

I think if he restored from the the Time Machine backup after replacing the
drive, then attempted the Lion upgrade, he'd have been successful. Minimally,
it would've been a combination of well tested scenarios. I'll bet not as much
testing went into using Migration Assistant under Lion against Snow Leopard TM
backups.

~~~
johnpowell
I'm not a fan of Time Machine. I just use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a
bootable version on a USB drive. If things go wrong I boot from it and clone
it back to the internal drive.

------
akshaym
I think it's interesting to point out that this is Rob Pike.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike>

~~~
Krylez
Interesting in that his industry veteran status gives this merit or
interesting in that his employment makes him a shill?

~~~
davvid
Interesting in that when it comes to computers, he knows what he's doing.

~~~
eropple
Does he?

Not a knock on Rob Pike, obviously a very smart dude, but knowing computers at
one point doesn't mean you've invested the time to keep up with them since. My
dad was a network engineer in the 90's and early 00's and I learned a lot from
him, but these days, when he needs to pick out a laptop or something, he asks
me. I'm more connected to it than he is now, because he has other things on
his plate.

~~~
jlgreco
If _Rob Pike_ can be said to be too technically unfamiliar for an Apple
product, then there is something very very wrong with Apple's expectations of
their users.

~~~
eropple
Is he too technically unfamiliar? Or is he trying to leverage assumed domain
knowledge in an incorrect way? I mean, I'm not a programming languages expert.
I couldn't work on Go. But I _do_ know that the bootable OS X installer is
within the app package upon which he was casting aspersions; I've used it
myself to reinstall OS X and to install it on different machines.

Some friends of mine who are professionals in other fields have noted (not
about me, I hope, but I know that I'm guilty of this at times as well) that
"computer people" have no end of cases where they think their preexisting
knowledge is enough to solve a problem when it has little or no bearing on the
topic at hand (politics, biology, whatever). I see no reason that can't also
be true within the computer field as well. Because a pretty cursory Google
_would_ have explained all the things people elsewhere in this thread have
explained about how to actually do this--but he didn't do it, relied on his
own previous knowledge, and it didn't really apply.

~~~
jlgreco
It doesn't really sound like he got himself into this situation because he
struck out on his own and broke something.

It sounds like he got into this situation by calling up _and trusted_ customer
support and doing what any normal consumer does: then calling the fixup guy
who is supposed to do this stuff professionally.

They said to make a backup and everything would work. He made a backup and it
didn't work. From there, everything got worse.

I know that is pretty much the opposite of what I, an undoubtedly overzealous
"technology guy", would try to do. Though, as a technology guy I probably
would have said _"Fuck it, lets install linux"_ not even halfway through the
trouble he was having (and if it were still 2003 and the linux distro I was
trying to install were Gentoo, the effort required between the two probably
would have just about evened out).

Sticking with it and trying to work with customer service is a very _"normal
trusting consumer"_ thing to do.

------
cletus
IMHO not having install media as the default option is a problem. It doesn't
matter if all the media does is boot up a network stack and FTP it from
somewhere and then run it but recovery scenarios aren't something you should
have to twist yourself into a loop to solve.

One of the advantages of the App Store model is that software is (AFAIK)
easily redownloaded and reinstalled, so much so that I know people who have
re-bought Aperture (for $80) on the App Store just for the convenience (plus
then it can go on multiple Macs).

Why Rob Pike wouldn't fork over $80 for Aperture and save himself the hassle
is beyond me. You can say "it's the principle of the thing; I've already paid
for it!" but really? What is your time worth?

iWork can be had on the App Store too. Photoshop obviously can't but Photoshop
should be recoverable somehow (right?).

These days I have a box with the few disks I need (Win7, MS Office), I store
my personal files on Dropbox and any media gets stored on a hard disk. If my
Macbook Air got stolen or just died I'd be up and running within 2 hours of
getting a new one.

The only real annoyance for me is changing what computer your iDevices sync
to. THAT is a major PITA. If you are migrating machines it's not so bad (but
harder than it should be). But otherwise you need to backup, wipe it and
reinstall everything and even then you lose all your iOS folders and so forth.

I don't like the iMacs because they're not built for replacing hard disks
(amongst other things). The Mac Mini however is. If this had happened to me I
would've been shelling out money to avoid the hassle and the whole thing
would've been over in a day or two.

The moral I get from this post isn't how Apple is making things harder than
they need to be (which they clearly are): it's that you shouldn't get caught
up on the small shit that doesn't matter.

