I know this is probably going to start a miniature war, and there will be people telling me "I did it wrong", but I need to rant.
My partner has an older Intel-based MacBook and whilst it doesn't support the current version of macOS, it's still a capable machine for internet browsing and watching the odd movie or two.
Anyway, for whatever reason, macOS was struggling. Things took forever to load, it was sluggish, something was not quite right. Probably just full of bloat from years of use. So I thought, let's just backup his shit, format, re-install the OS. Simple enough... right? After copying all his files to a USB drive (because the status of the Apple iCloud sync wasn't clear, there was no simple way to tell whether all his files were uploaded or not, so it was quicker and easier to do it the old fashioned way, rather than risk data loss), I followed the instructions on Apple's website to wipe the disk and re-install the OS. Now, whilst I'm not an "Apple person", I've used them for years and know quite a bit about the hardware and software, but I had the guide open just to make sure I was doing the right thing.
I knew erasing the disk was also going to erase the recovery partition, that's fine. Don't really care about that since it can be set up again. Booted back up into the "internet recovery" mode, is where the first hurdle began...apparently, even though macOS and the wireless card in this machine supports WPA3 networks, the built-in firmware doesn't. It sees my network but refuses to connect to it. No reason, just a "nup, can't do it" generic error message. Once I resolved that (by creating and connecting to a WPA2 network), the machine locks up. Reboot and it wants to sign-in using his Apple ID (for reasons unknown), but that didn't work. It just refused to login or connect even though the connection was working and the correct credentials were being offered. No matter, skip that crap for now. It eventually began downloading and installing the OS.
Except, that it wasn't the latest supported version of macOS for this machine. Instead, it went and grabbed a copy of macOS X 10 (Yosemite) which is almost 9 years old now. After getting this up and running, I figured I'd check and install updates. A few downloads and reboots later, we were "up to date". Except that we weren't. We were still stuck on OS 10. Even searching the Apple App Store, there was no sign of a later version of macOS. Eventually I found a link on Apple's website in some blog post which manually took me to where the OS update lived, but of course, you can't just download it and run the package... no no no... it forces you to use the App Store.
But before you can download anything, you have to sign-in using your Apple ID. After entering in the correct username and password, it claimed the login was incorrect. 45 minutes went by and after lots of swearing and threatening to throw the machine into the bush like a Frisbee, it was by pure chance that I found some obscure instruction which said I needed enter in the password, let the authentication fail, then enter the password again
along with appending the 2FA code to the end. Oddly enough, that worked. Why the hell did I need to play this guessing game? If this was some kind of weird legacy requirement, why not say so in the application itself?
Secondly, why not just provide the OS as an ISO image to be installed from a USB drive? Why all this fucking around and signing-in to stupid cloud-based garbage? Too bad if you wanted to use this machine offline. This whole process just re-affirmed three key points:
- If you're running legacy hardware, you're on your own, good luck.
- If you don't do things Apple's way, too bad, so sad.
- The hardware, whilst it may be glorious, is let down by the awful experience of macOS itself.
OK rant over.