So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I d…

It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

@wylieprof Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

@wylieprof Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.

@wylieprof Just kidding! That was lame. On the plus side I could now plug the charger in either side. (Except I couldn’t quite because one of the ports was faulty, and it wouldn’t charge properly—I was alerted to that by the salience of a non-whoop silence.)

@wylieprof What else? Oh! The mysterious double-space. At some point, your new keyboard started occasionally inserting two spaces when I only hit the spacebar once.

@wylieprof Maybe I was typing too hard? But then I noticed it elsewhere. For example, I’m pretty sure it happened to Mary Beard too, judging by the unexpected in her tweets. Hi Mary!

@wylieprof The new software updates were great, too. For example, at some point AirPlay stopped working. Fortunately I had yet to upgrade my iPhone, so I could still play music on the stereo.

@wylieprof Still, the upgrade was worth it. After four years, I had a hard drive that was... 50% larger, and a processor that was... 25% faster.

@wylieprof This made it easier when I stared losing work (for the first time in a decade) by unexpected application crashes, because I could load up Safari and... hang on... oop

@wylieprof I also had new friends. Like Laurel and Hardy! Hi guys.

@wylieprof These were so advanced that I had to upgrade their firmware when I first plugged them in (!) Also I think they were $60 each.

@wylieprof The computer itself was so skinny that when I carried these around I felt like a photographer’s assistant at a fashion shoot.

@wylieprof Making the trackpad extra large was great because my finger got a concussion running off the edge of the last one? Not really, but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.

@wylieprof This was the first time since the late-1990s Jobs reboot that I felt I was working for my computer, not the other way around.

@wylieprof The era of understated perfection is, in my opinion, over. Given the bugs that erupt with each incremental update now, I can’t even imagine the current team rolling out an entire rewrite of the OS, as they did for OS X. https://t.co/2lZn5RQm4w

@wylieprof One last example, a little more technical. Apple rolled out a new file system. It’s called APFS, you’ll get it free if you upgrade to High Sierra.

@wylieprof APFS forbids “hardlinks”. So if you do upgrade, all of your UNIX stuff will probably break. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.

@wylieprof Oh also—APFS is incompatibile with older versions of Time Machine. Apple can’t even not break its own stuff. And you can’t reformat back to the old system.

@wylieprof https://t.co/RD5XpCYTSm if you don’t believe me.

@wylieprof A new update was released today or so—Mojave (motto: Welcome to the Desert of the Real).

@wylieprof I learned this because people already figured out it breaks Mathematica.

@wylieprof A well-built machine is a beautiful thing. You get attached to excellence in them the way people get attached to the old Volkswagen Beatle.

@wylieprof So, support request to @AppleSupport. Please fire Johnny Ive, and take everyone else on a five year retreat to Tibet to meditate on non-being or something.

@wylieprof @AppleSupport We can wait.

@wylieprof @AppleSupport Or, someone start a tweet campaign and get @elonmusk to build a better laptop—something that will last twenty years and be more than a platform for failed AI voice assistants and marketing popups from Software Update.

To cheer everybody up, here is a list of cool people using macs. https://t.co/pToRotyQyX