Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring problems that are eroding trust in macOS. From text files that won’t show up in Spotlight search, to clock timers that are empty and don’t work, they all have a common characteristic: macOS encounters an error or fault, but doesn’t report it to the user, instead burying it deep in the log.
When you can spare the time, the next step is to contact Apple Support, who seem equally puzzled. Ultimately you are advised to reinstall macOS or, in the worst case, wipe a brand new Apple Silicon Mac and restore it in DFU mode, but there is no reason to believe that this will prevent the problem from occurring again. You know that Apple Support doesn’t understand what’s going wrong, and despite the involvement of support engineers, they seem just as confused as you.
One reason for this is that macOS rarely reports errors, and when it does, it is uninformative, if not downright misleading. Here’s a small gallery of examples I’ve encountered over the years, to refresh the sad memories.
Maybe you saved an important webpage in Safari 26.1 using the Web Archive format, only to find a few days later that you can’t open it. There’s no error message, just a blank window, so you try again with the same result. Another site also shows the same problem, which forces you to conclude that it is a bug in Safari. Are you now going to dedicate your time to getting enough information to report to Apple using Feedback? Or contact Apple Support and pass it on to an engineer who can hopefully find the cause?
Silent failures like this are less likely to be reported to Apple. In most cases, we find a solution for ourselves, here is to abandon the web archive and start saving webpages as PDF instead. When someone else tells us they have the same problem, we advise them that web archives are broken, and our loss of confidence spreads contagiously.
Honest and understandable error reporting is essential for confidence. This enables us to deal with problems rather than giving up in frustration, assuming that this is another feature we relied on that has been lost in the rush to get the next version of macOS out to market.
Lack of confidence is also a problem that vendors of AI have ignored, or at least severely underestimated. It’s all very good, using the euphemism of Maya To reduce the severity of errors generated by LLM. But these can only reduce users’ confidence, no matter how ‘intelligent’ you think your AI is becoming. Talk to lawyers who have been caught presenting AI creations by courts to see if they still have full confidence in your product.
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