An Apple software update bricked my MacBook Pro, and it ultimately eroded any faith I had in Apple products.
One thing’s for sure: I’m done with Apple.
Firstly, a huge hat-tip to the technician called Scott and the other staff of the Knoxville Apple Store during my visit of 10/5/23. Scott was very knowledgeable, he was willing to approach me on my level, and he was instrumental in getting this laptop back online. Apple: hire more techs like him. Seriously. He is a credit to his profession, and to you as a company. You almost kept a customer because of his professionalism. Almost.
Now for some context.
I wanted to hold off on upgrading to macOS 14.0 “Sonoma,” as I usually do, since I didn’t want to run the risk of introducing a software incompatibility that it would potentially take weeks to resolve. Running Python, RStudio, R, Visual Studio Code, and many developer tools on my machine, I don’t believe in taking chances, all the more so since Apple users often tend to be paying beta testers nowadays. So, when I saw that there was a point update to Ventura 13.6, I figured I’d apply the patch, restart my Mac a time or two, and everything would be golden.
It wasn’t.
The laptop shut off halfway through the update process, and it wouldn’t start back up. Thus began my desperate attempts to try to coax any life at all out of the machine.
I tried opening it up and disconnecting the battery terminal, which required me to disconnect the trackpad.
I tried booting it into the recovery mode.
And that was pretty much it. I was out of options, which was a first for me.
On “lesser” computers, I could have, and probably would have, tried rewriting the firmware (doable on some computers with an SOIC clip and a Raspberry Pi) or resetting the non-volatile RAM (not an option on Apple Silicon Macs). You can revive a Mac computer with a trashed firmware, but the process requires a second Mac and a suitable USB-C cable.
I put out the call at work, but none of my coworkers were Mac users. I posted a now-deleted tirade on Twitter where I expressed my frustration rather vocally:
After 17 years, I am done with Apple.
My $2,000 MacBook Pro, which cost me a month’s wages, is now a brick because of a macOS update. What idiotic kind of design is that?
I’ve never had a PC brick itself because of a botched update. At worst, I had to install Windows/Linux.
I wasn’t even upgrading to Sonoma. I was installing a point release of Ventura, a hotfix recommended by the vendor.
No more iPhone. No more Apple Watch. No more AirPods. As circumstances allow, I’m going back to Android and Linux.
It’s been fun, Apple. I love Mac and iPhone.
But I don’t love these products enough to place my job or my education at stake knowing that a botched OS update can ruin everything.
Reviving my firmware will only make the computer useful long enough for me to get my data off it.
The first thing I did, once I got my laptop home from the Apple Store, was get all my data off it, with several large zipballs now cluttering my iCloud ‘home directory.’ And as I write this, I’m working on getting away from Apple more broadly: finding an alternative to Apple Music, moving my data off of iCloud, and I’m even looking at Android phones and smartwatches for when the day comes that my iPhone 13 is paid off and I can afford to move away from the company completely.
I have loved and admired Apple and its product portfolio for most of my life. The company and I are at an ideological crossroads, however, because I disagree with the notion of an OS upgrade containing a hidden firmware update that could grenade my computer if I lost power. I disagree with the notion of a vendor continuing to exert control over my computer even after I’ve purchased it outright. And I disagree most vehemently with the notion of basing your computer’s technical architecture on one of the most closed-off hardware platforms in existence. On my iPhone and iPad, I don’t have any issues with the strictly locked-down nature of the platforms; on those devices, whose use cases are much less generalized, the benefits of increased security, reduced attack surface for malware, and more-or-less guaranteed operation are to the benefit of my personal safety (in the case of the phone) and incredible convenience (in the case of the tablet).
Computers, however, are different. They operate under different constraints. They address different concerns. For many of my purposes, I genuinely require the openness and extensibility that a truly open desktop OS allows, and with nearly 30 years’ worth of inertia, I greatly prefer the desktop metaphor to other methods of interacting with a computer. Apple didn’t introduce that metaphor (Xerox did), but they did perfect it and make it commercially viable, which the Xerox PARC developers seemed none too keen on worrying about.
