Last week’s outstanding news was the discovery of a potential treatment for Huntington’s disease, that killed Woodie Guthrie at the age of 55, a tragedy I learned of from his son Arlo’s movie Alice’s Restaurant (1969).

That treatment is so complex that even James Gallagher’s diagrammatic account doesn’t do it justice, but it provides a much clearer picture than some of the treatment offered for our Macs. Although in a different league, our novel treatment of the week is Device Recovery Assistant, as I showed here on Friday. It’s sufficiently new that Apple hasn’t quite gone firm on what to call it. Its sole account refers to it as Recovery Assistant, in accordance with the menu command used to open the app in Recovery mode. But when it’s running, it claims to be Device Recovery Assistant, which sounds like it might also be good for your iPhone or iPad, but isn’t. That’s a similar feature added to iOS and iPadOS 26, as explained here.

I’m still a little wary of magic healing tools in Recovery mode. The first is there even now, waiting to catch those who’ve taken AI a little too seriously, and think running repairHomePermissions might be a good idea. Whatever you do, please don’t try this one at home, as its effects can be devastating. I now only run it in a disposable virtual machine, as reversing its changes would be so time-consuming.

In Recovery mode, typing repairHomePermissions into Terminal launches a GUI app to ‘repair permissions’ in a selected Home folder in the Data volume. Far from repairing them, each time I have tried this it locks me out of every folder in my Home folder and wreaks havoc elsewhere. Yet somehow this historical remnant has been left behind in Recovery mode to catch the unwary.

(Device) Recovery Assistant doesn’t appear to do anything so disastrous, but Apple is completely opaque as to what it actually does. Even its description for macOS 26 beta testing used the same words, “Recovery Assistant is a new way to recover your device if it doesn’t start up normally. It can look for problems and attempt to resolve them if found.”

Just what “issues” can it discover, and how might it attempt to “resolve” them? One thing I can report is that it doesn’t attempt to repair the damage done by repairHomePermissions, and doesn’t see anything wrong with a user not having permissions to access their own folders. Maybe it isn’t that smart yet.

One small clue given by Apple is that it can leave your iCloud connection in need of a further recovery process run when back in normal user mode. Once again, though, information is lacking as to what that does, and why it might be needed.

Of course, if your Mac does have an appropriate problem that prevents it from starting up normally, and it instead puts itself into Recovery Assistant, you have little option but to give it a whirl and hope that it fixes whatever was causing the problem. But why might you want to run Recovery Assistant voluntarily from Recovery mode? Is this something worth doing for specific reasons, or is it just a universal panacea?

With Apple silicon Macs, we’re running out of panaceas. If you don’t know of a specific fix for a problem, most of the old tricks such as resetting NVRAM and SMC, repairing permissions, installing the Combo updater, and re-installing macOS have either become impossible or demonstrably futile. We’re currently left with the innocuous procedure of starting up in Safe mode, and quickly run out of ideas after that.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that Recovery Assistant is a placebo, but until we know more about it, neither can it be a new panacea.

If your Mac starts up in this new Recovery Assistant, or you use it manually in Recovery mode, please let us know what happened and whether it did resolve your problem.