Fruity Tips #3 - Got a Slow Boot Problem On A MacBook Pro?

My love affair with my new refurbished 2017 15" MBP was on the verge of needing a trip to Relate recently. Whilst it has been a brilliant performer and has easily coped with everything I've thrown at it over the past three months, it has had something of a teenage strop in the last few weeks. It has been taking ages to reboot and be ready for me to start to do any actual work.

I'm used to Windows machines taking an age between powering them up and being able to do anything productive - that was the primary motive for me making the move to a Mac. And I've never had any problems with MacBook Airs or iMacs in respect of boot time. Even the latest addition to the Apple Harvest was fine until a few weeks back. And then it suddenly started taking an age to reboot. I'd get the Apple logo and progress bar which would get to about 60-70% and then hang. I'd power down and re-power and the same thing would happen.

I hate it when this kind of problem occurs because you usually know it's going to take a lot of sleuthing and pain to find the root cause. And it's almost certainly going to take a lot of time and patience (and as I get older, patience is sometimes in short supply).

I started off with all the usual experiments:

• Reboot in Safe Mode - the outcome was even worse. I nearly wore out my fingertips waiting for the logo to appear
• Reset SMC - no change
• Reset PRAM - no change
• Reboot into recovery - result!

Once in recovery, I could at least test the SSD using disk utility and this showed there were no problems (but indicated there were 9 APFS snapshots, each of which took an age to verify). In addition, with access to the Terminal app, I also set the boot arguments to automatically start up in Safe mode and with verbose output. I started the laptop and retired to a safe distance rather than sitting there watching it and being tempted to interfere. I returned after about an hour and the MBP was indeed booted into Safe mode. Phew! I becoming was less concerned that this was a hardware issue and more of a software or configuration problem. I reset the boot argument and started again.

A reboot into Safe mode is sometimes all that is needed to fix a teething problem, but not so in this case. When I restarted in normal mode I still had the same problem. This time I left the laptop to its own devices and it took over twenty minutes to get to the login screen. In theory,  I could have things as they were. I generally keep my MacBook powered on, just putting it to sleep every night and waking it up every morning using a schedule set up in Power Manager. I only switch off the machine on a Saturday night, again, using an automated schedule which then wakes it early on Sunday morning. Since the machine is set to switch on before I wake up, I wouldn't see how long it takes to boot! Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. 

But I already knew it was a problem, so I needed to resolve it. It's just the way I am, and who knows, it could be hiding a bigger problem just waiting to happen. Next step was to reinstall Mojave. I have a USB installation drive for such contingencies, so I booted that up (it booted almost instantly) and ran the installation. 

Still no improvement on the boot time. But since the USB drive boot was quick, it was becoming clearer that this was now either a problem with the SSD, which I deemed unlikely or it was a third party software configuration issue.

I started searching for similar reports of poor boot times and was kind of relieved to find I was far from alone. A boot time of twenty minutes was far from uncommon. One particular discussion on the Apple support forum ran to twenty-three pages (with no obvious resolution). One area that caught my attention was that the APFS snapshots could have been responsible and I went back to verbose mode to see if this was a problem but it turned out to be a red-herring.

Eventually, I happened upon a discussion about Little Snitch and some people reporting that they had isolated their boot time problems to a specific set of releases of Little Snitch. A support query on their web page concerning this problem runs to 7 pages. Since I was into my second weekend of trying to isolate the problem, I was willing to give anything a go, so I disabled Little Snitch and rebooted. Wham, bam and thank you, mam. I got back to the kind of boot time I was expecting, around 20-30 seconds (I have quite a lot of stuff that gets loaded at boot time). 

To try and prove the point and verify that this was the problem I re-enabled Little Snitch and went back to a twenty-minute reboot. A few days later,  Objective Development who own Litte Snitch released a new version which resolved the problem - a problem that Objective Development say they've been unable to recreate, which I find extraordinary. Nonetheless, Little Snitch 4.3 Build 5256 appears to have fixed the problem...For now at least! 

