A Personal, Heartfelt Note on macOS Reliability

I powered up my with the intent of doing some writing this evening, and there was a surprising turn of events–it rebooted straight into the installer, complaining that it couldn’t finish installing the OS:

Image credit: Jeremy Riga

This happened a day after having used the machine without a hitch, including upgrading the OS to 10.13.4, working a bit more, and shutting it down for the day.

For the record, I managed to get past this by booting into Safe Mode1 and am now re-downloading the 10.13.4 update, since the machine appears to have been snapshotted back into 10.13.3.

Needless to say, I’m livid. Regardless of the cause (I suspect some interaction between APFS and the 10.13.4 update), I’ve never been so squarely hit upon the metaphorical chin by ‘s incompetence at doing QA on what is essentially a closed system that they have absolute control over.

This is beyond amateurish–it’s incompetence, pure and simple, and does not bode well for they’re crafting.


  1. A piece of advice: When this kind of disaster strikes, pay a visit to Ask Different‘s support forums are completely useless, and the level of expertise you’ll find makes all the difference (pun intended). ↩︎