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.
Yep, they haven’t 100% every time got it right, but for Apple in the Jobs era form and function were the same thing, and for the most part they’ve kept to that vision. Just look at AirPods or the watch.
Obviously we’ll never know, but I don't think Jobs would have tolerated the butterfly keyboard debacle anywhere near as long as it dragged on.
> 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.
Hard disagree on this. Durable and long lasting has to be a joke. Can’t handle a short fall and planned obsolescence after 2 years. Good support is also very wrong. Replacing broken screens (poorly) and factory resting phones (because their own security police’s prevent the user from doing it themselves in the name of theft prevention) for excessive fees isn’t good support. They’re no better than any other device maker, they just have a huge theatrical mall presence that makes them look like they’re “different”.
> This “encouraging learned helplessness” you talk about is in fact the opposite.
> and when they break they should be taken to professionals to fix
That's precisely "learned helplessness". You can't do anything, take it to the professionals, is the lesson you're supposed to learn.
Example of cars is apt. The owners manual of a car these days doesn't tell you anything useful, anything that needs works is just "take it to the dealer". Compare to car owner manuals of decades past which went into deep technical detail on maintenance, valve adjustments, etc.
The analogy is apt, yes, and the reasons are the same. Cars decades ago were simple physical systems. I could take apart my 1980 Mercedes with one box worth of tools. A modern Mercedes can’t even be tuned without special software. Even more modern cars — EVs — are basically laptops with wheels. The old world is gone, and we’re never going back to it.
It’s not learned helplessness for me to realize that I can’t debug the firmware of a modern car. Even if it were OSS, I’d still have to rely on the expertise of others to solve my problems.
Do you know how to plant wheat? Butcher a cow? Refine iron? Is it “learned helplessness” that you can’t do these things yourself? You’re not an island :)
> A modern Mercedes can’t even be tuned without special software.
And these trends are a tragedy, for all kinds of products not just computers and cars.
Sure, most people didn't care to repair their widget even in the 70s they just took it an applicable professional. Which is fine. But some people wanted for various reasons. Some of these people got so interested that it became their career and went on to great developments. Nearly every engineer can tell stories of tinkering with some products as a kid and it drove their career.
A lot of that is lost when products are un-tinkerable. Think of the generations growing up today for whom a computer is a hermetically sealed device from apple where they can't do anything but consume, tightly within the guardrails apple enforces. That's not bringing up a generation of computer tinkerers.
> The old world is gone, and we’re never going back to it.
For you it may be gone, for many others - myself included - it was and is and always will be. The key factor here is self-reliance, the desire and ability to take care of your own`environment. This is, no matter what "experts" and those who parrot them say, still possible even when confronted with modern equipment. Not with all modern equipment, mind you, but that is not a problem given the wide array of choices presented to us by the oft-lambasted capitalist economy - vote with your wallet and avoid user-hostile equipment.
>That's precisely "learned helplessness". You can't do anything, take it to the professionals, is the lesson you're supposed to learn.
Pretend you're a common man, you're Joe Schmoe: Is it worth your while to learn, know, and care about all the intricacies of how a computer (and specifically a Mac) boots? And even if you do, is it worth your while to learn, know, care, and have on hand the means necessary to fix a computer that won't boot?
I would answer: No. Taking it "to the professionals" is the quicker and cheaper option.
The problem isn't that most people don't care to learn, it's that platforms become more and more locked down to the point that people can't learn. Or even if they can, the device is so "sealed" that they can't dive in even if they knew how.
A big part of the reason I got into computers and software development was because I wanted to know how things worked. And I could do that: I could dig into things, write simple programs, take things apart, put them together, all that. Young minds these days have fewer opportunities to satisfy any curiosity they may have about these sorts of things.
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.
the m1 macbook pro with the touch bar and usbc only, or the m1 macbook pro where apple went from that to a refresh of the 2012-15 design as a capitulation to years of complaints about form-over-function?
You seem to be equating imperfection with complete failure.
That's a little under-nuanced for this forum.
If those Macs were really so flawed complaints would have died off as everyone migrated away from them. Instead, people loved them enough to put up with rough edges, while passionately posting their frustrations.
i didn't say anything about perfection or failure. i don't know how a generous/good-faith interpretation led you to that
i agree with you that the computers were good, but i was responding to a post that used an m1 macbook pro as a counterexample to apple choosing form over function, when really it's emblematic of their pattern of occasionally going obviously too far toward form
I bought the M1 with the Touch Bar intentionally because I like the Touch Bar. Even apart from the Touch Bar, it’s the best new laptop I’ve bought since I first switched to Macs in ‘07
Now we're getting into a different topic. They were really well-rounded machines—I just upgraded to 14" from an M1 Air myself, and only for compile + transcode times—but I wouldn't rank them higher than most others I've had:
- Core 2 Duo Pros proved to me you can have a laptop as your main computer for real dev + video work
- First-gen Retina 15" saved me from daily tension headaches
- Second-gen 12" MacBook, after only having a maxed out 15", changed the way I structure my days and where I consider going to work
I briefly had a Touch Bar supplied by a job; initially it was cool, but after the first month my only use for it was volume and brightness. I thought I wouldn't like going back to function keys but when I got the M1 Air I realized I prefer them
I have one of these. Hands down the best laptop I've ever owned. Fast, quiet, and I literally had to check system settings again to confirm that it's close to three years old. (And I'm the guy who tosses it in a briefcase that inevitably falls off my carry-on at least three times per trip.)
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!
