Has Apple sounded the last POST?

Apple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't work.

Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process. It's far more reassuring to see things happening than pressing the power button and being "left in the dark" waiting at a black screen for a few tense moments as something happens.

[1] The satisfying "clunk" of the power switch, to the fans and hard drives spinning up, the latter doing their initial seeks once they've reached full speed, the beep of the POST, the buzzing of the memory test, and then the sounds of the disks loading the OS. It's all very information-rich, and once you get used to the normal routine, it's easy to notice when something changes unexpectedly.

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.

No, POST as in the actual test, not just the sound. The article speculates that unlike “other models that have mute boots”, here there might literally be no power-on self-test: “there are no accessible records of any POST taking place on Apple silicon Macs, no other evidence that they do, and even if they did it’s hard to see what they might achieve.”

Ah cause a part of POST is link training/etc, which can make some rough approximation of error rate from SERDES eye reports. Its the same problem with computers that lack ECC, without actual hardware tests (be that POST, or HW/SW error detection) your simply praying to the data corruption and crash gods that nothing goes wrong. And frighteningly a lot of things can actually be going wrong long before you will notice the data corruption or happen to have an application crash. Thankfully HW doesn't tend to just go bad as frequently as it just has errors that can be detected consistently given sufficient error detection/testing.

But even on PC's one is generally doing the same thing the mac is doing and using preprogrammed/saved machine parameters. Its only when you plug in new ram, pcie cards, etc that a full POST sequence is run on a given bus. Something the mac can't do because it doesn't have user upgradable ram/pci cards/etc. And then your average PC also has a diagnostic mode that can be started that runs a more complete system test to report back to dell/hp/etc before they send a tech or issue a RMA.

And things like memory zeroing are frequently simply not done anymore, or there is HW in the memory controller which does it in the background during initial bootup as ranges/banks are first accessed (usually for assuring ECC is set correctly).

Anyway, the point of POST is to do some rudimentary sanity checks to report errors rather than having the OS fail bootup, or the machine acts generally unreliable. Better to see degraded link/fan/etc errors at post than wonder why your machine is just running slow or being a POS like seems to be fairly common with Mac's if you watch Rossman's channel much.

For sure I take your point about seeing POST information. When I switched from Debian to OS X (10.0) I installed an app which gave me that POST info on boot. It looked pretty cool. I was used to seeing it in Linux for years, and it make me happy to have it on OS X.

> Apple has always chosen form over function.

But this isn’t true, and there’s substantial evidence against it. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “Design is not what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.” Under this mantra they prioritized function over form for decades.

Now, sure, they screwed up sometimes, e.g., the previous generation of laptops absolutely prioritized form. Jony Ive got all excited about making something thin and minimal, and ended up dramatically compromising obvious functions, like the very thin but very shitty keyboard.

But that’s an outlier. Mostly their stuff is very high quality. Judge it by longevity and resale value, if nothing else.

This “encouraging learned helplessness” you talk about is in fact the opposite. You clearly care about computers and how they work. Most people don’t. Most people want to treat them like cars — they should work all the time, and when they break they should be taken to professionals to fix. This is nice and predictable for most non-technical people.

Then to compete well in that market, computer manufacturers need to make things which are durable and long-lasting, and with good support. Apple does exactly this.

And if you’re still not buying it, consider that the primary computer for most people today is a mobile phone, and those things need minimal maintenance outside of accidental physical damage. The rest of maintenance is handled by software updates, where again Apple does better than anyone.