~~~
dchichkov
>>>> Why Rob Pike wouldn't fork over $80 for Aperture and save himself the
hassle is beyond me. You can say "it's the principle of the thing; I've
already paid for it!" but really? What is your time worth?

Well, the trouble with that approach is that money votes. When you pay this
extra $80 you reinforce the behavior.

~~~
brianpan
And you wouldn't want to reinforce the behavior of providing a time-saving
service for money?

~~~
dchichkov
I don't want cloud service providers forcing me to buy an application a SECOND
time, by limiting my access to installer.

And I'd really prefer not to pay second time. Because that reinforces the
behavior of profiting by screwing people up. Maybe it saves my time. But it is
unethical.

~~~
ricardobeat
They didn't limit access to the installer, he was trying to bring it back from
a Time Machine backup. If he had the original disc it would work fine.

~~~
dchichkov
Same thing really. He couldn't reinstall application that he owned. Because
access to the installer was convoluted.

~~~
ricardobeat
You bought it on a CD, keep the CD.

Before downloading apps was the norm, _no_ company would issue a second copy
of something you bought.

~~~
dchichkov
Well, before advent of app store I NEVER had a case than I couldn't reinstall
application that I've purchased.

And with the app store, in just a year or so I already had a couple of cases
when I lost access to an installer. One was that I lost iPhoto, with OS
upgrade on Air. Another, temporarily, for around a week I had no access to
XCode installer [because of some screw up in the store].

------
0xC3
My Mac Pro running 10.8 has some issues such as applications with blank icons,
pixelated icons, etc. I was told to boot into safe mode (which I tried about
5x) and it hangs at about 1/4 into it.

It seems pretty silly to include a "safe mode" that won't even allow someone
to use it. I always end up holding the power switch in for a few seconds until
I reboot into normal mode, which apparently includes having blank/pixelated
icons :-/

~~~
rangibaby
Disk utility's repair disk and repair disk permissions functions, which are
run as part of a safe boot, can take quite some time to complete their job.

I would just wait.

However, if you would _really_ like to know where your boot is getting stuck,
do a verbose boot, which is the same thing as a safe boot, except it replaces
the gray Apple screen fairly (and usefully) verbosely.

------
languagehacker
Sounds like he had a bad day. Oh well. Probably as much of an unproductive
waste of time to write this long, passive-aggressive blog post.

~~~
aprescott
_Sounds like he had a bad day._

Did you read the whole thing?

