Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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!

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com