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Has Apple sounded the last POST?
- gaudat 4y agoPOST as in the short beep you hear on an old sad PC booting properly but not in the literal sense.
- msla 4y agoPOST as in Power-On Self Test.
- yladiz 4y agoRight, in this case what does the OP mean by POST? The HTTP call, or something else that’s with the same acronym or spelling?
- computerliker69 4y agoPower on self test
- TheRealPomax 4y agoWhat do you mean "what does the OP mean"? It's literally the first sentence of the article...?
- mitt_romney_12 4y agoI think he's referring to where OP said "but not in the literal sense"
- verandaguy 4y agoI don't get this comment, modern PCs still undergo POST and motherboards have gotten progressively better at displaying POST outcomes (from beep patterns to seven-segment onboard displays). Macs have POST rituals, detailed (alongside other boot routines) to an almost extreme extent in this article.
- rm445 4y agoAnd the pun in the headline being 'The Last Post', the bugle call played at funerals. (To American ears, it may sound like a slow mournful version of 'Taps').
- aendruk 4y agoNo, POST as in the actual test, not just the sound. The article speculates that unlike “other models that have mute boots”, here there might literally be no power-on self-test: “there are no accessible records of any POST taking place on Apple silicon Macs, no other evidence that they do, and even if they did it’s hard to see what they might achieve.”
- pulvinar 4y agoI'm surprised the article didn't tell how to run diagnostics on an M1 Mac: Shut it down, hold the power button until you get a screen with some buttons, hold down Command-D until it brings up a diagnostics screen, and answer a couple questions (your language, run local, etc.). Then it takes a minute and posts results. And lastly you click Reboot.
- userbinator 4y agoApple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't work. Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process. It's far more reassuring to see things happening than pressing the power button and being "left in the dark" waiting at a black screen for a few tense moments as something happens. [1] The satisfying "clunk" of the power switch, to the fans and hard drives spinning up, the latter doing their initial seeks once they've reached full speed, the beep of the POST, the buzzing of the memory test, and then the sounds of the disks loading the OS. It's all very information-rich, and once you get used to the normal routine, it's easy to notice when something changes unexpectedly.
- manv1 4y ago[flagged]
- nickvanw 4y agoI'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.
- usernew 4y agoI have an 8core xeon laptop from work. it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM. I can set the profile to quiet, and the CPU doesn't boost and the fans never come on. Here's what I can do, that a MBP cannot do - run a whole bunch of crap that doesn't run on ARM - most vendor tools that aren't browser based. The MBP is a laptop, it's fast, but it's not a "pro" laptop. Pro means I can plug it in with a brick-sized power brick, draw 200 watts, and with lots of loud fans get some major work done. And when I don't run a heavy-hitter script? easily 9 hours of battery life. M1 is not that much more faster than intel - it just has a lot of precompiled procedures in hardware. The reason no one else did what apple did? Because normal companies design their computer for what it needs to run. Apple designs their computer and says - world, you now have to build all your software for this computer. Well, that's why pretty much nothing I use runs on macs.
- quercusa 4y agoIn the event of early boot failure, the only recourse seems to be to abandon the process, and leave the Mac in DFU mode. I wonder what the official phrase behind "DFU" is?
- devinprater 4y agosigh I wish Macs were better for accessibility. But nope, Windows still rules for blind people. VoiceOver's awful support for web apps really shows how... Safari not responding. bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which my job depends on pretty heavily. I hope Apple's renewed focus on the Mac means a renewed focus on MacOS as well, and definitely accessibility.
- yreg 4y agoAnecdotally we have more issues with developing for NVDA and JAWS than for VoiceOver.
- sweetjuly 4y agoPOST really doesn't make sense in many embedded systems and most modern devices I've worked on or with don't use them. The general approach to boot has been to just try and boot but have a safe failure path. That is, if DRAM times out/a bus error is raised, fail out to an embedded bootloader which can boot over USB/SWD. If flash doesn't respond, fail out. This is exactly what Apple is doing with DFU. It makes sense too; why waste time explicitly testing when you can just "test" it by booting? Sure, maybe if you're building something that has life and limb risks, POST it up before coming online, but most consumer electronics have no need.