Official apple support vastly differs depending on the country, so in terms of service US support seems to vastly more friendly and lenient than most other countries.
Here in New Zealand we have The Consumer Guarantees Act. It says something like ‘things should last an amount of time commensurate with their cost.’
You’ll easily get a MacBook or iPhone fixed by Apple for faults in the first 2 years. You’ll also pay a premium, but that’s what happens when you're at the far end of the world.
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.
I have an 8core xeon laptop from work. it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM. I can set the profile to quiet, and the CPU doesn't boost and the fans never come on.
Here's what I can do, that a MBP cannot do - run a whole bunch of crap that doesn't run on ARM - most vendor tools that aren't browser based.
The MBP is a laptop, it's fast, but it's not a "pro" laptop. Pro means I can plug it in with a brick-sized power brick, draw 200 watts, and with lots of loud fans get some major work done. And when I don't run a heavy-hitter script? easily 9 hours of battery life.
M1 is not that much more faster than intel - it just has a lot of precompiled procedures in hardware. The reason no one else did what apple did? Because normal companies design their computer for what it needs to run. Apple designs their computer and says - world, you now have to build all your software for this computer. Well, that's why pretty much nothing I use runs on macs.
> it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM.
Really? 128GB of RAM means it has four memory slots, which is usually only found in systems that are using desktop processors in a mobile package. There's no market segment of laptops that's thicker.
> M1 is not that much more faster than intel - it just has a lot of precompiled procedures in hardware.
There's a lot of special-purpose hardware in the M1, but they're not magic. The CPU benchmarks you've seen are still just benchmarks of the general-purpose CPU cores.
If you build your own PC, POST is your basic smoke test that everything is plugged in and functioning as expected.
And if you didn't build your own PC, well, stuff fails and POST can tell you what's wrong. And it's fine if that stuff isn't important to you, but its better to have these tools and not need them instead of the other way around.
Ah cause a part of POST is link training/etc, which can make some rough approximation of error rate from SERDES eye reports. Its the same problem with computers that lack ECC, without actual hardware tests (be that POST, or HW/SW error detection) your simply praying to the data corruption and crash gods that nothing goes wrong. And frighteningly a lot of things can actually be going wrong long before you will notice the data corruption or happen to have an application crash. Thankfully HW doesn't tend to just go bad as frequently as it just has errors that can be detected consistently given sufficient error detection/testing.
But even on PC's one is generally doing the same thing the mac is doing and using preprogrammed/saved machine parameters. Its only when you plug in new ram, pcie cards, etc that a full POST sequence is run on a given bus. Something the mac can't do because it doesn't have user upgradable ram/pci cards/etc. And then your average PC also has a diagnostic mode that can be started that runs a more complete system test to report back to dell/hp/etc before they send a tech or issue a RMA.
And things like memory zeroing are frequently simply not done anymore, or there is HW in the memory controller which does it in the background during initial bootup as ranges/banks are first accessed (usually for assuring ECC is set correctly).
Anyway, the point of POST is to do some rudimentary sanity checks to report errors rather than having the OS fail bootup, or the machine acts generally unreliable. Better to see degraded link/fan/etc errors at post than wonder why your machine is just running slow or being a POS like seems to be fairly common with Mac's if you watch Rossman's channel much.
Well, “significant number” is nevertheless a tiny minority.
Making computers accessible and non threatening to everyone is important. Filling the screen with acronym soup advances neither of these goals. Instead of people thinking “I can do this”, they think computers are hard.
Also, minimising what I’m saying by using diminutive language - “messages makes my computer unpretty” - is lazy. Good design is important, even if you don’t see it.
The obvious solution is to make these messages visible to those who want it, but disabled by default.
I thought that’s how Macs used to work, but maybe I’m thinking of a MacOS boot mode.
I’m not minimising the importance of technical users. I’m just saying that ugly POST messages aren’t helpful to most people. Hell, I’m technical and I don’t miss them.
I’m not sure about your point that mostly technical users buy MacBooks, since they don’t show POST messages. Doesn’t that suggest I’m right?
Hiding information and making it harder to fix things yourself is what makes computing inaccessible. A black box computing appliance that you can’t fix or work on is less accessible, not more.
If my POST fails, and the machine actually surfaces status information during the tests, I'll try to fix it.
It's absolutely fine that you don't want to go through that, and just want a professional to fix things. But I'm sick of manufacturers (like Apple) taking options away from me. I don't want a hermetically sealed appliance where I can't replace the RAM or SSD or whatever when something goes wrong or I want to upgrade.
Let's ignore the benefit it gives to anyone who wants to solve their problem quickly instead of having to take a round trip to the mall.
It gives information to third party shops so they can fix your computer. Which provide competition and give you the option to save money, and impose competitive pressure on the OEM to charge more reasonable prices for repairs, which benefits you even if you still patronize the OEM's store.
Absolutely serious. What do you want me to do? I’m uninterested in fixing it myself.
To be clear: I don’t have an opinion about whether or not POST is technically necessary. It is or it isn’t, whatever. I’m just responding to the commentary that somehow Apple’s approach to POST is wrong and that POST messages are somehow important in and of themselves.
Just because POST messages float your boat doesn’t mean that they’re necessary or critical, and I for one am happy with them out of my life.
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"
POST codes are vendor-specific but they'll generally tell you the general category of a hardware problem, e.g. memory error, video error, CPU error. Then if it's a memory error you try reseating the memory or removing half of it and then the other half to see if you have a bad stick, etc. Knowing it's a memory error is useful so you don't waste time trying to fiddle with the video card.
> 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.
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.