Dear Apple Computer

The BBQ Pit
1

TL;DR ==>

I bought a used Mac on eBay after verifying with Apple that yeah, no problem reverting it to the OS version I need to run on it. Couldn’t manage to do that on my own. Apple tech support is now on their 2nd week of trying to make this happen.

Hey folks! Lifetime Mac fan and evangelist here, been using Macs since the heydays of booting System 3 from an 800K floppy. I can touch ten working bootable Macs right here in my home office and I’ve never owned a Windows PC.

So, a handful of months ago my employer mandated that the minimum OS to remote in and work from home was MacOS X 10.14, and my reliable vintage-2011 MacBook Pros are too old to run it, so I obtained a used vintage-2018 MBPro from eBay, new enough to run that OS or anything newer but old enough to let me run 32 bit applications, a few of which I need. It already had 10.14 on it so I used the Migration Assistant and was up and running almost immediately.

Problem is, the only 2018 model I could find at that time had a mere half-TB SSD and I need more space if I’m going to make this computer my primary and not just a work-only computer. Well, I also always want an emergency computer, an identical box that can boot the exact same environment (right down to every setting and preference, every document, etc) that I can switch to if the primary box goes belly-up some day, so fast forward a few months and I jump on another eBay 2018 MBPro that has a full 2 TB SSD in it. I can move everything over to it and keep the existing one as emergency backup (booting it from external bootable daily backup if the main one needs to go into the shop someday).

Well, the new 2018 laptop was advertised as having Big Sur on it (that’s MacOS 11). I wanted to make sure there was nothing that would get installed on the laptop along with OS 11 that would keep me from erasing and formatting and installing MacOS 10.14 over it, so I contacted Apple tech support chat line and they verified: “Oh yeah, as long as that model is capable of booting 10.14, you can revert back to it, no problem”.

Ermm, not quite.

What I usually do is boot from the external drive (bootable backup of the current box) then format the internal and run the backup software in reverse. First problem: new laptop won’t boot from the external.

Okay, method two: set new laptop to boot in “Target Disk Mode”, which means other computers can attach it and access its drive as if it were an external drive instead of a computer. Attach it to the original 2018 in Target Disk Mode and yep there’s “Macintosh HD” from the new 2018 on the desktop… but so are two other volumes! I’m seeing a second one also called “Macintosh HD” in orange external-drive colors and a third one for Recovery. Disk Utility shows a drive containing a “Container” containing these three volumes. Confusingly, they all claim to be 2 TB capacity volumes.

Back into Apple Support chat. “Do I need to erase from the top, or just one of the volumes, or what?” Chat person says erase “Macintosh HD” and ignore the others. I do that, run Carbon Copy Cloner to push my Mojave (10.14) environment onto it, shut down, unplug, reboot new box. It won’t boot. Starts runnning something called “Internet Recovery”. Back to Apple Support chat. “Let it finish Internet Recovery, then I’ll walk you through the erase and install”.

Well, Internet Recovery fails at the end. Repeatedly. So laptop won’t boot from its own drive, won’t boot from external, and won’t boot from Internet Recovery. I try returning it to Target Disk Mode (by holding down “T” at boot) and reattaching it to the other 2018 laptop. This time I erase the entire SSD, format it APFS, and it makes a “Container” and within the container the new volume (just one this time). I again put Mojave on it.

It again won’t boot from it.

Apple switches to tel calls, escaling the ticket. “Well, looks like someone put an Activation Lock on it, contact previous owner”. I do. He apologizes and removes the lock by removing the Mac’s registration from his iCloud. Still won’t boot from anything, including Internet Recovery.

“Drive it to the nearest Apple Store”, telephone support instructs me. I do. I explain, and I bring old and new 2018 laptops, the bootable backup of Mojave, the Apple official Mojave installer, and cables. I show that the virtually identical (except smaller SSD) computer boots fine from either of the drives I connect with cables, but new one won’t. I explain I need Mojave and that’s why I was trying to erase and install over Big Sur.

I get email soon: “Come pick up your laptop, it’s ready”. I drive to store. They’ve installed Ventura on it. “Nope, I can’t use that, need 32 bit apps, ticket said to install Mojave, see here?” Oh yeah, sorry sir. Won’t be done before end of day, we’ll email you when you can come pick it up.

The original telephone Apple tech calls me next day to follow up. “I see from the notes it’s done. Did you get it yet?” I say no email to me yet. Decide to wait and see if they email me to pick it up before end of day. They don’t. I call next day to ask. “Oh, it was ready days ago”. The pickup date they cite is when I was first called because they’d erroneously put Ventura on it.

They have no notes about needing to erase Ventura and put Mojave on. The person on phone goes to read the original ticket. “Oh yeah I see they were supposed to put 10.14 on there. I’ll speak with the techs”. On hold music. “It should be ready tomorrow some time”.

They’ve all been very nice about it but I’m glad I wasn’t in any real hurry. Today is Day 8 of what should not be more than a few hours’ effort.

