steveu75 wrote:
I asked the system engineer to provide a definition of what an error code meant. He said it was against Apple policy.
They are just telling you what you will accept. People accept the idea that Apple has these draconian policies and everything is super-secret. They may rant and rave, but that's fine. They accept it. They won't accept the truth.
You are going to tell me something went wrong but not tell me what went wrong.
I asked him to request a list of what error codes meant from engineering and he said he could not.
So now I know that something is wrong, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to fix it.
You're doing a lot better than we are! We have no idea what problem you are having.
How in the year 2024 are we still using error codes?
What does the year matter? Much of the code that is running your devices was written 20 years ago. The code that was written back then was the same kind of code that had been written 20 years earlier. And much of this code is using practices that the best minds is Computer Scientist had proclaimed "harmful" 20 years before that.
When something goes wrong tell me in English what went wrong and make recommendations on how I can fix it.
That's difficult, time consuming, and literally no one ever does it. Plus, the operating system is localized in lots of languages, which is a real can-o-worms when it comes to technical computing terms that actually don't exist in most other languages.
What do I do with an error code of 100067 or how about 8062.
Error code 100067 means "too many processes". Error code -8062 is more of a general purpose error. Could mean anything.
Showing any of these low-level error codes to the end user is, itself, an error. It actually should do as you want and give you a meaningful description of the problem and how to resolve it. But that's an ideal example of error handling that literally no programmer ever does.
Is my file system corrupt is, iCloud not working?
It would be best to start with a description of the problem you are experiencing. Describe what you are attempting to do, what you expected to see happen, and then contrast that with what actually did happen.
I guess Apple can't help me according to this Engineer.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that you have not talked to any Apple engineer. You are far more likely to experience an engineer giving you a meaningful error handling experience than ever communicating with one. You were just talking to Apple support and they were reading from a script. That's the way it works.
Does anyone know somewhere where error codes are defined.
They are probably defined in some header file. As a developer myself, I have those header files somewhere on my computer. You can just Google them. It's all out there. But they're meaningless. Software is very complicated. When something fails, the detection of the error is typically going to happen at a very low level. That is where the error code first arises. In a simplistic error handling scenario (i.e. all of them), that error will just be bubbled up and reported. The logic where it occurred is likely some general-purpose routine used for many different operations. It would be very difficult to identify the exact cause, at just the exact location, and tell you that. And since nobody likes to do difficult things, it doesn't get done. Most operations are successful. So there is a strong disincentive to do any kind of error reporting during the rare cases when something goes wrong.
Maybe you could share that with Apple support so that they might actually be able to help their customers.
Would you have felt better about your Apple support experience if they had told you what I just did? As I said before, it's complicated. You probable understand these details better than the Apple support person that you talked to.
It's all quite messy. We are here to help. If you describe the problem with your computer, we will do our best to help you fix it. We can't do anything about what Apple does or doesn't do. We also can't fix the code. But we may be able to tell you what the problem is and suggest ways to avoid it in the future. That's the best we can do.
