"Failed to Enable Personal Hotspot on iPhone" – finally, a solution

Some of my older Macs running High Sierra or Mojave were unable to join the Personal Hotspot of one or even two of my iPhones.

I searched the Apple "Community" Support forums and found several related questions, with lots of "I have the same issue" tags, but with no helpful answer:

• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8153026
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8337291
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254471591

So I did figure this out on my own.

If you get this error when trying to connect from your Mac to the Personal Hotspot of your iPhone, try the following for a fix:

 There is a file called "com.apple.airport.preferences.plist" in the folder "/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration".

 If you cannot locate it directly, use a tool to find it, e.g. with my program Find Any File (no need to pay for it if you only use it once - just download it).

Then make a back-up of the file, in case you get it wrong below! For instance, copy the file to your Desktop.

Then you have two options:

1. Delete this file. But that will also reset all your network interfaces, e.g. if you had set up a LAN connection with a fixed IP address or made other configurations in the System Preferences' Network panel. And after deleting it, you need to restart the Mac so that it sets up the network interfaces again. Then try to connect to the phone again.
2. If you're more adept, edit the file, e.g. with the app PrefEdit or BBEdit, then find all entries that mention "phone", and remove those. After saving the changes, you should be able to reconnect to the phone without even requiring a restart.

If something went wrong, copy the backed-up file back into the folder (you'll have to enter your admin password).

Good luck!

iTunes 11 modal alert dialog overflow

Do you tend to show modal dialogs to show issues to the user when processing his data? Well, think twice, or you might end up upsetting your users like Apple manages with iTunes 11.

See here for a screen recording I created when trying to update my iOS apps after about a week from the last update.

Blogger was supposed to show a video box here,

but that doesn't seem to work.

Instead, watch the video here (Youtube)

Or here (Quicktime)

Admittedly I am suffering from iTunes 11 more than most users because I have two iTunes accounts: A German and a U.S. account. And I have downloaded iOS apps from both accounts. This leads to iTunes wanting to update all apps for both accounts at the same time, even if it only shows me the German updates.

However, before iTunes 11, this was still manageable. iTunes 11 made this much worse.

Also, there are other alerts in there that even the usual Apple customers with just one iTunes account might experience, such as the late-appearing "age restriction" notice that pauses downloading, and messages about problems with particular apps without naming those apps.

Overall, iTunes 11 does this all plain terribly. Apple used to excel at good user interfaces. Nowadays, I get the impression they take the kids right from college, let them work on these programs with no supervision from anyone who still has a clue about how to avoid such bad user experiences.

(I've also reported this to Apple via their bugreporter, see http://www.openradar.me/15350892)