Has Apple sounded the last POST?
eclecticlight.co
eclecticlight.co
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.
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.
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.
I'm gonna reboot. And if it keeps failing, I'll take it to a shop.
If I take a Mac to the Apple store, they will run their in-house diagnostics and tell me what's wrong.
If I take a PC to the PC store, they will run their own diagnostics and tell me what's wrong.
So what benefit does this messy POST give me?
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.
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.
I’m just talking about all the text logging that clutters the screen; I think it’s unnecessary.
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.
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.
For you? Nothing. For a significant number of people? A lot.
You would rather remove the helpful messages because "messages makes my computer unpretty", than simply ignore them?
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.
May tiny, but tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands is still "significant" in any sense of the word.
> Also, minimising what I’m saying by using diminutive language - “messages makes my computer unpretty” - is lazy.
Like how you're minimising the importance of technical users?
Lets not forget that it is primarily technical users who buy macbooks; developers, designers, etc.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.)
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 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
- 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
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"
We've all come across people online saying "it doesn't work" without any further explanation but asking for help.
This is the computer equivalent of encouraging that, by essentially preventing people from giving more information even when asked.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-Appl...
Shut it down, hold the power button until you get a screen with some buttons, hold down Command-D until it brings up a diagnostics screen, and answer a couple questions (your language, run local, etc.). Then it takes a minute and posts results. And lastly you click Reboot.
Sure, maybe if you're building something that has life and limb risks, POST it up before coming online, but most consumer electronics have no need.
Safari not responding.
bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which my job depends on pretty heavily.
I hope Apple's renewed focus on the Mac means a renewed focus on MacOS as well, and definitely accessibility.
Macs have POST rituals, detailed (alongside other boot routines) to an almost extreme extent in this article.
I wonder what the official phrase behind "DFU" is?