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Panic: no external boot disk

THE INTRODUCTION OF completely novel hardware inevitably brings the unexpected when some people among the millions of new users do things that the engineers hadn’t anticipated. One failing in M1 Macs is the common situation in which an external startup disk is removed when that Mac is shut down.

If that disk was selected as the startup disk and is nowhere to be found when the Mac next boots, the result is total catastrophe; it panics, causing another boot, which leads to another panic, and so on until you force it to shut down, then start it up in Recovery.

It shouldn’t be hard for the firmware to cope with this by entering Recovery in the first place and letting you choose an available startup disk, but Apple still hasn’t fixed this in the eight months since it started delivering these new Macs to users.

> More information in list views

In the Finder’s List View, I can choose to display additional information such as duration for some folders but not others. How can I extend that to any folder?

Some designated folders such as Music can show you additional information about files when seen in the Finder’s List view.

The Finder’s list views can be customized to show info about files in certain folders. To try this, open one of the specially designated folders in your Home folder, such as Movies, Music or Pictures, and show it as a list. Ctrl– click in the header bar of the window to see the column menu, and there are special properties shown below the divider, such as Dimensions and Duration. These are controlled in the Finder preferences file, and aren’t something you can readily customize. The Finder uses the folder name to determine which of several suites of properties to offer in that menu. For example, name a folder in Documents as Movies, and its list view properties will resemble those in your standard Movies folder. You can get this to stick even when that folder’s name changes again, and that’s one way of effectively adding properties to the lists elsewhere. This is different from the categories listed as Information below the thumbnail shown when a file’s selected in column view, which is determined by the file’s type and set in the same Finder prefs file.