shamino

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shamino
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  • Apple provides instructions to erase and restore unresponsive M1 Macs

    shaminoshamino
    randominternetperson said:
    This possibility has existed for every Mac (at least since Mac OS X?) and it's incredibly rare.  I expect it's incredibly rare with these new Macs.  But if you're the one in 10,000 who bought a new Mac and then f'ed it up, you want a knowledge article about how to get it restored.  Now that article is available.
    This isn't a case of a rare bug triggering.  This is one very specific case - where the new owner immediately tried to perform a system restore on the new computer, possibly even before booting it even once.  From what I've read, some owners do this in order to manually de-select optional installations (e.g. iLife applications) and minimize the footprint of the system software.

    There was a bug in macOS 11.0 where this procedure bricked the computer, requiring Configurator 2 (or other procedures mentioned in the article) to recover from.  Apple fixed the bug in 11.0.1, so anyone who upgrades to 11.0.1 before doing this system restore should be safe as well.

    This bug is an embarrassment for Apple, but ultimately no more than that, since they have patched the software and published recovery procedures.  I suspect that nobody on their internal testing team considered the idea of performing a system restore on a new computer that still has its factory image installed.  I'm sure they will be adding this to their test suite in the future.
    cat52Fidonet127ronn

  • Compared: Apple's Developer Transition Kit versus Mac mini

    shaminoshamino
    I wonder if iFixit will be able to get one of these?  Apple doesn't normally take kindly to pre-release stuff being taken apart.  They were very upset the last time iFixit did that (sorry, I can't find the link right now), but I'd still love to see it.
    williamlondoncaladanianwatto_cobra

  • Apple researching all-glass iPhone with wraparound touchscreen

    shaminoshamino
    This looks like the last thing I would want.  No wired connectivity of any kind, so no charging while traveling unless I want to drag an expensive charge-mat around wherever I go.  And no USB connectivity, so all audio is going to be via Bluetooth, even though it never sounds as good.

    And then, of course, with the entire device an active surface, there is no possible way to hold it without accidentally triggering some operation or another.  And if you try to put it in a case, you block access to this "feature".

    If Apple ships this, it will convince me to look elsewhere for my next phone.  Actually, given the sorry state of Android, I'm starting to think it's time to give up on smart phones altogether.
    williamlondon

  • First look: Fitbit guns for Apple Watch Series 3 with Ionic smartwatch

    shaminoshamino
    ...Fitbit Pay, an Apple Pay competitor which is still expanding U.S. bank support but should work anywhere NFC payments are accepted. Apple Pay often requires specific support by merchants.
    Let's correct this bit of misinformation.  Apple Pay uses the exact same technology used by contactless cards.  Which is why so many merchants make you sign the PIN pad even though ApplePay is authenticating the user via his fingerprint.

    There are some merchants that accept contactless cards but reject Apple Pay.  These merchants (or their banks) have installed explicit software designed to look for and disable Apple Pay.  Usually for political/ideological reasons (don't want to support Apple, wants to promote a competing mobile wallet tech, etc.)  Convincing a merchant to remove their Apple Pay-disabling firmware is not "requiring specific support", no matter how many press releases to the contrary the merchant may make.

    Are there places that accept NFC payments that do not accept Apple Pay?
    There are.  And every time I've looked closely, I've found that the merchant (or bank) in question is an investor in some competing mobile payment technology and is deliberately looking for, and disabling, Apple Pay thinking it will somehow boost popularity of the tech they are promoting.

    WalMart is one of the worst examples.  To be fair, they are blocking all contactless/NFC transactions, not just Apple Pay, but they definitely fall into this category.  They and 14 other companies explicitly decided to block mobile payments in order to promote "CurrentC", their own mobile payment system (which requires granting the service direct access to you bank account) that after 4 years of vaporware was shutdown and abandoned.  Today, WalMart still won't support NFC, but is instead trying to convince customers to make their in-store purchases through the WalMart app, which doesn't work anywhere else.

    Why not just accept NFC payments?  Because WaMart's CEO has some personal vendetta against Visa and MasterCard and is looking for some excuse to get rid of them, so they are using passive-aggressive BS to try and make customers pay with other mechanisms (like direct debits from checking accounts) instead.
    watto_cobracaliradarthekatairnerd

  • Tips: Turn off iOS 11 Smart Punctuation to avoid data entry problems

    shaminoshamino
    I would love to see more details about what's really going on here.  In iOS, user input comes in the form of an NSString object (or a String object in Swift).  These string objects are fully UNICODE enabled, include length counters, and do not use NULL bytes as terminators.

    If an application is grabbing the raw data and treating it as a C-style string, whether for internal use or for use with an external framework, then problems like this are likely to occur, because the byte-stream can include zero values.

    On the other hand, if the application is doing the right thing, and calling appropriate member functions to get (for example) a UTF-8 representation of the UNICODE string, then there shouldn't be any zeros in the resulting byte stream.  If there are, then Apple's got a bug somewhere, which will clearly need to be fixed.

    john.b