Hacker News Reader

This. The thing that made the MacOS ecosystem worth the pain and sacrifice was the quality and things "just working". What I don't understand is Apple has more than 10 times the developer resources they had 10 years ago yet quality has gone backwards. Do you really need to be a Stalin to ensure your company makes quality software?

They're stuck conforming to an artificial schedule of once a year major releases. They won't let themselves take the time they need to get things right anymore. It's no surprise quality has gone down.

Quality usually don't go up when releasing less frequently, quite the opposite. The more you change things, the more likely you are to have severe bugs. When Apple was releasing major OS upgrades less frequently, you usually had to wait until a .4 or .5 point upgrade to have something usable.

The first release of macOS Sierra (10.12.0) was vastly more usable than the first release of MacOS X Snow Leopard (10.6.0). I should know: I transitioned to Snow Leopard on release and practically nothing was running on it. I think it's the only time in my life I reverted to the previous version of macOS... It didn't prevent Snow Leopard to become one of the best OS, in the end.

The problem is that Apple is shipping things that aren't right/ready, but this should be independent from the release schedule.

At least they had time to reach that .4 or .5 version. Now they pop out a new one before the old one is fixed, and we're stuck in a never-ending cycle of suck.

I think their scale is actually a part of the problem. They try to act like a small company but they aren't anymore, and it's working against them.

I grew up with Windows, switched to to OSX and got an iphone 6 years ago, it was amazing. Apple made me love my job, programming on my MBP was awesome. Now it's exactly that, no added advantage, but regressions. Same on iOS in my opinion. Time to move on.

Move on to what though? Windows 10 is never up to date for me. Linux decides to reinvent the UI paradigm every couple of years or are still running X for maximum battery usage

I tried Windows 10 for a couple of weeks and while it was better than I expected it's still a mess.

The short version is that the Windows ecosystem is plagued by legacy software (even Windows itself).

As a daily windows user I'd say the main problem is hidpi support. It can't do mixed dpi environments properly, which is the typical experience when you use a (hidpi) laptop combined with an external monitor. Microsoft blames this on legacy software, but even office doesn't work properly.

A secondary issue are forced updates breaking things, which i've had on two of my 4 windows laptops so far. Finally, the mess of legacy and new settings screens is annoying, but once setup it doesn't matter much, so it only affects the first-run experience.

Aside from those i think w10 is nice. I wouldn't mind replacing my mini with a windows machine, and if apple doesn't update it soon i probably will.

It's a challenge. Given that most of my work is operations for Linux systems, containers, Kubernetes - either to bare metal in my garage, AWS or GCE, it could be (reasonably) argued that maybe I should be running that on my local system.

I just got the Kaby Lake XPS 13 Developer Edition. If you want to be cutting edge and "refined", you'll have issues. By cutting edge I mean things like:

XPS13DE ships with Ubuntu 16.04, kernel 4.4. Switching to an external DP/TB3 monitor kernel panics. Switching to 16.10, kernel 4.8 makes Network Manager unhappy.

Using the Kensington SD4600P dock I bought (because the Dell docks are, to all reviews, horrible, and buggy), you can't run multiple displays except through Windows - OS X, Linux, ChromeOS can only drive one.

Not major issues, to be sure - but they do challenge where I want to be, a 'just works' experience (that I -used- to have with Apple, but less and less so recently), neat and polished (it is so nice to just put my laptop in a vertical dock at my desk, plug in a single USB C and get:

- power to my laptop

- 4K DP

- external keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc

all from that one little cable.

There haven't been any significant UI paradigm changes in Linux desktops for quite a few years. They've become boring technology, for the better.

That's good to hear. I used to enjoy the GNOME2 and KDE2 and 3.5 days but after that I switched to Mac OSX (as it was then). I am now running macOS and Windows 10 but with a Linux console box (WindowMaker on VNC, classic eh) but don't feel a strong desire to switch back after my attempts with Unity and GNOME3. XFCE is still there I suppose.

I'm glad they're settling into boredom - I just want to get stuff done without faffing around. Gone are my days of ndiswrapper for fun and XFree86Config for kicks. Actually, they're probably long-gone for a lot of people....

Does sleep/resume work?

> I used to use Exposé all the time, now I don't because everything slows to a crawl when I activate it.

Too true. I just tried opening Mission Control on a maxed-out MacBook Pro with Sierra and it took 7 seconds. It's a shame that Snow Leopard isn't compatible with most toolchains now.

Really? what are you running? Base 13" MBP here running ubuntu vm in virtual box, slack, Xcode, iPhone sim, safari, iTunes, messages, calendar, 1password and vs code, plugged into an external 4k display along with the internal one (Both at scaled resolutions) and it opens in less than a second. It definitely drops frames but that is more on the intel gpu trying to push so many pixels.

