macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive | Hacker News Reader

macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

shirtpocket.com

359 pointszdw317 comments

What is this about? I seem to be missing a lot of context.

> Apple broke the replicator.

What's the replicator?

> What this means is this: until Apple fixes the bug, you'll have to use "Backup - all files" with "Smart Update" to copy everything but the OS.

Use that where? Is that an option in some macOS tool?

The article's author seems to be part of the team behind the Mac disk-cloning/backup utility, SuperDuper.

https://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescriptio...

shirt-pocket.com and shirtpocket.com lead to the same company's website.

This is from the SuperDuper backup folks. SuperDuper is a tool that you can use to make bootable backups of your macOS system. Apple took away the ability for 3rd party tools to manipulate the OS and copy it to another partition/drive and took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2. So that breaks SuperDuper's ability to make a nice, clean, bootable backup of your Mac.

Is this something intentional that Apple has publicly stated in some realm?

AFAIK, in that case, maybe it's just a bug that they're planning to fix...

Which part? The inability for 3rd parties to create bootable images instead of using Apple-signed tools? Because that was 4 years ago and is kind of a fundamental requirement for the chain of trust needed for signed system volume security introduced back then.

Or are you arguing that this blog post is wrong in asserting the OS release this week introduced a bug in those tools?

Arguing? Christ. Is that what we call “stating that it’s possible that…”. Not everything is a hill to die on.

"Resource busy", as opposed to "this tool is no longer supported", almost certainly is a bug, and I don't read the blog post as implying otherwise.

But that doesn't mean it's not reckless of Apple to introduce a load-bearing component that wasn't necessary before and then not properly regression test it across OS updates.

Maybe boot a Linux USB drive and use dd to copy the drive? I assume this is too easy, but I'm curious about where it fails.

Maybe if the target device is the same part number (I assume an m.2 NVMe), that would work. IDK if it works with other drives, e.g. different capacity, let alone using a USB-attached drive. I don't know what bits, beyond the image proper, belong to the trusted signed set.

It would just be a bit-for-bit copy, so maybe it would work? I don't know what a trusted signed set is.

I'm mystified about why I'm getting downvoted for that question. If it's inadvertently stupid of insulting to Apple users, wouldn't an explanation be more useful then trying to censor it?

Is it possible to boot a Linux Live CD on Apple Silicon Macs?

I think Linux runs on Apple hardware? I could be out of date, and it's completely locked-down these days.

Edit: I suppose it could explain the downvoting. "Apple doesn't let us boot Linux, you insensitive clod!"

> took it upon themselves to provide that functionality via a utility. That utility is apparently non-functional in 15.2.

Apple turning our devices into jail cells.

These tech titans need to be regulated. We should be able to install whatever we want on Mac, iPhone, and Android. To be able to back up whatever we want, install from web, not be forced to use app stores, not be forced to sync with the cloud, and not be forced to use first party software.

You are able to do and install what you want on a Mac (although for some things, you’d have to disable SIP), unlike on iOS.

I’m not the biggest fan of the grip Apple has on iOS, but this seems less of a case of platform protectionism, and more one of not wanting to (implicitly) support low-level interfaces/implicit APIs that are becoming hard to support for whatever reason.

Definitely annoying, but almost every OS does that at some point.

> Apple turning our devices into jail cells.

> These tech titans need to be regulated.

You say this as though anyone buying a Macbook in the past decade reserves the right to be surprised. New Trump administration isn't going to budge on this - he's actually rather upset at the EU for how they've been treating his good friend Tim Apple. Chances are, he likes this lockdown and wants Americans to accept it.

If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. There is no government to save you, and no god Apple will answer to.

> If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program.

I use iPhone because I try not to use any Google products. I didn't sign up for no nothing, I have no other choice.

Tried a fairphone with graphene?

There is a technical reason that greatly benefits the user. The ability to guarantee the OS is unchanged, and to restore to factory defaults like on an iPhone are great benefits.

Regulations on our OSes means we end up with Microsoft refusing to limit access to the kernel not to displease the EU, which led to the Crowdstrike outage.

The EU objected to Microsoft having access to APIs that third party developers did not.

There has been no EU objection to creating new security APIs that would be accessable to Microsoft and third party developers.

As far as MacOS goes, you can't infect the system files with malware when the whole partition they live on cannot be modified by anything but the OS, which does indeed seem like a valid technical reason.

A point is being missed here; The user, nor the provider of hardware/software can be hostile towards each other.

Here's why:

The cloud is someone else's computer, not yours. It's a shared drawer that you get a key to, but so do many others. If our main access to your drawer is through the programs on our computer, it also can be limited and broken for hours, days, or weeks while under repair.

I'm not sure how many laptops you've owned (personal and work), it seems once people get past 5-10, we are basically buying the death of the device at the first moment we open a new laptop.

It's my device. I pay for it. I own it. I use it how I want.

Being protected from myself is fine. Being protected from external internet threats is fine.

Having a switch to bypass it is mandatory. Non negotiable. Instant deal breaker.

More realistically, MacOS is possibly * being shuttered, sequestered to get locked down to make adopting iOS / iPadOS type OS on the macbooks directly instead.

Windows tried to dictate when my computer should update and not do anything else, so I left. It's unforgivable. This was well before any policies to manage it cam eout.

There are many difficult technical and other important considerations and trade-offs and I think that Apple is answering them the majority of them as best it can. There are major benefits to having the kind of integration that Apple has, for example, the security chip and the wifi obviates theft of laptops and phones. You cannot get that with the traditional "PC starting from a boot partition" model. I lost a lot of respect for Apple when they seemingly limited the AirDrop sharing time coinciding with the protests against the government in China. I dread to think about what kind of compromises Tim Apple has made for the government of China, but then, there are many people who install and use TikTok voluntarily. It's fun to think about what if The Cloud™ was like a technoir IPFS running on top of peer-to-peer radio. You can make a decision to get out of your driveway huffing your new car's smell, and drive somewhere dirty with it.

I don't disagree with what you are saying. The T2 Chip is nice. And it worked fine with Carbon Copy Cloner/Super Duper.

The simple thing is choice. A switch to turn it off. By making it locked down, it also does make it more insecure.

Open Source and auditable code is better than private code that no one has an idea of whether it's compromised or not, and for how long.

The recent iPhone zero days are an example.

Do we know if this was a bug in the beta releases of 15.2, or did it manifest only in the final version?

I wonder if Carbon Copy Cloner is affected.

Having bootable backups was the only reason I ever moved to a Mac.

This means, a backup of my computer created using something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper backup when plugged into any other Mac, and it would boot as my computer. Also known as Target Disk Mode booting off this backup.

Indispensible when or if my laptop was in for repair with Apple.

TimeMachine is a pretty good second option. It's not bootable itself, but the recovery console on any mac can ingest a time machine backup and get you back up and running quite quickly. The benefit here is that it's free, trivial to setup, and very easy to keep running; Given an empty disk, plug it in, click one button, done.

Time Machine is OK as secondary, never primary, or the sole option.

Having Target Disc Mode and Target Display Mode on a Mac are two of probably the 4 reasons I switched to a Mac from Windows. Skitch was the other, and CC/SuperDuper was the 4th. I had tolerated my last windows laptop dying :)

Multiple copies of multiple types of backups is the only way.

I have always maintained a CarbonCopy/SuperDuper at all times, plus a Time Machine that I cared far less about. Time Machine is my desperate fall back.

Time Machine backups haven't always been super reliable, nor is the recovery time to restore acceptable. I'm sure it's gotten better, but enough for me to forget what it hasn't done in the past? Doubt it.

Time Machine is kind OK for set it and forget it backup to a NAS or something. I didn't find as much value in Time Machine to a dedicated external drive since it had the risk of being the only backup, and it's not a backup if there's only one copy. Time machine's limited utility of use when there is an emergency on an external drive, compared to SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner which is you are up in minutes not hours or days while you figure out what is going..

Having a Carbon Copy/Super Duper external drive sitting at one of your desks that's regularly plugged in gives you a live replica should anything happen.

Time Machine has it's own history of issues:

https://www.google.com/search?q=time+machine+backup+issues

Apple’s built-in backup solution is called Time Machine. It was dogshit when it launched a decade ago, never got more reliable despite many OS releases, and is still largely dogshit.

The author of the blog makes an application that is very good at making backups on macOS and now their app is broken due to skullduggery by Apple.

So the issue is threefold: a) Apple further turning MascOS into iPhone, b) this harms competition, and c) users ultimately suffer because Apple has no incentive to get better.

Or it's the same thing that has been happening for 15 years.

People install .0, .1 or .2 release. Complain about bugs. Bugs get fixed. Repeat.

Some might think this is what the beta is for but I guess not. Let’s excuse the multi trillion dollar company for releasing broken software, each release being more broken than the previous one

That Super Duper post didn't indicate whether they filed feedback during the beta or not.

It's gotten so bad I normally wait until 0.7 (final release).

Time Machine is really quite good, all things considered.

I’d be very happy if Apple were to bring it to iOS, but obviously they’ll never cannibalise their iCloud storage subscription business.

> Time Machine is really quite good, all things considered.

