Why aren’t Apple's error messages written by marketers?

Okay... that redesigned error message looks like every error message I run into on Windows and the link always points to a useless page on microsoft's website. I prefer the other error.

Hmm do you really want "Whoops, we apologize a slight error has happened, but behold everything is alright..." instead of "Error C0000005 go google this"?

I am guessing that there are dozens or maybe hundreds of assertion type errors like this buried in the code. Only a small fraction of them turn out to be real errors that actually occur in the field.

So presumably the guy who coded the original error message didn't anticipate real issues and likely didn't have a handy resolution available. Only later, once the code was in the wild and the error started happening reasonably frequently in the real world did customer support investigate the problem more. Eventually a workaround was developed and made available on a website.

Defensive Design by 37 Signals and Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug are both great books about how to design for when things go wrong. Engineers, in addition to designers, should read these books post-haste. EDIT: If you're a hacker in SOMA/SF and want to borrow either of these books they're very quick reads.

The trouble with technical error messages is that almost invariably, engineers end up writing them. "Not my area of expertise" or "I put in a request for copy months ago" are some of the many reasons that poor error handling happens.

Additionally, having a truly helpful environment requires additional resources: In the example in this article, the "Heres how to fix your problem!" link would require an additional application to keep track of known issues and solutions.

That being said, it's exactly how every application should work: Error messages like this may not be daunting to more technically proficient users, but the vast majority of users are not technically proficient and many users simply give up (if they can) when they see an error message that they are unable to understand/fix.

For that matter, why aren't everybody's written by markters or at least given some UI thoughts?

People talk up good customer service all the time - sort of starts w/the error message IMO

Written by marketers? You mean something like "An error occurred! Oh, and have you signed up for our promotional newsletter? It's FREE!"