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hoakley February 27, 2020 Macs, Technology

Finder still thinks this Mac’s got a hard disk, and won’t set Preview Options

It’s a question almost good enough for one of Saturday’s Mac riddles: where does every Mac tell its user that it’s still got a “hard disk”?

The answer is in Finder’s Preferences.

Neither my iMac Pro nor my MacBook Pro 16-inch have any option to come with an internal hard disk, or even a Fusion Drive for that matter. They’re SSD all the way through, yet open Finder’s Preferences, and in the General and Sidebar sections, the internal SSD or, as Apple prefers to call it elsewhere Flash Drive, is there referred to as a Hard disk. Really. Try this on your own Mac if you don’t believe me. And yes, this is Catalina 10.15.3, not Leopard 10.5.

internalhd02

internalhd01

I find it quaint enough that Catalina’s new boot Volume Group still defaults to referring to its two sibling volumes as Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data. We all know that HD stands for Hard Disk (or Drive), but just carry on in case something deep in the bowels of macOS can’t live without the ancient name.

Less entertaining and more irritating is the complete failure of Finder’s Show Preview Options in its View menu – a useful feature which simply doesn’t work on either of my Macs here, again running 10.15.3.

The idea is sound enough. Select a document of the type whose Finder preview you want to customise, such as a JPEG image. Use the Show Preview Options command to display controls over which items are listed below the QuickLook thumbnail. In this case, PDFs are set up to show just the basic file information in the preview, as shown in the example in this Finder window.

internalhd03

The moment that you dismiss the Preview Options window, though, Finder reverts to what it feels I want to see, in this case adding several items from the General section. The only one of the options offered in that window which does seem to work is the item at its foot, Show Quick Actions. Others only apply as long as the Preview Options window is open.

internalhd04

Maybe I’m doing something wrong here, but given the space that some of these metadata can occupy, it would be nice if this feature were to work. Perhaps it’s awaiting my hard disk to become available?

One last Finder bug in 10.15.3, which is possibly the longest-standing in the front end of macOS, is the column width bug, which I detailed here nearly five years ago. It first appeared in OS X Mavericks in 2013, if not before that. I’d love to know of its first recorded sighting, so we can start having an annual Finder Column Width Bug Day, to celebrate each year that it continues to infuriate users and waste their time.

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Posted in Macs, Technology and tagged bug, Catalina, Finder, macOS 10.15, metadata, Preview, Quick Action, QuickLook. Bookmark the permalink.

21Comments

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  1. 1
    Andy Norman on February 27, 2020 at 10:46 am

    The Preview options don’t save on my Mojave MacBook Pro either.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 2
      hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 12:14 pm

      Thank you. Yes, I have a feeling that I moaned about this in Mojave as well. That it should still be non-functional in 10.15.3 is disgraceful. If the feature doesn’t work and you can’t be bothered to fix it, then remove it completely. It’s just a lie.
      Howard.

      LikeLike

  2. 3
    J. G. Vía on February 27, 2020 at 10:59 am

    About entertaining “Hard Drive” question: apart that English is used by default in many countries (not just UK & USA) requiring just description without literature, this is a practical and solomonic linguistic decission. It is the most understandable nomenclature to designate “OS drive” vs. “auxiliary data drive”. Any other naming could be more confusing… No good idea to use “internal disk”, as boot drive could be external (but “internal” for system). And it’s not a bad idea to use different icons, which are not figurative pictures in this case (external disks includes sd cards also…). I’m not sure how an internal data drive (no bootable) is named, but it should be “external disk”, following the intention.
    I can’t find a simpler way to name these two kinds of storage, keeping a standard nomenclature across different macs. Trying to identify if disk is solid or mechanical is not important at this stance, and changing to a more “realistic” description is futile and messy.
    I embrace Apple’s convention, and I suspect it’s the result of a very meditated question. Same way, default “hard disk” is still baptized as “Macintosh HD”, keeping consistence in a “mac specific dialect”.
    OK, it’s not a perfect language (unlike Maths), but a natural one. I believe “having tea” in UK can be done without tasting tea…

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 4
      hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 12:11 pm

