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Comment by carlosrg | Hacker News Reader

I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to mention the drop in performance and battery life and the discoveryd and Wifi problems last year. These were not isolated issues and a lot of people suffered them, I'd say in a much higher proportion than any first release of OS X since 10.0. At least the Ars Technica people are smart and recommend people to wait until 10.11.1 if they can (although last year Yosemite 10.10.1 didn't solve anything).

I have to chuckle when I see some reviews saying "UPDATE _RIGHT NOW_! THIS IS THE BEST OS EVER!". They said the same last year, what a coincidence. Personally, I feel that Yosemite 10.10.5 is very stable now, and I'll wait at least until 10.11.2 to upgrade, no matter how many times people tell me how wonderful El Capitan is.

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The thing is, I've had 3 different Macbooks, young and old (2011 MBP, retina MBP, macbook air), all on Yosemite, and had none of those issues.

It's not unreasonable to think the reviewers just didn't experience those issues.

That's true, but also kind of the point. If reviewers can't figure out a review process that illustrates the issues, how useful are they, really, other than a look at features?

That makes sense, but then would you expect them to test every configuration of every model that supports the OS they're reviewing?

I don't want to speak for spike021, but it is possible this is an edge case that is specific to carlosrg. If it was a localized issue specific to how the OS was installed or how that computers environment was set up, what can a reviewer do? There are as many programming environments as there are programmers. If a review can give as much insight as possible about how the subject changed from the previous version, as well as technical details I consider it a good review. If they themselves, have problems, it would be awesome if they include them as well as any other qualitative data. On balance, there will be subtle differences across hardware and software that can not be addressed in granular detail. The best way to get information is just to read several reviews, and see if any of those people had edgecases.

edit: wiredfool pointed this out above, as I was writing this. Having purchased 2 equally specked computers at the same time and experiencing differing results. After upgrading from MAvericks, I personally experienced significantly better battery life. I have edited launch daemons and blocked some outgoing connections which caused coreaudiod to go into an infinite loop using >80% of the cpu. This KILLED my battery and performance. After fixing this issue, both of those metrics were amazing.

This was a bug for which we know the root cause and for which a patch was actually developed. If it wasn't affecting you, I will argue it is more likely that you just have a high tolerance for these kinds of conflicts.

https://medium.com/@mariociabarra/wifried-ios-8-wifi-perform...

Interesting post. I had come across wifried in the past but didn't personally feel a need to use it. You definitely have a fair point that it could very well be a case of "out of sight, out of mind." Maybe not as noticeable for some people, especially since it's also possibly related to older hardware not supporting full AirDrop.

hmmm. I was referring to CPU and battery above but I looked into it a bit further. Also, connectivity is HORRIBLE on my iphone iOS 9.1 so thank you. I don't know how to confirm the wi-fi issues independently here.

I have gamecenter.app deleted, airdrop and bluetooth disabled and many of the sharing and push notification services are disabled. I have fairly decent connectivity and not much seems to change after disabling awdl0, a speedtest seems pretty similar.

I am now really interested. Is there a way I can run a better speedtest, and also check if these issues you describe are happening because it sounds as if it is sporadic. Also, is there a way to use something other than bonjour/mdnsresponder via wi-fi? I could not find anything which is why I still use it unfortunately.

edit: Also, almost forgot.

> This was a bug for which we know the root cause and for which a patch was actually developed.

What? I have seen issues surrounding coreaudiod but none of them are referenced in your post. The post actually explained the iOS connectivity issues I am having but doesn't seem related to a glitch in the core services daemon, which seems to affect some users, and was almost certainly self-inflicted. Now, I want to test my connectivity to confirm, but it seems alright most of the time.

It's incredibly difficult to figure out what portion of users experience a certain issue, especially for a very new (or even unreleased) OS, and especially for things like WiFi performance and battery life, which most users don't measure rigorously and thus may be imagining or exaggerating the problem.

So basically, are you expecting the reviewer to spend hours and hours of QA testing to try to find bug that the OEM didn't find during the pre-release test?

It seems obvious to me that a technical review will be pretty limited in term of "stability" evaluation. They will run a few tests, but it can't cover all the configurations. Especially things like the wifi issue which were mostly triggered depending on the network environment (what is your access point? What other devices are connected? etc.)

I would imagine the reviewer could have done some investigative journalism: put a call out for people having problems with the beta, collected stories, and set up configurations to try to reproduce those. Not just trusting what people say, but not going all the way to QA, either.

Ok, presented this way it sounds fair to me!

My wife and I have identical refurb Air 2012s, I bought mine with Mavericks, hers came with Yosemite. There's maybe a 6 month difference between them.

My battery life way better than hers. I'd suspect hardware, but the battery capacities check out ok. Hers just sucks the juice way faster than mine.

Odd. I'm guessing you both use them fairly similarly?