This comment page is full of examples of very real issue with Time Machine which will bite you at some point if you use it. It’s not quite good. It’s bug riddled and Apple refuses to actually do the work to fix it because they would rather you buy iCloud.

Backup systems are both complex and very very critical to many people – of course there will be somebody running into every conceivable edge case.

But good or bad only make sense as evaluations relative to something. In my case, that's Linux (I never felt comfortable with any backup solution I looked at there while I was using it, especially not the Ubuntu built-in ones; maybe things have changed with btrfs now) and Windows, which doesn't even try (and all the third party ones I've looked at seem extremely shady in one way or another).

The fact that macOS has a pretty solid one out of the box is more than I'm expecting from an OS at this point. I've restored from it a couple of times, both the entire system and individual files, and it did exactly what I expected of it.

It appears “solid”, but the only test of a backup system is disaster recovery and I’ve had to attempt to get files from Time Machine drives before and it is hell.

iCloud Drive is also a bit iffy, it does a lot of weird shit with file meta data that can screw up file processing.

This is bad. - Just recently I broke my system badly. So I decided to erase my system and re-setup from time machine. After several unsuccessful attemts I realized that my Time Machine backup (1.45 tb) exceeded my ssd capacity (1 tb). I did research, and learned not to prune my Time Machine backups. As that may corrupt it. So after several days and failed attempts to restore from time machine and after some research and finding out that indeed it was still possible to boot from external ssd, I decided to buy a 2 TB ssd, restore to that ssd, boot from it, clean up excessive data, and migrate from that ssd to my Macbook. It took me three days to solve it. As each failed attempt and investigation took hours to complete.

In the meantime I called Apple support to get help. I said right away that I am an IT professional who worked as sys admin in the past and that I would like to talk to experts. And they forwarded me to „experts“. The first said: „Forget about full restore, won’t work. Create a fresh install and manually (!) copy individual files from time machine to your mac.“ Second person told me to buy a new Mac with 2 tb ssd and restore to that. I asked her if it was possible to restore to an external ssd via Carbon Copy Cloner? As I did in the past half a dozen times. She told me she definitely does not recommend that path as she cannot recommend third party apps (?!?).

I did not try that option immediately as I heared a few years ago that latest MacOSes do not support booting from external ssds. And so I didn’t think of this option. But some research and I found out that indeed it is still possible, but you have to go some extra steps.

So if this wouldn’t have been possible I would have had spent two weeks to restore my machine. Or bought another machine with 2 tb just to restore from backup.

PS: I spent almost 5k Euros for this maxed MacBook Pro with 64 gb. Plus Apple Care. I didn’t want to buy another Mac just to restore from backups.

PPS: All of this was shortly before a very important presentation. So I was stuck with my work laptop (windows machine), and I am 90% less productive with it as it lacks my tools. Yeah, shouldn’t have screwed my main machine just before a super important milestone. Lessons learned.

Sounds like the lesson learned here from reading your travail is not to invest in an ecosystem that makes it difficult to do a standard operation.

Maybe. But what are the options? Windows? Not really. Linux/Debian/Ubuntu is great, in theory, but it lacks tools: Acorn, Keyboard Maestro, OnniGraffle, Alfred App, MS Office, MS Teams, and a dozen more. Plus Apple silicon. I test LLMs locally.

This isn't me trying to convince you to use Linux, but the listed reasons (other than LLM testing) aren't real deterrents (and there are plenty that exist for many people, no use pretending not):

> Acorn

GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

> Keyboard Maestro

GNOME and KDE have been able to do this out of the box from pretty much the beginning. The OSes are still mostly terminal-first (one of the big complaints, actually), and that translates into the DEs and Applications. A keyboard automation is just a sequence of commands.

This is probably one of the few areas where Linux almost definitely beats macOS or Windows.

> OnniGraffle

There's a large swathe of diagramming tools in Linux.

> Alfred App

Yep, both KDE and Gnome are able to handle this task as well as Alfred. Like automation, this is probably an area Linux will be able to shine above macOS.

> MS Office

LibreOffice would be the common alternative.

> MS Teams

They used to have an official client. They now recommend you create a PWA, and there are some unofficial clients that do pretty much that:

https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

This seems to be the route they'll be going all around, similar to slack (web + an electron app).

> I test LLMs locally.

LLMs run fine on Linux, but you will be limited to about 16GB on the VRAM side. Though, you could technically use Asahi + Apple Silicon as the support matured if you want.

Most of these are open source applications, with cludgy UIs/warts and all; and aren't really designed by teams with UX masters, so operate oddly and require relearning. But if you were interested in making the move, they're options.

> aren't real deterrents

They are, because your listed alternatives are substandard. Just the fact you recommend incompatible LibreOffice as an MS Office alternative is enough, but then comparing KM to system defaults is also a joke.

> The OSes are still mostly terminal-first

And terminals are universally so bad at shortcuts that many can't even support all the modifiers keys on your keyboard

What kind of nightmare documents are you encountering that you actually run into MS Office / Libreoffice incompatibility?

And in turn don't also run into to incompatibility between different versions of MS office?

I've had at least as many issues moving complex documents between MS word versions than moving from MS to Libreoffice.

> > Acorn

> GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

You will be surprised to know how some professional treat their tools.

Some illustrator love their software just like some mathematician love their chalk. Many woodworker make their own tools to make them feel just right.

> > MS Office

> LibreOffice would be the common alternative.

If you export them as PDF, maybe. If you need to exchange editable file with others, every small layout different hurts. You won't want your tables paginate differently from others.

Which is why I specifically stated that the feature set matches and not that they're drop in replacements. Then gave a giant disclaimer about open source software in general at the bottom.

I'm not evangelizing, I'm stating that the listed software/workloads are perfectly amenable to Linux if you wanted to make the move/relearn those softwares.

Almost none of the software you mentioned is a realistic, fully featured, profesionally-usbale alternative to the software that doesn't run on Linux. So, overall, Linux can't be an alternative to the Mac and/or Windows for anyone who relies on these tools.

That's an opinion.

A realistic opinion.

You might want to try the German program Softmaker. It's not free--though I think there's a free version--and it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. There is a Linux version as well.

> GIMP (or Glimpse, if you want a more modern UI) or Krita can definitely do pretty much anything Acorn can.

I'm fairly certain that anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.

I didn't recommend it, I offered three options (one specifically created to fix the exact issue you're probably complaining about - GIMP's horrendous UI)

The problem is, you imply the alternative solutions are somehow just a stand-in replacement, which is not true, and not just with Gimp in the programs you listed. Software matters, and when software you need is not available, it is a significant compromise.

Up until the last paragraph, where he freely admits all the options are basically shit in comparison.

The idea that having to relearn all software and deal with idiosyncrasies for a professional is laughable.

I have only ever used GIMP and I will admit that the UI looks like hell. I also rarely do anything very advanced in it anymore so I can’t say whether it has feature parity with PS.

I can, it doesn’t.

I have been using gimp for almost a decade now.

Granted, I am not a professional in that field, but why would I not recommend it ?

It does everything I want to, and more.

I've been using GIMP for 20 years now, but the UI is atrocious; you can tell it's been designed by engineers who know nothing about UX.

Even the most basic UI elements, such as the slider bars, are horrible and unusable.

>why would I not recommend it ?

You're free to recommend it, but if you tell somebody coming from a Mac that GIMP is an alterantive to tools like like Affinity Photo, Pixelmator, Acorn, or even Photoshop, you're doing them a disservice, because it's not.

I'm glad that GIMP works for you. That's good. And technically, it probably does a lot (or even everthing) that most people do in other applications. And maybe you can even argue that it doesn't do those things worse, it just does them differently.

But the reality is that if you're used to a tool like Acorn on the Mac, which puts a huge priority on providing a good, efficient user experience, you're just never going to switch to GIMP.

Same applies to a tool like OmniGraffle. I've looked everywhere, there's nothing like OmniGraffle on Linux. By that, I don't mean that there aren't any tools that allow you to create diagrams and mockups, I mean there aren't any tools that are as nice, simple, and quick to use as OmniGraffle.

> It does everything I want to, and more.

So does ms paint for a large part of computer users. Not sure that's a good enough argument.

Can confirm. GIMP after Photoshop is a true BDSM experience. And no, it's not about "doing things differently." It's a torture.

That is just basic resistance to change.

People keep recommending Krita or photopea against Gimp but I am using both (Krita for digital painting, gimp for other stuff) and have made back to back test with all 3 software and the UI is almost identica[1] so that is just ignorance talking.

[1] just a handful of menus in a different order woaaaaa torture indeed!!!

GIMP 3.0 is going to be released soon. That might interest you.

Ousted the front door, coming back by the backdoor:

- “Maybe you’re using it wrong”

- “It has greatly improved since Gimp 2.0”,

- “It’s just doing things differently”

- “It has 90% of the features of MS Office”

seem to be the top arguments for trying Linux over Mac, again for the 20th time in 20 years, each time awfully bad. As Steve Jobs once said about Microsoft: “The problem is these people have no taste.” It’s correct that when you have no need for something to be beautiful or no need to be productive between two recompilations of the kernel, then Linux is the OS of choice.

