Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

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hoakley

November 30, 2025
Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

Cast your mind back to when you learned to drive, ride a bike, speak a foreign language, perform a tracheostomy, or acquire any other skill. Wasn’t confidence the key to your success? Whatever we do in life, confidence is always critical. If you run a business, one of the metrics that are likely to be collected is confidence in your business, as that’s such an important economic indicator. Confidence is every bit as important in computing.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS. From text files that simply won’t show up in Spotlight search, to Clock timers that are blank and don’t function, there’s one common feature: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report that to the user, instead just burying it deep in the log.
When you can spare the time, the next step is to contact Apple Support, who seem equally puzzled. You’re eventually advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, to wipe a fairly new Apple silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but have no reason to believe that will stop the problem from recurring. You know that Apple Support doesn’t understand what’s going wrong, and despite the involvement of support engineers, they seem as perplexed as you.
One reason for this is that macOS so seldom reports errors, and when it does, it’s uninformative if not downright misleading. Here’s a small gallery of examples I’ve encountered over the last few years, to bring back unhappy memories.

Maybe you saved an important webpage in Safari 26.1 using its Web Archive format, then a couple of days later discovered you couldn’t open it. There’s no error message, just a blank window, so you try again with the same result. Another site shows the same problem, forcing you to conclude that it’s a bug in Safari. Are you now going to devote your time to obtaining sufficient information to report that to Apple using Feedback? Or to contact Apple Support and pursue its escalation to an engineer who might fortuitously discover the cause?
Silent failures like these are least likely to be reported to Apple. In most cases, we find ourselves a workaround, here to abandon Web Archives and switch to saving webpages as PDF instead. When someone else mentions they too have the same problem, we advise them that Web Archives are broken, and our loss of confidence spreads by contagion.
Honest and understandable error reporting is essential to confidence. It enables us to tackle problems rather than just giving up in frustration, assuming that it’s yet another feature we used to rely on that has succumbed in the rush to get the next version of macOS out of the door.
Eroding confidence is also a problem that the vendors of AI appear to have overlooked, or at least seriously underestimated. It’s all very well using the euphemism of hallucination to play down the severity of errors generated by LLMs. But those can only cause users to lose confidence, no matter how ‘intelligent’ you might think your AI is becoming. Go talk to the lawyers who have been caught out by courts submitting AI fabrications whether they still have full confidence in your product.
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Posted in Macs, Technology and tagged AI, alert, bug, confidence, error, fault, macOS. Bookmark the permalink.

54Comments
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joethewalrus
on November 30, 2025 at 9:20 am

This was timely, as last night I engaged in the obviously criminal act of trying to launch a simple application from a shared network volume, only to be told that the application was damaged (it was not) and “You should eject the disk” (Why?) with a glowing Eject Disk button begging me to hit Return. I chose to click Cancel.
“You should eject the disk” is a new one to me, and I considered sending you a screenshot.
If that wasn’t bad enough, later when I was done with the file share, I tried to eject it, and then got the stale old error that the disk couldn’t be ejected because some mystery application was still using it.
This was using Sequoia. I’m afraid to try it with Tahoe. My confidence is at an all time low, even worse than when I used the nightmare unpatched Mac OS 8 all through high school.
LikeLiked by 5 people

Dakotamoons
on November 30, 2025 at 9:10 pm

Joe,
Just curious. When you say “shared network volume” I assume you are referring to a NAS? If so, what brand/model is it, and are you using SMB 2 or 3, or something else?

