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Mojave

Fix a “could not complete your purchase” App Store error

I've been having an odd issue with the Mac App Store app on my Mojave-running iMac: Sometimes the App Store app will fail to install an update for some app. When that happens, I see a dialog with this text as the title:

We could not complete your purchase.

Below that is a single word, "cancelled," and that's all. Searching the web, I came across this thread on stackexchange.

What finally worked for me was a combination of things listed there—none of these steps on their own seem to fix the problem, but all together do, at least until it occurs again.

  1. Quit the App Store app.
  2. Switch my DNS to another provider.
  3. In Terminal, paste this command and press Return:
    open "$TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.appstore/"
  4. Confirm that the Finder opened a window to the com.apple.appstore folder, then drag everything there to the trash.
  5. Back in Terminal, paste this line and press Return: killall -9 appstoreagent
  6. Relaunch the App Store app.

This method has worked for me each time I've had this issue. It's annoying that it keeps recurring, but at least the fix is relatively simple.



Feeling the (Mail) squeeze in Mojave

My new iMac runs Mojave; my old iMac never moved off High Sierra, which I felt was a fine version of macOS. Now that I have no choice but to use Mojave full time (I have it on my laptop for work purposes), I'm finding some annoying changes. Amongst those annoyances, this one is—by far—the most annoying…

That's a set of messages in Mail, as viewed in Classic View mode (using San Francisco Display at 15pt on both Macs).

Somewhere in Apple, someone thought it'd be a great idea to reduce the line spacing in Mail—only when using Classic View, which is my forever-preferred view. Maybe they're doing this to force us to upgrade to the modern view?

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2018 MacBook Air versus some of its aged predecessors

I recently purchased a new 2018 13" MacBook Air—my first new Mac laptop in over five years. My hope is that this machine can replace two aging laptops: A 2013 13" Retina MacBook Pro (I use this when I want more "power" or screen resolution) and a 2012 11" MacBook Air (I use this when I want portability).

Reviews of this machine are all over the net, so I'm not even going to attempt a full review. If you want an in-depth review of the machine, go read Six Colors' review, or The Verge's review or Wired's review…or just start with Macrumors' round-up of reviews and go from there.

Instead of a full review, I'll provide some brief thoughts on the machine, then move on to my main focus: The performance changes in Apple's smallest laptops from 2012 to today, based on comparisons between my three machines. I was interested in how this would turn out, as the two older Macs are both Core i7 CPUs, versus the Core i5 in the new Air. There's lots out there to read about how the 2018 Air compares to other current machines, or semi-new machines…but I thought it might be interesting to see how performance has changed in five-plus years.

But first, my thoughts on the new Air…

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