High Sierra macOS freezing and stops
discussions.apple.com
discussions.apple.com
I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?
Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.
It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such.
I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.
They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?
When was this?
> Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated
That has been the case for as long as Apple has made calendar, music and email apps. People have complained about Mail since the first version (it used to be that most "die hard apple fans" were using Entourage). I hardly need to mention how unpopular iTunes has always been.
The Jobs revisionism every time an Apple product has a bug is extremely tiresome. The famously hated 'skeuomorphic' version of iCal was apparently a specific request from Jobs[1]. The single worst GUI control I've ever had the displeasure to use was the old 'thumbwheel' volume control in Quicktime Player. On the hardware side look at the puck mouse. Those kinds of things were worse than mere bugs in my opinion because they were deliberate and reflected the design philosophy of company at the time (or the inability of anybody working there to tell Jobs to fuck off and stop sabotaging products), and lasted for years before they were replaced.
[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...
When ? Seriously when. I have used MacOS since 4.1 and never remember a period where there was the case. Especially during this phase of the development lifecycle i.e. we have only just had the 2nd point release update.
I worked at Apple pre and post Jobs and nothing changed. Because he never managed any of the teams directly and his involvement had been less and less for years prior.
Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.
10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.
Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too.
So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.
The only reason, to me, that I remember Snow Leopard as being so good is because Leopard was a steaming pile of slow shit.
2001 10.1 Puma: First OS X to ship by default
2002 10.2 Jaguar: GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4
2003 10.3 Panther: Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine
2005 10.4 Tiger: Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video
2007 10.5 Leopard: Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel
2009 10.6 Snow Leopard: App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM
2011 10.7 Lion: Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch
2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center
2013 10.9 Mavericks: iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration
2014 10.10 Yosemite: Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff
2015 10.11 El Capitan: San Francisco font, Metal API
2016 10.12 Sierra: Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift
2017 10.13 High Sierra: HEVC, APFS, VRMost of the early OS X problems were resolved: Pretty much any printer you bought would work instantly; there was a healthy ecosystem of well-supported native apps; bundled apps worked well and used open standards (Mail, Address Book, iCal); networking worked well, including sharing files between Macs and PCs. And built-in utilities worked great, like printing to PDF and opening PDFs in Preview.app.
And hardware was quite good around that time too – with unibody notebooks (both plastic and aluminum) released during that time.
Things went downhill with 10.7 Lion and beyond, when Mac OS X imitated iPhone OS and usability started to decline:
- Bundled utility apps suffered: iCal and Address Book got photorealistic leather, and lost key functions like column-based navigation for your contacts and easy handling of multiple networked calendars.
- Flagship apps lost core functionality in the name of simplification: iPhoto took up the whole screen but lost core functions; iMovie was dumbed down (prior to 10.6); Final Cut Pro X left a massive gap in functionality from Final Cut Pro; Aperture was discontinued.
- Things just got worse for no valuable reason. Example: watch a Quicktime movie full-screen on a multi-monitor setup, and all the other monitors just show... textured linen.
- Reliability declined. I don't have data to back this up, and I'd really like to find an objective source for "reliability" on the Mac. But I no longer say "it just works" seriously anymore. That used to be mostly true, but it's no longer true for me. Personal example: constant problems when adding or removing my external display – permanent sleep that requires a hard reset, or display will repeatedly not be detected, or built-in keyboard and trackpad won't work until I plug in my wired keyboard again, type something, then remove it again.
One data point.
I'm not a "die hard apple fan" (just a long time mac user), and I have no problems with most of their apps. Overall, I'm still very satisfied with my MBP.
My affection for Apple has been slowly diminishing over the years. At this point, the fact is that their software is absurdly unreliable and isn't even well designed in the UI department, even though great UI was their main way of attracting fans.
I do still use all the built-in apps, including iTunes. They enable me to do what I want to do even though I regard some aspects of iTunes' design as ridiculously bad. I don't have a lot of motivation to change. I've figured out that, for instance, in order to do a search of Apple Music, you have any of the iTunes tabs selected EXCEPT Store. I can use it even though I find the design to be very lacking.
I have pretty much lost all my loyalty to Apple at this point, between the unreliability and the poor design. The main thing that's keeping me in the Apple world is the fact that I just have to believe that reliability has gotten so bad that no matter what kinds of blinders they've been wearing, they're going to have to see that something is seriously wrong, and start to seriously work to address the situation. And I'd rather not have to adjust to new OS's, and I'd like to be able to stay familiar with Apple software so I can keep helping people I know who are using it (in many cases, due to me). I am hopeful that in a year or two, reliability (if not UI design) will be decent again. I'm even hoping that this will be explicitly addressed by Tim Cook in his next keynote. The reliability situation is so obviously bad that he really should discuss it. I think Steve Jobs might have done so if things had gotten to this point--but I don't think they would have gotten this bad under him, even though there were major problems under his tenure.
