years ago I watched a very senior engineer refuse to use an IDE debugger because “real understanding means doing it in your head.” He was brilliant - and also spent two days chasing a bug a junior fixed in 10 minutes by setting a breakpoint. The junior didn’t understand more; he just had a better tool for that moment.
Tools don’t make you wiser or lazier by default — they amplify whatever habits you already have. If you’re using them to avoid thinking, that shows. If you’re using them to explore faster, that shows too.
Beginner’s mind isn’t about ignorance; it’s about being willing to try leverage where it exists.
DFU the protocol isn’t the issue — the ambiguity is around which physical port actually exposes DFU at boot, and that seems to vary by SoC variant (base vs Pro/Max), not just by chassis. The docs don’t make that distinction clear.
The fact that switching ports fixes the issue strongly suggests boot-ROM-level port routing differences. macOS wouldn’t have visibility there anyway, which explains the lack of diagnostics — but it also means the docs/UX are doing too much hand-waving.
This reads less like “DFU is broken” and more like a documentation gap that only shows up in recovery flows — exactly where precision matters most.