I will say Snow Leopard was by far the peak of OS X stability (And with that, probably the best OS I have ever used) but Sierra is far from being bad or unusable for me.

That's roughly what I'm running + some Adobe CC apps and a half-dozen Chrome windows. I believe the difference is the cached v. uncached performance of Mission Control; after the initial (really really long) loading time it's fine, but once enough windows need to be re-rendered it freezes up.

That's at least 6 seconds slower than a 2010 MacBook Air running Sierra. It might be worth watching Activity Monitor when you open it to see whether you have something like swapping or simply I/O issues loading all of the icons – high latency is a common indicator that a storage device is about to fail.

Most of my Sierra pain comes from plugging/unplugging my 27" Cinema Display on a 2013 MBP. Have to reboot to get them to sync again. In frustration I told my wife, "It's like XP all over again." (Not really but it's indeed a major pain to have a workflow that worked flawlessly for a decade to suddenly stop working.)

Both of the problems you mentioned sound like previously undetected hardware issues or possibly an issue with a kernel extension. Sierra, like its predecessors back to 10.0, does not need to be restarted except for updates in normal usage – but the symptoms you describe are characteristic examples of a hardware failure (halting animations suggests it's not I/O but something like the CPU/GPU or a kernel extension). Similarly, enabling FileVault is a reliable process which doesn't cause disk corruption but since it accesses the entire disk it sometimes exposes pre-existing corruption.

I would start by checking the logs to see whether there's anything obviously failing, running the hardware diagnostics (reboot while holding down the D key – https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201257), and then uninstalling all of the apps which you mentioned that require privileged access since at least Karabiner and Little Snitch are kernel extensions and third-party kexts are notorious sources of bugs for months after a new OS X release.

I've experienced these UI hangs. It's the OS reacting poorly to memory pressure.

Parts of the UI hanging can be memory pressure (or, at least in the past, things like network issues with e.g. LDAP or network home directories) but I've never seen that halt animations, mouse motion, or stop the clock from updating.

I do agree that Apple needs to get better at I/O scheduling – even with an SSD the experience is less responsive than BeOS was on 90s PC hardware — but the animation loop has typically been a reliable diagnostic cue in my experience for distinguishing between swapping / disk failure and other issues.

> I've never seen that [memory pressure] halt animations, mouse motion, or stop the clock from updating.

This is exactly what I've seen. If I catch it early enough and can get the UI to respond to me tabbing to the terminal, I can kill Safari's web content processes or whatever it is that's leaking memory and it goes away.

The only thing I've seen stop the clock (besides SystemUIServer itself hanging) is a forkbomb. But even that didn't stop the cursor. If the cursor is stopping, that indicates something more serious is going on.

Seen this on a family member's Mac. It ground to a halt in exactly the same way computers have for ages when too much virtual memory is being used.

I think what's happened is that every single developer at Apple has SSDs on their work and home computers so they get wasteful with memory. When iPhoto needs 150% memory to update an index you're not even going to notice that with an SSD, but with an HDD the system can freeze up.

This will eventually resolve itself once every computer has a SSD, but in the meantime the existing Macs with HDDs will be a mess.

I see memory pressure cause even SSD-equipped Macs grind to a halt in this way.

I am not sure what you're doing different, but the exact opposite is true for me. I don't reboot my computer unless some update from work forces me to. I run a bunch of programs all the time. Here is my laptop currently and this isn't even the highest, I've gone much longer than this on both my work and personal laptops. Both are regularly connected/disconnected to big displays too.

$ uptime 13:41 up 38 days, 17:01, 6 users, load averages: 2.21 2.01 2.01

And the “modern” incarnation of Exposé is an example of the lack of polish that many people now see from Apple. Since the beginning of the Mac, the menu bar was the “safe spot” for dragging (if you started a drag by mistake, you could always throw the mouse at the top of the screen and drop safely — nothing would happen). The modified Mission Control breaks this now; if you drag just a bit further than you intended, the whole desktop goes away and now you have an even bigger problem: not only is there no “safe” spot to drop, your accidental drag can now create even more chaos by moving objects onto entirely different screens!

Smart user interfaces are practically invisible, created by dozens of tiny accommodations for each situation. The Mac is starting to lose that fit and finish.

I would look for hardware errors - I haven't had to reboot my MBP outside of system updates since back when Mavericks had buggy graphics drivers. And I have all kinds of crap running.

I used to get this as well. Disabling Spotlight seemed to fix it.

Yeah but then I wouldn't be able to search my emails with Apple Mail so it's not really a solution either...

Indeed, it wasn't completely pain free, but it was a better alternative to rebooting several times a day.

Same here. Even worse, the issue happened so frequently that I had to reinstall a fresh copy of Sierra. Frustrating!

Downgrade to El Capitan