LikeLiked by 2 people

joethewalrus
on November 30, 2025 at 9:25 pm

A MacBook Pro running Tahoe, so I was probably effed from the start.
But that doesn’t negate the unhelpfulness of the error.
LikeLiked by 3 people

Dakotamoons
on December 1, 2025 at 5:37 pm

Just my personal experience so far with Tahoe v26.1 test-running on a Mac Studio M4 connected via ethernet to a couple of Synology DS923’s, connecting with at least SMB-2, or 3, I have not observed any issues whatsoever.
HOWEVER, I’m not committing to running Tahoe on any of my production machines for a few more iterations and patches for Tahoe.
I don’t ‘need’ Tahoe for any particular reason, other than the slight added built-in security updates, so I’m holding off, probably until January at the earliest. Too much at stake in my case. Just not worth any risk.
LikeLiked by 2 people

couldnotbebetter
on November 30, 2025 at 9:24 am

Apple has been very disappointing lately. It is getting to be time to buy a new computer. I am reluctant to buy another Mac. The hardware is still great, but I don’t want to rely on MacOS. Now I am debating if I should go with MS Windows or some Linux version.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Duncan
on November 30, 2025 at 12:56 pm

I am reluctant to buy another Mac. The hardware is still great, but I don’t want to rely on MacOS.
One option is to buy an older model Mac whose hardware is quite capable but can still run an earlier version of MacOS (and not Tahoe, which a new Mac will be saddled with). In the US a good source is Other World Computing, who carries a pretty good variety and is a reputable dealer. You’ll also save a decent amount of money doing so (or can upgrade the memory/storage above what that same money would buy with a new machine).
Unfortunately, that would only kick the can down the road, as running older versions of MacOS brings its own security risks (to the extent that one might worry about them), and eventually Safari will stop accessing New, Improved! web sites that load themselves with the latest memory-hogging technology.
If you instead decide to switch platforms, then stay away from Windows. I’m seeing nothing but apocalyptic warnings from long-time Windows users over what Win 11 has become. Switching from Mac to Windows today would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into a blast furnace.
LikeLiked by 5 people

Dakotamoons
on November 30, 2025 at 9:22 pm

Duncan,
Love your analogy of “jumping out of the frying pan and into a blast furnace.” No truer words have ever been spoken, still, and likely always, true.
I share your concern, along with the emphasis on this topic coming from Howard. This is very scary. I am responsible for almost 30 years of financial information. I use a few Synology NAS boxes running RAID6 SSDs.
There are already many ways that even under the best of circumstances things can potentially go off the rails, let along dealing with an unstable OS.
So I wait.
I have Tahoe v26.1 installed on an M2 MBA and an M4 Mac Studio, BUT ONLY FOR TESTING. I still run the latest version of Sequoia on all my production machines.
I am very thankful for Howard’s dedication to all things Mac, and in particular this very salient topic. Thank you Howard, and everyone else for all the updates.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Enzo Vincenzo
on November 30, 2025 at 2:29 pm

Ma conosci Windows?… Lo conoscevo benissimo, fin dallo squallido Windows 3.1, assieme al DOS e da oltre vent’anni lo installo comunque sul mio Mac (prima con Virtual PC e con Parallels Desktop da quando Apple è passata a Intel).
Ma lo tengo solo per vendicarmi dello stress e dei mal di testa che provoca quando sei costretto a usarlo.
Installato su un Mac, infatti, Windows vale quanto qualsiasi altra applicazione ed è come uno schiavo.
Ma anche così, se devo accedervi perché costretto (ad esempio, per eseguire un programma fiscale), non vedo l’ora di chiuderlo e tornare a macOS.
Per non dire quanto io mi senta male in un ambiente di lavoro in cui si usa Windows perché molti produttori di strumenti diagnostici medicali sono incompetenti riguardo a macOS e pensano che Windows favorisca il loro business e non osano progettare software da utilizzare con macOS.
Pertanto, bisogna avere a che fare con programmi la cui interfaccia è spesso irrazionale e bisogna capire ogni volta come hanno ragionato i loro progettisti.
Insomma, è un inferno.
macOS per sempre!
LikeLiked by 2 people

peterkillick
on November 30, 2025 at 3:57 pm

Enzo, I didn’t have time to translate your comment, but I spotted a word ‘incompetenti’ in the middle which seems entirely apt for this topic, so it surely deserves a ‘Like’ from me anyway.
LikeLiked by 4 people

Larry
on December 1, 2025 at 4:09 pm

Really, no time to translate? Highlight his text, right click on it and select Translate. Quick and easy.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Bart
on November 30, 2025 at 4:36 pm

