Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are frustrated by this issue alone, not to mention their apps breaking as a result of a 'forced' upgrade!
High Sierra has the same lack of 'internal polish' as iOS 11, and as a result, it's going to leave a lot of users scratching their heads in anger.
Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up (read: pay) a DVD :)
The driver I am on is this one but it looks like (as per above thread) there could be updates. http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/126538/en-...
Disclaimer: Check your device is compatible before trying to install any drivers from the above links :D
Also simple application drawing starts to fail too, I've encountered visual errors like this https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2... in multiple applications, Xcode's console/stdout window breaks often. Quite interesting features for a stable release indeed.
It has also fixed watchdog timer firing in the middle of the night and waking up to a fresh boot.
Unfortunately, I have some other fun regressions:
- Preview has become pretty much unusable. It crashes often when zooming PDFs. It also often doesn't linearly go through pages/slides when pressing the down key when a thumbnail is selected.
- The other day my MacBook Pro (2016) showed the charge icon, but it didn't actually charge. I noticed when it was at 5%. Unplugged and plugged the charger and it works again.
- Keynote doesn't open (some?) presentations produced with PDF2Keynote anymore. This worked fine in the previous version of Keynote.
Right now my WindowServer is only around 240 MB and I haven't rebooted in a couple of weeks. Not one visual error either.
(Memory is looking like:
app mem: 1.6G
wired mem: 1.9G
compressed mem: 1.8G
file cache: 1.0G
free: 2.5G
Each time I open one of those I see a memory drop of about 1G, but I run Memory Cleaner to keep an eye on it, and running a quick flush clears up about a gig with no performance drops.
That visual issue looks extreme! I've not had a single problem besides the odd program needing updated to be able to run.
I did wait until the first official release to upgrade the OS, though. I didn't grab the beta.
Did you guys install the beta first?
There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2) they want to use you as a beta tester 3) they want to ensure the integrity of their DRM ecosystem. It is the same reason that I am coerced into installing Sierra if I want to put a video on my iPad that they forced an iOS9 update onto (I would have to "upgrade" iTunes which requires that I update the OS).
Sadly, this has become a trend.
Otherwise, the only people who get the latest hardware are those who need to test or develop code on it, and that is a very small fraction of the total number of employees.
[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.... -- "[Steve] would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."
2) Apple has a beta program if you want to see what beta releases actually look like. What Apple is doing is releasing updates in a more agile fashion i.e. more frequent at the expense of longer test/fix iterations.
3) Apple has no DRM on the Mac and on iOS it isn't about rights management. It's purely about not allowing side loading of apps to ensure security and privacy.
4 There are plenty of ways to put videos on an iPad that doesn't require iTunes nor an OS update.
I've avoided upgrading to macOS High Sierra just to wait and see how it turns out. I'm less cautious with iOS, and am currently frustrated by two things in iOS 11:
1. The WiFi/Bluetooth radio behavior in Control Center (to compensate I use Siri to turn those off, but that's cumbersome too). The recent beta of 11.2 has a popup announcing the new behavior, and that sounds like a terrible idea by itself. Instead of giving more control to the users, Apple, for my needs, has made a terrible decision on this one. (Of course, I have read comments from other people who actually like this new behavior).
2. The bloat in the OS, which causes terrible lag in different screens (including Settings) when it's running on last year's device (an iPhone 7). I don't play games or do video editing and other activities that might need more RAM. My usage has been the same as it was on iOS 10, but the device is sometimes a pain to use. I'd expect such slowness in a device that's three or four years old, since Apple doesn't seem to optimize for older devices, but last year's device??? I've restarted the phone, reset it, updated to the latest .x version as soon as it's been released, but nothing has helped (my flash storage is less than half used - so it's not that either).
Overall, I guess I'm just echoing what some others have said over the last few years - the software quality and "it just works" mantra that Apple used to take pride in is gone. If anyone in Apple were to ask me what it should focus on, I'd suggest something like two releases on the lines of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which was primarily under-the-hood changes to optimize things and make it better and faster. I'm certain iOS needs this kind of effort badly.
