Happy Birthday! What a superbly useful, solid piece of technology. Don't forget when this came out, the only option to watch video on Windows was to pay money, or try Windows Media Player, which I don't recall ever successfully playing any video I ever threw at it !
Thanks for the info. The guy is not an oracle but I enjoy his docs like Power of Nightmares, etc., as much as Pilger's docs. True quality in a sea of crap.
Not many other general purpose computers require another computer to fix.
Most windows and linux machines can be reinstalled with a USB stick. If you don't have that USB stick they can usually be written with any macos, windows or linux machine.
Updates do not usually brick machines. I'm guessing your PCs that broke did not require another PC running the exact same windows version to fix? And I'm guessing that if those PCs were made within the last 5-10 years you could restore from recovery and not need another device?
> Updates brick device across many platforms all the times.
A few weeks ago, I fired up Adobe Photoshop from their CC platform. No go, something, something about an intel compatibility.
Do online and start googling the error I was getting.
Seems the newest version determined that my quad core Xeon processors didn't support SSE 4.2 or later. A LOT of people were fuming online that in order to run the latest version, they would have to get a new PC or laptop with a new processor that was now required for the newest version.
The current solution for many is to now install an earlier version until they figure out what they want to do. Ironically, I still run a lot of stuff on my old Mac Mini so I found out that I can run the most recent version of Photoshop on there instead.
I haven't checked into the issue for a week or so. I'm still not sure if anybody came up with a solid solution without having to buy new equipment.
> Seems the newest version determined that my quad core Xeon processors didn't support SSE 4.2 or later. A LOT of people were fuming online that in order to run the latest version, they would have to get a new PC or laptop with a new processor that was now required for the newest version.
I was with you until I looked up when SSE 4.2 was introduced.
SSE 4.2 was introduced in the Nehalem architecture...twelve years ago for desktop processors, ten for xeons. I really don't see anything wrong with Adobe requiring a processor newer than ten years old for software used by and large by creative professionals, people who make money with it.
If you're a creative professional working off a twelve year old computer, you're wasting money just from lost productivity waiting on that system - as well as flushing money down the drain on all the wasted energy running the system, unless you live somewhere electricity is insanely cheap.
A new computer would literally pay for itself in reduced power consumption alone, both idle and loaded wattage. A Ryzen 3600 uses less than half the power of a lot of xeon chips, has a single-core performance 50%+ higher than the very fastest second-gen quad core nehalem, and has two more cores.
Same goes for a modern GPU - everything is GPU accelerated these days, and you can get a several year old Nvidia card that is so power efficient the fans aren't even spinning most of the time.
Then there's the huge performance boost of NVMe.
The list goes on. Dude(tte). Buy a new computer. Or one at least made in the last 5-6 years?
Can a Windows update brick a PC? I’m pretty sure it can’t, because it does not update the firmware of the main system controller. You might end up with an unbootable copy of Windows if you’re unlucky, but it’s fairly easy to fix it with install media or a recovery partition, and you might be able to recover any data your backups don’t cover (you make backups, right?). If you don’t have any install/live media for Windows or Linux, it’s trivial to make those with any working computer (Linux, Windows, macOS), including a friend’s. But if a macOS update nukes your T2 chip’s firmware, you need access to another Mac and the appropriate cables.
We shouldn't applaud that it turned out to be possible to fix this thing after grueling effort (and the company trying to push purchasing a replacement) when the security chip was an unnecessary user-hostile blight in the first place.
If they can't afford another machine, then not until the current one stops working. Ironically!
But for a lot of developers, their work literally can only be done on on Apple devices. You can't develop iOS and Mac apps on anything else.
There are a lot of people for whom that is their job, including freelancers.
They could switch to a new domain of business, but that's a large change with many disadvantages. It's not like picking a different laptop just because you fancy a change. E.g. for an iOS developer to switch to being an Android developer, it's not hard to start but there's a lot to learn to be good at it to the same level and bring in the same money.
Thats a very weird example. Those developers should know better than update on the first week of a new OS on their only non-virtualized machine.
I would be surprised if my accountant updates to a new version of Excel within 3 days if it coming out, and would be very disappointed if as a result he wasn’t able to prepare my taxes. The situation you described is similar - someone who should know better throwing their old tools before they know for sure the shiny new one will work.
The system notifies you about software updates from time to time, and you are trained to install them for security.
The Big Sur update is notified in the same way. It gives the appearance of being just another big software update.
Unlike Windows, Mac OS updates come out more often, about once a year for major version, and every couple of months for minor version. Despite the marketing fanfare, they are not as big a change as say jumping from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
Ok, maybe you still want to take care with a new OS. Like with Excel three days before filing taxes. (Though when do you expect the accountant to upgrade? They are always doing someone's taxes.)
Maybe you do try it in a VM first, and decide you like it, it works well for you. Some people try new OS versions in a separate partition. You can do that on a Mac, just like on a PC. It seems like it ought to be safe, because you've kept the old installation on as well. Just like on a PC, you can choose which to start up using the built-in boot menu.
Being sensible you take a full system backup first. Usually, with Apple, a backup is pretty good. You can reinstall from a backup provided the system can boot. Macs have a reinstaller built in. By analogy with a PC, it's more like "imaging" a Windows or Linux system, and as if the PC BIOS had built-in tools to restore from a backup image.
Following that analogy, the problem here is that Big Sur nuked the BIOS! It can't even reboot from external media, or the recovery partition. If a Window OS upgrade did that we'd not only be unhappy, we would also be rather surprised that we can't boot an external USB key to recover.
> Unlike Windows, Mac OS updates come out more often, about once a year for major version, and every couple of months for minor version. Despite the marketing fanfare, they are not as big a change as say jumping from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
Windows 10 has new major releases every 6 months, changes might be more minor than a typical macOS major release. Windows also gets security patches and bug fixes every month, those are comparable to macOS minor versions.
I can't imagine anything worse than being a passenger on one of those (other than begin a low paid crew member who's been forced to remain aboard for the past 8 months)
Yes. I got dragged on one by my parents in the 1980s. I wanted to kill myself after about a day. It was like butlins with no escape and even lower standards of hygiene. It’s a profitable captive market to milk a load of people drowning their sorrows in alcohol and feed the slop in return. Why you’d pay for it I don’t understand.
Secondarily, good riddance to the whole industry.
Edit: after reflecting on this I don’t think my parents enjoyed it either. They went on it because it was the done thing at the time and they could tell everyone they went on it.
The TI 990/10 DX 10 minicomputer was exactly the same. The teacher at my old school actually picked the TI990/10 over the PDP/11 because the PDP11 did not have "true descenders". The 990 didn't either but avoided the problem by having miniature capitals for lowercase.
