Warning, anti Apple rant

I need to develop an iOS app to go along with a BLE project. My clients mailed me a 2006 MacBook so I can write the app.

I only have my mother’s iPad Mini, which has iOS 7 on it. In order to load any programs to it, the project target in Xcode must be iOS 7, targeting iOS 6.1 and loading it to an iOS 7 device is not allowed.

My Xcode copy can’t target iOS 7 because it’s not Xcode 5. In order to upgrade to Xcode 5, I need to upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion.

Mountain Lion does not support 2006 MacBooks. Which is stupid… People are still using XP machines on Pentium 4 in some places, and even a netbook can probably run Windows 8, but Apple decides to just drop support for a computer from 2006. I looked up the actual hardware requirements and the 2006 MacBook should meet every one of them (RAM, CPU, HD space, GFX, etc), but there’s a specific check against the model that prevents the upgrade or installation. The customer service rep from Apple told me to buy a new Mac without giving me any alternative solutions.

I looked around for a way to manually install Mountain Lion, and as a result, the MacBook no longer boots up. This is probably my fault for even trying, but I didn’t panic because I thought it would be easy to just recover the old OS.

Wrong… The recovery process requires an internet connection! Great idea… Fine, so I connect it to my Wifi. Then it required the Apple ID of the original purchaser of Lion. Fine, I put that in. But I’m in Canada and the original purchaser is in the USA. So it gives me a message saying it’s redirecting me to the American app store, and then nothing happens. I tried again and it said unknown error. I can’t use my own Apple ID to just repurchase it either.

Then I look up how to do recovery without internet. There’s a recovery USB drive I can create, but the tool used to create the drive can only be run on another Mac. So I start up a OS X virtual machine and tried to run the tool. Nope… The recovery USB drive can only be created on the computer with the recovery HD partition.

Good job Apple, that makes a lot of sense.

I wonder why people like Apple so much…

My laptop has a recovery that will work offline, or I can just re-image the drive. Windows has a recovery command line in case it won’t boot. Plus I can make any bootable Linux USB drive or Windows installation USB drive from anywhere at any time (or burn a DVD). Apple either wants me to buy a new computer or force me to take a visit to their store, where they can show me all the shiny overpriced crap they sell.