Well crafted, beautiful software used to be what set the Mac apart. That, and a well designed system with logical rules that you learn once and then can use all over.
I too have used Windows since 3.1, and Apple has squandered a lot of the Mac’s advantages.
In many ways it’s just six of one as they say, there are now some pretty good things about Windows as they successfully copied most of what the Mac did well.
I will say that it is nice that the Mac has a simple highlight and translate feature that seems to work pretty well!
LikeLiked by 3 people

Oleksandr
on November 30, 2025 at 10:11 am

Speaking of Safari web archives, I never trusted them as a long-term archiving solution: undocumented, proprietary format, never in the spotlight. Also, seeing how once key technologies like Automator, Quartz, scripting, and image capturing are slowly decomposing by being abandoned with no updates in years, slowly accumulating bugs and compatibility issues, I see web archives as joining this list. Thus, I’m using the SimplePage extension to capture and archive HTML pages as a single all-in-one file that can be opened as long as browsers last.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Ralf
on December 1, 2025 at 1:26 pm

Oleksandr, I assume you mean the browser extension ‘SingleFile’? And thank you for the tip.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hhanche
on November 30, 2025 at 10:23 am

I absolutely concur. What happened to the old Apple slogan, “It just works”?
Years ago, that was true much of the time, but as I recall, even then, the messages you got when something didn’t “just work” anymore, and that did happen, were less than helpful.
We touched on the Music app recently. Another mystery of mine is with Keychain Access. As far as I have been able to find out, I may be the only one on the planet afflicted by this. On three different macs, no less: First of all, there is no keychain named “iCloud Keychain”. There is one named com~apple~CloudDocs, but if I click on it, it appears empty. However, if I type a search term – no matter what– then I get a list of all keychain items, including a bunch in this mysteriously renamed iCloud keychain. But of course, search does not function as search, so instead I have to scan for the item I want by eyeball only. I can select a sort column, and that works and makes the task somewhat more manageable. But still, it drives me nuts.
Oh, and there’s tool tips, which you now find many places. They have a tendency to not go away when they should, interfering with what’s underneath. They can be hard to get rid of sometimes, especially if not noticed right away. I have resorted to quitting and restarting Safari because of a tab preview that I could not get rid of otherwise.
LikeLiked by 3 people

Markus Ruggiero
on November 30, 2025 at 1:09 pm

Another one that does not deserve confidence (anymore?) is Preview.app. I am still on Sequoia, so I do not know whether it works better in Tahoe.
I often receive multi-page PDF documents. These work well and can be easily opened by Preview. Sometimes I need to split such a document into its parts. Simple: open the sidebar, show the page thumbnails, select those you want, command-c copies them to the clipboard. Right away do a command-n. This creates a new document from the clipboard. Everything looks good, all copied pages are there, fully displaying their content. Save that new document by giving it a Name.pdf and be happy – until you try to open that newly saved PDF. Oftentimes parts are missing, text areas are empty, just a border shows, only some background page elements are shown. Very often however the document is ok.
Mind you the corruption only shows after having saved the new document when you re-open it (Preview or quick look).
The workaround is simple but absolutely unnecessary. Instead of saving the new document (which looks complete on screen) print it to PDF. The resulting PDF-file will be complete! Throw away that unsaved document
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on November 30, 2025 at 9:02 pm

I confess that I’ve never had any confidence in Preview, which is one reason that I wrote my own PDF viewer. If you want to edit PDFs, there are several excellent options, of which my favourite is PDF Expert, although for various reasons I have to keep Acrobat CC ‘Pro’ to hand as well.
Howard.
LikeLike