My backups work though. As a Linux user, it's exhausting watching people complain about macOS and Windows every single day on this site, because there's nothing you can do about. You're a captive prisoner on their platform.

For some of us, dealing with GIMP's warts is more tolerable than the alternatives.

Also, Glimpse has been abandoned since 2020.

> anyone who recommends GIMP hasn't really used GIMP.

Or they only ever used GIMP but never Acorn/Pixelmator/PS and thus don't understand how they run circles around GIMP.

Same about OmniGraffle vs the supposed horde of Linux diagramming tools.

Or Logic (or even GarageBand) vs Ardour or - deity forbid - Audacity (which is at best a glorified wav editor, but a far cry from a DAW)

They're just not in the same league.

Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented. LibreCAD is a prime example example of doing it their own way, cutting off their nose in spite of their face, there was no reason to change most every command and require us to hit return after every single command. The free version of QCAD is still superior to LibreCAD and it is difficult to justify suffering through all of LibreCAD's failings when QCAD only costs $45 with a year of updates, even if you don't renew that outdated QCAD it is still more capable and usable than LibreCAD.

I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux, too much of the software is so fixated on competing that they have lost all perspective. For awhile now I have seriously considered switching to Haiku and developing the software I want for Haiku with its API that will not run on anything else, but I have not quite been irritated enough to go that far. Getting there and it might happen once Haiku irons out those last few wrinkles.

Edit: Should add, been a few years since I last used LibreOffice, they may have gotten their act together. I suffer gimp far too often.

> Gimp and Libreoffice both seem to go out of their way to do everything their own way and ignore what has been demonstrated to work well and has essentially been established as a standard, this is one of the major issues with OSS for me along with trying to offer more than is reasonable and put in time on niche features (MORE MORE MORE) instead of working out the issues with what is already implemented.

I haven't tried GIMP or LibreOffice for years now, but I speculate this is one outcome of ego-driven development instead of market-driven development, and possibly also because UX people aren't contributing as much to open source as developers are.

> I have used nothing but linux for over two decades now but it is getting harder and harder to justify using linux

At least in the context of windows vs Linux, Microsoft is making it incredibly easy. Once again pushing MS recall, integrated ads, and user hostile updates made me finally switch to Linux again. I absolutely hated having a computer that seemed to have a mind of its own. I had a dual boot setup that defaulted to Linux, and very frequently I would be doing something in Windows, leave the computer on with programs or games running, and come back to find that it had rebooted into Linux.

Keyboard Maestro is a lot more powerful than what you're thinking of. A sequence of shell commands bound to hotkeys is in no way an adequate replacement.

Do you have any examples of use cases Keyboard Maestro is great for?

When building macros you can leverage OCR and image recognition so it can know how to find elements on the screen that you need it to click. I have barely scratched the surface of what it can do I am sure there is lots more.

Xdotool/xdo, xsel and so on.

A bit of nostalgia.

Switch to whatever you want https://youtu.be/9GO3mccvTCs

> > I test LLMs locally.

> LLMs run fine on Linux, but you will be limited to about 16GB on the VRAM side.

That'll probably be a dealbreaker.

> Acorn

GIMP

Don't get me wrong, I am still gratefully using GIMP, it's a fine tool for what it is and I am happy with it. But from a "meet people where they are" perspective, it's absurd to tell someone who uses tools like Photoshop that GIMP is a viable alternative as it is right now.

Libreoffice isn't the alternative, office on web is. And even that is still gimped compared to Windows Excel. (Which is the true killer app for professional use of Windows in general)

Yes, I find it fun to use office as a Mac differentiator when the Mac version is so inferior to the Windows one. At least, office365 works fine on Linux using Crossover.

It’s the same weirdness with people recommending Gimp for Acorn when Linux has great photo manipulation with Darktable and good digital painting with Krita.

And I say that as someone who quite like MacOs even if it’s getting worse with each version.

Try Softmaker Office for Linux.

Office on the Web is a cruel joke. It theoretically does what you want it to do, but more often than not, it will do it extremely slowly while vaporizing your RAM.

I can't imagine it being better on Linux.

And here I am running Linux on M1 Macbook. Graphical interface is superior, native docker support is superior, development experience is superior, backups for sure are superior than Time Machine. For work purposes online office on the web is sufficient. It is not for everyone (like photographers), but for software developers it works very nicely.

May I ask what distro you're using, and when there's any good documentation around for the installation procedure?

I'm an Arch guy, but for the M1 I am using the official Asahi Linux distro which is based on Fedora. Documentation and information about compatibility can be found on their site: https://asahilinux.org/

I previously used the Arch based Asahi distro when it was official, but Arch on ARM is a 3rd party project and it was not very well maintained and lacked some packages, so they switched. Fedora could also be considered more stable and better supported. But there are Ubuntu, Debian versions for Asahi if you prefer those.

I question the native docker support is superior. On a mac I can run linux/amd64 docker containers at near native speed with Rosetta 2 for Linux, this is something that you just cannot do (at the moment) on Linux running on Apple Silicon.

Platforms that lack MS Teams are doing the user a favor.

I don't think the end user is the one making the choice to use MS Teams.

Are we reading different comments? Because the only reason he had problems is because he didn't do anything standard. He futzed with his backups instead of letting the OS take care of it, and that's the only reason he had any trouble.

If you let Time Machine doing it's thing, restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

(Though it's been years since I had to restore a Mac for any reason. It makes me wonder what he was doing.)

I had only 600-700 gb of data on my Mac. Installed OneDrive, did not know that I had configured my NAS to do 800gb of cloud backups to OneDrive. And Time Machine downloaded that data into its backup. Although I had configured OneDrive not to download that folder to my Mac. So time Machine screwed up in the first place.

Sounds like an edge case that Microsoft didn’t think of when they developed OneDrive on Mac. You should contact them and let them know that they should exclude OneDrive from Time Machine backups automatically unless it’s configured to download everything.

You can very easily exclude folders from Time Machine backups yourself.

My point was about being able to boot from ssd. Not about whom to blame re Time Machine backup.

Ahh, I didn't see that you were the original commenter.

The reason is the opposite - he was doing the standard thing of using the substandard Time Machine for backups, which has been poorly engineered not to allow restoring without pre-pruning

> If you let Time Machine doing it's thing

Then you can corrupt your whole backup, and then fully restoring becomes impossible instead of long and painless, but possible

> It makes me wonder what he was doing

He was doing the restore recently, not many years ago

> substandard Time Machine for backups

Compared to what?

Mentioned was a pretty fundamental issue with time machine, to this day. In that it doesn't (de)allocate older backed up space to make for up space for newer back ups. This or some variations of that.

The bug may not always manifest itself I suppose which makes it worse emotionally.

I'm there setting on a 1tb backup disk dedicated to backup a 500GB root HDD, it keeps saying there isn't enough space available after 1h sorting out what needs copied over. Deleted a series a snapshot but it won't tell what doing this is saving me. I can only resort to wipe the entire backup and backup again. Now wondering, what if I deleted some documents a while back which I thought would have a snap. Do I care more about getting a fresh backup or unweilded snapshots that may or may not contain something I don't know I've lost.

> restoring from a backup is fast and painless.

Had to restore recently. Was painless, but most definitely not fast. Took 24 - 36 hours to restore a 1 TB drive with < 400 GB in use after restore.

Takes me around an hour or so to restore a 2tb drive from a HDD NAS with borg. Wasn't a full 2tb, and I might be off by an hour or so as it's been a minute. Usually I dd from the old drive to the new one over USB which doesn't take too long 30-40 minutes?

I don't think that making a backup unrecoverable from is "doing its thing". I would expect a 1:1 copy of a drive to be less or exactly the drive size.

Sounds a bit too simplistic. Apple is about the only company that allows you to run any decently sized LLMs on a laptop. They also have all day battery life, amazing single-threaded performance and great multicore performance. And they didn’t stop there, they also threw in a truly fantastic display and speakers that are so far ahead of any competitors that I wonder what kind of magic they have that no other laptop brand is able to put better speakers in their laptops.

> Apple is about the only company that allows you to run any decently sized LLMs on a laptop

Comments like these make me wonder if people even use different computers anymore or if they just say stuff and hope that it's right.

Please, do tell me where else can I run 32b models locally without quantization

64GB of system RAM and partial offload to a laptop 3090 or 4090 will run 32b unquantized.

What kind of performance are you seeing? The tests that I have seen are not usable for anything because they are so slow.

Will I get an answer back anytime soon? On a MBP pro it's conversational speed.

Nope, on cloud it is faster than conversational where you can skim to the right place or quickly regenerate seeing it is going down the wrong path.

I take that to mean that it is basically so slow as to be useless and that you would in fact need a Macbook to be able to run this model locally.

This whole thread has become a bit frustrating with comments about how other laptops are competitive with a Macbook. But no one can actually name a single laptop that can do all the things that a Macbook can.

I just replied to someone saying it couldn't run on a Windows laptop with how it can. It's below reading rate. Both are below skimming rate that is more useful for LLMs. I would rather have a 96GB macbook than a windows laptop if my only case was local LLMs and I didn't care about all the hoops around sealed system volume, signed app troubles, etc. that are bringing Macbooks closer to ipads/chromebooks, or the many other things that are better with nvidia GPUs.

