Last week the Macbook Pro I use for work died.
Not entirely, but bad enough that it refuses to fully boot. “Something went wrong with your computer” shows in six languages and then it tries to boot again. I log in, and — repeat.
The company I work for nextday air’d me a replacement. Yeay!
So, I had to figure out how to transfer two years of customization and configuration over to the new one. Oh, look there’s thing called Migration Assistant, let’s try that.
Now, I *could* boot into “SafeMode” (hold SHIFT while PWR buttoning the crippled thing), and voila, there’s all my stuff. Connecting the two Macs together, good, now Migrate! Two hours later, with 10 minutes to go… BOOM. Same issue, reboot.
Crap!
OK, well, I guess I can just copy over my stuff manually. And that basically worked. Until… I learn that THIS Mac has Apple Silicon while the OLD Mac had Intel Silicon. What? Yeah, it’s a thing and many apps require specific processor-architecture-silicon to operate.
Holy Hell!
So, it was back to level ZERO, installing all the software I needed one piece at a time. And now, days later, it’s nearly complete. But oh, what’s this, the language I write in, RUST, has very gnarly “Apple-Silicon” conditions under which it can compile code for deployment to AWS Lambda.
Bloody Monday!
Oh, and in Apple’s infinite wisdom, they provide these four little ports on the machine to plug in things like keyboards and mice and CAT-5 network and speakers and mics and… Well, the OLD Mac did. The NEW Mac rejiggered these ports so that the plugin extender I bought won’t work for it. I had to buy a new port-extender dongle.
Frickin’ Bastards!
Needless to say, last week–the Mac died Monday morning–was a full-on productivity blowout. Good thing we’re in Holiday-Code-Freeze when no new code can be pushed to production on the off (frequent?) chance shit goes haywire. So, being out-of-commission was not so bad.
Phew!
Long Live Apple’s Macbook Pro.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Can you imagine trying to do this without the benefit of having a very good understanding of computers? No wonder so many laptops are defenestrated!
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That was a word of the day not long ago, accompanied by a painting or etching of some European government guys getting tossed out windows.
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This sounds like too much work and I refuse to give money to Steve Jobs or whoever runs it now. I think he’s dead but I’m not giving him money either way. Although I hate to admit it but we have an Ipad we got for free at least thirteen or fourteen years ago and it still works..
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I don’t have those kinds of specific things I need a computer for, so I ask very little of mine. I have a Macbook Air from 2013 and — knock wood/silicon — still working great except for the fact that it won’t digest upgrades and Apple continuously sends me little notes saying I need to upgrade, and I tell it “remind me tomorrow.” It’s a ritual I go through every morning when I turn it on. I could get a new Macbook Pro, or at least a new Macbook Air if the need arose, and would probably have no troubles just because I don’t need special stuff.
I think Apple and Microsoft both have their …uhm …foibles. For that matter, I just posted a rant about WordPress’s block editor (the Classic has its own set of weird behaviors, I found) and the obvious and simple solution is to write posts somewhere else, paste them into one of WP’s editors with a single click, publish and done.
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I inherit computers from people who screw them up and give up. The block editor really isn’t the devil and is based on a system I’m too lazy to look up but is designed so that worker bees can update content and access media assets instead of paying “smarties” to do it. Web junk has that same mythic magic surrounding it that AV install and a few other things have. “We need an expert here!” Nonsense. To write software, yes. To execute it, no. I constantly have to apply the old RTFM to myself.
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Sounds like fun. I try to keep everything I care about these days either in the cloud or backed up there. So when I get a new machine, it’s mostly an exercise in installing stuff, which typically can take a few days. (Particularly if the install files for any reason are hard to find, as they are for some of the clients I have to install.)
Rust. So many programming language out there these days. With all the Mastodon stuff I’ve looked around a little in some of their Ruby on Rails code in Github. Very different from my programming days.
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Urf. Forgot to sub.
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The painful parts, that I was generally able to transfer, were all the “.” files and folders. The .aws, .npm, .cargo, .ssh, .you-name-it. All that /users/ level stuff that various CLIs and tools use to do their work.
I didn’t mention all the database connectivity that I lost and will have to beg-back to things I’d been granted but, today, may have a hard time justifying.
“Why do you need access to production Redshift?”
“Uh, cuz I sometimes need it answer data-warehouse questions?”
“That’s not your domain, any longer.”
“Oh, OK.”
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Oh yeah, I had forgotten about all those . files. I used to use a Macbook Pro years ago and remember dealing with those. Ugh. Although at least they’re there on *nix based systems, unlike the registry in Windows, which is hopeless.
I know what you mean on the security access. Our security teams does periodic audits, often asking, “Do you still need this?”. Usually they take my assurance that I do, but it’s always a anxious moment.
Does the Redshift stuff need some kind of client level registration? (I haven’t used it.) The cloud DBs I work with we’re good if we have our account credentials and authenticator apps.
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Redshift, Postgres and Mongodb are systems that few need access to — directly. But, I’ve had need to hit the metal from time to time due to the fact that the apps and such are inadequate for the wrinkly tasks I ask of the systems.
Generally, the 10 or so AWS account SSO logins, there are 200 of us engineers now, are plenty to get into the systems for inquiry. There are 2 VPNs as well, that must be juggled. And the Execs just bought another company with twice as many employees.
Nightmare I tell ya.
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I have a great story about designing shit in a vacuum.
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Which should have gone up there where it was relative. Fuck Apple’s “fuck users” mentality. Over priced, suddenly obsolete and prone to fail. They sure look good but at the sacrifice of longevity. Redundancy is the only hope, and then there’s those pesky processors… oops. I think Jobs had a sign on his wall “Fuck Y’all Suckers”
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