Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks TIP: Startup Mode Diagrams

I just came across these charts of boot options for Intel Macs and M1 Macs you might want to include in your personal "Knowledge Base".

Many thanks for those links!

Apple's related support pages aren't nearly as easy to follow, and considering their interface guidelines, they've long been seriously remiss in not posting them as diagrams.

It all depends on how your mind works. Graphically or textually. Left brain or right. Software developers tend to be predominantly left brain oriented so it is not surprising Apple's documentation is textually dominant. Those diagrams come from Apple users on a graphics oriented web site which implies a far more right brain orientation.

Abstractly, that makes sense, but as a real life situation, I can't think of a single instance in which a procedure that involves options and is presented as a graphic would be more clear as text.

The idea of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines - although this instance may be considered outside of their purview - should be to coddle Mac users, not Mac developers.

A observation my Operations Research professor made comes to mind, In all my years of experience I have yet to find anyone who could even remotely challenge that remark. Similar to McGillicudy's (SP?) corollary to Murphy's law I would add my corollary to Klaus' Observation
NOTE: Klaus' Observation is why software developers often hire platoons of English Literature majors to write the user documentation. The problem is the English Lit majors don't fully understand the software (or the software developers) and by the time they have learned enough to understand they have too often begun thinking like the software developers. 🤯

In that case, the best approach to the problem may be for Apple to add a third "Helpful?" option which specifically asks about presentation of content to the bottom of their support pages.

The locus of people who can both discern the need for clarity and envision the necessary formatting or, as the case may be, write the appropriate English is users.

Let the developers and English majors muddle their way through the documentation and pass it on to the "real experts" for polishing.