For desktop I'd still rather threadripper etc. where it has more competitive CPU memory bandwidth and is upgradable and can run multiple GPUs.

If you do not care about speed, pretty much everywhere.

On any other computers with integrated GPU you can have more memory than on Apple computers, where memory is abnormally expensive.

The main advantage of the current Apple computers is a wider interface with memory, which provides a better memory throughput for their integrated GPUs.

In 2025 it is expected that others will catch up with Apple even from this point of view (e.g. AMD Strix Halo).

Let's hope that AMD Strix Halo will allow for 128 GB of VRAM when it releases next year. That's what Apple has to offer at the moment.

> On any other computers with integrated GPU you can have more memory than on Apple computers, where memory is abnormally expensive.

Are there any laptops that support 256 GB of RAM that cost less than a fully speced out Macbook Pro?

> Are there any laptops that support 256 GB of RAM that cost less than a fully speced out Macbook Pro?

No, but there are absolutely laptops with more than 128gb of addressable RAM. If you did your research you might have found them, at a literal fraction of the Macbook's price:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/cty/pdp/spd/precision-16-768...

Really, this is what I mean by wondering whether anyone even cares anymore. When you work long enough in the tech industry, you end up sitting next to people that just do not care about anything they interact with. People that use a paid GUI to write git commits, people that pay Pakastani developers to do their work for them, people that brag about computers and smartphones like jewelry. Do you actually research the domain that you claim to care about, or do you just own things and then find reasons to get defensive when people attack your insecurities online?

If you have not used a non-Apple laptop since Apple Silicon released, do not pretend you're in a position of authority to make comparisons. I had an M1 Pro for work, and while it was nice for day-to-day browsing I would have never bought one for myself. It's GPU is truly one of the least appealing parts, both from a performance perspective and considering what little it actually supports.

I did eventually stumble upon the Thinkpad one which supports 192 GB of ram. So that is better than the MacBook. I still can’t see where it says that the Dell machines support that much.

The Lenovo one comes with a decent GPU, but you can’t get it with more than 16 GB of memory. But the 5000 ADA should be a lot faster at running smaller models compared to the M4 Max. It does cost a lot. The one with 128 GB of RAM costs 5519 USD compared to the MacBook at 5999 USD. So it’s not that much cheaper.

GPU is great, for smaller LLMs, but the CPU is not that great. The i9-13950HX is quite behind the M4 Max.

Battery life isn’t half bad either. PCmag was getting close to 10 hours, but then again they got 27 hours out of my current laptop and I can say that I get much closer to 10 hours with my workload, so then I would be getting maybe 4 hours out of the Lenovo, which is not exactly great.

I’m glad that you’ve found a machine that works for you.

Without a concrete counter example you risk looking like you’re denying the claim with no elaboration and hoping you’re right. :P

Apple is the only company that makes integrated GPUs that are actually any good, and even their CPUs are really well-optimized for these sorts of workloads.

They also build their RAM in a way that makes it suitable for both CPU and GPU uses. This means you don't have separate CPU RAM and GPU VRAM, it's all just memory. If you get more RAM for your Macbook, that automatically means more memory you can use for LLM inference.

Yes, you can technically buy Nvidia, but you'd pay just as much for that if not more, and I don't think you can get as much VRAM in a consumer GPU anyway.

Haven't laptops used integrated RAM for decades? It was always considered to be a bad thing in the past.

I guess because the integrated graphics was always weak?

One big factor was bandwidth. Seems Apple mostly solved that though.

> Apple is the only company that makes integrated GPUs that are actually any good

I will reiterate; if you have used AMD or Intel iGPUs recently you would know this is just plain wrong. AMD's iGPUs often outperform Apple's for the price, and come with a featureset that isn't intentionally gimped and supports "professional" features like Vulkan conformance. People condemn Apple's GPUs for having a featureset too simple for anything besides video transcoding and compute shaders. If Intel didn't exist, Apple would probably be the single least-efficient and lowest performance GPU designer shipping products today. And they had to cut corners to get there.

> If you get more RAM for your Macbook, that automatically means more memory you can use for LLM inference.

And then it's your paltry GPU that's the bottleneck. You can get comparable results on pretty much any sub-120b parameter model with PCIe offloading on Nvidia hardware that costs a fraction of a Mac Studio with enough memory to compete.

See for yourself. Nvidia's fastest laptop chips still outperform Apple's most powerful desktop GPU chips: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

And it's not even close. Apple's biggest professional GPUs struggle to swap spit with Nvidia's last-gen laptop chips.

I don't know of any other laptop with a GPU that has 32GB of VRAM, and definitely not any with 64 or 128.

> I wonder what kind of magic they have that no other laptop brand is able to put better speakers in their laptops.

The answer is integration.

With Windows laptops, you have one company doing the sound card, one company doing the speakers and one company doing the enclosure. What you actually want is your sound card's equalizer curve being perfectly tuned to your speakers' frequency response, taking into account how their positioning in your specific laptop enclosure affects the sound. If your sound card maker doesn't know what laptop the card will go into, they just straight up can't do this.

There's also the fact that sound cards have to be conservative about how much power they output, to avoid blowing up the speakers. Apple knows the exact tolerances of the ones in their laptops. They even have special temperature sensors in them, so that they can increase the power even more, and go back to a safer level in software if the temperature ever crosses a safety threshold.

idk about the LLM part, but the rest of this is not true. there's multiple laptops that compete or even beat MacBooks in display, battery life, performance etc. and the MacBook displays have really slow response times

I guess we all have different requirements in a screen. I don't care so much about response time. For me it's more important that the screen can do 1000 nits continuously, support 120 hz and is close enough to 4K that I can't see the pixels.

Although I can't find a windows laptop that can beat the M4 Max in single threaded or multi threaded. Got any tips for any laptops that can compete with the M4 Max?

I’d be curious to see an example.

You act like other ecosystems are better. They aren’t.

When I last restored from Time Machine it allowed me to select which folders I wanted to restore. Then I could just restore the most important bits and leave anything big behind on the backup drive to restore manually later.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102551

I only was offered to select top level folders. Nothing below them.

Did you try to reinstall the mac and use migration assistant to restore from the Time Machine backup?

Yes I did. But the time machine backup was way larger than my macbook‘s ssd. The reason was this:

> Second person told me to buy a new Mac with 2 tb ssd and restore to that.

Or you can just upgrade the SSD as you would do with any normal laptop. Oh, wait...

I've really been noticing how Apple software quality has been on a slow decline since Snow Leopard. I look at some of their older source code and it's a joy to read!

Nowadays, my daily travails with restarting Xcode multiple times a day to work around bugs (package blahblah is not available) have really worn thin (I mean, Xcode has always had problems, but not THIS bad). Add to that the fact that the "system data" on my mbp now takes up 80% of the space on my SSD (800GB of system data! Even after manually deleting caches and derived data)...

It's like they don't even care about code craftsmanship anymore. And yet their culture of not putting in useful debug messages (because "it just works") persists.

My latest and greatest headache? Some parts of AppKit now directly call [NSApplication _crashOnException:] regardless of the "NSApplicationCrashOnExceptions" setting, and WITHOUT even calling [NSApplication reportException:]. So now you lose the exception entirely and good luck figuring out what caused the crash. Ugh...

I don't use Xcode so maybe it is an exception but in general I would say the opposite. For me it has been getting better over time.

People talk about Snow Leopard being stable but it was riddled with bugs, just take a look at the release notes for all the updates it received over the next year.

I have had a similar experience after i shared my MacBook with my girlfriend for a while. Turned out even after uninstalling her cloud file sharing software thing, there were still over 100GB of cached files left on disk. MacOS didn't make the obvious identify or find in the storage overview.

I ended up finding it through a disk space visualizer that showed a large folder (the stolen 100GB) in some cache directory. I can highly recommend trying that out. MacOS' inbuilt tools are in my experience inadequate to find what is stealing your disk space (on top of applications being unable to clean up after themselves).

Yeah

Let me guess, the best engineers are working on iPad/iPhone apps today and MacOS is relegated to code fixes and people building for the "common user" that doesn't know what a drive is

The system data apparently contains the Time Machine backups that haven’t been flushed to your external backup, including folders that are set to be ignored.

I discovered this while trying to restore a docker vm image that was maybe ignored, while not having enough space on the drive to restore it back, because deleted versions still take up space in the system data, even when the trash is emptied.

> I didn’t want to buy another Mac just to restore from backups.

And then presumably one more Mac to backup your backup Mac.

It's Macs all the way down!

You chose the walled garden.

How did you end up with TM backup larger than original source? Sure, total storage consumed on TM drive can be larger than source, but that is because older versions of files are stored as well. But restoring most recent versions of files should be equal to source in size.

Ah, ok, that's a nasty bug/scenario. I long for the good old days one could just rsync the internal drive and bless it and you have a bootable clone, or make compressed disk image. Those were the days.

I don't know time machine, but why would a full restore take more space than the original drive? Wouldn't a full time machine restore by default restore the last state of the system being backed up (and not full history) by default like any half decent backup solution?

