I posted this so people that know what they are doing, have the problem, and want to see if this fixes it on their system can give it a go. Even though it didn’t work on my M2 mini, I DID get Express to work on this M4.
This is what was installed yesterday at the Apple Store. Interesting that ‘RosettaUpdateAuto’ was installed, that was the ‘mystery install’ that happened.
Something triggered that to install, and I downloaded that package, to see if it makes any difference.
It didn’t, or the updater programs aren’t the same for some reason.
And you can download the RosettaUpdateAuto package by following these instructions:
And you find the version of your macOS by going to About This Mac, then More Info…, then System Report (scroll down), and click on Software. At the top it will show the major version, and the release version. 18.55 is release 24F74. Search for that, and above that you will see a line ‘ULR<key.>’. Below that, copy the URL that begins with HTTPS, and ends in “pkg”, but only between those two parts, and paste that into your browser and the file will download. Double click it and it will start the installer. After it’s done, reboot and try it again.
Now the only thing that I changed on the notebook was a setting in Privacy and Security. There is a section after the Security section titled “Accessories”; I set it to ‘Always ask’. It’ll popup and disappear on occasion, but when it pops up, click ‘Allow’. That is the only thing that I changed after the erase/reinstall of macOS. (And it still works on this notebook, amazingly enough)
There also seems to be enough blame to go around for this. If it is a Rosetta issue, why doesn’t Rosetta fire the install more consistently, and why doesn’t the command line install apparently work properly. On the other side, why doesn’t Garmin have an Apple Silicone version of Express, or at least handle whatever is missing better.
The error message ‘This device isn’t compatible with Express’ seems to be the answer when the programmers don’t want to figure out what the problem was. It could also be the default answer when the connection dance doesn’t complete, ignoring potentially a lot of issues and giving a non-answer. (I remember seeing ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for’ in an macOS error log, and a third level engineer laughed: ‘That’s the message when we either can’t identify the problem, or don’t want or don’t have to know what it was’. Basically ‘Something bad just happened and we don’t know/care’. Nice, cute, but not at all usable. Programmers…