Remarkable how cheap the comments on stories like this tend to be. The regurgitated "Apple is bad, mmmkay" low effort posts.
To be clear, guy started a sync with his phone (people still do this?). In the middle of a sync he decides he wants to restart his computer, which tells him, reasonably, to wait until its done. If you were running a long-running terminal script, in the middle of a backup or large file move, or countless other tasks, any reasonable OS does exactly the same thing -- it asks the various subsystems if now is a good time, if not it delays the reboot.
He could forcefully stop the sync (which would make it not an issue, while forfeiting the work it had done thus far), and he could forcefully reboot his computer, but this has positively nothing to do with "you have to reboot your phone first".
There needs to be a moratorium on these sorts of low-info, low-effort posts. It's just pandering to a base.
Not entirely correct. I've run into this problem on Catalina as well, and very often it IS a bug with the phone syncing (yes people still sync, we're not all backing up our phones to iCloud).
The phone appears to be done syncing, there's no progress bar/circle/spinner anywhere, the phone might even be disconnected from USB (though some syncing can happen over wifi), and YET, and yet! The Mac refuses to let go and reboot.
Unlike the blog author though, I figured out that 'sudo reboot' works very well in this situation...
Can you forcefully stop the sync or[0] reboot the still-trying-to-sync computer if the OS doesn't want you to? I'm not up to date on the material these sorts of posts are Hallmark-style-loosely-inspired-by-true-story-esque based on. Edit: FWIW, weikju seems to claim that `sudo reboot` still works correctly (forces a reboot regardless of what the OS wants) as of Catalina; I dunno about `kill -9`-ing the sync.
But other than that, yes. I was expecting this to be a legitimate problem like two-factor authentication on the computer.
0: by which I mean that both options are available, and you choose which, not that at least one is available.
A sync should be an atomic operation. Or at the very least, reversible if it gets interrupted. In that case, a reboot should be able to happen at any time.
more than that. a sync should be interruptible and resumable.
rsync does that.
so does syncthing which i use to keep my phones data synced to my computer. it runs all the time and syncs when i am on wifi (even when i am not anywhere near the computer)
it pauses when i get off wifi or the two machines can't connect for other reasons, and resumes when the connection is back.
Exactly. Ideally, a sync is silently interruptible, or at least can be easily manually paused. That's the actual, and legitimate, issue. Being "unable to reboot" because of the in-progress operation is a derivative result, and the author is misleading by making that the title, for the purpose of creating a more provocative headline.
Not allowing reboot during sync without a warning is a feature.
Not allowing you to cancel the operation from the warning is a missing obvious feature.
Not having a discoverable method besides rebooting the phone to cancel the sync operation is a major UX flaw, though probably more of a design flaw than a bug, sensu stricto.
Sometimes processes hang -- bugs exist -- and there's no getting around it but to kill them. (The author doesn't even explain exactly what they were doing or why they couldn't cancel it, but every major Finder file operation I'm aware of has a status bar and a cancel button.)
I'd still rather my OS refuse to shut down because it thinks a process could lose data.
Because at the end of the day I can always just hold down the power button to turn it off, you know?
A good thing would be including a force restart button.
Also if you read the article, they said they couldn't figure out a way to stop the sync other then rebooting their phone, which likely has a higher chance of causing dataloss.
Yikes--that's not good. You really do need those security updates; they're not optional if your Mac is connected to the internet or has any form of communication with the outside world. There have been some nasty vulnerabilities over the past year.
How about just holding the power button on the Mac down for several seconds if shutting down from menu options is not working? The user doesn’t seem to mind losing data on the phone by interrupting a sync operation in some unknown state or doesn’t seem to mind losing any data on the Mac by a forced shutdown either.
Yes indeed, the humor in my comment didn't land. The device coupling is out of hand, like when your phone rings and the watch, computer, fridge an vacuum also buzz.
Totally agree about the nature of what appears to be the ultimate point the author is making. They really should have focused their criticism to avoid appearing unreasonable.
Wait, people still sync their phones? I thought that went away about 5 years ago... At least that’s the last time I or any of the people I ‘friend support’ for did so...
I do it when I dump photos to my NAS with Image Capture. I've never needed an iPhone backup... but it's nice to know it's there if I do.
I think it's crazy to keep more than a few months of photos on a handheld device unless you routinely backup or subscribe to a service or iCloud. Some of my friends have years of photos and no backup. :(
The actual complaint here appears to be that a iPhone sync can't be interrupted. Is that true? The reboot complaint appears to be a complete misdirect and a non-issue.
I really hate this (not so recent) concept of having to ask my computer “pretty please, with sugar on top, do this thing.” When I command my computer to do something I expect it to do that thing immediately. Not ask me if I’m sure, not do it later when it’s not too busy, not do something else because AI. Do it right now! Even the wording has changed. We used to command our computers, now we issue requests. And maybe if the computer feels like it, it will actually listen to the user.
On PCs it all started with the “shutdown” button. Used to be, when you wanted to turn your computer off, you flipped the mechanical switch and it’s off. Now we have all these buffers to flush and caches to sync, and inscrutable background tasks doing god knows what that you have to wait for. So now instead of the switch you need to ask very nicely: “Please oh wise computer, do this thing that was instant and reliable before!”
You own your car but you don't demand the right to turn it off any time you want, nor to drive any way you want. You don't do it because you know there are consequences if you do. If you're happy with bad things happening "because I have the right to do it", then well... by all means proceed.
I rarely want to, but in fact I can turn off my car at any time, and have, and it would be an intolerable problem to discover some day that I was not in control of my car.
You have presented no argument.
It's bad enough that it's impossible for anything to be perfect, and so even when you do your honest best, I will not be in control of my car once in a while because something simply broke. (I pressed the brake, the car didn't stop)
But there is no excuse for artificially injecting avoidable breakage by having things decide not to work, on top of the unavoidable honest breakage.
It is ultimately, and fundamentally, wrong to try to predict all valid actions ahead of time and provide some sort of managed answer for all the actions you though of and decided are the universe of valid actions.
If you stop a disk format in the middle, you have to start from the beginning. I'd imagine the same thing would happen with a sync.
If you stop in the middle of a firmware upgrade, it's a bit more fussy; a good process would just need to be started over, but sometimes you need to do an emergency procedure (and sometimes the emergency procedure involves an external firmware programmer, which is exciting).
Yeah, phone syncing is not a critical task. Alternative: Finder is currently syncing your phone and you click “Cancel Reboot” for the next 10 seconds if you want. Otherwise your phone sync will be canceled, your computer will restart, and you can restart the phone sync later.
Big Sur is such a joke of an update, it's almost farcical. Basic functionality doesn't work, and yet again, core functionality has increased its memory usage by >15%.
I have the highest spec'ed 16 inch macbook pro, and while running some Docker containers and some data ingestion scripts, my battery is drained (while plugged in!) to 5%.
I will never buy another Apple computer again. I have work to do.
To be clear, guy started a sync with his phone (people still do this?). In the middle of a sync he decides he wants to restart his computer, which tells him, reasonably, to wait until its done. If you were running a long-running terminal script, in the middle of a backup or large file move, or countless other tasks, any reasonable OS does exactly the same thing -- it asks the various subsystems if now is a good time, if not it delays the reboot.
He could forcefully stop the sync (which would make it not an issue, while forfeiting the work it had done thus far), and he could forcefully reboot his computer, but this has positively nothing to do with "you have to reboot your phone first".
There needs to be a moratorium on these sorts of low-info, low-effort posts. It's just pandering to a base.