Apple doesn’t care. They want you to subscribe to their iCloud plans and “abstract” away backups so that you lose the ability to own your backups.

I wish they did abstract it away. But iCloud is the only widely used cloud storage service that doesn't have file versioning. So as an iCloud user you really do need a backup and they're telling you as much every step of the way.

To most Apple users, the most important version is the latest version.

My experience with Apple backup is, please turn every backup on so you’ll max out your iCloud storage. There’s no way to tell iOS or MacOS to backup to a self hosted target.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I just want to say that it is extremely refreshing to see a good ol' fashioned Linux vs Win vs Mac debate in 2024. The Internet isn't dead.

I lied; I actually do. GIMP sucks!

"Create a fresh install and manually (!) copy individual files from time machine to your mac.“"

This is, and always has been, the only sane answer.

If you value your time, energy and sanity you do not upgrade your OS - you wipe it clean and install from scratch. It is as true today with OSX as it was going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

A side rant with some useful information:

I had a nightmare week with an office Mac Mini, 2018 . When the employee tried to update to Sequoia, he faced the error-try again conundrum. So logically, I introduced the restore option.

Oh boy, what a shitshow. So after faced by 8 hours restore process option, I proceeded to USB installation. Due to T2 restriction, enabling the boot process in restore utility menu is mandatory.

Surprisingly, this cannot be done without working installation and admin user. So installing the OS which was the default for the computer and booting again was the next step.

Long story short, the Mini stopped working in the middle of the installation. No chime sound. No light. We decided that it is dead for good.

And then I got mad. Perfectly working computer bricked by slow and buggy restore process. 8 hours? Did Apple have no money to afford more server speed from Akamai? Or deliberately f&cks up the process, users to go and buy the new stuff? HMM.

Solution:

So I proceeded to DFU mode with non-recommended cable USB2 to USB-C (from my Logitech mouse, with data capabilities.) You power up the mini by holding the startup button and push the power cable in. USB-C must be connected to the first thunderbolt port after the HDMI input. Then magically you have a connection in your host mac Finder and proceed to restore the T2 firmware. Install as usual from the USB stick and revive the Mini.

P.S. Found bits and pieces to come up with this solution from hardware repair forums. If you call your Apple "support" you know the procedure. Come to the store and buy more.

Article is pretty unclear, "copying" can mean many things to many different people:

    cp -r / /Volumes/Clone  # this never worked

    # what about rsync, does this still work?
    rsync --acls --archive --hard-links --one-file-system --sparse --xattrs / /Volumes/CLONE
    sudo bless -folder /Volumes/CLONE/System/Library/CoreServices

    # what about block-level copying, does this still work?
    sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk2 of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m conv=notrunc

It’s documented in their older blog posts, I believe they use the ‘asr’ utility to copy the OS install. The many partitions that make up a macOS install means that cp or rsync isn’t enough. dd would do it, but at great cost in flexibility (can’t back up to a smaller disk, or select files) and speed

> dd would do it, but at great cost in flexibility (can’t back up to a smaller disk, or select files) and speed

I mean if we are talking about copying the whole OS or disk, that is a very macro operation. The fine-tuning can be done at the target location after copy like removing unwanted files/resizing partitions etc. No idea how slow would dd be but I thought you could specify larger blocksize for better performance (hoping someone more knowledgeable on dd can add their views).

It also kernel panics if you power down external monitor but keep HDMI connected or have an HDMI output device that is powered off.

It was a great out-of-the-box experience for my new MacBook Pro.

FWIW, I don't have the same behavior. I have a large tv hooked up to my caldigit TS3+ that is turned on and off when I want to watch a movie and I just tested it and it continues to work just fine.

From the other commenter it sounds like it’s an issue with the built in hdmi port on the pro laptops.

Here is part of the backtrace in case it brings it to the attention of someone: https://imgur.com/ycyVIzF

I already sent it to Apple but who knows when they'll maybe look at it. Panic at IOPortDPDelegate.cpp:256.

I do not have this problem, I do this every night.

It obviously shouldn’t panic, but have you looked at the dumps for what could be the cause? Or perhaps try a different cable and/or different hdmi device? It’s still a bug, but perhaps it’s a non-spec-compliant hdmi cable or device?

Interfacing with external monitors (or at least 3rd party ones) seems to be a weak point for Apple.

Being 'upgraded' to macOS 15 is the worst part of buying a new macbook pro.

I counted 12 bugs during the first hour of use.

Makes we want to start a computer company.

My bext comouter will not be a Mac. Works nice but the lock-in is crazy all the time.

Yup both Mac and Windows have a better replacement now: Linux. Thanks to all the hardware vendors and Valve, Linux has become a better desktop alternative for sure.

The day Microsoft decides Proton is a nuisance that gaming alternative is gone, as Valve decided fostering a GNU/Linux game ecosystem wasn't worth it.

Microsoft has joined Open Invention Network a while ago and AFAIK (though I can be wrong) Valve is also member of OIN. They can't really attack anyone using their patents now.

And Valve is not exactly a small startup that's possible to sue into debt. Even though they're much smaller by headcount they certainly do have money and desire to fight any kind of legal battles. And with amount of goodwill Valve has from it's customer base anyone attacking them will end up with huge PR disaster.

Also even if above wasn't true I doubt MS want any more antitrust scrutiny.

It is as easy as having Windows and XBox APIs that Proton isn't able to easily replicate, while requiring them for Windows Store and XBox Game Pass.

Valve got lucky with UWP.

No need for patents.

Also there is the whole question Microsoft has outlived its founders, will Valve be able to do the same, and those that come after Gabe will they sell it, what would their view be regarding Proton, and so on.

> It is as easy as having Windows and XBox APIs that Proton isn't able to easily replicate, while requiring them for Windows Store and XBox Game Pass.

This will do more damage to Microsoft's position rather than Valve. They already lost current generation of console war and weakening their positions further by breaking compatability would't do them any good. Also Apple eating into their laptop market share by ARM offerings and have it's own compatability layers for graphical APIs.

Microsoft cant do much of anti-competetive vendor lock-in by technical means now. It was possible for them to stop something like Open Source community efforts, but likes of Valve and Apple are so much more resourceful. Everything they do on Windows can and will be reverse engineered.

> Also there is the whole question Microsoft has outlived its founders, will Valve be able to do the same, and those that come after Gabe will they sell it, what would their view be regarding Proton, and so on.

Here I'd tend to agree. There is a huge questions whatever Valve-after-Gabe can continue as it's now.

Apple has 10% of worldwide desktop market, and no presence on servers and cloud. They aren't eating anyone's lunch, not even on mobile, where Android rules world wide.

Microsoft also owns the PC, besides XBox, Valve is a guest and should not forget how many studios are owned by Microsoft.

And with a Microsoft friendly US administration, maybe even Valve-after-Gabe can become part of Microsoft.

Apple owns 10% of the market, but around 90% of all computers above 1000$. They make around 7.5 billions in Mac revenue per quarter, which makes them the most profitable computer company.

Apple controls the high margin market. That has royally screwed Intel, which explains in part the woes its in right now; it lost the only high margin computer maker.

Apple might aspire to be the Ferrari and Lamborghini of the computer world, yet that is exactly why their growth is now limited, and they are desperately looking to iPhone next, failing at VR, arriving late to the AI party, and there is only so much rich people in the planet.

I'm not quite sure what you are saying here but Valve can beat Microsoft at almost any game.

Really? Steam Machines weren't exactly a success.

And apparently the only way to get games on GNU/Linux is to build on Microsoft's work with reverse engineering APIs.

If they can beat Microsoft so easily, where is Valve's own platform, without Microsoft dependencies?

Its called SteamOS

And Linux works pretty nicely with Android too - not hand-in-glove cohesion like Apple can provide for obvious reasons, but practically all vendors provide tools to switch pretty easily during the device setup stage and Syncthing provides amazing flexibility in managing data between Android and Linux devices on an ongoing basis.

No one really complained with 15.1 and macOS completely blocking software that is "untrusted".

You know the "move to bin" popup, which you used to unblock in the past by cmd+clicking the binary, or later via the settings menu for privacy & security (insane in its own right!)

Since 15.1, you're done and dusted. Unsigned/untrusted binaries simply will not run on macOS, regardless of how much you trust them to be. Thanks Apple.

That is a big deal, a really big deal... For the music industry, many industries and consumer grade software, such as game installers from GOG, etc. They simply don't open anymore once you install them fresh.

I raged for about 15 mins at these idiots at Apple for making such a breaking change to user space.

This is clearly not to protect the user as much as it is closing the walled garden onto users. Disgusting, silent move, in a minor release.

Thankfully I found the solution in

        xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ~/binary

But what do I do once this doesn't work anymore? I really wonder. I really like the M1-M4 chips. I can't stand listening to a fan anymore. If this keeps going south I will be jumping ship to the first distro that supports this hardware properly.

A sad state of affairs. macOS is a beautiful OS with its problems but very workable. Apple is slowly picking at it and worsening it, mostly, throughout the years. Long live Snow Leopard!