FWIW, I've also provided this feedback to Apple at apple.com/feedback and I'd suggest others who're concerned or have issues do the same.
This is either an engineering decision (let's just focus our efforts on the latest thing) -- but then optimizing the whole iOS would speed up ALL of the devices, wouldn't it?; an economic decision justified as an engineering one (who cares about the old devices? let's just sell them a new one); or incompetence.
Apple supports OSX 10.13 on seven year old devices and iOS on four year old devices. And the only reason they don't support it longer is because older devices aren't 64-bit. If it was an economic decision they would just match Android's support lifetimes.
Also I use a 17 inch 2011 every day and it's just as fast as it ever was.
You and those people would be completely wrong. The quality has been about the same.
What you are doing is remembering OS releases when they were at the end of their cycle e.g. 10.4.11 instead of remembering them at the start. Right now we are at iOS 11.1 and OSX 10.13.1 i.e. the buggiest these releases will have ever been.
Part of me misses updates like Snow Leopard where the only reason I wanted it was because it saved 7GB of HD space and improved performance. I would 100% buy OS updates that all they did was optimize existing code.
I'm sure High Sierra includes plenty of lower-level improvements too, but I fail to see why a photos app isn't an optional add on or distinct app from the app store, especially when the OS download is over 5 GB and done in the background without asking. Maybe I'm just a purist, but I'd like my OS to focus on system stuff rather than application stuff.
How about a brand new filesystem?
Because OSX has always shipped with applications. In fact every OS does.
I honestly see why normal users never want to upgrade anything, for any reason. The first 5K iMac I used was an upgrade nightmare: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/01/01/5k-retina-imac-and-mac-os... . Many of the x.0.0 OS X / MacOS releases have edge-case bugs and one gets in return minimal user-visible functionality improvements. So why bother?
Side note, it's annoying that Apple ties app updates to OS updates. One of the big selling points this time seems to be the new photo app stuff, like you can't just release that for everyone?
/rant
It isn't the company that feels the need to stay relevant, it's the UI designers & developers. They have to keep changing thins to justify their existence.
It's still about people being relevant to people. Just internally instead of externally.
Personally, I abhor this continuous churn too; I'm a developer myself, but I'd rather spend the time to fix small things and in general drive towards that asymptotic stability than attempt huge breaking changes in the fashionistic sense.
Every time something improves something else gets worse.
Except in Linux and maybe mobile OSes. Latest Android or iOS is objectively better, even with things that regressed.
I hope Apple and Microsoft will start to realize many of their customers see the OS as the layer for getting things done, and not as an end to itself. Annual, or semi-annual, feature updates are not fun, waste time with a slow install, and the features are frequently unwanted. And with the lack of QA in both companies, each major update brings a whole host of new bugs.
MacOS? Always innovating with new "features" like APFS. Are they truly making the OS easier to use in some novel way for non technical users? Are they improving things for technical users? I know technology changes and APFS is supposed to make SSDs better, but... the general sentiment is just what you stated.
My iPhone 4 used to work great with a given OS. All it needed was security updates for 3+ years, instead after about 2 the latest updated was unusable. iOS "improvements" were very hit and miss. Some were good, some were not. I do not mind mobile OS improving as much though.... that hardware has still been improving rapidly offering much better features so the more rapid OS updates kind of make sense there in terms of supporting the latest hardware.
But laptops? What has changed.....
The f* touch bar? The amazing keyboard? The Retina display?
Only one of those was a real innovation and it has been supported for a long time.
/extra_rant
uncheck "Download newly available updates in the background" in the App Store section of your computer's Control Panel.
The only option enable for me is "system data file and security updates".
BTW, if someone doesn't want to use terminal. It's possible to control all App Store downloads/install behavior on "System Preferences" > "App Store".
