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M1 MacBook Air has stumped Apple Engineers

DocBo

DocBo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 16, 2011
6
2
My M1 MacBook Air has stumped Apple Engineers. They have poured over my downloads I've sent them (Twice) & can't figure out why I have no desktop icons or can't drag any thing to my desktop. I can only access my desktop folders thru the FINDER icon in bottom strip. It's been over a month and they're stumped. Waiting til Wed to hear back from the APPLE support rep. This is the 2nd time (2015) I've had a problem escalated up to their Engineers.
Bought my 1st Apple computer in 1979. APPLE 2 plus
 

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I don't think this is a solution. Why would the Apple engineers still baffled by my current problem. Why have the requested 2 data dumps?
 
Just ran both commands and they work, running the latest version of Big Sur.

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop true; killall Finder
 
DocBo said:
My M1 MacBook Air has stumped Apple Engineers. They have poured over my downloads I've sent them (Twice) & can't figure out why I have no desktop icons or can't drag any thing to my desktop. I can only access my desktop folders thru the FINDER icon in bottom strip. It's been over a month and they're stumped. Waiting til Wed to hear back from the APPLE support rep. This is the 2nd time (2015) I've had a problem escalated up to their Engineers.
Bought my 1st Apple computer in 1979. APPLE 2 plus
Click to expand...
You screenshot shows Safari is in front. Can you switch to the Finder?
 
DocBo said:
I don't think this is a solution. Why would the Apple engineers still baffled by my current problem. Why have the requested 2 data dumps?
Click to expand...
Just run the command the others have suggested.. it doesn’t matter if you “don’t think it will work” or because the “engineers haven’t figured it out”. Engineers can get stumped by these things too. I work for a large tech company on embedded devices and I’ve been in similar situations.
 
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DocBo said:
Why have the requested 2 data dumps?
Click to expand...
Why do you think troubleshooting an anomaly only requires one data dump?

I'm surprised that Apple hasn't offered you a replacement so they can get your computer in-house to test further; you could probably push for one at this point.
 
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darngooddesign said:
I'm surprised that Apple hasn't offered you a replacement so they can get your computer in-house to test further; you could probably push for one at this point.
Click to expand...

For hardware issues, that makes sense. And in those cases, wiping personal data from the device doesn’t affect the ability to reproduce the issue.

For software issues, it makes less sense because you don’t need the machine, you need the environment. But the environment also happens to contain all the user’s data. This is partly why companies have been pushing analytics, so they can collect more targeted data related to problems customers see, and understand how their code actually behaves in the real world better. But it isn’t perfect, especially if you take the approach of limiting what you collect in the analytics (for both privacy and bandwidth reasons), and troubleshooting anything you don’t have an in-house way to reproduce can be a royal pain. I say that as someone who has spent time having to do just that.

The biggest pain can sometimes be when a bug gets introduced in a chunk of older code that has never been instrumented for debugging purposes, and only a small number of customers hits it. So you have no instrumentation telling you what’s wrong, and it perhaps takes weeks for any changes that adds instrumentation to make it out to the impacted users so you can get more information. Not fun.
 
DocBo said:
My M1 MacBook Air has stumped Apple Engineers. They have poured over my downloads I've sent them (Twice) & can't figure out why I have no desktop icons or can't drag any thing to my desktop. I can only access my desktop folders thru the FINDER icon in bottom strip. It's been over a month and they're stumped. Waiting til Wed to hear back from the APPLE support rep. This is the 2nd time (2015) I've had a problem escalated up to their Engineers.
Bought my 1st Apple computer in 1979. APPLE 2 plus
Click to expand...
Have you tried setting up another user and see how that account behaves?
 
DocBo said:
I don't think this is relevant It's old and not M1 or Big Sur
Click to expand...
I would like to add to this as well. A lot of the code that makes up macOS comes from NeXTStep machines back in the 90s before Jobs even came back to Apple. The CPU architecture doesn’t change the code (in layman’s terms). What changes is how the compiler translates that code. So those commands that are “old” are most likely still going to work, because it’s part of macOS and independent of the version and architecture.
 
Just an update to my M1 problem. Just got off phone/Apple support. The senior tech admitted that the Engineers are stumped by problem. Did another data dump sent to Engineers. Will keep u up to date after next call from Apple.☹️
 
DocBo said:
Just an update to my M1 problem. Just got off phone/Apple support. The senior tech admitted that the Engineers are stumped by problem. Did another data dump sent to Engineers. Will keep u up to date after next call from Apple.☹️
Click to expand...

Please try the documentation I sent you, I tested it in Big Sur and was able to disable and re-enable my desktop items, which is exactly the issue you are seeing.

Something in the OS has changed the flag somehow, this is not a hardware issue it’s the operating system.

if you are not comfortable with running the terminal command yourself, share it with the Engineer you are working with.
 
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