Enzo Vincenzo
on November 30, 2025 at 2:08 pm

Unfortunately, Apple’s engineering resources have begun to prioritise aesthetic aspects, transparencies and superfluous effects that we may find pleasing, but which should come after the absolute stability of an advanced system.
If, over all these years, Apple had pursued the perfection of Darwin/macOS, today we would have, first and foremost, the absolute perfection that a UNIX-based operating system should enjoy after 25 years, i.e. a quarter of a century.
After that, none of us would have anything against enjoying transparencies and other graphic effects, provided, of course, that we could disable them if they caused disturbance or annoyance to our nerves, our eyesight, etc.
LikeLiked by 1 person

hoakley
on November 30, 2025 at 9:06 pm

Thankfully, Mac OS has never been Unix, and long may it never be. One of my principles has always been that, if you can’t do it in the GUI, then there’s something seriously wrong that needs to be corrected.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Enzo Vincenzo
on December 1, 2025 at 8:33 am

Thanks Howard! That’s exactly what I think and say!
As for giving a comprehensive assessment of UNIX, I’m not the best person for the job; you’re the IT expert, and you’re right about the need for a GUI.
I was only referring to the fact that Mac OS X started with a solid Operating System over UNIX. I say this based on what I learned from reading books and magazines in the early days of Mac OS X and learning to use the powerful Terminal commands compared to the ridiculous CMD of DOS and Windows that I used and know.
[OT. However, I am very fascinated, in films and television series, to see hackers or super experts typing text through Terminals, scrolling through thousand lines and solving international dramas that even include the command of rockets and satellites 😂. So, should I be disillusioned? Do you think all this is fake and impossible? Thank you]
LikeLiked by 1 person

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:30 pm

Most of those scenes from films and TV are completely bogus, but they play on an image of wizards at the command line. Most of my most powerful and important tools don’t come in Terminal, but apps like MarsEdit and Xcode.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

peterkillick
on November 30, 2025 at 3:49 pm

Just a week ago I saw that Bloomberg (Apple’s official news “leakers”?) announced, er, rumoured that “Apple will concentrate on “quality and underlying performance” when engineering the various iterations of macOS 27.
Did they perhaps notice user complaints were mounting up, or is this just a happy coincidence?
That article references Snow Leopard as the baseline example for resetting the foundations of the next OS. Forgive me sounding like a stuck vinyl (record) in my post again, but non-contiguous text selection in TextEdit was a core feature of Snow Leopard so there should be no excuse for not restoring it and of course any other core features that have been deprecated without being superseded by a genuine improvement.
LikeLiked by 3 people

hoakley
on November 30, 2025 at 9:10 pm

Thank you, Peter.
Howard.
LikeLike

joethewalrus
on November 30, 2025 at 10:13 pm

I’m afraid they’ve backed themselves into an uphill battle of convincing users that THIS is the time it will get better.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Joel
on November 30, 2025 at 7:33 pm

I too am dismayed by Apple in recent years. I have been using the Mac since the first one, and the tremendous goodwill and enthusiasm of those early days are long gone. The current volume of thoughtlessly designed, clearly untested and buggy software coming out of that corporation makes me think we should now call them Applesoft, so closely are they emulating their big rival. After all, if MS can make a fortune from 3rd rate software, why not Apple?
For me, the rot set in around the time when individual credits were banned from About screens for their own applications. Previously, you could contact the developers and have some relationship with them, with mutual benefits; now, nothing. Those meaningless, un-actionable error messages are just the lazy, and unforgivable, end point.
Maybe a new generation of command-line first developers, who may never have heard of the pioneers of interaction design and usability testing who came before them, are now in charge.
I have no desire to renew any of my Apple gear, and I might look at Tahoe in 2026, but I want to distance myself from computing as much as possible now I am retired. It’s the discourtesy and the unprofessionalism that is insulting. Apple doesn’t seem to care, so why should I?
LikeLiked by 3 people

hoakley
on November 30, 2025 at 9:15 pm

Funnily enough, in my third (?) attempt to retire, I’ve ended up getting more deeply embroiled in computing and Macs than when I was also doing other things. Maybe when I try again to retire, I’ll be more successful.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 3 people

joethewalrus
on November 30, 2025 at 10:17 pm

Don’t leave us, Howard!
On the other hand, I believe you are the exact age as my relative-housemate, who is newly retired. I’m sure you’ve earned it as well as she, so I’ll try my best to let go of Eclectic Light Co with grace and dignity when you decide the time comes.
LikeLiked by 3 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:24 pm