And it was just in time for Valentine's Day - so the machine and I could continue the love affair and no machines got massacred during the writing of this blog post!

Fruity Tips #2 - Enable Handoff and Continuity on older Macs

One of the things I got really excited about when Yosemite (OS X 10.10) was announced was the ability to start a task on a Mac and then seamlessly pick it up on an iDevice. In Apple terminology this is called Handoff which is a sub-function of the over Continuity function.  Continuity is dependent primarily on Bluetooth 4 LE hardware.

I was under the impression that my mid-2011 MacBook Air would support the technology but it wasn't until I tried to get it to work that the penny dropped, and although the hardware supports Handoff and Continuity, my MBA was telling me a different story - until now.

When I did a comparison of the Bluetooth configuration on the MBA and my late 2012 iMac (which categorically does support Handoff out of the box) it seemed that the specs were actually better on the older machine. Which seemed a bit perverse. So I did some more investigation and discovered that the ability of any particular model of Mac to handle Handoff depends on hardware, software and a configuration (.kext) file which contains the model names of supported machines. If the appropriate .kext files are modified, it is possible to persuade the OS that the machine will support Continuity and Handoff. 

After a bit more research I found this web site from which you can download a tool which will patch the appropriate files and enable you to turn on Handoff. The whole process took less than 10 minutes and my first test proved successful. I loaded my web mail page in Safari and switched on my iPhone and in the bottom left corner of the lock screen was the Safari icon. I swiped up on the icon and my web mail page appeared on my iPhone.

As with any system modification you do this at your own risk, and you absolutely must read the instructions before you attempt to make the modification, and it would be prudent to take a back-up or better clone your start-up disk before running the tool.

If this works for you, don't forget to make a donation to the guys who did all the work. There's a place for you to do so on the site!

Fruity Tips #1 - Automatically Detect Your Current Timezone

Here's the first of the Apple Harvest Fruity Tips. It's been a while coming but it has saved my bacon this week so I had to share it with the world as soon as possible!

I've had problems travelling overseas with some of my iDevices for the past six months because the Timezone setting won't update automatically. This never used to be an issue, but I'm guessing that in iOS7 or iOS8 a preference has changed which does now cause the problem.

And what a problem it was this week. I returned to Prague and forgot to change the time on my iPad 3 (the new iPhone 6 and new iPad Mini 2 were both OK) and as a result got up an hour later than I intended on Monday morning.

The problem appeared when I went to the Settings->General->Date & Time preference with the Set Automatically option switched on. The Time Zone setting wouldn't load properly - I just got the spinning fan icon. It turns out that the fix is very simple and it's all to do with the Location Services in the Privacy settings.

In order to get the Time Zone to update automatically, you need to turn on the Privacy->Location Services->System Services->Setting Time Zone. Once you make this tweak the Time Zone will change automatically in the future. Of course you also need to make sure that Location Services are switched on!

Make sure Setting Time Zone is Turned On!

Luckily in my case there was only an hour difference between where I was and where I'd been and there were no critical appointments in the diary. It could have been a very costly error though if I'd had a flight to catch or an interview to attend!

Apple Harvest - Fruity Tips

Back in April this year I kicked off a new series of posts that went under the Fruity Picks label and could be found in their own special area of the Apple Harvest blog.  I'm pleased to report that these mini-reviews seem to have proved quite popular - although I've not come across anything that's really rattled my cage enough to add a new pick recently.

Not only do I collect all sorts of Apple related software and hardware, I also pick up lots of useful hints and tips from all sorts of sources. Some of these are well known, others are a bit more obscure, but they all have their value to someone, so I've decided to spin off another new series called Apple Harvest Fruity Tips*. Each Fruity Tip will feature a single item that has special appeal to me and that readers may also appreciate. Like the Fruity Picks, Fruity Tips will be mini posts and just like Fruity Picks, Fruity Tips will get published as and when something worth writing about comes along.

The first Fruity Tips will be appearing shortly, so come back from time to time to check on progress!

* This time I can't find any alternative meaning for the phrase "Fruity Tips"!