As an early adopter, I trade-up to new hardware when there is a significant hardware change. I am fortunate to have both the đ» MacBook Pro (M1 Silicon) and the đ§ AirPods Max.
Experience
I have experienced more than one annoyance, and I expect that with new hardware and a new operating system. The alert message below takes the cake â a lot of applications have the same issue (not human-readable message).
đ€Ź As the constructive alert message indicates, I donât know if this is a software issue, hardware issue, or a combination of the two.
The Gripe
Alert messages that do not include a human-readable explanation are useless. macOS team, you can do better!
First, for non-tech users, the alert message may induce fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the Apple ecosystem experience. It is definitely a confusing message, and Mac owners might be thinking, âIf the error is unknown, what the heck is (9039)?â
Second, for tech users, the alert message includes an error code (9039). The first thing a tech will do is Google it or search Apple developer forums.
The Solution
Approach 1
This gripe is easy to avoid. Remove the last sentence from the alert message. Simple. Easy. Done. This one change improves the user experience and doesnât affect debugging steps or reporting an issue. Applications, including the operating system, write messages to log files. You can view them in the Console application.
For non-technical users (by the far the dominant user role), it is confusing to include the text âAn unknown error occurred (9039).â
Approach 2
A second approach is to replace the last sentence with a pseudo-link to Apple documented codes. If âan unknown error occurredâ is displayed, it may have been triggered in a try/catch block, at which time, the developers didnât know what caused the error. Fair enough.
If the message was a link to a web page, then as the dev team learns more about the cause of such errors, the description can be dynamically updated on the web site.
References
Provide a message that describes the situation clearly and succinctly. A message like âAn error occurredâ is mystifying and likely to annoy people. Be complete and specific, without being verbose. When possible, identify the error that occurred, the document or file it occurred in, and why it occurred.