If you build your own PC, POST is your basic smoke test that everything is plugged in and functioning as expected.

And if you didn't build your own PC, well, stuff fails and POST can tell you what's wrong. And it's fine if that stuff isn't important to you, but its better to have these tools and not need them instead of the other way around.

Ah cause a part of POST is link training/etc, which can make some rough approximation of error rate from SERDES eye reports. Its the same problem with computers that lack ECC, without actual hardware tests (be that POST, or HW/SW error detection) your simply praying to the data corruption and crash gods that nothing goes wrong. And frighteningly a lot of things can actually be going wrong long before you will notice the data corruption or happen to have an application crash. Thankfully HW doesn't tend to just go bad as frequently as it just has errors that can be detected consistently given sufficient error detection/testing.

But even on PC's one is generally doing the same thing the mac is doing and using preprogrammed/saved machine parameters. Its only when you plug in new ram, pcie cards, etc that a full POST sequence is run on a given bus. Something the mac can't do because it doesn't have user upgradable ram/pci cards/etc. And then your average PC also has a diagnostic mode that can be started that runs a more complete system test to report back to dell/hp/etc before they send a tech or issue a RMA.

And things like memory zeroing are frequently simply not done anymore, or there is HW in the memory controller which does it in the background during initial bootup as ranges/banks are first accessed (usually for assuring ECC is set correctly).

Anyway, the point of POST is to do some rudimentary sanity checks to report errors rather than having the OS fail bootup, or the machine acts generally unreliable. Better to see degraded link/fan/etc errors at post than wonder why your machine is just running slow or being a POS like seems to be fairly common with Mac's if you watch Rossman's channel much.

I’m not suggesting power on initialisation or important tests should stop, that’s silly.

I’m just talking about all the text logging that clutters the screen; I think it’s unnecessary.

> So what benefit does this messy POST give me?

For you? Nothing. For a significant number of people? A lot.

You would rather remove the helpful messages because "messages makes my computer unpretty", than simply ignore them?

Well, “significant number” is nevertheless a tiny minority.

Making computers accessible and non threatening to everyone is important. Filling the screen with acronym soup advances neither of these goals. Instead of people thinking “I can do this”, they think computers are hard.

Also, minimising what I’m saying by using diminutive language - “messages makes my computer unpretty” - is lazy. Good design is important, even if you don’t see it.

The obvious solution is to make these messages visible to those who want it, but disabled by default.

I thought that’s how Macs used to work, but maybe I’m thinking of a MacOS boot mode.

> Well, “significant number” is nevertheless a tiny minority.

May tiny, but tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands is still "significant" in any sense of the word.

> Also, minimising what I’m saying by using diminutive language - “messages makes my computer unpretty” - is lazy.

Like how you're minimising the importance of technical users?

Lets not forget that it is primarily technical users who buy macbooks; developers, designers, etc.

I’m not minimising the importance of technical users. I’m just saying that ugly POST messages aren’t helpful to most people. Hell, I’m technical and I don’t miss them.

I’m not sure about your point that mostly technical users buy MacBooks, since they don’t show POST messages. Doesn’t that suggest I’m right?

Hiding information and making it harder to fix things yourself is what makes computing inaccessible. A black box computing appliance that you can’t fix or work on is less accessible, not more.

If my POST fails, and the machine actually surfaces status information during the tests, I'll try to fix it.

It's absolutely fine that you don't want to go through that, and just want a professional to fix things. But I'm sick of manufacturers (like Apple) taking options away from me. I don't want a hermetically sealed appliance where I can't replace the RAM or SSD or whatever when something goes wrong or I want to upgrade.

Let's ignore the benefit it gives to anyone who wants to solve their problem quickly instead of having to take a round trip to the mall.

It gives information to third party shops so they can fix your computer. Which provide competition and give you the option to save money, and impose competitive pressure on the OEM to charge more reasonable prices for repairs, which benefits you even if you still patronize the OEM's store.

is this... serious?

Absolutely serious. What do you want me to do? I’m uninterested in fixing it myself.

To be clear: I don’t have an opinion about whether or not POST is technically necessary. It is or it isn’t, whatever. I’m just responding to the commentary that somehow Apple’s approach to POST is wrong and that POST messages are somehow important in and of themselves.

Just because POST messages float your boat doesn’t mean that they’re necessary or critical, and I for one am happy with them out of my life.

You can ignore the messages if you want, but you can't learn from something that you can't see.