Category: MacOS

backing up my iphone to my newest macbook pro

whbeebe
macOS Sonoma 14.3 iPhone backup

Not performing backups to computing equipment is a dangerous habit to be in. I do try to keep everything backed up because shit happens at the worst possible time, especially the moment when you absolutely need to depend upon a device. My iPhone hasn’t been backed up in years. I back up to my MacBooks, and the last time I backed my iPhone 11 up was three, maybe four years ago on the Intel i9 MacBook Pro.

That’s plain stupid to be honest. Why? The personal history my iPhone now represents. Every time I’ve purchased a new iPhone I’ve always moved everything on the older iPhone to the new device. I have photos and text messages that go back to my first iPhone 6s Plus on November 2015. Same with text messages. Notes and other files as well.

iPhone 6s Plus Mars lock screen from 2015

As you can see in the lock screen capture from my former iPhone 6s Plus, iOS was still using the “slide-to-unlock” widget that Apple tried unsuccessfully to sue Google for adding to Android. On top of that I miss not having that Mars image on my current unlock screen. Apple would just blow away wallpapers when major iOS updates were installed, never bothering to ask if a user wanted to keep all of that. Yet another example of Apple’s arrogance.

Anyway, my iPhone represents an unbroken nine year slice of the last nine years of my life up to today. Not all of my life to be sure, but the bits that are important to me. I really don’t want to lose it; it’s worth protecting through backups.

One final note: the total amount of storage Finder measured at the bottom added up to about 119 GiB. Yet when the backup was complete it totaled a smidge over 80 GiB. That 74.64 GiB was “Documents & Data,” meaning my stuff. The backup preserved enough all of that, plus (I’m assuming) the state of the iPhone itself, which would include a catalog of all the applications installed and those application’s stateful information. Buying that iPhone 11 with 512 GiB back in 2019 was a waste in storage as well as overall processing; unfortunately it came with the largest battery at the time and I felt I needed that feature. When I trade in and up, I intend to drop back to the 256 GiB storage tier, which is about $300 cheaper than the $512 GiB tier. I’m also not buying the Pro version either. I’ll keep my iPhone in the latest Otterbox and pocket hundreds of dollars more in savings.

why apple makes me mad

whbeebe

There is a video of Ken Thompson on YouTube (yes, I know about NoTube November and what I said; I haven’t back slid) where he announces he’s walking away from Apple and going to Linux, specifically Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi. The video is below at the proper location in his talk, so you can listen to it now if you want.

I bring up Ken Thompson’s talk because today I was reminded of why he said he was leaving Apple in that talk. After starting Visual Studio Code on my brand new M1 Max MacBook Pro I attempted to check for VS Code updates and was gobsmacked with the following error dialog:

Visual Studio Code Quarantine Message

Look in the lower right corner at the dialog with the red circled ‘X’ about running on a read-only volume. There’s a link to mitigate the issue, but the the statement that “This might mean the application was put on quarantine by macOS” just royally pisses me off. This is the very first time I’ve been hit with the “quarantine application” issue on macOS, but not the first time I’ve run into a show-stopping problem on macOS that shouldn’t have happened.

I followed the link in the message, and based on the post I performed the following to get things straightened out.

sudo chown $USER Library/Caches/com.microsoft.VSCode.ShipItxattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/Visual\ Studio\ Code.app

My VSCode is located locally in my account folder, not under global /Applications. I’m sure that chown isn’t needed, but still it’s good to have around. Once those changes were made, I quite VSCode and restarted it via Launchpad as always, then checked again for updates, and it worked just fine (VSCode was already up to date anyway).

It’s obstacles thrown up like that that make developers like me who actually know how to get work done want to just walk away from Apple. I’m sure Apple will point to XCode, but I don’t want to develop with XCode because I do a lot of wide-ranging work well beyond Apple and macOS. It’s not as bad as Microsoft, who have basically driven me away from Windows permanently with their shenanigans with regards to Windows 11. But it’s getting close. If it gets bad enough I may indeed contemplate migrating to Asahi Linux; that’s another reason why I chose this M1 Max over a later version of Apple Silicon; Asahi Linux was originally developed on, and for, the M1.

Links

Code won’t update on macOS #7426 — https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/7426