[tpmx]

This is depressing. They clearly have they ability ($$$) to do the required amount of manual QA, but don't. Or there was QA and someone decided that your case still wasn't enough to hold up the release.

In my mind, when we pay that ridiculous Apple premium on RAM and storage, we pay for excellent quality in SW/HW. They also need to deliver that quality.

[mort96]

Or they did QA but just happened to miss this issue. Most companies would consider "the upgrade sometimes bricks the device" to be a release-stopping bug, I'm betting Apple is among them.

[krackers]

Apple still hasn't put up any official page about the issue though, nor does it appear they've pulled the update. Even if it missed QA, why haven't they made any official comment?

[FirmwareBurner]

You clearly don't know Apple as a company. Last most big companies, they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products (unless forced to by large scale fiascos) because that would damage their perfect brand image. It's why they have comments disabled on all their social media accounts.

[gcr]

Google this week seems to be going through a similar bug on their flagship Android 14 release, affecting users who have multiple accounts set up. They also seem to be favoring a "minimal" strategy when it comes to PR communication surrounding this issue.

[tpmx]

Okay?

[JumpCrisscross]

> they never EVER publicly admit any faults or mistakes with their products

Of course they do. They’re just secretive in general, and keep communications edited. Compared to the word salad of modern companies on social media, I find it refreshing. Just fix the problem, issue replacements for those affected and move on quietly.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Of course they do.

Where? Do you have any examples?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Where? Do you have any examples?

The whole battery gate saga. Touch Bar. The 2013 Mac Pro [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

[tpmx]

It's not "refreshing" to hide problems.

[TylerE]

It IS refreshing not to be insulted by the usual "You are important to us and we're taking this very seriously" PR fluff.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's not "refreshing" to hide problems

Hiding entails ignoring the problem. They're not doing that. Their track record is to fix it. Not every action needs an accompanying tweet and blog post.

[cirrus3]

Maybe because it isn't that big of an issue? Have you heard about this anywhere besides HN? If it were a big deal you know all the websites would be all over it as if the Mac were doomed.

[rainbowzootsuit]

"You're updating it wrong." —Steve

[solarkraft]

> Most companies would consider "the upgrade sometimes bricks the device" to be a release-stopping bug

I've run into such horrific bugs during pretty normal use that I don't think this anymore.

[tpmx]

That would be: not delivering while still charging a premium.

[codr7]

Used to be, while Jobs was still around.

These days it's just a bunch of wannabes trying too hard to be him.

[Joeri]

But how would they then keep up their profit margins to keep shareholders happy? Their first obligation is to the shareholder, not to the customer.

(I think it is ridiculous that the system works in that way, especially for a company that hasn’t needed investors in over a decade, but it is what it is.)

[pb7]

It's a bug...

[tpmx]

It's a device bricking bug. For a $2.5-10k device.

[astrange]

Brick usually means unfixable without an EEPROM replacement or data loss.

It's not possible (well, it's very difficult) to do this on an Apple Silicon Mac; once there's an update you can always apply it from another Mac, like the steps on this page do, and your data is still there. With Intel Macs it's possible.

[cesarb]

> Brick usually means unfixable without an EEPROM replacement or data loss.

The definition of "bricked" is not set in stone; a lot of what a normal person would consider "bricked" (doesn't turn on, or turns on to an unresponsive black screen, and no magic sequence of button presses can reset it to working order) could be fixed by a power user with the right equipment, software, and knowledge.

In this case, it requires fairly expensive equipment (another $2.5-10k device), somewhat easy to acquire software, and the appropriate set of instructions, to overwrite the device's broken firmware with a working copy; you don't have to open up the device and plug a JTAG adapter, but using the DFU protocol is very similar to that, since in both cases you're writing directly to the firmware under control of an external device. This is not like "BIOS FlashBack" and similar on non-Apple PCs, in which the device can rewrite its firmware by itself from a common USB stick.

(Also, about data loss: a device with removable storage could get bricked without any data loss, and fixed also without any data loss, simply because the data storage is separated from the firmware and from most of the hardware. It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.)

[astrange]

> In this case, it requires fairly expensive equipment (another $2.5-10k device)

A few minutes of access to one, not ownership of it, and hardly any system requirements on it.

> It's Apple's insistence on non-removable storage which risks losing data when something else makes the device fail to boot.

That's actually not the reason. All storage is removable if you just desolder it. It's because the storage is encrypted and you can't extract the keys.