It’s Not Just Microsoft (Premium)

With 25 years of experience covering Microsoft, I tend to focus a bit heavily on the software giant from Redmond. And one of the big topics this year, of course, has been a decided lack of software quality. Most recently—but not exclusively—with Windows 10 version 1809.

These problems are serious, and they’re real. And they continue despite a 6-week gap between the original release of the October 2018 Update—which upgrades your PC to Windows 10 version 1809—and its re-release this past week. As Microsoft documents on its Windows 10 update history website, this update shipped with three fairly serious issues. One is described as a “known issue” while the other two are “upgrade blockers,” meaning that they’re so serious you won’t ever see the Update until they’re resolved.

Point being, Microsoft had six weeks to “fix” the October 2018 Update, discovered a second data loss bug while doing so, and yet it still shipped the thing with three other fairly major issues. Software quality at it’s finest, ladies and gentlemen.

So here’s the thing. We can get outraged at this. We can even start shopping around for other platforms, if you want to get extreme about it. I certainly have enough of a dark, self-destructive streak to consider such things. So there’s no judging here.

But know this. It’s not just Microsoft.

I’ve made this observation in the past—because, you know, Microsoft software quality is as enduring and constant a problem as its ineffectual excuses for not explaining them properly—but it’s worth making again. For all the stupid shit that we have to put up with this company, the primary factor that has kept Windows 10 and the PC ecosystem afloat in recent years is that the competition is just as terrible.

Worse, actually. I spend a lot of time testing alternate platforms, and I always have: I purchased an Apple iBook in early 2001 specifically so I could test the about-to-be-released Mac OS X and I’ve purchased and owned more Macs and other Apple gear since then than most Apple fanatics. Most recently, I found that the 2018 MacBook Air and Acer’s Chromebook Spin 13 are fantastic, premium devices, and PC alternatives.

And yet. I still prefer Windows very much. And for a variety of reasons that go well beyond familiarity. Other platforms are still very limited, to me, and are not as optimal for the work that I do. So I put up with Microsoft and its inane inability to finish the job. It’s like getting punched in the face repeatedly sometimes. And then I come back and I ask for more.

But again. It’s not just Microsoft. These other platforms and the companies that make them have all kinds of problems, too. And it’s important to remember that while things may always seem greener on the other side of the fence, there are weeds over there, too. And some bigger issues too.

I’ve reported endlessly on the issues Google has faced trying to release handsets that actually work reliably. Today, I’d like to discuss something a bit more innocuous, a bit less dramatic. But this situation still highlights, I think, the point I’m trying to make.

When I got home from my Boston trip last Sunday, my new MacBook Air was sitting there waiting for me. I unboxed it, took photos, and set it up with the apps I like to use. And I wrote my first impressions article.

At the time of that writing, I was waiting on the re-release of the October 2018 Update so that I could test Boot Camp on the new MacBook. This is the macOS feature that lets you partition the Mac’s hard drive into Windows and macOS sides and then dual-boot between the two systems.

That re-release happened on Tuesday. And so I visited the Windows 10 Download website on the MacBook Air, downloaded the 1809 ISO, and set out to use Boot Camp. This is something I’ve done many dozens of times. Most recently in my previous-generation MacBook Air, and I knew that Boot Camp had changed, and had additional features since that release. So I was curious to see those changes and determine whether the install was more efficient than was the case in the past.

From what I can see, the Boot Camp wizard hasn’t really changed at all since my previous MacBook Air, though it does take on the Dark mode that I prefer in macOS Mojave.

But I ran into an issue during the disk partitioning phase of the wizard. “Your disk could not be partitioned,” the error dialog noted. “An error occurred while partitioning the disk. Please run Disk Utility to check and fix the error.”

I did so. What I saw in Disk Utility was that Boot Camp had, in fact, partitioned the disk. There was the normal Mac partition, called “Macintosh HD.” And then two partitions for Windows 10, one for the actual install and one for the small system partition that Windows needs to boot.

It gets complex from here, so I’m going to generalize. And I may even get some of the terminology wrong, as I’m not a Mac expert. But there’s no need to correct me on any of this, as the details don’t really matter.

Disk Utility doesn’t really show you everything on the disk by default. Instead, it presents a simplified view of the disk layout. You need to use View > Show All Devices to see it all. And what I discovered then was that each disk partition on my Mac was inside a container of some kind. This is apparently a byproduct of using the latest macOS file system, APFS. And that the MacBook Air disk was encrypted apparently was contributing the problem.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, removing those disk partitions and containers is laborious work. Fortunately, I got really good at it as I went through this process several times. And you have to go through it because the Boot Camp wizard will not work if the disk is already partitioned. You have to go back to a single partition first.

To be clear, the Boot Camp wizard screwed up the disk partitioning. And then would not work because that disk partitioning was screwed up.

Oddly, that’s not the biggest problem I encountered.

I spent a lot of time troubleshooting the problem and checking the disk. I did this from within macOS and from within its recovery environment. Whatever. The First Aid feature in Disk Utility always said that everything was fine, and that there were no problems. But during one of the runs, I noticed a warning in there. And there’s a “Show Details” thing you can expand in the dialog that lets you see what’s wrong.

And there was a cryptic warning. Which I infuriatingly never screenshotted somehow, sorry. But in hours of Internet research, I basically found out that all of the supposed fixes—offline terminal arcana, whatever—would not work. And the advice I saw, again and again, was that there was only one solution.

You have to blow away the Mac install, and reinstall the OS. When you do this, you can run the Boot Camp wizard again, on this fresh install. And it should work.

Ah boy.

I had just gotten the thing fully configured with everything I’d ever need. But. I really did want to use and test Boot Camp. And so, last night, I rebooted the Mac while holding down the CMD and R keys, booted into the recovery environment, and I nuked the thing from orbit.

When macOS Mojave came back up and I had signed in and reached the desktop, the first thing I did was re-download the 1809 ISO and then run Boot Camp. It was able to partition the disk successfully, and I installed Windows 10 in a dual-boot. Success. Of a sort. (I still have to reinstall all the apps on the MacBook Air so I can get back to work.)

(Also, when I run First Aid in Disk Utility on the new install, there are no errors or warnings. And the BOOTCAMP partition is not in a container. I had been worried that there was a physical issue with the SSD. But it is apparently fine.)

So here’s the thing. The “why” of this problem is complex, but it has to do with bugs in Apple’s newest file system and how it works over time. And Apple’s own disk tools cannot fix it. The only thing you can do is pave over the system and start over. This is not a normal thing to ask a typical user. It’s kind of unacceptable, really. Like Microsoft unacceptable.

I’m technical enough to deal with this kind of issue, though I didn’t explain it very well here. That no one normal would have been able to deal with this is obvious. But I’m curious how the Genius Bar might have handled this problem. I believe a backup/wipe was the only option.

Whatever. The point is made. These stupid problems are everywhere. And leaving Windows isn’t going to change that.