I have learned to be scared of my MacBook. Seemingly safe behavior can cause permanent damage. It does completely unexpected things, apparently by design.

I do not put my pictures in the ~/Pictures directory for fear of what the newest app will do to “improve” them for me. I fully expect it to apply lossy compression to my files without asking. This is after Photos or whatever it was called at the time mangled the dates on a bunch of my vacation photos to 10 years before the actual trip.

Oh and have fun when your photos are automatically uploaded to iCloud to save space locally then silently deleted from iCloud to... save space? My sister lost her first year of baby pictures to that one.

Same with ~/Music after iTunes wiped out a bunch of carefully curated metadata. Yes, I did want that album art.

I fat-fingered some key combination in Messages recently and got a prompt confirming I wanted to delete the entire conversation history. I consider myself lucky it bothered to ask.

I can add “view a PDF” to the list of things likely to leave me holding the bag.