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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Warning, clueless tech blogger

I don't like to dump on other bloggers for making mistakes: stones, throwing, glass houses ... you get my drift.

However, I'll make an exception for Time magazine's Techland blogger Matt Peckham, whose piece "Apple's Mountain Lion Developer Preview Bricked my MacBook" ticked me off not just for over-the-top idiocy -- that's too common to get worked up about -- but for spreading unnecessary fear, uncertainty and doubt among the general public.

I need to go line by line for a little bit to explain the depth of my frustration. Bear with me.
No really, the developer preview of Mountain Lion bricked my MacBook Air last night. As we’re fond of saying here at Techland, “Whoopsie-doodle.”
(If that's how they talk at Techland, you're gonna be keeping strange company, Harry. Sigh.) Well, you've repeated your main point, Mr. Peckham. Adding "no, really" suggests you didn't expect your readers to believe the headline. That, in turn, suggests you believe those readers believe Apple software doesn't cause bad things to happen to their electronics. Now, your readers' trust in Apple's software is not a problem. Your undermining of that trust is. I'll explain why a little further on.
I blame myself, of course, something I’m fond of calling “bad user on device error,” though inside, I was silently picturing Apple’s new slightly-more-hostile-looking kitty growling “Brick you, Peckham.”
I blame you too, Mr. Peckham, so at least we agree on something. Yet even here, in your first self-deprecating remark (the first of several), you made a mistake: you didn't explain why you were at fault. I would, but it will make more sense if I wait.
On a whim, I’d signed up for Apple’s $99 a year Mac developer program yesterday afternoon to have a look at the Mountain Lion developer preview, which Apple just released.
A big alert klaxon went off in my brain as I read that. You can certainly sign up for Apple Developer Connection (ADC) on a whim, but you had better have some idea of what that actually means if you're going to be mentioning the fact to a worldwide audience of non-technical people.

ADC is a service for developers -- people who write software. It gives them access to documentation, tools, and support they need to make their software work on the Mac (or on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad).

These developers need to get a taste of the next version of Mac OS X long before the rest of us can get our grubby hands on it. There will be new frameworks, changes to existing ones, new policies and best practices (for user interaction, accessing system resources, and who knows what else), changes to the file system -- hundreds of differences, big and little, between what is and what is new. Any one (or many) of these might cause a developer's existing software not to work any more. The developer, then, has to make sure that its software works, or is modified to work, on the new system. That way, when Apple officially releases Mac OS X 10.NEW, the vast third-party ecosystem of applications (software) is ready to run on 10.NEW as well. (I use "10.NEW" to denote whatever the next new release of OS X is. Mountain Lion will be Mac OS X 10.8, for instance.)

Apple doesn't wait until 10.NEW is completely ready before outside developers get to see it. Rather, Apple decides when 10.NEW is mostly ready -- "feature-complete and free of devastating bugs" are the usual criteria. "Feature-complete" means that all the big new functionality is present in its final form, especially the functionality that non-Apple developers can (or sometimes must) use. "Free of devastating bugs" is a subjective measure; a good software company has a feel for when its work is ready for (sufficiently expert) others to try out.

Why not wait until 10.NEW is completely ready before sharing it with outside developers? There are a bunch of reasons, none of which I have the space or time to get into right now. It suffices to say that this is the way every commercial OS vendor (that I know of, anyway) does business and that it makes good sense.

Now, getting back to our Mr. Peckham -- it seems painfully obvious that he is not a developer. Ergo, he lacks the large body of knowledge and experience necessary to understand what "having a look at a developer preview" really entails.
After waiting a few hours for the nearly 4GB of install data to come down (courtesy the App Store), I did an over-the-top upgrade, just as many of you probably did when you first bought Lion.
Bzzzzt!

CRUCIAL MISTAKE: he installed over his working system.

Installing a beta version of any software (and that's what a "developer preview" is, a beta version) makes you a test pilot for that software. You might have heard that bad things can happen to test pilots.

The engineers did their best to get the shiny new flying machine in tip-top condition for you. However, they're breaking new ground with the design. They can't foresee all that will take place when the machine goes through the process of getting and staying airborne. If you're lucky, the problems will be non-catastrophic, like the engines not starting. If your luck isn't so good, you could end up breaking new ground, too -- inside the flaming wreck of that shiny new flying machine.

Installing the developer preview of Mountain Lion over his current system irreversibly committed Mr. Peckham to using that version of Mountain Lion on his main machine. No developer in his right mind would do that.

Any developer knows to dedicate at least one system exclusively to testing. That way, a flaming wreck from a beta version of 10.NEW means, at worst, a complete reinstall of the working OS X version while you update your Facebook page on your blissfully still-functioning main machine.

Back to Mr. Peckham's saga. We'll skip ahead a bit. (Don't worry if you don't know what iDisk is: it's not important for my analysis.)
So with no way to access iDisk, short of bringing it up in Apple’s clumsy browser interface, I decided it was probably time to switch back to Lion and wait for Cupertino to release a less buggy preview.
He is on the cusp of discovering, too late, the CRUCIAL MISTAKE. Let's see how painful the learning process is. (Emphasis in the following is in the original.)
Only what I didn’t realize, and maybe I missed it somewhere in the fine print, is that the developer preview replaces Apple’s hidden system restore partition — which on my summer 2011 MacBook Air had been packing Lion — with Mountain Lion. When I dropped back to the system restore feature by holding down the “r” or “option” buttons at reboot, my only choice was to restore a clean copy of Mountain Lion itself.
The ominous, three-note descending chord of doom has blared from the soundtrack; our hero is staring into the camera, a look of horror slowly dawning on his face.