Don’t worry, Joe, there’s no imminent danger of my retiring again. With two previous unsuccessful attempts, I know I have to get it right next time :)
Howard.
LikeLiked by 3 people

Duncan
on December 1, 2025 at 2:35 am

PLEASE keep all this information alive somehow if you decide to back off from all this. It is the only place to find a lot of these details, and I for one keep spelunking through your archives to learn more or solve problems.
Quite honestly, I’m just astonished that you’ve been able to keep up this pace. It’s all I can do to read through all the related articles, and yet you’re the one writing them faster than I can digest it all! If nothing else, maybe consider cutting back on the number of articles per week, for your own sake as well as for us trying to keep up.🧐
LikeLiked by 4 people

joethewalrus
on December 1, 2025 at 9:13 am

web.archive.org “The Wayback Machine” has done a great job of preserving these blogs, including comments. (I just checked.) The complication is there is no easy way to search for a specific topic there.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:27 pm

Don’t worry, Duncan, I have no intentions yet. But there will come a day.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hstriepe
on December 1, 2025 at 4:30 am

Given the thousands of engineers Apple has at its disposal, the lack of polish is shameful.
QA and fixing bugs are a thankless task, but they essential to systems that are mission critical in our life. I would be happy to forego any new features I do not need anyway, and have a solidly reengineered and tested version of macOS that “just works.”
LikeLiked by 4 people

couldnotbebetter
on December 1, 2025 at 4:43 am

The deterioration of MacOS is, at some level, a business decision. Apple could afford to assign some software engineers to fix some of the persistent bugs. It would make Macs better computers to use, but would it increase sales?
LikeLiked by 3 people

Duncan
on December 1, 2025 at 11:53 am

When I use my iPhone I realize just what a technological marvel it is, and what a good camera it offers. But at the same time I also realize that I’m holding the main reason why the Mac has become what it is. Almost all the ills of MacOS can be traced to the rise of the iPhone.
This pretty much $ums up Apple’s priorities.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:34 pm

I disagree, Duncan.
Many of the strengths of the Mac owe a great deal to the iPhone, both in technical development and in funding. Apple silicon is perhaps the most obvious. Without Arm in iPhones, and P and E cores, I doubt that Apple would have been able to go that way for Macs, and it certainly wouldn’t have the prodigious sums to invest in developing their hardware, firmware or software.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Duncan
on December 1, 2025 at 6:46 pm

There’s no doubt that the Mac’s hardware has benefitted from the iPhone platform, but I was referring to its software. Which could have proceeded apace with the money that Apple was already earning.
And I still contend it’s comes down to priorities. Apple may be awash in money right now, so they can afford to develop just about any OS improvements that comes out of the R&D lab. But instead their software engineering (and art department) is squandering their efforts trying to make the Mac more like the iPhone, and neglecting its usability in the service of… I’m not sure what, exactly.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 9:59 pm

Hmm. You have a narrow view of Apple’s software engineering.
For example, the kernel and its architecture have been undergoing major changes in readiness for an Arm-only future. Time Machine has been transformed thanks to features in APFS. macOS virtualisation delivers near-native performance including graphics. It’s unfortunate that some of the most visible features are the most troublesome and least impressive, but Apple certainly hasn’t been squandering its engineering effort, and macOS remains far from iOS.
TBH the ‘unifying’ interface claimed in Tahoe doesn’t bring them any closer either. I rather like iOS 26, and in most respects it has a better interface than Tahoe.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

Brian
on December 1, 2025 at 4:12 pm

Joe’s mention of the Wayback Machine as an unsearchable method for archiving Howard’s work made me think of a few things. It’s a great resource, but in many cases it never archives beyond the first level of page, which is funny for an archiving service to ignore linked pages on the same site. It rarely does complete site archives on its own.
Howard, with your countless excellent articles on many subjects, would it be worthwhile to create a categorized index that updates? Archive.org could archive that singular page when prompted by anyone using their “Save Page Now” option. That might help Archive.org and your readers find articles with certain keywords like: Time Machine, Backups, Security, Text, etc. You don’t need another project or more work, just a thought.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:38 pm

