O. M. G. Apple just screwed up my day. Completely.
The truth is I both love and hate Apple. I love the slickness and polish of their products but I often feel like I'm in some kind of abusive relationship where the company often winds up coercing me into do things that I either don't want to do or would prefer to do at some other time. The upgrade to Yosemite underlines the problem I have with Apple.
I got into the habit of using Pages, which, as a word processor, is just OK despite its flaws (for example, you can't paste text with URLs that's been copied from, say, a Web page without losing the links). Then OS X Mavericks upgraded Pages for me. After that Pages informed me that it couldn't retrieve documents from iCloud because of "compatibility" issues which meant I had to upgrade to OS X Yosemite!
May the system architects at Apple be visited by a plague of boils.
Now I had the Yosemite upgrade downloaded and ready to roll but I was putting it off until I had some time when I wouldn't be using my iMac. Pages not being able to access iCloud pushed me over the edge ...
Yes, I could have got the documents by browsing and downloading them from iCloud but, I foolishly thought, why not get the upgrade done? After all, how long could it take? An hour? Oh, what a fool I was (no, you really don't have to agree with me).
At around 10:30AM I clicked the button and the upgrade started. I answered questions and when it appeared there were no more I went out to lunch and got back to find the OS loading. Unfortunately the boot process appeared to have got hung up.
What to do? I tried putting stickies on the screen so I could come back later and see if the load bar had moved even some tiny amount but parallax caused to the thickness of the glass made this an unreliable measure.
I was, of course, nervous about just shutting the machine down and but after about 20 minutes I couldn't stand it any longer and hit the power switch.
Much to my surprise, success! On restart the boot process finished and then the system spent the better part of an hour doing mysterious stuff. Then Pages demanded another update!
May Apple marketing be plagued by locusts.
The entire process was completed around 4PM whence I was able to resume work ... a total of five and a half hours after starting.
While I like Yosemite so far and haven't come across any problems since everything settled down I do wish that the upgrade process had been easier. It would be nice to have a hands-off upgrade and it would be nice if the boot screen showed some kind of activity indication other than the load bar so that if the damn thing is frozen you'd have a clue.
But my real complaint is that Apple organized updates apparently to force users to upgrade which, given not all users will want to upgrade and not all apps they use have been re-engineered to be Yosemite compatible, is arguably not the wisest path.
So, as I said at the beginning, my love-hate relationship with Apple continues. For today, it's a pox on their house.