Charles Arthur, The Overspill:
I wrote a while back about the problems I had with my 2012 retina MacBook Pro, and its strange shutdowns – which I suspected, but couldn’t absolutely prove, were due to the graphics card problem that these models have been known to suffer from: when the discrete graphics card was activated, there was a chance it would go completely off the rails.
Finally it shut down and didn’t seem to want to start.
And:
The only way to absolutely prove that the problem with the computer was the graphics card, of course, was to take it to a Genius Bar. After eventually getting an appointment (the Mac Geniuses are rare, compared to the iPhone/iPad Geniuses), I turned up with the rMBP which I’d left for dead.
If you’ve got a Mac, especially if you are running High Sierra, take a few minutes to read this story.
My hope is that this is specific to Charles’ Apple Store and not a symptom of a much wider problem. And I do take heart in the fact that the store manager wanted feedback, wanted to find the problem with their systems.
But I do think this solution should have been driven from the top, at corporate. APFS is not news.
From the very end:
But anyhow, if your Mac does break down, and you’re on High Sierra, make sure to tell them if you’re on APFS when they come to the diagnostics. And if they tell you that you need to wipe your drive and start again, just make sure to ask them: “are you certain it’s that, or could it be your network drive can’t read the APFS file system on my machine?” It can’t hurt to ask.
Indeed.
That’s weird. The store I worked at the standard practice was to boot the system off network images to run diagnosis on the systems. I recently had the HD on my iMac go out (which is on the latest betas with a fusion drive). The first thing the genius did was to pull an ethernet cable from the table, plug it in reboot to their diagnosis tool and see that the physical hd was the issue.
Surprised to read Apple Genius diagnostic tools don’t initially identify APFS or HFS+.
I am pretty sure Apple Genius have diagnosis tools that identify APFS or HFS+. I think this article doesn’t explain or left out some important details thinking Apple must be stupid or not preparing…
Same for me. I didn’t have a hard drive problem but that was the first thing they did.
I’ve had 3-4 issues over the years with my iPhones and Macs and the diagnosis and service has always been spot on.
The only time I’ve ever had a problem was trying to find someone who could accept payment for an item. Sometimes they are just overrun with customers.
They did that here. They saw 2 500g volumes, so felt it might be reporting things badly etc (there was only 1 SSD).
This entire post is nothing more than an inexperienced or inattentive Genius combined with tools that should have correctly read the drive as APFS. No harm, though, aside from some lost time.
Really? I’ve had three and looked after about a dozen others – ZERO graphics card issues, most still being used including mine which went to another family and is mid ‘08.