MacPro

dewme said:

MacPro said:

Another warning story.  I have several spare Macs, and each year around this time, I select one (I have a spare M1 Studio this year), clone the working current drive with Carbon Copy Cloner, set that aside, and install the beta with my developer account access.  This may seem safe, but I vividly remember many years ago, linking the beta to my iCloud account was a temporary disaster as once done, the Photos library on the cloud was no longer available to all the other devices until months later, they were also able to upgrade.  Since then, I haven't linked the non-public beta to my working iCloud account. I suspect the answer is to have a separate iCloud account, but I have never gotten around to bothering with that so far.

Excellent advice to be prepared to do a full reinstall if things go wrong and to be prepared to suffer from degraded iCloud services on all of your production machines. My worst beta disaster was an early dev beta of macOS Mojave that attempted to upgrade my 3 TB Fusion drive to APFS when the OS really didn’t support Fusion. Not only did I have to do a full reinstall, I had to manually rebuild the Fusion Drive from scratch using the terminal. Learning moment for sure.

Having a separate iCloud account isn’t as bad as it once was because you can take advantage of Family Sharing and make the new account part of your family so you’ll still have the ability to install apps that support Family Sharing on the machine.

I’ve never bricked an Apple device but I have bricked other devices, mostly during system firmware updates but sometimes at random. Over the years device manufacturers have learned to squirrel away a copy of the previous system firmware or factory installed firmware on the device that will get reinstated when doing a factory reset. Earlier devices didn’t always have enough onboard EEPROM or flash memory to keep a recovery image onboard during system firmware upgrades. A good example is some fairly recent LG soundbar wireless subwoofers. They get totally bricked seemingly at random and can only be restored by reprogramming the EEPROM chip on an EEPROM programmer. There is at least one person who offers this reprogramming as a service, but shipping a heavy subwoofer back and forth is not always a good deal, especially if it’s a lower end device and with no guarantee that it won’t happen again.

Apple’s firmware update process has been amazingly reliable for as long as I’ve been using Apple devices. Intel finally got their firmware and driver update process to a very reliable state with their NUCs, so I hope Asus continues to maintain it appropriately.