Thank you, Brian. I do maintain several index pages, listed in the menu at the top, and again at the foot of every page. However, they’re little-used and take time to maintain. They’re also pretty huge already. I don’t know any way to automate the process, though.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

peterkillick
on December 1, 2025 at 4:16 pm

It Isn’t only some of their apps that are now working sloppily. Another key aspect we used to confidently rely on Apple to always provide was total consistency between their various devices and systems.
If you’ve recently tried to rearrange the order of tabs in a Safari tab group by the usual method of dragging and repositioning them, well you can’t any more (Sequoia 15.7.2). There is apparently a new menu, denoted by an ellipsis, that does enable you to still do this after you select it.
Except there is no such ellipsis symbol in the Sequoia sidebar. The ellipsis only appears in IOS 26.
To borrow your driving analogy, this is like one of those cars that is available in both electric and petrol versions. One day you get into your petrol car and find there is no longer any place to insert your driving key. You check online for a solution, and discover that the starter switch has been replaced by a button. But the button only exists in the electric version.
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 4:40 pm

(As an aside, this reminds me of the courtesy car my garage provides for servicing. Each year they come up with a novel combination of manual/auto with different ways to start/stop the car, etc., to keep me on my toes.)
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

Warren Nagourney
on December 1, 2025 at 5:32 pm

As someone who is well into his ninth decade, I find that my 3 ARM based MacBooks satisfy my simple needs very well. Frankly, I find relatively little difference in the performances of my M1 and M4 though the former’s tiny memory (8 GB) is very much a problem at times. I am delighted by the hardware and haven’t found any limiting bugs in the OS so far (though I don’t like the aesthetics and usability of macOS 26).
Regarding the car analogies, I have had two Toyota hybrids (Camry) since 2012 and have never had an unscheduled service on either. For planned maintenance, I wait in the waiting room for the roughly 1-2 hours it takes for the mechanics to finish their work. (My first car went to my youngest daughter when my wife could no longer drive and the old car performs like new.)
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 9:49 pm

Thank you, Warren.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

Kevin Buterbaugh
on December 1, 2025 at 4:43 pm

Another very annoying type of error message – possibly worse than one that includes no useful information – is one that contains false information. For example, I have been getting the following error: “Time Machine did not finish backing up because some files were unavailable. Backup will resume when your Mac is unlocked.” And I get that even when my Mac is most definitely unlocked the whole time the backup ran.
There are rumors that the “27” releases next year will be primarily oriented towards bug fixes … sure hope that’s true.
Kevin B.
LikeLiked by 2 people

Duncan
on December 1, 2025 at 7:03 pm

“There are rumors that the “27” releases next year will be primarily oriented towards bug fixes …”
It appeared for a while that Apple had adopted Intel’s ‘Tick-Tock’ method of development: innovate on one cycle and refine on the other. This was reflected in the names of MacOS, first with a ‘Cat’ > ‘modified-Cat’ and then with ‘Place’ > ‘modified-Place’ scheme. I would feel better if they got back to that regimen, and then I’d know to skip every other release. (Or two out of three, which is what I’ve been doing since Mojave.)
LikeLiked by 2 people

PowerCubed
on December 1, 2025 at 8:27 pm

Something I dislike about the transition to Swift is how little attention was paid to improving detailed error handling. So many Foundation functions just return an “Error”, with no more detail than that. The “best” you can do is report the description to the user, hoping they can make use of that. Otherwise, you are left with an Error after attempting a file operation. Does that mean a permissions error? Out of space? File not found? I suppose you can try and parse the error description, but that sounds like a horrible choice. So you end up with no way to remediate potentially resolvable errors.
To me, it seems like there’s a dogma at Apple of only focusing on the Happy Path. Something goes wrong? Oh well, destroy everything and just try again. Still doesn’t work? Oh well. It’s no surprise their support response often ends in “delete everything and reinstall”
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 1, 2025 at 10:04 pm