Sometimes it fails to recognize one of my two external monitors, and when I wake it from screen saver or screen off (energy saver, but with laptop still running), it flashes the three displays a while and fumbles around trying to decide what goes where before _finally_ allowing me to unlock. And after I unlock, all my windows have been rearranged and shoved onto one display.
I find no improvement or redeeming value in High Sierra. It's almost as bad as my new Windows 10 laptop next to it... in fact with the crashes it's now even worse.
Apple has been on the path of self destruction, dare I say, since Jobs died. He may have had some goofy ideas, but apparently his dictator like control and obsession with details was worth more than I realized. Sadly for us users, especially developers, we'll soon have no OS that works great all the time.
That said, I strongly disagree with forced version upgrades.
I also echo the sentiment that it's difficult finding a practical alternative.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/277967/major-issue...
Perhaps I'm lucky, but I never had a single OS update problem during this time. Not a one. Not until High Sierra.
This update is so bad, I'm actually abandoning the platform entirely. I've been shopping for new PC hardware since I installed this disease.
For instance activating accessibility zoom freezes the entire system for 5-10 seconds before it kicks in. It’s horrible.
I am also regularly frustrated with file system changes taking up to 30 seconds to show up in Finder. I presume this is a side effect of APFS.
You're not running it on old platter drives are you? It's made for SSD.
Microsoft was a lot more aggressive and shady, and used a bunch of evil UI patterns, like installing it by clicking "Cancel" button. Or displaying a second start button that opens the shady installer instead of the start menu. macOS auto downloading is not right, but it is whole level below that.
If you look at OS charts like on Steam, 64% still on Win7, many reverted back, because Win10 (29%) is shit and full of dark patterns, and Win7 is the new XP. In the last few months the install base of Win7 increased whereas Win10 decreased (I was one of them). http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc and https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-7-user-base-on-steam-con...
(Side note: I had no idea you can still buy Snow Leopard DVDs from Apple! Costs $30.99 including shipping:)
https://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207251
With the Windows 10 update, Microsoft was actively using dark patterns to circumvent their user's wishes.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/67367/upgradegat...
This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"
Obviously if you know what this is you can turn it off.
Case in point: when Chrome throws a TLS error, you could type "danger" to bypass it, but they had to change it because businesses started teaching users to bypass errors blindly.
Not exactly apples to apples, but similar enough in my mind. If users blindly disable updates, they won't be updated when there's a major security patch.
This sort of subtle authoritarianism in the name of "security" is quite frankly extremely disturbing, and the companies are using it to force what they want by bundling plenty of other highly disruptive and completely-non-security changes too. I could go into a more political direction here, but looking at some of the other changes that have happened to society in general lately, I'm not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.
But, there’s a difference between auto update by default and forced updates. And there’s, again, the option of buying the same thing with no internet connection—pretty much nothing you own needs to be connected to the internet at all.
To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this.
I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it. For pro users, shouldn't be rebooting, for most users, they shouldn't notice.
It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.
If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.
This is something I've found fault with in Windows, and was greatly disappointed to see happen in Sierra.
I had been getting the High Sierra update reminder notification once a day for several days and normally just clicked "Remind me tomorrow" (since there's no option for "Don't remind me"). One day after having it pop up, I instead clicked "Try in an hour".
I expected this to ask me again in an hour, at which point I would choose whether or not to proceed with the update. Instead, while my MacBook was asleep with work open, it went ahead and updated the OS without my consent.
I don't (think) I lost any work, as I typically save things and Vim didn't leave any swp files. But the experience was disconcerting and bitterly reminiscent of Windows...
On any given day, at least one of Windows, Firefox, VSCode, or myriad other less important apps wants to update before it runs. Talk about pessimising app start times! App start time is now the time to download and reinstall!
Windows FCU silently borked 6 of my machines by steamrolling drivers I had carefully selected for stability and performance. Broke GPU and Wifi on 5 of those, and it took me half a day to figure out what changed. On my main dev machine, Windows Update got into an infinite loop of churning the disk 100% and never finishing. Every fix I tried did nothing, until finally I disabled all WU services.