I haven’t updated to 15, but I thought they just removed the ability to run unsigned software by right clicking and selecting open. My understanding was you had to manually approve it in the system settings via Gatekeeper?

Apple is 100% slowly boiling the frog in respect to locking down macOS to be like iOS. I already switched to Linux on my personal machines. I saw the writing on the wall when notarization was announced in 2017.

15.1 completely removed the ability to "open anyway" within the Privacy & Security panel, which was already a shocking way of handling it.

It's still there for me, though the context menu option is not.

https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/apple-forces-the-signing-of-...

According to this post you can bring back running software from anywhere:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255759797?sortBy=rank

You can either switch off Gatekeeper or go into the system settings to click open anyway. Yes, it’s annoying though.

No, this is what I'm saying, 15.1 removed the system settings to "open anyway". It's gone.

I had to find an application to test, so I downloaded the kitty terminal emulator for macOS which was just an executable.

I tried to execute it from the shell ./kitten-darwin-arm64 and it gave me an option to cancel or move to bin. I went to system settings -> privacy & security -> and told it to allow kitten-darwin-arm64. I then rerun ./kitten-darwin-arm64 and it now had the option to "Open Anyway".

So in 15.2 it is still possible to execute software by unidentified developers.

moving to Asahi Linux seems like an option eventually

Yeah I was looking at that. The problem is I write my own mac software and I'd be missing on that.

Do you make money from those? Are they created in some relatively cross-platformish way?

No and no. I just enjoy Swift and SwiftUI.

For additional context, the dialog reads:

> "App" Not Opened <br> Apple could not verify "App" is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. [ Done ]

The upper right of the dialog has a ( ? ) button that opens https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/apple-cant-check-ap... which says:

> However, if you choose, you can still open an app that isn’t allowed to open by manually overriding Privacy & Security settings.

There's a link to the settings, under which you have to scroll down and find a second copy of the above message and then click "Open Anyway", with then gives you a third warning:

> Open "App"? <br> Apple is not able to verify that it is free from malware that could harm your Mac or compromise your privacy. Don’t open this unless you are certain it is from a trustworthy source. [ Done ] [ Open Anyway ]

Continuing on requires authentication, and the prompt offers a fourth warning: "You are attempting to open an app that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy."

According to https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/ you do need a full $99 Apple Developer Program membership to have apps notarized.

Tangential:

I updated my iPhone 15 from 17 to 18.1 and got Safari crashes. Lost handoff capability from iPhone to MacBook, works perfectly the other way. Both of these problems are incredibly frustrating.

The funniest bit about upgrading to Sequoia for me was that running programs in Apple's debugger breaks establishing local network connections.

i.e. a device directly connected via ethernet can be communicated with when running the binary normally, but cannot under lldb. Meanwhile no prompts about allowing network connections etc. are presented.

That wasted at least half a day until I realized I could just use the upstream LLVM debugger.

> This sucks. We think it sucks. You think it sucks. But we can't fix it: Apple has to do so.

And this is why I gave up on macOS several years ago now and moved to Linux.

It's not about which OS is better or worse. All software has bugs. It's about the empowerment to _do something_ about the inevitable bugs, rather than wait and hope that a fix comes down from above.

And not just that: if an update breaks my Linux install, I can figure out what broke it and roll back to an older version. Rolling back updates on macOS or Windows is just... not really a thing, at least not without a full reinstall, assuming you even have installation media for older versions these days.

Windows automatically save a restore point before updates are installed and rolling back - assuming the machine isn't bricked - is really simple.

Windows Update once borked my overnight ML job to install “critical updates; reboot required” on my desktop.

I bought a MacBook the next day and put Linux on that desktop. 100% happier.

It's actually really difficult to roll back a MacOS machine to an earlier OS even with a full reinstall.

You either have to make MacOS backup disks immediately upon opening the machine, or you have to find MacOS installation disks from the dodgy high seas.

Not really difficult to reinstall every major Intel Mac OS release, at least, as they're all downloadable from Apple in one way or another:

1. You can reinstall "the version of macOS that came with your Mac or the closest version that’s still available" via Internet Recovery[1].

2. You can download installers for every major release back to High Sierra from Apple via the App Store[2] or directly from Apple's update servers using a tool like installinstallmacos[3].

3. You can download installers for Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mountain Lion, and Lion directly from the Apple support site[2].

3. You can download Snow Leopard and Leopard from the Apple developer site[4] (free registration required; paid membership possibly required).

Note that the downloads on the developer site are the 10.x.0 retail builds, which may not be compatible with all Macs that shipped with a later build.

In this case, assuming the version you need is no longer available via Internet Recovery, you'll probably need to install and patch on an older machine, then transfer the patched install to the target via disk swapping, imaging, or NetInstall, or to install and patch directly to the target machine's hard drive using Target Disk Mode (or else track down a copy of the model-specific restore DVDs that shipped with the target).

Downloads from the App Store and support site should always be the latest point release, so this should only be a problem if you want to install Snow Leopard or Leopard on a post-release machine.

Installing non-final point releases is admittedly problematic: you can download some but not all x.y.0 builds from the developer site, some but not all patches from the support site, and a few x.y.(z < latest) installers from Apple update servers, but AFAIK there's no way to get an arbitrary point release of any version unless you can find someone who has a copy saved.

Though I wouldn't even be a little surprised if older patch releases were still available, unadvertised, somewhere on some public Apple Web server, given that you can still download System 6.0.3 (released October 1990; last supported Mac was the Classic, discontinued September 1992) if you know the correct URLs[5].

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-macos-recovery-...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662

[3] https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts

[4] https://developer.apple.com/download/all/

[5] http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft...

http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Soft...

Bookmarked.

When I tried to wipe and reinstall stuff back in 2021, it was impossible to find old versions.

Nice to see that has changed.

Thanks for the links.

>or you have to find MacOS installation disks from the dodgy high seas.

Mist[1] downloads them directly from Apple.

[1] https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist or https://github.com/ninxsoft/mist-cli

You can. Most Linux users can't -- I say 90%, if not 99%. Most Linux users are just users, many of which don't know how to use tar or xargs without looking it up, very few have the technical knowledge and capability of figuring out "what broke it".

I had it for a while. Then systemd came and everything changed. Can’t just grep logs and won’t bother learning how to handle that “journal”. Some programs don’t write logs at all, they just crash with an indicator in a systray that something crashed (the most useful info in the world, /s). Linux was being made by hackers who know how to debug things, not anymore. Now it’s new kids raised on rainbow unicorn nonsense. I feel myself in linux like I’m in early windows now, so what’s the benefit?

Here's the command it sounds like you're looking for:

`journalctl --grep="search string"`

You can limit it by time period like this:

`journalctl --since=-6h --grep="search string"`

Note that there's a separate user journal (such as for things that show up with an indication in the systray), accessible like this when in a shell as that user:

`journalctl --user --since=-6h --grep="search string"`

Also, if you really want, SysV still exists and works. You can setup a system with SysV and syslog-ng and have the good ol' service run system and flat log files back.

Thanks, but today I avoid troubleshooting it, I just accept the roadblocks and escape to my windows+msys2 installation as soon as possible. I find this combination a better gnu-based system and better upside / downside balance, which is all I need on desktop. Even logs usually get written to text files cause windows system logs are rarely used by regular apps and unixy services.

I’m not a gnu vs linux pedant, but gnu never let me down like that, and linux is really just an implementation detail underneath that I’m free to replace without compromising key functionality.

Rollbacks on image based distros like Fedora Silverblue are as easy as selecting the old version on boot. Literally hitting down and enter.

Besides that, you never wait for updates to install.

If you restart several times in succession after an update (e.g. if the machine is stuck in a boot loop), Windows automatically rolls back the update. If the machine boots but you still want to rollback manually, the option is available for a period of time after the update is installed in Settings under Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery. It's true that once the period of time is up (something like 10 days), you can't rollback any more, but I think your statement about Windows is untrue enough to warrant a correction. Rollback of Windows OS updates is there and it works. I have relied on this functionality in actual real life practice.

It's a shame as APDS does support snapshots and they appear to work well. Having said that I could foresee problems with rolling back the system partition but not the data.

In theory I can make bluetooth and wifi and deep-sleep work with Linux, but am I actually able to fix it? No, and not for a lack of trying. If we're talking about practical ability to fix what goes wrong with my daily driver, then macOS still wins hands down.

you can fix it by buying a linux compatible laptop/pc or building one with known compatibility.

Oh cool, all I have to do is buy new hardware when the software breaks during updates or when Mercury is in retrograde

Frankly, the same is still true for Windows. Not all WiFi and BT devices are created equal. Sometimes an update breaks them in subtle ways.

Actually, I had fewer compatibility problems with Linux than I had with Windows, using absolutely non-esoteric hardware, like Thinkpad laptops, Asus motherboards, etc. Hell, sometimes it was easier to set up a printer under Linux than under Windows (which, frankly, is more often the other way around).

But usually Linux, and to a smaller extent, Windows, allows you to cobble your own solution if a solid predefined solution is not available.

MacOS is much more often a "my way or highway" kind of environment. Some enjoy it; I don't.

Alternatively buy laptops that come with Linux or at least are known to be well supported.