I’m not sure where Swift comes into this. In these cases, the errors are reported, but into the log, where almost no one will ever find them. It doesn’t take much effort to inform the user that something has gone wrong, whether you’re coding in Swift or Fortran.
Howard.
LikeLiked by 1 person

Brad Ackerman
on December 2, 2025 at 12:34 am

If you need to assign a new private MAC address to a Wi-Fi network on an iPhone, the obvious method would be forgetting it and rejoining. But that doesn’t work. You can tap “forget” as much as you want, but it won’t actually do that.
The only method that works is to do a network reset. That shouldn’t be a big deal; after all, your network settings are all backed up to iCloud, so assuming Apple’s software developers are at least as competent as the contents of my cats’ litterbox, everything will be resynced.
Turns out that said contents are better at software development than most Apple employees, because it won’t resync. Bonus: my Mac, iPad, and iPhone all claim there’s a different number of networks with settings saved in iCloud. Which one is correct? Are any?
LikeLiked by 2 people

hoakley
on December 2, 2025 at 8:47 pm

Thank you.
Howard.
LikeLike

Marcel
on December 2, 2025 at 10:02 pm

In recent years, so many random bugs have crept into macOS that my workflow now consists solely of taking as few risks as possible. Because as soon as I try out new apps, features, or settings, the likelihood of something breaking increases rapidly. Even during a normal workday, services such as TouchID, QuickLook, or AirDrop gradually fail – or after a few hours, Finder no longer knows how to perform a copy function. Then the only option is to restart, and the game starts all over again. It’s just frustrating – and it gets worse with every update. Since macOS Tahoe 26.1, for example, I can no longer decrypt my external APFS hard drive and now have to hope that one of the next versions will fix this problem. What used to be anticipation for every new macOS update is now a mixture of fear and the feeling of “Let’s see what breaks this time.” Thanks for that, Apple.
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hoakley
on December 2, 2025 at 10:08 pm

I’m sorry: that isn’t macOS. You have something seriously wrong there. Touch ID, QuickLook, AirDrop and encrypted APFS are pretty bombproof, the latter particularly so.
Which Mac are you using?
Howard.
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Marcel
on December 2, 2025 at 10:31 pm

I’m using an M2 MacBook Air and reinstalled macOS 26.1 from scratch to try to fix my issues, but they always return after a few hours or days, forcing me to restart. Sometimes I can’t copy a folder because iCloud Drive is syncing, even if both the folder and the destination are outside of iCloud Drive. For the external encrypted drive, Finder asks for the password but then fails to mount it. First Aid reports the drive is fine. Now I’m waiting to see if the next update resolves these problems.
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hoakley
on December 2, 2025 at 10:42 pm

I’m afraid that I don’t think 26.2 is going to help, because I don’t think your problems are with macOS.
Which M2 chip, how much RAM, and how much free space do you have on its internal SSD?
Reinstalling macOS is almost always a complete waste of time now, as almost all of macOS is in the Signed System Volume, which is invariably perfect down to the last bit, or your Mac won’t start up.
Have you checked its log at all, e.g. when apparently failing to mount your encrypted APFS volume?
Howard.
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Marcel
on December 2, 2025 at 11:28 pm

I’m using a 2022 MacBook Air with the base M2 chip and 24 GB of RAM. My 512 GB SSD has 100 GB free. Thanks for the heads-up about macOS reinstallation – I still remember when that could solve some issues. Console, Terminal, and Disk Utility all recognize my external hard drive, but it seems I was mistaken about macOS asking for the encryption password. The system prompts me to confirm connecting the drive, but even after saying yes, it doesn’t recognize it as an APFS volume. Interestingly, it worked fine before the 26.1 update.
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michaelsschmitt
on December 3, 2025 at 1:28 am

It has been reported before that Apple’s policy now is that if a bug isn’t discovered during the time when a macOS release is the current release, it is deemed pre-existing behavior, and won’t get fixed unless it is egregious. So the bugs just build up and up. I can’t remember the last time a bug I reported has been fixed or the bug report acknowledged.
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