 _It took weeks to get everything working again properly._

 _Because I could prove that I had paid for the software, Apple agreed to send
me fresh installation disks for everything of theirs but Aperture, but that
would take time. In fact, it took almost a month for the iWork DVD to arrive,
which is unacceptably long. I even needed to call twice to remind them before
the disks were shipped._

~~~
dubcanada
That's why app stores exist... you think Microsoft would have been faster if
they sent you MS Office?

------
jordanthoms
I'm mostly amazed that the person being sent to replace the hard drive with a
blank one didn't think to bring installation media...

------
smoyer
I'm also having one of those days ... I just updated Ubuntu on a newish
machine and now have no sound and snow on the screen where video had been.
Some days I hate computers and hope they're just a passing fad.

------
millerized
You seem like a smart guy, but heres an FYI: the Lion installation app, as
well as ML installer, is just a wrapper application with preflight functions
for the installer. This app wrapper contains the disk image of the Lion
installer that functions just like any other disk image of OS X. To find the
disk image for lion in the "Install Lion.app" app wrapper, you right click on
the app and click show contents, find a resources folder and bam, there it is.
The disk image can be burned to DVD or restored to a flash drive using disk
utility. No excuses now, they didn't fail anyone. Time machine has never
failed me. The only time things get dicey is when you encrypt, using vault or
etc, large file sets or systems. All you needed to do from the first go is 1)
back up to time machine, 2) install new drive, 3) restore the time machine
backup with option at boot (snow leopard install disc might be required, but
you scratched your disc, not apples fault), if disc is scratched for DVD
install, there's a good chance you could have still restored a usable copy of
it to a flash drive or a new DMG on your desktop using disk utility. 4)
restore the disk image of lion from the install lion.app, the DMG you were
unaware of and bitched so much about, to the flash drive and 5) upgrade your
SL to lion using option at boot. Also, before backing up a dying drive, make
sure to repair permissions using disk utility. Also, if you kept your old
drive, you can buy an enclosure for 30$ and turn the drive into an external
disk and restore your original installation. And not the time machine backup.
Works every time even with dying unrepairable drives.. Cheers.

------
nicklaforge
I have to laugh at hose of you who fault Rob for following anything but the
most mainstream recourse in resolving his crisis as proof that he's to blame,
didn't do his homework, etc. Consider this: despite the (somewhat strange, in
my mind) phenomenon of various Plan 9 alumni (and Google employees in general)
using Macbooks for daily use, the fact that these folks are proven experts at
bringing up ports of their own research operating systems on new machines from
just their hardware documentation should key you into the fact that these
Apple products were purchased with all the expectations of an appliance! I.e.,
not things to be mucked around with, but the result of a commercial
transaction that ought to be judged on its capacity to perform as advertised
and supported if necessary.

Getting a closed, commercial product (with a baroque unix base) to bend over
backwards to perform basic functions like backup and installation is not a
Plan 9 user's of fun. I would hazard a guess that the greatest reason Rob got
burned could have been the naive expectation that programs will perform their
designated task simply and correctly?

Considering Apple's user-base, on the other hand, idiot proofing the system
seems to be a much higher priority. Which is the main reason why I still don't
understand why Plan 9 people can stand to use Macs.

------
chm
After witnessing my dad's troubles with TimeMachine, I bought a copy of
SuperDuper!.

It's amazing software, and it saved me once now, it's been only a year since
I've been using it. Hard-drive fails? Plug in external one, and use your
computer as if nothing happened.

Their "smart update" feature is very useful.

[http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...](http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html)

------
frio
I wanted to blog about something similar myself, but currently lack a blog.
Apple's rejection of physical media is, I would argue, extremely harmful.

I have an old, 2008 Macbook (not Pro) 4,1. The old white plastic kind. Lion
performs atrociously (at best) on it, so around half a year ago I installed
Linux on it. Recently, I got around to buying a new laptop (a Lenovo), and
wanted to restore OSX on the old Macbook in order to give it to family.

I figured off the bat I'd do a clean install of Mountain Lion. I have old
Leopard installation media, but that's a dead upgrade path: you can't buy Snow
Leopard media anymore, so you cannot upgrade it. Apple don't sell physical
media for Mountain Lion either, so I went to a friend's house, logged into the
Mac App store, purchased and downloaded Mountain Lion.

When I got home, the installer (which took an hour or so to image onto a USB
stick) didn't work. I figured it might be balking on the HDD being Linux, so
dd'd it. Nope. It turns out Mountain Lion is incompatible with my hardware.

This is where the vortex begins. I returned to my friend, and tried to get the
Lion installer off the App Store (on my account), which I had previously
purchased. No dice. Apple have removed Lion now that Mountain Lion is out.

I tried to install the copy of Snow Leopard my friend had. Not possible. As
OEM media, it's got (very basic, admittedly) DRM onboard which restricts the
installation to his hardware.

I tried to get the copy of Snow Leopard I had originally installed, when my
previous employer had (kindly) purchased a stack of us personal copies
alongside upgrades for work machines. Nope; they'd stopped using Macs and
those were gone.

Being frustrated, I figured I'd install Leopard on the laptop and be done with
it. Nope. The disc, it turns out, is scratched.

At this stage, I called Apple. I asked what I could do. I was advised I could
purchase a physical copy of Lion off them, if I paid full price -- despite
_already having purchased it_ on the App Store. Frustrated, but at this stage
just wanting to be rid of the device, I agreed. It turns out this was also not
possible. Apple's support is in Australia, and NZ can't get the physical media
(at least, I believe this to be the case; I may have conflated the issue on
the phone with needing to get the media within a week).

The next day, I took the laptop to a Yoobee store (our Apple store
equivalent). They told me they'd have to ship the laptop to the support centre
to fix it.

So, to recap: I can't install Mountain Lion, because my hardware is too old. I
can't get physical media for Snow Leopard or Lion, because Apple no longer
sell it. I can't retrieve a copy of Lion from the app store and create my own,
because Apple has removed it. I can't install Leopard, because my media is
damaged (not Apple's fault) -- but even if I could, it's unsupported and with
no physical media, there's no upgrade path. The only solution was to pay to
ship the laptop off to a support centre. Ultimately, I was very lucky to find
another friend on IRC who still had a Lion USB stick he'd imaged earlier, but
the fact I needed to do this is... well, awful.

This is a _terrible_ customer support situation. I'll admit it's compounded by
the fact I'm in New Zealand, and we have no Apple stores (fair enough: our
entire population is less than several US cities), so support is harder to
come by. I'll admit that, having installed Linux, I'm probably in somewhat of
a minority. However, Apple's forced hardware deprecation, and removal of
physical media, have made it almost literally impossible to restore a working
copy of OSX on their own hardware.

