One bad Apple (update) can spoil the whole week

 

     Apple sneaks into your living room at night and rearranges the furniture.
     In the morning, you come downstairs and see the couch is not where it belongs, the chairs turned facing the wall, the hutch, askew. You go to put your everything back in place, and can't.  The couch is too heavy. The chairs, somehow bolted to the floor. The knicknacks are missing.
     So you call Apple. Together, virtually, you push furniture this way and that. For nearly an hour. But when you're done, the living room is somehow still not right. You could live with it this way. But why should you have to? You want it the way it was.
     Welcome to my week with Apple, a company I've been patronizing with canine devotion for nearly 25 years, since the first sleek lozenge of a iPod came out. You could store lots of music on it. "This makes me proud to be a human being," I'd tell friends, showing it off.

     I own a Macbook Pro, an iPad, two iPod Pros, one old and tinny, one brand new, a iPhone 17. I have two 24-inch iMacs, the one the paper issued me 18 years ago, and a new one, since you can't have one that old. Bought last January. Paid for the extra memory.

     So when a little notice appears that it is time for the Tahoe 26.5.1 update, I do not feel a protective frisson of fear. There was no premonition. I didn't jerk my head to the right, as if hearing a sharp noise. These updates are necessary, for security.I have a brand spankin' new iMac I click my approval and go to bed.

      I awake to a changed world. My screen saver, for years a view of the Grand Canal in Venice, now replaced by some rock strewn aqua lake. The icons on my desktop are not in their familiar disarray, but assembled in neat rows, as if by some sociopath.

     But that isn't the bad part. The bad part is when I open my photos, I find 1,640. Not the 88,000 possessed the day before.

     No problem. Up into iCloud. There they all are. Whew. And I could leave it like that. But clouds blow away. Things happen. I paid extra for the terabyte of memory on my machine because I want the photos at hand, where I can edit them, which you can't do in the cloud. So I begin to download the photos.

     Only they won't go. I get to 10,000 or so, and the thing freezes up. I try various strategies, guided first by AI, then phoning, reaching a very realistic voice. We try this, then that ,then this again. Only it doesn't work. Nothing works.

     Eventually, I 'm passed along to an actual human. Very nice. We work together for another hour. No luck.

      Throughout it all, I tell myself: The photos are in the cloud. Human agency will get them out. On Day Four, another human has me download a new update, 26.5.2. I wonder if it has just been issued to address the nest of bugs caused by the last update.

     So I contact Apple media relations, and that is really why I'm writing this — well, that and to complain.

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