MacBook Madness

MacBook Madness

There are times when I truly want to frisbee this overpriced machine out of the window as far as I possibly can.

A lot of my day job is managing Mac's. To do this effectively, you need something running macOS. Besides which, if I didn't use it every day, I'd forget where it hides most stuff and how it behaves. I also manage Windows devices too but I don't feel the need to use it all day every day to remember how it works - because in general, it does as it is bloody well told once you start hitting it over the head with GPO's. Mac's on the other hand, I have always found to be an utter nightmare when it comes to managing and attempting to get them to behave the way I want them to. Mostly because I just find the Apple way ass-backwards most of the time.

To the point. Yet again I have no idea what this bloody thing is attempting to do. I got in from my run, turned it on as I headed for a shower and then came back. Made sure everything was signed in ready for work and went down to have breakfast. Came back upstairs to find a few messages waiting and all was well. Went to brush my teeth, came back and the thing had restarted and was just sitting an the black screen with an Apple logo. Automatic updates are turned off.

It continued to sit there doing absolutely fuck all for the next 40 minutes before I gave in and attempted to restart it a couple of times, but this didn't seem to make a difference. So I gave in and booted in to recovery to reinstall macOS once more. This is now the third time I've had to do this since the COVID-19 restrictions were put in place in March. That's basically once a month - not even Windows is this bad.

"Well you're obviously doing something wrong". I never test deployments of any kind, be it App/Config Profiles/etc. on my device until I've seen them working without detriment for 2 weeks on a test machine I remote in to in work. The only thing I do on this thing most of the time is run Outlook/Teams/Skype/Edge/Firefox/Jamf Admin - There are a few other things but they're just as normal and every day as those.

Honestly, working with Macs is like a nightmare that never ends. How I long to go back to the days where I could run Linux with a Windows VM for the few bits I needed when we had proper phone lines and didn't have to rely on Skype for Business as the "Telephony" service.

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