I'm not saying Yosemite is perfect; I'm sure there were problems with it at the start. To me, the original person I responded to seemed to kind of just make a blanket statement and I wanted to make sure it was known that there are counter-examples (based on anecdotal evidence anyway).

I'm not sure comparing refurbs is the best idea. While they do come with new batteries (I think), who knows what else could be quite different.

That would be a good question. They're identically spec'd machines of roughly the same age with batteries that are within 1% full charge capacity. They re both on the same wifi, Bluetooth is off. Display brightness varies, but neither is cranked, I'm not sure what else hardware wise could be seriously different.

The biggest difference is the os.

I will concede that usage varies, hers hits Facebook, mine Twitter. And I run virtualbox but she doesn't. We're both running safari, chrome and mail.

I have a 2014 MacBook Pro and had the Yosemite Wifi issues. And looking at the Apple forums a ton of other people had them too. It has become better (from totally unusable) but Wifi still cuts out from time to time.

I wonder if these problems were already apparent during the test phase.

I have no issues. Until I enable my Bluetooth mouse. Easily solved by using the 5ghz band but really. An apple mouse fucks up my connection from my apple laptop to my apple access point. That's really unacceptable.

Yeah, physics sucks.

Modern WiFi and Bluetooth hardware is meant to have coexistence support so that the two don't trample all over each other.

I have the same problem and apparently the laws of physics changed when Yosemite was released. Before it was fine.

I too had WiFi trouble when bluetooth was enabled. The commands below fixed it for me (it might be that only one was effective but I've had no trouble since Feb 7). YMMV.

sudo ifconfig awdl0 down

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser DisableAirDrop -boolean YES

Once Apple ditched DiscoverD, my wifi and bluetooth woes disappeared instantly. I had a problem where my connection speed suddenly would drop to no more that about 7k as second through wifi which required zapping the PRAM on my 2013 MacBook Pro until a week or so the connection would start exhibiting the same problems. mDNSresponder seems to work like a charm in Yosemite.

I never had any WiFi problems with Yosemite. The thing is, there are millions of people using macs and even if 0.1% have problems, forums will be swarmed by them.

I can say that I definitely experienced and experiencing laggy animations compared to mavericks. Launchpad animation is like 3-5 FPS and is very noticeable. But probably many people just don't care about that.

This is why I thought Apple joining the WiFi broad is a good thing. And from their hiring they will eventually make their own WiFi Chipset as well.

Because WiFi, right now SUCKS. The software and hardware together, the compatibility, all those optional features, Wave 1, Wave 2 etc.....

But the reason these issues do not exist is that Apple has full control over the hardware _and_ the operating system.

I've got the 10.11 GM running on my 2012 Mac Mini (Core i7) with spinning rust, and it has made such a huge improvement over 10.10 in terms of snappiness and how fast the entire OS feels.

It is a world of difference, to the point that I am happily using my Mac Mini for stuff again, whereas before I would avoid it as much as possible and instead reach for my MacBook Pro Retina to get anything done.

Doesn't happen to me. Nor to anyone I know.

Now, there was a trend with OSX releases that, until about Lion or so, every new release was faster and more optimized than the previous one. We are used to expect just the opposite, specially from competing operating systems.

I have not seen signs of that trend in the more recent releases.

> specially from competing operating systems.

Windows is getting faster on the same hardware since Vista (7 was faster than Vista, 8 was faster than 7 and 10 is faster than 8). Linux is difficult to judge here because of the variety of DEs, but it's not really slowing down with time either.

Newer iOS versions are slower on old hardware than older versions, and this is also more or less true for Windows Phone and Android.

I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to...

I think you are lying to yourself!

It's tough to hold out on major OS upgrades as they come up with a number of new app features and enhancements that are coupled with the OS.

Yes, I've regretted upgrading to Yosemite when 10.10.1 came out... First thing, Filevault managed to crash and corrupt my hard disk. Had to restore from my backups (not a huge issue but a waste of time).

Then, I cannot connect to either iphone or my wife iphone's hotspot without turning the wifi off first and then turning it on again. I have the same issue on both a macbook pro and a macbook (but didn't have that issue before Yosemite).

And in term of performance, my macbook pro is nowhere as performant even with the latest Yosemite update as it was before. I also have noticed a strange issue. On yosemite, whenever the battery reaches 5%, everything slows to a crawl...

I feel that the last really stable OS from Apple was Snow Leopard

That is the feature of Maverick too, that on 5% of battery, CPU goes into throttle mode.

It's still not clear to me what is the actual, working, non-broken procedure to clear the DNS cache on 10.10.5

Sadly a lot of reviews sound like iVerge these days - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA

Same here, Yosemite is the new Windows Vista ! I'm finally stable enough with 10.10.4 after many kernel panics, not gonna rush it to upgrade. I'll wait for 10.11.1.

El capitan seems promising though.

You are late. El Capitan GM which was released mid Sep to developers has been already marked as 10.11.1 (build 15B17c).

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