zerosleeps

A refurbished one, but still…

Previously on zerosleeps.com: first post in what has become a series, second post, and third post.

Shortly before starting this post my MacBook had been up for 9 hours and 8 minutes. Activity Monitor reports that mediaanalysisd has used 6 hours 22 minutes of CPU time (whatever that means in today’s multi-core multi-threaded world) and has read 38.69 GB of data from storage.

log stats --process mediaanalysisd --last 9h reports 1.8 million errors, 93% of which are “Embedding version: 0 not supported, skip embedding publishing”. That’s an average of 55 errors a second when you divide one thing by the other.

And all of this is with “Images” and “Movies” disabled in System Settings → Spotlight, by the way. At the weekend, I moved my Apple Photos library off my Mac just to see if that had some gremlin but it made no difference. (Again, the files mediaanalysisd errors on are never in my Photos library, but I’m trying anything I think of.)

And what would I gain even if it wasn’t behaving like this? Buggered if I know. I’m not playing with Spotlight exceptions any more - whenever I add an exclusion the thing just gets fixated on another location, so I’ve disabled my entire drive from being indexed. Spotlight is now useless, which makes my Mac a little bit more useless too.

Now look, bugs happen. I’m a developer and I’ve written some doozies. But that has never really been my issue with all of this - my issues are lack of control over my own device, and the complete absence of official support. Read my previous posts and tell me what sensible options remain. A visit to my nearest Apple Store where they’ll tell me to try a new user profile (done that) or reinstall (done that) or some other nonsense that will never explain the cause? No thanks.

Between all of this, an awful experience I had with HomeKit a few weeks ago (which I didn’t blog about but the outcome was the same - something wasn’t working and Apple’s “it just works” arrogance doesn’t make it possible to find out what’s going on when it does not just work), the shitshow that is “Apple Intelligence” (does anyone want that - I don’t), and the trust-destroying decision this weekend to use Apple Wallet to push a notification advertising a movie to customers, I need to look around and see what else is out there.

So I’ve ordered a 4-year old Thinkpad T490s just to see. I am under no illusion - I’ve been here before. macOS on it’s worst day is almost certainly better than Windows or Linux on their very best days, but we should poke our heads over the parapet every now and again, right? I have no reservations about the hardware: AUD$400 for a slightly used flagship laptop with 32GB of RAM, touchscreen, a plethora of modern ports, and status-lights-my-gawd-I-miss-status-lights is astonishing.

It’ll come down to the software. Stay tuned.