~~~
pasbesoin
A bit of toothpaste diluted with water, and a gentle fingertip, may take that
scratch out of your Leopard disc. _Do less than you think is necessary_ , then
stop and assess.

In part, it seems some people "have the touch" for such work. I've fixed up a
few abused (by others) music CD's this way.

~~~
sneak
[http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4179024/Mac_OS_X_10.5_Leopard...](http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4179024/Mac_OS_X_10.5_Leopard_Install_DVD_-
_full_iso_image)

[http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5068890/Mac_OS_X_10.6_Snow_Le...](http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5068890/Mac_OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard_\(Final_Retail\))

------
piotr_krzyzek
So I may come off as a grumpy old man, and I do sympathize with the op ... but
in this day in age, it's only _that_ much more important to keep manual
backups of serial numbers, passwords, installers ...

I trust Apple, Windows and Linux enough to not ruin my life, but not enough to
keep me 100% safe.

Passwords: Personal & Business kept in LastPass and a copy in KeePass (synced
in dropbox to 3 devices). Client passwords stored in Keepass + manual copies
on digital client folders (secured files) + notes in a locked safe.

Games + apps: Digital downloads loaded into Raid 5 array, backed up on server,
backed up onto DVD. serials/usernames/download links saved in cloud mail
server + keypass

Documents: Saved to external HD, saved to raid 5, rsynced to private VPS,
rysynced to downstairs server.

There is absolutely no excuse for losing passwords and misplacing things like
that. That part of the story I believe it all the ops fault.

------
Tmmrn
There were several articles recently where I was reminded of the Linux Genuine
Advantage satire website:

<http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/>

> Did you wake up this morning and say "I wish someone would figure out a way
> to let me do less with my computer"?

------
krrrh
There is no way he had a core duo system that is only 4 years old. Apple only
made core duo MacBooks in early 2006.

~~~
homosaur
#1. It's an iMac.

#2. You are wrong. [http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-
core-2...](http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/specs/imac-
core-2-duo-3.33-27-inch-aluminum-late-2009-specs.html)

~~~
arrrg
1) He was specifically talking about his laptop.

2) You are wrong. Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo. There is a difference. Apple only
sold Core Duos for a very short time in 2006, right after their switch to
Intel. At the latest, he could have bought a MacBook with a Core Duo on
November 5, 2006. After that date, Apple discontinued the last one. So his
MacBook is at least nearly six years old.

~~~
homosaur
Then I'm sure he meant Core 2 and made a mistake, because I'd sure he wouldn't
miss the computer's age by 50% if he purchased it.

~~~
arrrg
No, it’s pretty certain he meant Core Duo since (and that was the problem he
was running into) all Core 2 Duo MacBooks support Lion while Core Duo MacBooks
do not.

It’s easy to massively mis-estimate the age of the stuff you own. Happened
often enough to myself, so I’m not really surprised about that.

~~~
homosaur
Right, I definitely missed that, I read this article in three parts while
making lunch and clearly skipped some paragraphs. It was my mistake that I
though Lion was supported on these machines. I have an old Core 2 that runs
Lion (poorly) but will not run Mountain Lion due to the crappy Intel graphics,
not because of the processor.

------
dmishe
Technology sucks
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUps...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx)

------
mproud
Why didn't he call AppleCare back?

All he needed to do, with an Internet connection, was power on holding
Command+R and the Mac does the rest (formats the new drive and creates a
recovery partition, then, boots to it, and one of the options there is to
restore the entire computer from a Time Machine backup).

Done.

He made this needlessly complicated, and really should have just called
AppleCare back, as they could have easily walked him through these steps.

------
Djonckheere
This post is riveting. No really. Bewildering to say the least. As the post
drags on and on the reoccurring "Thank you Apple" takes on an increasingly
sarcastic tone.

Regardless of the author's fluency with computers (who really cares?) one can
only marvel at the sheer absurdity in squandering the better part of a day (or
was that several days?) mucking around with OS updates. Really? What a
colossal waste of time.

~~~
prodigal_erik
He is not merely "fluent with computers." He co-created three operating
systems and at least one programming language, _including_ the OS Apple
managed to hinder him from installing. If your process is beyond him, your
process is very, very broken.

~~~
sbuk
Thing is, it doesn't seem to be beyond quite a few people here or elsewhere on
the Internet. Appealing to authority is no way to prove a point. I wouldn't
trust an architect to actually lay bricks.