2

I thought that is where your story was going and thought it would end there, I’m just glad you were able to contact the previous owner. The Activation Lock is just freaking insane and it has bricked more than one device I’ve run across. As in, this is basically a paperweight now. That you got this resolved seems miraculous to me.

Good luck with the rest of it. I’m curious if they actually get things the way you need it.

3

Why isn’t your employer supplying you with your remote work equipment?

4

The miracle of modern technology…

5

Not all employers do and they certainly don’t have to.

I remember a decade and a half ago (holy crap has it been that long?!) that I had the option to remotely work from home, but I needed to use my own computer and install VPN software that allowed me to connect.

My wife works for our county, and up until this year she was using her personal computer to remote in and work, because her work computer was years out of date and frankly unusable.

That’s reality.

6

I have an iPhone and an iPad, but I’ll never again own any Apple desktop after a horrible experience with the Performa model in grad school. Defective logic board, power supply that went south, bad memory cards installed by an Apple dealer, and years of spontaneous shutdowns and crashes. I’m told that their products are much better now, but it was too many years of crisis for me to ever quite trust them again.

7

The Performa computers were not real Apple computers IMO. They were created in a period where Steve Jobs was no longer at the company and they were trying to create PC clones to compete with the likes of IBM. I supported Performa computers professionally in my first real IT office job so I have a LOT of experience with them. When Jobs returned to Apple, they scrapped production of the Performa line and totally reformed their way of making computers, starting with the iMac and iBook which led over time to the products Apple creates today.

Swearing off Apple computers because of a bad experience with a Performa is like saying that you tried “New Coke” in the 80s, thought it was disgusting, and haven’t drank any Coke products since. It’s kind of funny actually. :laughing:

8

Dear OP.

Since this is the Pit.
I’ve lost count of how many fucking threads you’ve started over the years where you simply do not fucking understand anything Apple. I’ve tried to help a few times, but it’s like banging my head against a wall, because there’s always something, something or some other thing that isn’t what you thought it would/should be. When posters try to figure out specifics - hardware specs, what you hope to achieve, if you’ve tried doing this or that - you are never, ever able to come up with a coherent answer.

Last week my 2014 Mac Mini froze. I called support, described the problem and said I need time at the Genius Bar, since it was clearly a hardware problem. I got an appointment the same afternoon, went there. The guy hooked up diagnostics, confirmed hardware problem and said they’d check it and get back to me.
40 hours later they called, said it was ready to pick up. Some connection for the SSD. No charge. For an almost eight year old computer, long out of warranty. I’m using it right now.

The problem isn’t Apple. It’s you. Since you clearly, and with much evidence from your posting history here, don’t have a fucking clue, do yourself a favor: hire someone who knows the basics about how Apple products work. Make them set up the whole she-bang to your liking. When it fails (as Apple things tend to do in your hands), call that person and have them communicate with Apple.

I’ve been dealing professionally with Apple products since 2008 (as Apple Admin at a school), including products locked by Apple-ID (which is a pain in the butt.

I can only say that I’ve always got the best service from them. That of course also depends on the fact that I can articulate what the problem actually is.

9

Back from Apple Store. Correct OS, 10.14, installed. Verified I can boot from my external drive containing the Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the other vintage-2018 computer.

Asked what wonderful secret thing it is that they did, so next time I’m in this situation I can do it for myself, and was told by the tech “Oh, you can’t, an end user can update to a later version of the OS but not to an earlier one”. I specified that I meant when booted from a drive other than the drive I wanted to roll back and his eyes glazed over and he said he had to ask someone and would be back. Back he did not come and I eventually left. I’ll ask the helpful Apple tech person who I’ve been phone-calling with.

Or, on preview, with the inestimable @Charlie_Tan who will explain it all to me.

10

Working from home is not a guaranteed privilege.

I don’t mind, I don’t want to be on employer-issued stock. I have worked the overwhelming majority of my work years since 1996 using my own supplied computer, configured my way, and only a tiny portion of the time on some box supplied by and configured by an employer, and it’s much much nicer the first way.

11

I am still working on getting my new apple computer up and running. It’s mostly working, now, but it took several calls to their user support (which is nice that it exists, but the guy i spoke with didn’t know whether i could power the thing from the USB C ports! WTF else did he not know?) And i finally made an appointment at the genius bar, and asked them to only port my account, and not my husband account or the applications, most of which don’t work in 64 bit …

So get it two days later, and they ported everything. I don’t want to start over, but it means i have a huge job cleaning up all the old broken apps.

And now I’m having issues with moving over crashplan, but that’s probably a crashplan thing, not Apple’s issue. Still, it’s been more than 2 weeks since i unwrapped the new toy, and I’m still not really transferred.

12

For all the talk Apple fans give about “It just works”, their hardware and software sure doesn’t seem to since Jobs died, Cook took over, and Ive was allowed free rein. A number of design decisions made me uninterested in their computers, I was never interested in the iPhone, and my iPad was acquired only because of a deal from my cable company.

