zerosleeps

Well I’ve run out of things to try and people to ask. I have even gone as far as rebuilding my Mac from bare metal and carefully restoring files. I’ve checked permissions, I’ve checked extended attributes, I’ve looked for patterns. Apart from it being the same 20-ish image files, they have nothing in common. Yet these 20 files are causing mediaanalysisd (and in turn the mds stuff that drives Spotlight) to hammer my CPU and thrash my SSD during system idle.

I have contacted Apple, but the only path I could find to do that was a form that gave me a text box with a limit of about 500 characters. I am under no illusion - that has been yeeted into a black hole and will never be seen by a human. Certainly not one who has ever heard of mediaanlysisd.

I posted my summary and asked my questions in the Apple Support Community and got some well meaning responses, but it was waving-the-rubber-chicken stuff, and even if they had worked I still wouldn’t have a root cause.

I asked the author of the Mastodon thread I mentioned in my first post - which is the only instance of the error message that I’m interested in that can be found by Kagi or Google - if they ever found a solution, and they didn’t. It sounds like they might have had a different root problem from me anyway, but come on, macOS must have hundreds of millions of users. We are not the only people with this issue.

So now I don’t fucking know. It’s not like it’s causing any functional problems that I’m aware of. Apart from probably killing the lifespan of my SSD (it’s reading and writing tens of gigabytes an hour) but this has really triggered something in me. I am not in control of the tool I use to make my living and that is not acceptable. It has also brought to the fore the complete and absolute disinterest Apple has in me. Those folk in the Apple Support Community don’t work for Apple: Apple has outsourced “support” to their own customers at no cost to themselves, and it doesn’t work.

Somewhere inside those towering walls that were built with help from the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on Apple products, there is at least one tremendously talented developer who knows exactly what my problem is and would love to help me and/or fix the underlying bug. Engineer-to-engineer. I could give them anything they asked for and try anything they wanted. But those folk will never know I exist.

Probably because some fucking middle manager has decided it’s more important to piss about with “a stunning new design” instead.