An A to Z of keys and keyboards: (macOS) Startup and login | Hacker News Reader

An A to Z of keys and keyboards: (macOS) Startup and login

eclecticlight.co

63 pointsrcarmo8 comments

It's somewhat frequently discussed in articles about UX here that Apple loves to hide useful functionality behind unintuitive and undiscoverable actions, and this is no exception. When Macs work, they work well. When they don't, it's a nightmare to figure out what's wrong through the (deliberate?) opaqueness. Here's a memorable example I encountered recently:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/svab0m.jpg

https://i.stack.imgur.com/xjQKxm.jpg

Try to guess what that... art is trying to say, and then go here to find the answer:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/427422/mac-mini-do...

The mouse one was easy to figure out, but the keyboard icon was strange as hell. In any case, a text label in all the major languages wouldn't hurt (similar to what they do for kernel panics.)

One of the things I really hate about the macOS login UX is that it doesn't give any information about what's going on.

For example when an AD account is locked or your account is valid but you don't have access to log in to that particular machine, Windows will tell you after your enter the username and password successfully. macOS will just shake the username field just as if you mistyped your username or password. I know you can't tell which one is wrong (as it can be used to enumerate accounts) but an invalid login or account locked out message would separate these 2 cases nicely.

This is really confusing for users. Just tell us what's going on.

> When pressed briefly, it starts the Mac up in normal macOS mode; when pressed and held until the Mac reports that it’s loading Recovery Options, it engages Recovery mode, where you navigate startup and other options using buttons and menus. These invariably work fully with Apple’s wireless keyboards and mice/trackpads, so there’s no need to connect them with their charging leads.

I wish…with portable Macs I can never get this to work :/

Be interesting to know why this doesn't work for you, my magic trackpad always works wireless in the pre-boot/recovery environments.

Possibly related: I've got a good experience with airdrop. Works flawlessly. Except on one laptop. I've got it a few years now, and it has never worked. It can send, but not receive. Other devices don't see it, and there have been several major OS updates in the meantime. I've not encountered another Mac with the same problem. Almost must be a hardware error, but an odd one, since wifi and bluetooth do work. Perhaps OP's machine has a similar rare failure.

Airdrop, Handover, shared clipboard and all those wonderful over-the-air-just-work integrations are wildly flaky.

I have an iPad, an iPhone and 3 Macs.

These features mostly actually just work and are one of the best reasons to have the whole ecosystem shebang. That said, every now and then they don't. And there's no indication why.

For a while it felt like they all got better and started working nearly flawlessly. Now they're back to working ~90% of the time. Not terrible but annoying when I'm relying on copy-pasting an image or a piece of text between devices. I guess I'm too coddled.

How is a user supposed to discover long power button press?

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