I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device.
I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck with a thinkpad at work that has garbage battery life and an infuriating track pad. Every Android phone also turned out to be a turd (Galaxy S3, Moto X). Now that I have a file browser on iOS I don't think I'll ever go back- especially when you consider that Apple is basically the only company in the big 5 that at least publicly goes to bat for your privacy.
That's similar to Macbook Air's, which I despise in the workplace simply because they seem to randomly die much more than other models.
All of our 2012-2015 MBP's are still going very strong. We have not replaced a single one.
Do you have a dedicated nVidia chipset? If so, you'll also be encountering a plethora of driver bugs introduced in High Sierra, most noticeable watching videos in a browser or viewing WebGL content.
The USB stack has been a joke since they rewrote it and made it closed source to hide their incompotence.
I would have stopped installing updates long ago if I wasn't regularly forced to update XCode.
Now my older Mac's were never perfect, but I don't recall having so many hardware issues so soon. And living somewhere, where there is no official Apple store, getting anything fixed is a week+ of no computer.
As a fellow current Mac user, I can understand why people, especially techies, are frustrated. Apple is well funded with high standards, making them a fashionable, luxury company that focuses on tech. They have a high price point for their products from which people expect high quality. More importantly, they control both the hardware and software stack. Unlike MS which has to cater to an infinite number of different hardware combinations from different vendors, Apple development teams just deal with a much smaller set of hardware products and components which theoretically should result in a more secure and stable product.
As other HN users have pointed out, there are hints as to why this is happening: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-m...
Apple is hollowing out the OSX/Mac OS team in favor of iOS.
While they did limit High Sierra's scope, maybe they needed to push back the release date as well given that they gutted the Mac OS team?
Regardless, the natives are getting restless.
Evidently you're not an iTunes user. But agreed on the fact that most Apple applications are pretty decent, with the exception of iTunes (bloated) and Pages (not bloated enough).
I do hope they have a skunkworks project to rewrite the whole thing from scratch, though. It could really use it.
To be fair it's because they charge 3-4x what other platforms charge (the ones that do) and use to have a slogan saying "It just works". People paid the Apple tax because they didnt have to deal with these issues and now they do and still pay the Apple tax.
Wait... where is this 3-4x number coming from? Are there any examples?
When it comes to laptops, the Apple tax is only about 2x more unless you compare it to an MS Surface Laptop which is about equal in price and quality.
E.g. http://www.techradar.com/reviews/xiaomi-mi-notebook-pro/2
It’s the price of the midrange Windows laptops, but the specs and build quality of the MacBooks.
The downside is Windows of course. But it is supposed to work pretty well under Linux.
"specs and build quality of the MacBooks"? Great, can we see that mythical laptop that is 3-4x cheaper than equivalently-specced MBP or not? Url?
Or is it just empty talk?
I think it’s more like 2.5 to 3 times cheaper than 3 to 4, but it’s pretty easy to find.
A$1400: https://www.lightinthebox.com/xiaomi-laptop-15-6-inch-intel-....
Vs
A$3500: https://www.apple.com/au/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MP... (with weaker CPU and GPU)
It also doesn’t come with OSX. Pretty sure you can find some other differences too.
I’m sure for some people the screen is a deal breaker. Others won’t care.
> can we see that mythical laptop that is 3-4x cheaper than equivalently-specced MBP or not?
So, how is it even remotely equivalent?
I don’t think the resolution is interesting at all, but I agree some will.
For some people the great MPB trackpad is enough to sell it. Some people want the Xiaomi NVidia GPU. Some want retina screen, some want resolutions with better Linux support.
If you don’t like it don’t get it. But don’t nitpick to try to find some way they aren’t exactly the same: no one thinks that they are.
Nevertheless they are both high quality, i7, 16GB aluminium notebooks which suit developers.
How so? It does not seem to have a single Thunderbolt 3 port. MBP has four of them. Instead, Xiaomi has a bunch of USB-whatever &c. That is not "better", that is strictly "worse" and cheaper.
Ok please show us the laptop that is 1/4 of the price of the same-specs MBP. Or how one could build one.
