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Thank you Apple

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Re: Thank you Apple

#3
TL;DR someone had a really complicated problem. Some of it involving electricians, cleaners, breakers and how they formatted a USB drive installer. His assortment of computers that are somewhere between 8+ years old don't work perfectly the way they might have otherwise. A DVD he had was worn out somehow.

Then he blames it all on Apple for not making it all work magically and blames it on planned obsolescence.

Re: Thank you Apple

#4
It had surprised me when Lion came out that the installation was done by an "app", not as a bootable image. This is an unnecessary complication for those of us that need to maintain machines. Earlier, when updating a different machine, I had learned how painful this could be when the installation app destroyed the boot sector and I needed to reinstall Snow Leopard from DVD, and then upgrade that to a version of the system recent enough to run the Lion installer app. As will become apparent, had Lion come as a bootable image things might have gone more smoothly.

Lion and Mountain Lion installers contain images which can easily be converted to ISO:

http://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/201209130700_convert_dmg_to_iso...

and there are many more options and approaches:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2628/install_os_x_from_dmg_fi...

http://0xced.blogspot.com/2009/08/booting-from-dmg.html

http://blogchampion.com/2011/03/12/how-to-create-a-bootable-...

Re: Thank you Apple

#6
post #4

It had surprised me when Lion came out that the installation was done by an "app", not as a bootable image. This is an unnecessary complication for those of us that need to maintain machines. Earlier, when updating a different machine, I had learned how painful this could be when the installation app destroyed the boot sector and I needed to reinstall Snow Leopard from DVD, and then upgrade that to a version of the s…

I think the point isn't that is impossible to be able to do a clean install of an OS and apps (Time Machine included) you have already paid (premium!) for but the fact that it is non-trivial and very much involved - all the things for which the Apple system stood against. Most of the newer Apple products are a black box which cannot be fixed unless even the technically competent users take extra efforts(^).

And this is coming from Rob Pike[1].

edit: (^)Or you take it to the Apple Genius people, who just have the correct tools.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Re: Thank you Apple

#8
post #5

I think it's interesting to point out that this is Rob Pike. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Interesting in that his industry veteran status gives this merit or interesting in that his employment makes him a shill?

Re: Thank you Apple

#9
post #8
post #5

I think it's interesting to point out that this is Rob Pike. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Interesting in that his industry veteran status gives this merit or interesting in that his employment makes him a shill?

Interesting in that when it comes to computers, he knows what he's doing.

Re: Thank you Apple

#10
In my experience, Time Machine works great. What doesn't work great are the absolute pieces of crap that Seagate and Western Digital are pawning off on us as viable backup solutions. They are just plain garbage. The controllers are unstable, and the drives are invariably refurbished. (And don't even get me started on the 2.5" drives with embedded USB controllers and no access to SATA ports.)

I went through a couple Seagates and a couple WD's, each of which would corrupt the Time Machine volume repeatedly. The last straw came when I had an internal drive failure on my MBP, and my existing Time Machine drive would not even mount, and Disk Warrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro (in that order) were of no help.

I switched to using a Thermaltake USB3 dock, with 3.5" WD Enterprise drives. I have not had a single issue since. You get what you pay for in hard drives. If you are relying upon them for backup - don't go cheap. It isn't worth it!

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