------
danso
I recently had problems migrating to 10.8 so I just formatted my computer and
reloaded the data parts. Still not fun having to reload apps but I'm at least
glad that app reloading is simpler than what it used to be when I used
Windows. I've tried to kee my computing as data-focused as possible...and hope
that big commercial packages, like Photoshop, do their job in surviving OS
upgrades

------
teilo
In my experience, Time Machine works great. What doesn't work great are the
absolute pieces of crap that Seagate and Western Digital are pawning off on us
as viable backup solutions. They are just plain garbage. The controllers are
unstable, and the drives are invariably refurbished. (And don't even get me
started on the 2.5" drives with embedded USB controllers and no access to SATA
ports.)

I went through a couple Seagates and a couple WD's, each of which would
corrupt the Time Machine volume repeatedly. The last straw came when I had an
internal drive failure on my MBP, and my existing Time Machine drive would not
even mount, and Disk Warrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro (in that order)
were of no help.

I switched to using a Thermaltake USB3 dock, with 3.5" WD Enterprise drives. I
have not had a single issue since. You get what you pay for in hard drives. If
you are relying upon them for backup - don't go cheap. It isn't worth it!

~~~
homosaur
Everyone should also have a remote backup anyway. Anyone relying on local hard
drives to secure their data are completely naive. Not that I DON'T use a
local, it's great for quick and easy file backup and transfer, but I sure as
hell don't rely on that $100 drive to work correctly and with remote backup,
I'm sure not going to spend more than that on a local drive. If your data
doesn't exist in three places, one remote, it doesn't exist. Ask Francis
Coppola about how well having one local backup worked out.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm>

Anyway, you're right about everything you said in your post, but just so
people know, you can pay $20K for a backup array and if you don't have a
remote, one fire makes that backup meaningless. Crash Plan, Carbonite,
Backblaze, etc etc (AWS Glacier anyone?) all these services are so cheap you'd
be insane not to just drop the $5 a month if your data is valuable.

------
bitcartel
If you use FileVault on your main drive or on your Time Machine, here are some
tips I picked up on Lion, which might make your life easier. Things may have
changed, but should still apply to Mountain Lion.

On each machine you have, download the Lion Installer app via the App Store.
The app seems to be different for different models of Mac. From experience, it
seems one model Mac might not be able to use the installer from a different
model Mac. Open the app package and burn the ESDInstall.dmg to a USB stick to
use as an installer.

Using the USB installer, erase the drive as a single partition, and perform a
clean install of Lion. This ensures the recovery partition is created on the
drive.

Launching the USB installer again, format the main partition and then restore
from your encrypted Time Machine.

The partition you are restoring to is unencrypted so when the restore is
complete, reboot your Mac, and manually enable FileVault (if you want it).

------
kora
It really seems like the entire point of this article was the author
declaring, boldly "I don't know how to use OS X," and that's Apple's fault.

They're not without issue, but I've done every single thing he's complained
about not being possible……except installing an OS over Target Disk……but that's
a stupid idea anyway.

------
Create
Same here for the AppStore, which happily took my money and I still can't
download Mountain, because I am in the "wrong" country.

Linux is running fine instead.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433082>

------
steve8918
Can someone advise me on the point in the article about how Time Machine is
insufficient to backup one's entire computer?

My wife's Macbook Air uses Time Machine to backup, and I haven't done any
other sort of backup with it. If her hard drive crashes, will she lose
information, or is Time Machine reliable enough to restore her entire laptop?
I just assumed it was good enough. If this isn't true, and if she loses any
information, it's not Tim Cook who will need to deal with her wrath...

~~~
timcederman
I've done several full system restores from Time Machine.

~~~
steve8918
Thanks guys, I'm relieved to hear both of you have done it!

------
niels_olson
> When you assume, you put plum paste on your ass

I don't get it...

Ume. I got it. I got. Hey, guys, I got it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ume>

~~~
DLWormwood
I don’t think that word is pronounced the way the blogger thinks it is…

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ume>

------
autophil
The "Thank you Apple" title sounds like a gushing fanboi love letter. I almost
didn't read the post (which is quite good, glad I did).

I just think the title should be a little more clear (like add a "not" at the
end).

~~~
blinkingled
Rob Pike is a Canadian :)

------
aklein
I was spec'ing out a new macbook pro and saw that memory is now soldered in,
and the SSD drives have proprietary interfaces. I am, how shall you say,
displeased...

------
sonnyhe2002
I learned something today.

------
se85
redacted