Whenever I buy a new piece of hardware of any sort I end up reading lots of spec sheets, reviews, and articles and comparing choices according to a whole range of desirable features. Making Linux support one of them hardly makes it any more complicated.

If nothing else search for product category + Linux then find a list of recommendations and then google choices that look good looking for unbiased critique focusing especially on people claiming systemic flaws in design that effect all units.

I would literally pay good money to watch some of you use Linux and try to figure out... you know, what's going on.

And or pay to know the actual truth about when the last time you used an up-to-date distro was.

My NixOS laptop is by far the most, stable consistent, unchanging device in my entire life. Speaking of which, shout-out Google for breaking LDAC on their most recent Pixel 9 updates.

It is impossible for a Linux-compatible PC to have a problem with Linux, because if a PC has a problem with Linux, it is obviously not Linux-compatible.

Therefore, if you ever have a problem with Linux on your PC, it is your fault for expecting Linux to work on your non-compatible PC, and you cannot blame the difficulty of fixing the problem on Linux.

Obviously you can avoid all of this by buying your Linux-compatible PC only from a True Scotsman.

Can't find any Scotsman in Australia, let alone a true one.

Weird, I’m pretty sure plenty of Scots are in Australia.

https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/whm-program/lates...

Bon Scott didn't do a lot of PC support, but he did have a hand built amplifier from one of the early legends of the BBS scene.

https://trevormarshall.com/bon.htm

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/photos/104marshall/index.html

This isn't a tautology. Plenty of hardware is in the set of hardware officially supported by manufacturer or oem under Linux or known to be well supported by open source drivers. If offical data is absent unoffocial data is oft readily available.

If nothing would lead a reasonable person to believe it is supported then your default assumption should be that is likely not.

If the functionality that one expects to work works as expected on supported hardware but not on yours then Linux isn't broken your hardware is.

If it doesn't work on previously supported or otherwise well supported hardware its a bug in the software.

It's weird that compatibly is discussed as if for the next 20 years one shall be forced to use a succession of randomly chosen machines and compatibility will ever be a crapshoot.

Often people will initially try Linux on random machines but official Linux machines are out there and those who have decided that Linux meets their needs can easily find well supported hardware.

This usually means you’re building/buying a 5yo “monster” that competes with your iphone. And even then it’s no guarantee.

As opposed to all the people who can't make a USB keyboard work with MacOS and can't do a damn thing about it.

The thread about it generally reaches 40+ pages before Apple erases it only for it to come back. Apple has known about it for half a decade. I can pinpoint the OS release when they broke it. Sure, it doesn't seem to affect everybody, but the people it does affect have no recourse.

With MacOS, as long as everything works, everything works. But, when it doesn't, you cannot do a damn thing about it.

Linux very, very rarely leaves that kind of catastrophic bug for 5+ years.

idk my xbox controller works on macOS, doesn't on Linux. Same bluetooth chipset (Magic of multiple drives and hackintoshing some crap). Idk what USB thing you're talking about but you surely seem to be capable of providing some actual useful info for people like me who would actually like to understand what you're talking about?

When did it break, and why does it still work for me? (Mac Studio, M1 Max, macOS 15.2)

It broke approximately 2018, and it works for most people. When it doesn't work, "why" it doesn't work is unclear, but it's very consistent for those of us to whom it happens.

I tracked it to a single OS update because it was one of the last iterations that still had removable SSDs. I could swap the drives and the USB failure moved with the OS.

It's almost certainly an overly zealous macOS USB HID driver. macOS will do very strange things if the HID descriptor and the USB report don't correspond exactly and it will do those weird things silently. People have had to work around strange macOS HID handling for quite a while now.

All of those work. As for bluetooth, I can connect multiple bluetooth headphones and playback audio at the same time. This is a bit fiddly, but I wouldn't even know where to start on some other systems.

Bluetooth on Windows is a nightmare too. Headphones, keyboards, mice etc might work initially, but at some point they don't connect anymore and it's almost impossible to fix. Mac is better in that regard, unpairing and repairing usually works. On Windows it's just broken.

It's why I only use hardware with fixed dongles (Jabra, Logitech, etc).

I was recently shocked to find out that you can't change the volume in macOS when the machine is connected to a TV over HDMI[1]. Volume control is entirely disabled, and you need to adjust it via the TV. Or use a 3rd-party program.

This is absolutely insane.

I'm sure Apple will claim to have a very good reason for this, but the concept of controlling volume on audio devices has existed since the dawn of computer audio. All other operating systems do this as expected.

This is my main issue with using Apple devices. You either accept their vision of how to use the device you paid for, or consider yourself lucky that a 3rd-party solution exists (and that Apple has allowed to exist), which you also usually need to pay for. Insanity.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/lgfjax/is_it_possi...

I assume the reason is that too many people don’t get audio over HDMI because one or the other volume controls is at 0.

What hardware were you experiencing issues with wifi or bluetooth or sleep?

Deep sleep doesn't work with Windows or Mac, and isn't needed on Linux either.

My past two laptops, ASUS and Lenovo, lasted days with modern standby. Not as great as Apple but good enough.

> deep-sleep

Didn't Apple kill deep sleep/hibernation when transitioning to ARM ?

It was touted as "Always On Processor" to mimic the iOS and iPadOS management of CPU and never shut it down.

No, that does things like Hey Siri.

I'm failing to find the offical docs, but from the release reporting:

> One of the lesser known facts about the Apple M1 chip is it has an always-on processor. This means that even when your Mac goes to sleep, it isn't really completely asleep. Macs with Intel chips have had a feature called Power Nap for a while now. M1 Macs don't need that feature because it's built-in and automatically running at all times.

https://www.xda-developers.com/first-10-things-to-do-m1-mac/...

The processor is limited and can't take general tasks from the AP.

I'm waiting with bated breath for the day I can run Linux with full hardware acceleration on a MBP or laptop of equivalent quality.

Everywhere I look in the tech world there is so much potential for incredible products just out of reach because of bad software forced on us by anti-competitive practices.

Apple. You're the richest company on Earth. For the love of god, let me use my "pro" device to do professional work.

I am overseas right now and am quite literally typing this from an AMD mini PC with my MBP set up as a second monitor I interact with via a network based mouse/keyboard sharing application. It really hurts the promise of portability if I need to carry a second computer with me because my MBP is _nerfed by software_ to prevent me from using it for everything I do.

I'm part way down this path. I bought a 2nd-hand M1 that only runs Asahi Linux (mainly for OpenGL/Vulkan and being able to use the unified memory for local LLMs). Still trying to find replacement apps to fully transition away from my old mac.

Especially, I'd love to find a tool as great as SuperDuper for my backups. I've been running it for 16 years now, including some full restores along the way. Thanks to the devs for a dependable tool! Pretty sure I used it to migrate laptops, which I imagine is also something that would be more tricky with later macos versions.

Anyway, I hope apple fix this bug soon. If not, then I'll look forward to buying a linux license for SuperDuper one day.

Maybe it's just me, but I've been so used to Linux for so many years that I have a really hard time using either Mac (helping relatives) or Windows (for work). I use a system76 laptop and a system76 PC. It's perfect.

What's the battery life of something like that under normal usage?

As long as they don't take away the __MACOSX folder when I copy other things.

Does anyone know of a way to disable the update notification badge? Or indeed remove the list of updates available. The old 'softwareupdate --ignore' flag has been removed.

So freaking annoying.

Apple just can’t add features to their OS without breaking existing ones. Probably used Apple Intelligence to QA the OS release.

Steve Jobs would be disgusted at what his company has become. “Just works”, my ass

I understand why you're getting downvoted but I also am in some form of agreement with the sentiment/hope they don't lose sight that they are pretty much keeping the dream of the consumer UNIX vendor alive.

You don't matter to them. The "What's a computer?" ad shows what they care about. Do what they want and stay on the happy path. Otherwise, you're holding it wrong.

Oh gawd that commercial... Yea I remember that pretenious commercial and it's end line when she says "What's a computer?", and I was wtf really what your holding is a computer.

Sure a computer where the boot loader is locked down to the point you can't even load your own signing keys or side-load, effectively taking away full ownership of the device from the owner, but it's still a computer.

Desktop linux has some market share in hollywood, I would think that market does matter to them as it did SGI etc.

Apple is sitting on a massive pile of cash but won't dedicate a team to develop their own Unix userland tools. That's how much they care about the underpinnings of MacOS and power users.

Can't argue with you there, even Windows has a package manager now.

On the one hand, it looks like they're getting MBA'ed slowly: the product lineup is getting more tangled every year (just try picking an iPad) as they search for more ways to slice and dice the market.

On the other hand: they created Apple Silicon in recent years.

Didn't they originally buy PA Semi while Jobs was on watch?

Yes. The first A-series designs launched while Jobs was still alive.

That said, from what I understand, a lot of the team was hired after. So it’s certainly not an indicator one way or another about the post-Jobs talent/innovation pipeline.

The myth of Jobs would be disgusted, the real guy shipped the same

Or worse even. Early versions of OS/X were very buggy. I think people look back at that era through rose tinted glasses.

