Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Yesterday I noticed that Apple had released a new update to OS X, and I instinctively updated right away. People on Slashdot made observations about this behaviour; Apple updates feel like attractive, useful and good things and you want to get them right away. People can even expect performance improvements out of them. Contrast this to your feelings about anything that comes out of Windows Update ...
But perhaps we shouldn't all have moved so fast. A few people seemed to get problems with certain hardware after updating, some poor people couldn't get their networking going after the update. Somebody noted that Apple's updates always seemed to have different minor side effects on different computers, like lost preferences and things like that. My mind sorted others' hardware problems under this and kind of dismissed it all. I've never noticed any problems at all with previous updates.
There is a first time for everything though. When I synched my iPod right after updating, an annoying box popped up. A few files, including this one, could not be synched because the source file could not be found. Great, I thought, what did I do? I found the first song it had complained about and saw it had a little exclamation mark next to it. Trying to play it threw up another box asking me to do the hard work for iTunes: the file could not be found, would I like to locate it?
Yes please.
I drilled down through the music folder's directory structure, thankful that iTunes names the folders in a human-readable way, and lo and behold, the file was right where it was supposed to be! I didn't find a convenient way to display only exclamation marked files so I had to scroll through the full track list, but there weren't too many files so the whole process wasn't too painful.
It wasn't until after I'd done this and read up a bit more that I made the connection between updating and losing the files. I was actually more happy having found a reason than I was annoyed by it happening in the first place. If I had found no reason I would have had to live in mortal fear of it happening regularly. Someone suggested repairing permissions between an update and starting iTunes might help, I'll try it next time. (Note added July 12th, 2006: I know better now, that isn't a permissions-related problem. Read more here.)
So 10.2.8 gave me my first ever update-related problem, even if it was a minor one. Apparently the number of people with larger problems weren't too few, because today Slashdot notes that Apple has pulled the update completely!
Is there a moral to this story? Are Apple getting sloppy testing their updates? Or are the problems really minor and Apple are showing their dedication by taking them this seriously? I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if another uptime-resetting reboot post-update is soon required :-) ...