So in resignation, I did install Ubuntu. And was quickly reminded why I don’t use it. Ironically, the productivity-killer there is also about updates: for any app I need to run properly, I have to update its whole lineage of dependencies, often manually, and work out which versions it likes.
So I’m reluctantly back to Windows. I’ve just changed all the update settings I can find to ask me or just leave me alone and let me get a little work done.
I think I'm at the point in the tech story of my home that I would love a UI that shows total and per-device usage history. With knobs to throttle each device on a temporary or permanent basis.
If it's a few years old, you may want to also verify that it can actually route fast enough for your incoming pipe.
Speed-wise,it’s also very good. It’s plugged in directly to my FiOS and I’m maxing out my 150/150.
You can use the TCP port (http vs bittorrent vs email, or individual games which often use a well-known port for communication), deep packet inspection (eg. to distinguish between normal web and HTTP video streaming), reverse IP lookups to detect location of the remote endpoint or what company it's assigned to (through AS number for example).
It took all of 10 minutes to get everything plugged in and configured and every WiFi issue I had in my house disappeared. I was immediately pissed at myself, why the heck did I resist the jump for so long?
Bonus points for the APs being POE, makes it a lot easier to put them on the ceiling, and more bonus points because I have not reset my router in 18 months.
Some people like living dangerously, I guess. For the rest, it's a good thing iOS strongly encourages people to keep up to date.
This is a problem with the manufacturer, that doesn’t backport security fixes to older OS versions.
Hopefully the EU takes this up, as they’re far more pro consumer than the US.
This kind of disparity makes a lot of sense in the PC world, where everyone has slightly different hardware. I can't quite figure out why it's still common on a platform where there is relatively no hardware variation.
I'd rather miss out on few security updates for a year, than have my phone completely freeze, require reboots, etc quite often - and this isn't even an old phone, it's 7+. And let's be honest, the security issues aren't even that easily exploitable or can be mitigated some other way.
I will never again update macOS and iOS until at least few months, and newer fix versions, after release - I've had nothing but problems with both.
I had held off and finally upgraded as the app is fairly important to me and I wanted to get the issue resolved.
Now input is 10+ seconds lagged, everything is significantly slower and apps frequently run out of memory and I end up at the home screen.
Unfortunately the iOS upgrade didn’t fix the issue and I’m still dealing with the vendor.
It's apparently a bit slower[1], but fine. And iOS 11 will see more optimization love in subsequent update.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/ios-11-on-the-iphone...
I actually had issues with iOS10 where my phone was consistently full no matter how much I removed from it. I had to remove almost everything to upgrade, but once I did it had cleared up most of the memory on my phone. The OS took up more space, but it seemed to have optimized whatever excesses were consuming everything before.
I can say I've noticed an improvement in performance overall, though. And at the very least, it hasn't slowed down or run into any major bugs.
I upgraded at launch on my Mac Pro with an OEM Apple RAID card.
The installer will update your firmware then install. After install it won’t boot.
Turns out they forgot to put the drivers in for the Apple OEM raid card. High Sierra cannot see any drives attached through the card.
Apple claims to support these older Mac Pro computers for this upgrade but can’t give me an eta for when they will add support back in.
If you have an older Mac Pro your system will be bricked by this upgrade.
When having less than 20GB the OS gets slow, so I usually run DaisyDisk to find what can I delete, I didn't like to find the high sierra installer there.
On the side note, I didn't update to High Sierra because it seems that there are issues with XCode 9 (slow simulator) so I can't risk.
Apple still sells a machine with a 128GB drive
Xcode itself is ~5gb I think. Or 10.
If you own a newer non-upgradable MBP, you can easily sell it and get an older model with almost the same features - but also upgradable - and maybe even make a few bucks.
It does not help that I have one of the "dead dGPU" 2010 series, and with every new release I dread more and more that gfx won't be able to lock the system in "integrated only" mode.
I’m not an “Apple are doomed”-er but this is the poorest Apple OS release since the black screen of death that plagued iOS8.