I’ve been a Mac user off and on since 2006. I haven’t always agreed with the OS strategy. I started with OS X Tiger in 2006 and proceeded through Leopard and Snow Leopard in the years to come. I still maintain that Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the finest desktop operating system Apple has ever made, primarily because it remained purely a Mac operating system and not some bizarre chimaera of Mac and mobile. After the release of Lion in 2011, I went on a long, primarily penguin-powered hiatus, using Debian, Arch, and Slackware (though I always kept a Windows box around for PC games). In 2018, I got into a new career and to celebrate, I bought a secondhand MacBook Air, figuring I’d upgrade to a newer machine if it still had the same magic as its forebears.
It didn’t. I sold it for about half of what I spent on it in January 2020, though if I’d held on to it for a few weeks, I might have made more since people would pay stupid money for a computer during the pandemic. In either case, I shrugged, went back to Windows 10, and in October 2020 I built myself a new gaming PC.
When I came back to the Mac platform again in 2022, it was the remarkably tasty 64-bit ARM processors that lured me back. A non-x86 laptop with performance specs to put even the best x86 machines to shame? Sign me up!
My laptop and I lasted for about 22 months this time around. I had hoped that my M1 MacBook Pro, an open-box purchase from Best Buy, was going to make a lot of beautiful software with me, and I mostly bought the machine in the hopes that a tech job offer was going to materialize and demand a nicer machine than the Dell Inspiron I’ve gone back to.
The MacBook Pro was a gorgeous machine, except in all the ways it wasn’t.
- Apple’s promise of a 14-hour battery life was bullshit even when the laptop was new. I got at most 9 hours with light Web browsing.
- Programming in Python on the MacBook was always an exercise in frustration: in Big Sur and Monterey, Apple was still shipping Python 2.7 (which was sunsetted at the start of 2020), meaning that you had to install the Python runtime (not a huge deal) and then pray that your PATH was set properly in the Unix shell (a big headache since that path changes per Python version).
- Even after disabling the features that the Internet told me to disable, I still got iPhone calls through my laptop if it was open. Even though I didn’t want to get iPhone calls through my laptop.
- My AirPods never learned my preference to connect to my MacBook rather than my iPhone.
- I never cared for the slight differences between the French Canadian layout on Windows and the one on macOS.
- I hated the stupid notch. The worst part of the notch was the fact that I repeatedly tried to get Citrix Workspace to pretend as though the notch wasn’t there – and it stubbornly refused to do so, blocking off part of my virtual Windows desktop when I’d attempt to work remotely on my MacBook. If Apple would sell a laptop without a webcam, the nearly bezelless screen would be a lot nicer of a concept, and a lot of privacy advocates would rightfully be very pleased.
On the bright side, the ProMotion screen looked amazing at 120 Hz, x86 compatibility was spot-on in Rosetta 2 (and performance was even good enough to run x86 games), and the laptop almost never spun its fans. Sidecar was a nice feature once I got an iPad, but a far more reliable feature with a wired connection than over a wireless one.
I don’t compute in silence. Ever. I’m always listening to music, a podcast, or a YouTube video, or if nothing else I’m typing fast enough that the speed of my typing is audible over any fan noise.
I run my laptop’s screen at 48 Hz to save on battery consumption, and frankly 60 Hz is good enough since the vast majority of video content is only available at that frame rate.
Duet Display only costs $25 and works fine on Windows to let me use my iPad as a portable second monitor.
And you don’t have to emulate x86 if you’re running an x86 processor.
The very machine that I purchased in the expectation that it would serve me as a development workstation turned out to be unfit for purpose. And as it turns out, I simply don’t like most Mac software. The Mac version of Firefox is alright, but I hate the Mac version of Microsoft Office. The Mac version of LibreOffice feels every bit as amateurish as its Windows counterpart. I’ve never liked Safari, or at least it feels that way since the last good Safari version came out in 2012.
At the end of the day, the fact that my MacBook Pro was an excellent piece of hardware did nothing to negate its clear and obvious flaws as a computer. The laptop-shaped object cosplaying as a Mac had to go, and so I parted with it.
The Apple of today is not the Apple I remember from my youth, or even from my teenage years. I knew this was coming – in the early 2000s, Apple became the iPod company with an incidental computer business, and after iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010) proved successful, they more broadly became the portable electronics company with an incidental computer business, far more like Samsung than they’re willing to admit.
(Speaking of: Samsung, your Galaxy Book laptops look very nice, but I’m not spending $1,800 on something with a home OS. Sort your shit, s’il vous plaît.)