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by vbezhenar 968 days ago
Today I had to DFU restore my macbook because I wanted to reinstall it, but built-in restore over the web did not work. My base system was 13.2, it downloads all the files for 13.6, it filled bar to 100% and then spewed error.

It's obvious that it's some incompatibility between 13.2 base system and 13.6 install. Apple quality is atrocious these days. One would have thought they would test the most basic scenarios before releasing their x.6 software.

And worse of all, there's no official (or even unofficial, at least I wasn't able to find one) way to create USB boot installer without another Mac or to DFU restore Mac without another Mac. Do they think I live in Apple Store? I don't have other Mac. I was able to DFU restore with libimobiledevice, god bless its creator, but it really should not happen. Windows or Linux are so much more transparent compared to macOS.
2 comments
baz00 968 days ago
Yeah the Apple bootloader and restore stuff scares the shit out of me. The network access requirement, firmware on SSD and hardware lock are always lurking waiting for the most inconvenient time to go wonky when I hose something.

Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

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cesarb 968 days ago
> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

It goes further than that, on many motherboards even a failed firmware update can be fixed through a random USB stick from the drawer, you just need the right BIOS file to put in it.

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Clamchop 967 days ago
And some motherboards even have a backup BIOS if one of them becomes deranged. Now that's luxury.
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EstesPark 968 days ago
As a lifelong Mac user, it just now hit me how inconvenient locked down the restore process is.
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jonhohle 967 days ago
In the FireWire days, you could firmware boot a Mac into target disk mode and plug it into another mac where it would show up as a disk.

How far we’ve fallen.

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seec 961 days ago
Yep, macOS is nice but Apple stuff is mostly locked down luxury garbage nowadays, yet they have more fanboys than ever which infuriates me. Previously everything was open, and it was genuinely nice to work on the various parts of a Mac, now I would rather have to fix 10 PCs than deal with a single modern mac...
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_lvbh 968 days ago
> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

Linux as well. Will probably work better than windows on older hardware

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jamesfmilne 968 days ago
Yes same here. I did install then uninstall Avahi Linux a year or so ago, but now I can't upgrade past 12.6.

I'll need to get an external drive, back everything up, then do a DFU restore on my M1 Max MBP to get it upgraded to Sonoma.

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_lvbh 968 days ago
I deleted the MacOS installation on my (older) Mac. Linux works well enough
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