You seem to generally get about 3 years of use from an iOS device before the CPU can’t really keep up with the OS updates. I couldn’t recommend upgrading an iPhone 6 to iOS 11 as my wife’s 6 Plus has basically become unusable.
Maybe part of the problem is that no-one in Cupertino will be using a 3-4 year old iPhone or a 2012 Mac on a daily basis?
[1] https://blog.macsales.com/42466-a-note-on-high-sierra-compat...
An automatic download that size can be an issue in certain circumstances, but why is this blogger just assuming Apple hasn’t done anything to address that? E.g., perhaps it doesn’t automatically download if you’re low on disk space. Perhaps they’ve even done something clever to determine when it might cost you download tolls and avoid it then too. I mean, if you use the internet much at all you are very likely involuntarily downloading a lot more than that in the form of ads and their associated video/audio, images, and tracking code.
At least (as the blogger mentions) it’s generally good for people to be up-to-date. It’s just reality that there are so many people who simply won’t unless it’s easy and without a little prodding.
I think people manufacture outrage at Apple for the attention it get them.
I moved house three weeks ago, and was using a short-term cellular internet connection to stay in touch with emails, update version control, etc.
The automatic download blew through all my bandwidth, and I needed to top up.
I was able to control other downloads, no ads no video, etc. But I had no clue what had used all my bandwidth until it was done.
You might try something like Little Snitch if you really want to lockdown network traffic not initiated by yourself, however, there are also just so many background system services trying to use network that this can be a bit time-consuming to setup.
It's $8, but has saved me so many times from blowing through data quotas.
It has worked fine before. Most background stuff checks for updates, downloads small stuff, I figure < 500Mb a day for gmail, my git repos, checking news, messaging apps: 5.6 Gb is an obnoxious amount. Not only size, but bandwidth.
If you're really saying we should all be fine with and expect multigigabyte downloads happening at arbitrary times, without our consent, then I think we have a very different model of computing ethics.
It may be worth re-reading my comment as I'm not arguing the interpretation you described: I didn't mention ethics and only described the reality of the situation we have today and one approach for addressing it.
Struggling to understand how a company nearing a trillion dollar valuation can't push out stable updates for it's platforms. Even iOS (Apple's cash now) 11 is buggy as hell.
I had my own personal experience with that today. In my case, the automatic installer didn't like FileVault, which rendered my mbpro a shiny brick. In relative terms, it was easy to work around in recovery mode but I can imagine the pleasure a non-technical user would feel at waking to find their beloved mac turned into a shiny brick.
Looks like not based on recent comments on https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/78908
P.S. I'm sure now that I've mentioned it, something's about to go horribly wrong.
Apple seriously needs to take heart of this message: https://youtu.be/e_hnG7kuam8
You should use a comma there. You probably meant "the upgrade did not succeed, [thus] destroying her OS install". But without the command, it means "the upgrade did not succeed [in] destroying her OS install", which is the exact opposite.
What really rocks is the copy/paste. It's blazing fast.
Is it common for VPN access to be handled this way?
What's the advantage over issuing a certificate or just using a username+password?
This tells me that Apple's originality is now gutted, the ship is rudderless, the company went beyond "bozo horizon" and MBAs with no vision took over. Sad, but expected.
I must say that I'm quite pleased that Apple still support a >8 year old machine. At least with software anyway -- asking at an Apple store last year about a replacement battery did not result in success!
I can't say it's going to work for your Macbook, but if it has an SSD (or you can put one in it) I really recommend trying out 10.12.6. Revert to a backup if things go awry.
I'm really sensitive to graphics issues. You never know if it's a bug or your GPU is going out. I'm not touching HS for a while.
However, I lose my laptop ... I am screwed (I can't afford backups right now).
I also have software that I paid rather a large amount of money for (back when I could afford it) that is incompatible with High Sierra and I cannot afford to upgrade the software.
So, I'm kinda stuck between a rock and hard place here.