      Thank you.
      I’m afraid that’s incorrect in current English technical usage, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Wikipedia, and all the style guides that I have ever written for.
      The full term is hard disk drive, and refers specifically to electro-mechanical storage devices which consist of spinning platters inside a housing. It’s hard as opposed to floppy, the disk refers to the spinning storage medium, and the drive refers to the device which reads and writes to and from the spinning disk. Hence a floppy disk drive is the thing that you insert a floppy disk into to access it.
      Hard disk drive, its abbreviated forms such as hard drive or HDD, does not include solid state drives, which contain memory.
      Not only that, but putting either form here is incorrect: enabling that item doesn’t list all drives of any sort at all. In fact it could mean one of two things here. One is internal drives, or internal storage, as opposed to external drives, which already appears as another option. That would be the case if one option included only those storage devices inside the Mac’s case, and the other listed those external to it. The other is the startup drive, in which case the other option labelled external disks is also incorrect, because if you boot from an external drive and have an internal SSD, neither option would include that.
      In case you’re wondering, there’s no Apple-specific usage here either. Look at Apple’s online specs for an iMac, for example, where it refers distinctly to “hard drive” as being what I have described above, as distinct from Fusion Drive or SSD.
      So to be precise here, there are two errors in the entry labelled “Hard disks”, which doesn’t refer to a hard disk at all, but should refer to the startup drive, and “External disks”, which actually should be non-startup or secondary drives.
      And in English, the word tea refers to both a beverage and a meal.
      Howard.

      LikeLiked by 1 person

      • 5
        J. G. Vía on February 27, 2020 at 12:57 pm

        Thank you.
        Dictionaries don’t rule over language, just tell how humans use words. So, all the specialised dictionaries & style guides should include a footnote to reflect and advice about how macs use these terms in a specific context, to be really complete.
        When you buy a mac, specs are in other language context. When you buy to Newegg, “ssd” must be even better detailed.
        Tech goes too fast (faster than language use) and confusion is inevitable: how should we name internal storage in iOS devices?
        Nomenclatures must serve to identify things without being too disruptive. This convention about internal/external clearly refers to “intimate” OS data vs. added external data readable by OS.
        Anyone dares to take the challenge to better rename Finder’s preference panel?
        (By the way: in Spanish mac OS follows that “weird” nomenclature also).

        LikeLiked by 1 person

        • 6
          hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 1:03 pm

          Thanks.
          It’s really simple: the window should use the correct terms.
          If they’re referring to internal v external storage, then use those words instead, or even drives or disks if you must.
          If they’re referring to startup v non-startup, then use the words startup (rather than boot) and secondary or other.
          Technical language must be both correct and precise. What appears in those windows is neither.
          Howard.

          LikeLiked by 1 person

  3. 7
    Jack Foley on February 27, 2020 at 1:03 pm

    The Preview Options are saving OK on my iMac Pro, running Mojave 10.14.6.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

  4. 8
    J. G. Vía on February 27, 2020 at 2:01 pm

    I hadn’t pay much attention to Preview Options before. I’ve changed some tags (useful, thanks) and Finders remembers settings perfectly well, on my iMac in 10.14.6 .

    LikeLiked by 1 person

  5. 9
    Duncan on February 27, 2020 at 3:20 pm

    I have set up hundreds (if not approaching a thousand) Macs over the years, and at this point I mostly accept Apple’s default settings rather than spend my time customizing things like Finder views, etc. Is that because I think Apple’s way is the best way? Hardly – when I first started using them in the 80s I would customize everything I could get my hands on, including using ResEdit to change the lower-level behavior.

    But since about Snow Leopard I’ve come to realize that trying to fight Apple’s bugs and UI anomalies is a fool’s errand, akin to Charlie Brown trying to kick the football that Lucy keeps setting up for him. When Apple introduces new features at WWDC I now say, “That’s nice – too bad they won’t be supporting it in another five years.” (And lest anyone think this is about Apple I’d say there are many companies much worse, such as Google’s penchant for cancelling products after only a few years.)

    So for better or worse I’ve come to accept only the barest minimum of functionality from my products, with exceptions for features that truly save me time or effort. New features mostly annoy me now, particularly when they intrude on my work with disruptive pop-ups and nagging reminders, and when older features continue to remain broken after, in some cases, decades. I have come to accept mediocrity as the true state of the art, something that used to irritate me a lot more in the past when I used to personally invest myself in these products. Now I just try to keep the usefulness/annoyance ratio to something I can live with.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 10
      hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 6:57 pm

      When you work 10+ hours a day at your Mac, small changes in settings can make a great deal of difference, both to your well-being and efficiency.
      The day when my Mac won’t do those things, it is going. It has been touch and go over the Finder column width bug, for instance.
      Howard.

