Not a Mac user, so I have a little anecdotal evidence here, but with all the buzz about Catalina being broken, has this been a problem in earlier versions?
Just last night I spent all day trying to do some work on a friend's 2011 or 2012 MBP (16 GBs RAM, i7, should be fully capable). They needed Windows 10 for some special software, and wanted some help cleaning the hard drive to make room for the partition. After hours and hours of fighting tools and trying to work around Boot Camp Assistant limitations (it insisted on always reformatting as exFAT, in spite of Win10's 4+ GB .wim files), I finally determined that it was probably all fixed in a later version of macOS and proceeded to update her to Mojave.
Fast forward another hour and we're stuck in a bootloop of failing Mojave installs with some barebones diagnostics and repair tools that do nothing.
Thank GOD she had months worth of complete Time Machine backups we could easily restore.
But it's insane to me that a system update served by the App Store in the golden path on a piece of hardware still within it's support lifecycle could fail so catastrophically. I've given the middle finger to Windows' "Don't turn off this computer" messages scores of times, and it's always been able to boot up again just fine. As of late, I've not even experienced the need to do "Automatic Startup Repair" like the old days.
Just last night I spent all day trying to do some work on a friend's 2011 or 2012 MBP (16 GBs RAM, i7, should be fully capable). They needed Windows 10 for some special software, and wanted some help cleaning the hard drive to make room for the partition. After hours and hours of fighting tools and trying to work around Boot Camp Assistant limitations (it insisted on always reformatting as exFAT, in spite of Win10's 4+ GB .wim files), I finally determined that it was probably all fixed in a later version of macOS and proceeded to update her to Mojave.
Fast forward another hour and we're stuck in a bootloop of failing Mojave installs with some barebones diagnostics and repair tools that do nothing.
Thank GOD she had months worth of complete Time Machine backups we could easily restore.
But it's insane to me that a system update served by the App Store in the golden path on a piece of hardware still within it's support lifecycle could fail so catastrophically. I've given the middle finger to Windows' "Don't turn off this computer" messages scores of times, and it's always been able to boot up again just fine. As of late, I've not even experienced the need to do "Automatic Startup Repair" like the old days.
Is Apple really slipping that hard right now?