Are we running out of panaceas?

Ever since the first personal computer, with the first Mac nearly forty years ago, all through Classic Mac OS and its successors up to macOS, we’ve had panaceas. Things we can do when we don’t really know what’s wrong, and have no idea how to fix a problem. Perfect panaceas involve arcane key combinations, hidden features, time to work their magic, and an element of mystique, even when they’ve become common knowledge.

Rebuilding the Desktop was one of the best panaceas in Classic Mac days. You’d notice that your Mac’s cherished custom app and document icons would be replaced by bland generics for no apparent reason, and the links between apps their document types would fail. The advanced user would mutter something about corrupt Desktop databases, so you’d rebuild them by restarting your Mac while holding down the Command and Option keys. This became so ingrained that as late as 2020 some users were still asking how to do this in Catalina.

Mac OS X has had its own rich collection of panaceas too, most of which have begun with startup key combinations.

Resetting the SMC and NVRAM (formerly known as PRAM) have been prime candidates to fix almost anything that could happen, from cooling fans going crazy to dodgy displays. Single-user mode (SUM) was everything the Mac support consultant dreamed of: a startup key followed by an inscrutable command line where they could demonstrate their wizardry.

Other panaceas of the recent past involved harder work. Downloading and installing the latest Combo updater to macOS was a favourite for fixing absolutely anything that could go wrong in the system, and if that didn’t work you could while away hours performing a clean install of macOS. That has somehow managed to survive until today, and it still amazes me how many continue to recommend it as a panacea, sometimes even Apple Support in desperation.

Repairing permissions was a panacea in two versions. The original applied to system files, at a time when mysterious forces seemed apt to doctor them. Then, as they seemed to die back, maybe a victim of SIP, along came the repairing or resetting of permissions in ~/Library/Preferences. Just as a new cottage industry was setting up, Apple removed all reference to the procedure that it still provides in a secret app in Recovery mode.

One by one, over the last few years, Apple has removed these comforting panaceas. Mac OS X brought an end to those hidden Desktop databases that Macs kept forgetting. SUM was removed from Recovery mode, first being replaced by ‘SUM in Recovery’, then taken away completely. When Apple introduced its new macOS updaters in Big Sur, Combo updaters vanished overnight. Apple silicon Macs don’t have a discrete SMC that can be reset, neither is their NVRAM intended to be reset. The SSV has made most attempts to perform a clean install pointless, and their cleanest install involves DFU mode and wiping absolutely everything, which is a bit too serious to become a popular panacea.

All we’re left with now is Safe mode. At least Apple has moved that into Recovery on Apple silicon models, to confuse those who still haven’t noticed their differences from Intel Macs. Apple’s documentation is carefully written to preserve an element of mystique: by not telling us precisely what Safe mode does, particularly in terms of clearing “some system caches”, we can still use it as a panacea for almost anything. It’s also generously non-destructive, and unlikely to screw anything up.

If you want to demonstrate your knowledge and prowess on an Apple silicon Mac, I suppose you can always start it up in Fallback Recovery mode (frOS), although I’m unsure what you could usefully do there that you couldn’t do better in regular paired Recovery, so it doesn’t really qualify as a panacea, more a party trick.

But for those of us who need to offer panaceas, Apple silicon Macs don’t provide the rich pickings of the past. Wouldn’t it be so much better if there was a little-known key combination in Recovery mode that did something deep and mysterious, like restarting the Always-On Processor in an M-series chip? Can I suggest that as one of the enhancements for macOS 15, or maybe I should send that suggestion to Apple as Feedback on 1 April next year?