I'm not sure how the OS X system-restore partition works, but let's think about it for a moment. Suppose that, whenever Mountain Lion is actually released by Apple, you get it running on your machine by upgrading over Lion. You happily use it for several months without incident -- then something bad happens that requires you to restore. What would you expect the result to be? You'd expect your machine to come back to life as the functioning, Mountain Lion-based system it was before the Something Bad happened, right?

How disappointed would you be if, instead, your machine came back to life as a Lion-based system? That wouldn't make any sense to you. And yet, that's what Mr. Peckham expected.

Actually, that's not quite fair. I can guess what he really expected, or rather, wanted: he wanted the system to be "restored" to working order. However, that's not a well-defined request as far as computer software is concerned. "Restore" has a very specific meaning in the OS X context, and Mr. Peckham didn't know what it was.

So, he can't get back to Lion, only to Mountain Lion. What else is amiss?
And even that has problems in the preview.
Well, uh, yeah: things can still be buggy in developer previews. Oh, sorry, I beat that dead horse already. Continue. (I'll skip his specific description of "what else is amiss" since it's not relevant to us.)
My options at this point were: Limp along with a buggy, feature-shorn version of Mountain Lion until the next update, or — I thought anyway — go buy a USB copy of Lion for $60 and restore from that.
"Until the next update" suggests that Mr. Peckham believes he would have been able to upgrade his way out of his mess. He would have been sorely disappointed, if my experience is any guide. Once you have "upgraded" from 10.OLD to 10.NEW, you cannot "upgrade" to a newer version of 10.NEW on top of that. As far as certain key pieces of the system are concerned, you are already running 10.NEW. (I'm glossing over details I'm not qualified to explain.) Really, his only option was to reinstall Lion from scratch.
Off to the Apple Store I went, just before close, dropping $60 on something I’d technically already paid for (as Billy Joel would say, “And so it goes…”). Only that didn’t work either. Attempting to restore from the USB stick just brought up a giant circle with a slash through the middle, making me wonder whether Mountain Lion hadn’t switched out something at the firmware level.
Mr. Peckham has illustrated the perils of willy-nilly OS upgrades in finer fashion than I thought possible.
Defeated, I left my laptop at the Apple Store with a request that they zap the thing back to Lion using their doubtless broader array of imaging tools.
If I were the Apple Store, I'd consider charging him for the service. But perhaps that's too harsh, given his travails already.
Like I said, I blame myself, not Apple (though it’s not just me — the developer forums are full of others having exactly the same problem). But what a night…and another cautionary tale, for early adopters.
And here, at the end of his piece, we come to the heart of my beef with Mr. Peckham.

He blames himself, and yet can't resist parenthetically adding that he's not the only one having this problem. Now, strictly speaking, the fact that others are having this same problem takes the blame off of him and places it squarely on Apple (though I question his ability to discern whether or not others are actually suffering "exactly the same problem", since many slippery roads can lead to the same crash site and the same slippery road can lead to crashes in different places). However, the real problem is that he doesn't specify for what he blames himself. It's a good question that leads to an even better one: what is the real problem here?

The real problem is not the technical issue, which falls under Apple's bailiwick as I noted. The real problem is that Mr. Peckham wrote an entire piece detailing the technical woes he suffered after performing an upgrade he was not qualified to undertake.

What's the problem with writing up his experience? There would be none, if he had done so in one of the developer forums he mentioned. Perhaps he did. But we know he didn't stop there.

Time is not a specialist publication aimed at developers: it's a general-purpose magazine aimed at everyone. Everything it publishes is intended for a non-technical audience.

We can assume a number of people have read his piece and come away with the impression that Apple has released a dreadfully buggy piece of software intended for general consumption. These people do not realize how much the words "developer preview" imply. Among other things, "developer preview" implies that instability of the severity Mr. Peckham experienced, while regrettable, is always a possibility!

More to the point, "developer preview" implies that users like Mr. Peckham are not supposed to be trying the software out! It's intended for -- wait for it -- developers! People who know how to cope with buggy software! People who have a real reason to get the advanced peek!

Mr. Peckham has done Apple a huge disservice by writing up his ill-conceived and ill-starred experience as if it were just another journalistic sneak-peek at a soon-to-be-released product. Mountain Lion is obviously not ready for that kind of test, and Apple didn't intend the developer preview to be evaluated in that way.

Maybe Mr. Peckham doesn't understand what "developer preview" means. In that case, somebody more knowledgeable should be vetting his posts before they're published. The more troubling possibility is that he knowingly and opportunistically took an unpolished OS pre-release for a spin and reported on his subpar experience because he knew it would get him page clicks. In that case, he should be disciplined for sleaziness.

Time should apologize for his fatuous and misleading post no matter what.

Were I in Apple's shoes, I'd kick him out of ADC. As far as I'm concerned, he obtained his membership under false pretenses.

If this piece is typical of how he does business, Matt Peckham should be considered harmful.

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