Apple's Time Zone Catastrophe

In "apple conflates time zone and time offset in the middle of MacOS", we learned about conceptual muddle around time zones and offsets in MacOS's settings.

Since then, I have set the Time Zone to St John's Newfoundland.  In the process, I learned just how primitive Apple's "MacOS" software is.

I unchecked "Set time zone automatically using your current location".  I clicked in "Closest city" and started typing.  I was going for St John's.  After a few letters, there were no matches in the interactive matching.  I hit return anyway, and got the following:

As if to validate its claim that an extension process had "exited", the depicted pane remained completely empty after I dismissed the "dialog" "box".

I turned off and on again the settings window, and researched the topic.  Apparently you have to type it exactly to match what it's expecting, or it doesn't match and crashes.  In this case. I had to type "St. Joh[..]", with the dot and space.  Then I could choose St. John's.

This is a basic function, in 2026, of one of the world's most successful and "engineered" operating systems.  This is where we got to.

p.s. my Casio F-91W handles timezones far better than this, by not handling them at all.  You just press some buttons to set the time now and then.

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