After all, the marketing message of no new features with Snow Leopard was because of the reputation of Leopard.

macOS has been in a slow, steady decline for many years. Every major (or even minor) release brings new bugs, that often go unaddressed for months; the yearly mad push for new features leaves no room to fix things.

At this point, I've installed an MDM profile to block major updates - planning to stick to 14.x until it's EOL, or only upgrading to an x.7 or x.8 when it's out.

I really, really wish someone high up at Apple took a long hard look at OpenBSD release notes <https://www.openbsd.org/76.html>, and used that as a compass for planning the next macOS release. But apparently it's more important to chase the trends now.

1st mistake: purchasing a post 2013 apple product

2nd mistake: installing an update on said product

I'm amazed to people's reaction to this. You themselves have chosen to use a walled garden closed source OS. What did you expect? Apple not screwing you? Apple has been doing everything to hint they are turning macOS from general purpose OS into iOS-like nonsense. Why are you even surprised? Switching to Linux is long time overdue.

So bad

Mac use to be for tinkerers, that is not the case anymore, I loved to tinker with them 10 years ago, it was the only (reliable) platform you could work with sound. You bought a machine that would run years, people in studio would run many years with them, then they started to close it down more and more. I stopped working with sound but my old machine almost 20 years old still runs, out of tinkering with it i got into Linux, now i work in operations with k8s, creative, complex beatiful engineering

managed software, managed hardware, managed people

are you an anarchist, then? i am curious

I question the sanity of anyone who takes a good hard look at the world around them and isn't a little bit of an anarchist.

One of the worst things about the move to smartphones is the inability to make full backups. I don't understand. It's my own device, all the data belongs to me, and I should be able to back it up whenever I want.

Some data is even completely unaccessible, like the app usage on Android. You can view it, but you can't export it in any shape or form.

It seems like you can, with the usageDirect app.

It’s very easy on iOS to make a backup of your phone including all apps, settings, and data. Either to the cloud to locally to your own storage. What am I missing?

You never had chat apps that don't let you back up the chats? How about login tokens, authentications? That counts too. Are you able to roll them back selectively when an app misbehaves?

Cloud does not work. If you have an app that is no longer available in the App Store, when you install from a backup you are out of luck because that app can’t be downloaded from the App Store.

If you choose to manage your phone from a Mac, then you can save a full backup.

It's not a binary choice: you can do a full local device backup occasionally and still use iCloud. That way you'll have saved copies of old apps available in case they get discontinued on the app store.

FYI for anyone who just needs to backup using a Windows machine (for me: download hundreds/thousands of photos reliably), iMazing has worked well enough.

Unless something changed I believe on macos it has to back up to the system drive. I paid my $200 premium to get my 1tb drive on my laptop and my ios backups take up like 30% of that outright. In a perfect world I’d have a server that everything gets dumped to but macos and ios do not make that sort of setup very easy. There’s this ios issue. And people report issues with time machine over network. The whole ecosystem is a little screwed up. But yet I want their hardware so here I am dealing with the hoops they make me jump through. Always some poorly documented issue I run into like with their launchd or all the bullshit they make us now deal with for “security”. No issues when I write for work on centos of course, a proper os. What I would do for a macbook that shipped with no os.

I was able to relocate the backup via symlink.

> to the cloud to locally

Requires payment for backup of any meaningful size.

> locally to your own storage

I don't own a mac. I own Linux. How do I backup iOS to my device? How do I restore it?

From Linux you literally cannot

You can run macOS or Windows inside a VM on Linux.

Tecnically yes but slow as hell and you are using a software you are not licensed for in this case.

>I own Linux.

That's the trouble with these niche desktop platforms, people don't write software for them.

Is windows also niche?

I think he meant iOS.

You can backup your phone to a Windows machine (using iTunes).

> I own Linux

Does idevicebackup/idevicerestore not work anymore?

But agreed, there's no technical reason why the phone can't just accept normal USB-connected storage and store a file in there (in whatever proprietary/encrypted format it wants, but at least the _storage_ is standards-compliant).

It seems to be actively maintained, so I would assume it still works:

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice

The backup part definitely works, I haven't tried the restore part.

Back when I used to play with roms in the Android world being able to back things up was neat… but also took a ton of space and was crazy cumbersome.

I kinda prefer iCloud style backups.

That is why many people complain about not really owning the device. And some others defend not owning the device because - cool reasons; and if someone owns his own device that breaks the magic for everyone involved, somehow /s

Do something about it? Get an Android phone you can root and own your device;

And if you feel you are missing something, slap an apple sticker on the back /s

Even worse, now some apps are not allowing screenshots. That's bullshit, it's my phone, I should be able to screenshot whatever the hell I want.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. You're 100% right. Android lets apps block screenshots with FLAG_SECURE, and iOS does too with https://github.com/JayantBadlani/ScreenShield, and neither one gives the owner of the phone a way to override that.

The wildest one I've seen is Chrome on Android not allowing screenshots in Incognito mode. I'm struggling to understand the rationale there except maybe to prevent people from accidentally screenshotting sensitive stuff like porn or domestic violence resources? Either way, it's really not something the app should have control over.

My guess would be to stop surveillance apps from taking screenshots - is that a thing?

> the inability to make full backups

Says who? I have been using this for years:

    adb backup -f backup.ab -apk -noshared -all -system

Apps can stop you from doing it, and many will, then it fails silently. It's also a deprecated feature. When I mean a full backup, I mean a bit for bit identical copy, not what the app developers think you should be able to access.

The issue is that Android lets app developers set <application android:allowBackup="false">, and doesn't give the owner a way to override that. Your command will just skip any such apps.

It's my own device

That's what you think, but based on the actions of the companies doing this stuff, clearly they don't and strongly want you to be happy with owning nothing.

tldr; sudo asr restore --source and all tools that just call that are no longer viable.

Gotta be honest, I find the idea of a bootable backup disk to be defective. What if it was an OS bug that wiped out your volume, and booting the backup does the exact same thing to the backup, because of the same bug?

The hope there would be that the backup is from before the OS bug reared its ugly head, so you can get what you need off of it. (or hope it doesn’t happen again)

Yeah, I don’t understand system backups anymore. I keep everything I care about in a single directory and clone that to the cloud. I no longer need to worry about backups outside of this. It’s easy enough to install a fresh OS and restore my directory. I’ll need to install a few apps but I’ll also have a nice clean system to work with.

And if you have many apps and don't treat your carefully edited configs as dirt, you'll understand it'd be a giant waste of time to recreate from scratch

I don’t carefully edit any configs. I try to be productive with the default/recommended configuration as much as possible, and be flexible when things change rather than fight to restore the familiar behavior. Otherwise you’re constantly fighting a lonely battle.

You don't need to fight anything, yo can be just as flexible, just starting from a much better base that the defaults. But this is not about you, but the inability to understand the value of backing up apps and their configs

You cannot be productive with the default configuration. You’re just telling it to yourself, but it really sucks.

What are key configuration that needs to be changed?

Prevent taskbar from collapsing apps into a single icon.

Are you sure you measured your net productivity, deducting the config editing and the evangelism?

Oh, I’ve used SuperDuper for years, and I adore it. Several years ago I had a spinning rust HD die in a Macbook. I plugged my backed drive into it, booted, and had access to all my stuff. Without that drive I would have needed another computer.

I could keep going making a list of all the ways I’ve found a bootable clone of a MacOS machine to be useful, but damn, I’d hate to live without it.

I’m thinking similarly.

I’ve been using normal Time Machine backups, together with iCloud (not really backup), occasional copies of data I care about to external SSDs, and occasional encrypted backups to remote storage (rsync.net)

But it never even occurred to me to want a bootable backup or include the OS in it. In fact whenever I upgrade my MacBook, I choose to set it up as a fresh device and don’t use any of the tooling to copy everything-and-anything.

You can roll back to a backup right before the OS update that caused the bug. For example I have hourly snapshots using btrfs. Each snapshot is entirely bootable by itself, so if I ever broke anything, I just roll back. The system snapshots are read-only, so they are unlikely to be destroyed by bugs like that. You can also just make another snapshot of the same snapshot to be safer. It's also separate from the user data I care about.

> Gotta be honest, I find the idea of a bootable backup disk to be defective

Well, having relied on a similar product (Carbon Copy Cloner) to keep a bootable backup in addition to time machine backups for myself and members of my family to reduce MTTR for many years, I find the idea of being unable to trivially recover from a hardware failure in a few minutes to be defective.

Any of our clones can be booted on any similar system. On a few occasions people have used borrowed machines until repairs were complete without relying on cloud or internet connectivity. Of course these are all older systems and working while booted from an external drive is definitely a degraded experience akin to driving on a spare tire until you can get to a proper service station.

It's actually insanely useful. Weekly clone to disk is something I value because if the machine dies I can use my clone on another machine and boot my real desktop without fuss and Continue Doing Things

This is a perfect move from an environmentally focused company! This will totally help reduce ewaste and anyone supporting the environment should totally absolutely undeniably without question of common sense just buy all of their products!!!!!!!!!

Mother Nature just got a call that her first check cleared, she's very excited for the future of Apple's courageous new direction for e-waste management.

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