      LikeLike

      • 11
        Duncan on February 27, 2020 at 7:38 pm

        “When you work 10+ hours a day at your Mac, small changes in settings can make a great deal of difference, both to your well-being and efficiency.”

        I completely agree, and do indeed change some of my settings as appropriate. (I used NeXT machines during their heyday and thus always set my Finder view to columns, position the dock on the right, etc.) However, I try not to get too attached to ‘nice-to-have’ features (as opposed to ‘essential’) in case they get abandoned or stop working properly.

        I wish I didn’t have to adopt this detached attitude but I’ve been bitten too many times over the years to get excited when Apple introduces a new feature. For example, I’ve long since given up on user-input Finder metadata, such as the comments field in the old Get Info boxes or Tags in the new. Far too much lost effort invested in those temperamental housekeeping ‘features’.

        And I wish Apple would establish a ‘crash project’ that focuses solely on the Finder (as in the well-worn acronym ‘FTFF’) and refines that into a crown jewel that it should be. Make everything work as originally promised and, in some cases, did but no longer does. But unfortunately we instead have to settle for ‘Apple gives, and Apple takes away’, while they add some new cloud feature to an Emoji editing app or some damned thing.

        LikeLiked by 1 person

  6. 12
    Andrew Martin Ross on February 27, 2020 at 5:48 pm

    FWIW, I changed the name of my drive to “Macintosh SSD” with no ill effects noticed yet.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 13
      hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 6:55 pm

      Thanks.
      Oh yes, you can do that, even with Catalina’s new Volume Group. But why oh why is the default still Macintosh HD? Has time stood still? How many new Macs actually ship with HDs?
      Howard.

      LikeLike

  7. 14
    Adam C. Engst on February 27, 2020 at 7:31 pm

    I wrote about the hard disk terminology issue tangentially in TidBITS recently as well.

    https://tidbits.com/2020/01/10/the-one-remaining-use-of-the-word-macintosh/

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 15
      hoakley on February 27, 2020 at 7:58 pm

      Thanks, Adam – a fine article.
      The reason that the Data volume in an APFS Volume Group doesn’t normally get renamed in the way that the System volume does is, AFAIK, because the Data volume name isn’t actually of functional importance, and the Finder’s illusion is that it’s all one volume anyway. That’s how Macs with – Data – Data – Data volumes end up working fairly normally, because the critical things are the firmlinks, not the volume name.
      Howard.

      LikeLike

  8. 16
    Pico on February 28, 2020 at 3:24 am

    Also relevant: System Preferences > Startup Disk

    If Apple just replaced “disk” with “drive” everywhere, I think it would make just as much sense to any user and would be more correct more of the time.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 17
      hoakley on February 28, 2020 at 7:45 pm

      Thanks, Pico.
      I don’t think so – more to come tomorrow morning.
      I’m sure that you’ll remember the difference between a disk, which is the medium on which data is stored, and a drive, which is the housing and read/write mechanism for that disk.
      Howard.

      LikeLike

      • 18
        Pico on February 28, 2020 at 8:28 pm

        I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

        Also worth noting how Finder lists things in the Computer window when you have “Use Groups” enabled and grouping by “Kind”. The groups I normally see are “Startup Volume”, “Removable Volumes”, “Remote Volumes”.

        When booted to an external drive, there is another group called “Local Volumes” which includes the internal drive. Interestingly, when booted to an external drive which has other partitions, those partitions are also grouped into the “Local Volumes” group.

        I don’t love the word “volume” for this (I don’t feel like it’s as easily understood for any user and it also has another more obvious and unrelated meaning it the computer world), but there is an argument that it’s the most correct since when dealing with multiple partitions there is no guarantee of a one-to-one relationship between icons in Finder and physical devices.

        LikeLiked by 1 person

  9. 19
    Hal on March 2, 2020 at 6:50 pm

    Not only is it not a hard disk, Apple refers to its computers now as “Mac”, not Macintosh

    LikeLiked by 1 person

  10. 20
    weuweb01 on March 3, 2020 at 6:49 pm

    My current infuriating bug in finder on Catalina is a filled circle icon for any mounted disk. It just appeared one day and the correct icon seems to be gone. Have you come across anything like this? I’ve tried resetting the shared file.plist and other finder related pref files to no avail. Totally fine with new user account, just not this one.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    • 21
      hoakley on March 3, 2020 at 6:53 pm

      Thanks. Yes, that comes and goes seemingly at random here too. At the moment I’ve got proper disk icons, but who knows when the filled circles will reappear.
      Howard

      LikeLiked by 1 person

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