In my experience, if you are willing to let Apple have complete control “it just works”. Whenever you want to do something complicated, the whole thing is a kludge while the company tries to pawn you off on low level techs that don’t actually know anything outside the workflow.

13

I don’t know about that. For most everyday things, and more than a double handful of out-of-ordinary things, Apple computers do indeed “just work”. I’ve done a ludicrous number of things with no prior info on how, just because they were self-explanatory.

I’m the kind of computer user who wants to customize the whole experience and I end up doing a vast amount of things that aren’t part of the expected Apple path, and yes, that is when things don’t always “just work”. I still expect them to work anyway, even if it takes a few extra steps, and they mostly do, although the word “just” is not longer particularly applicable.

I was installing INITs and cdevs back in the System 4 days to modify everyday Macintosh behavior. I wanted to be able to create folders on-the-fly to put the document I was saving into. Someone wrote a little shareware tool to let me do that and I installed it. Been that way ever since. All these years later, I refuse to have a Dock eating up screen real estate, so I’ve been disabling it since MacOS X 10.0.4; I have ⌘-N creating new folders as it should be, I have verbose boot turned on, my hard drive is never named “Macintosh HD”, I don’t tend to use Apple’s application programs (can’t stand iPhoto / Photos or iTunes, I have other software I use instead of Apple Mail, Calendar, Chat, Notes, Preview, Reminders, Safari, TextEdit, or Stickies)… I don’t use Time Machine, either, I have a different backup strategy. Etc. And I don’t save my files to Documents. I prefer to partition my drives and create my own folder hierarchies, thank you very much. I don’t use iCloud or the Apple Store, just as I wasn’t a user of iDisk. I don’t let the Installation Nanny tell me what I can and cannot run on my computer, either.

Such behavior does indeed throw off some of the techs. I don’t really expect otherwise, I don’t get mad at every glitch or every delay in getting me the help I need.

But I did check with Apple tech support before purchase and they said I could do what I wanted to do, so it’s been a bit annoying.

14

I’ve been using Macs for 30+ years and I don’t need those low level techs or any other techs. I’ve never had a problem with my Macs.

15

Well then, you’ve had better luck than I’ve had. Today I see a paucity of ports, soldered un-upgradeable components, other bad hardware decisions like the butterfly keyboard and touch bar, proprietary interfaces, difficult to customize software, and often very little control over something you spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on. For those who find Mac products work for them, great. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. But I gave up on Apple when my MacBook Pro had the graphics card fail for a second time and they simply did not make a piece of hardware that I wanted to buy. And in the meantime, I found that Dell and other PC manufacturers had caught up in a lot of ways regarding hardware design.

16

I’ve always had towers or iMacs. And I’m not worried about you or anyone else trying to get me to switch to PCs and windows.

17

OP, why do you absolutely have to use 32-bit apps? That’s like driving in 2nd gear on the interstate.

Apple doesn’t exactly have a history of supporting old OS. I’ve always found it’s best to upgrade and learn how to use the upgrade. Insisting that the old way is better than anything that operates on new hardware just keeps you in stagecoach mode. You may have invested years of toil into mastering your craft, but you gotta move on and work with current technology if you don’t want some kid with an online certificate taking your job.

18

I can’t speak for the OP, but I know a great number of people who use old OS versions to run 32 bit and other utterly obsolete software because they have to interface with legacy systems that require it. My wife, in academia, regularly uses machines from 30 years ago, and they have to use an OS that will talk with it. Thus a lot of poorly maintained Windows 2000 boxes (which was the last update they could handle) which will only save to a 3.5" floppy as a specific example of “well what else are you going to do?”

19

I have a fair amount of experience with Macs, having utilized them exclusively for my personal (i.e. non-work) computer for over 36 years. I try to get at least 10 years out a given machine, which means the last few years on that machine is on older hardware and software before I’m forced to upgrade.

I do [eventually] embrace new technology, but I am not an early adopter. I generally upgrade the macOS only when the subsequent version is introduced. For example, I recently upgraded to Monterey around the time that Ventura was introduced. That way I get a robust OS that hopefully has all of the bugs worked out.

I love iCloud and the way it syncs my Calendar, contacts, notes and files between all my devices. Time machine is great too. I back up to an internal hard drive as well as to a rotating cast of external drives.

When I run into issues, I can generally find a fix with a Google search. I’ve never had to call tech support or take my device in.

One complaint I do have is Apple’s tendency to abandon old standards with abandon. :wink: For example, I spent a lot of money on a Mac Pro a couple of years ago because I like the tower form factor, only to have Apple turn around and abandon Intel-based chips. Then again, the same thing happened in the mid-2000s when they switched from PowerPC to Intel, and in the mid-90s from Motorola 68000 to PowerPC. It just sucks that I bought such an expensive machine at the end of that particular life-cycle.

20

Apple is a Cult.