I do it like once a month, and this "3-4x" claim is strictly false. If you spec MBP versus Dell or HP or Lenovo or whatever with the same parts, Apple may be anything between 5%-30% more, nowhere near 300%-400% that you claim.
Sure thing. Long as you remember to show us the laptop 3-4x cheaper than the equivalent MBP.
True, most doesn't come with nvme ssd, but you can always upgrade (which you cannot on a macbook), processors and graphics are way better for half the price, and you usually get a matte screen in which you can actually see anything besides reflections.
You made a claim. If you can't back up that claim with some basic evidence, we tend to call that claim "bullshit".
Given that other posts identify a laptop with a 1920x1080 display to a retina MacBook Pro, the concept of "equivalent" is clearly not the same for everyone.
The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.
I'm still running El Capitan, and not having any issues.
Admittedly, I would have upgraded had my mac been eligible, because I'm just that sort of person, but there's nothing in Sierra or High Sierra that would make a meaningful difference to me.
If there was no yearly release deadline, and the project were resourced identically, my experience points to there being even fewer releases of identical quality.
Deadlines needed.
Simply more / better QA resources required.
The best strategy seems to be to treat the current release as a beta, and hang back at least one release. If you upgrade to 10.(n-1) just before 10.n is released, you're on a release that's had about two years to mature. Though I skipped Yosemite entirely.
It's simple. There is noone to whip developers when they ship major bugs. Quality goes down.
Tyrannic leadership has its pros and cons. Try to imagine the internal tantrum after the company shipped an update and it crashed steve's iphone.
If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhone pipeline became a never-ending treadmill.
The tax of losing much of the top talent across all engineering functions has slowly taken its toll on Apple since. I would not be surprised if the institutional knowledge of OSX has either left or been promoted up the ladder, leaving that team with new hires unfamiliar with its inner workings.
Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired
Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).
I think it's more about appealing to peoples' ambitions and desire to be recognized in this case. Imagine if a VP of Engineering addressed you directly to 'make a big impact' on the company's new secret product. Many engineers would want to impress this person, consequences be damned.
The thing I find disturbing is that moving slower doesn't just result in the thing coming slower. It seems to result in never shipping or a lack of innovation. It's like there is some kind of activation energy that must be overcome and the effect is non linear. Real innovation only ships at the threshold of collapse.
I find it disturbing because if true it means innovation is Molech, a god that demands a kind of human sacrifice in the form of burnout, destruction of health, loss of relationships, etc.
Well it could certainly be said to have caused Al Gore some grief...
Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to.
Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either.
And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.
People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.
> The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.
What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans.
For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac.
The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good.
small edit
It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.
Err... that thread seems to have 21+ pages (at the time of writing this comment), including many "Me too" style of comments. Doesn't seem like an isolated problem. :/
"Nobody cares if it works for you".
I'd be careful to use the number of posts on Apple's support forums as any indicator of how big an issue is. Apple's support forums are, after all, fairly pointless in that there is a close to zero chance that they will be helpful. It is the wailing wall of Apple products – people come there to moan, to be joined by others who moan, to a deity that never shows itself nor provides meaningful response.
However, there appears to be a consensus that Apple isn't delivering the software quality one would expect from a company with their resources. There also appears to be some consensus that things are getting worse, if you read forums and discussion threads. It would be wise to at least investigate the mounting discontent with Apple from the ranks of professionals.
Nobody but you cares if your 2013 MBP has had zero freezes.
It's not an Apple problem, it's an industry problem. Software should, generally, be more reliable now than it was 10 years ago: There's more experience building, designing, and using it, so some best practices should have floated to the top, at least. But in every segment I look, I find it's just generally worse. Everyone is shovelling worse software into the pipeline than before, and this includes industrial control systems with which I'm familiar, even aside from consumer software.
I don’t think there is a solution unless we start talking laws, and you can bet everyone here would hate that.
This has been frustrating me as well. The console has become a constant stream of these errors, the out of bounds month one is particularly annoying.
I personally had this issue with the 2010 MacBook Pro. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2420192
I mention all of this to give context to my post; I'm not writing from a position of OS ignorance.
Anyhow: I'm continually surprised by the support for proprietary operating systems and hardware amongst IT professionals in general, and programmers specifically.
I've been running a mix of Xubuntu devices (older ThinkPads for the children) and FreeBSD (for my personal laptop and the home NAS / Minecraft etc. server) and enjoying ease of deployment (simple shell scripts), low cost, high confugurability and especially high reliability in the case of FreeBSD.
Windows users used to tell me that NIX was fine, but to get a job, they needed to program for Windows. That's probably still the case in many fields, but not in the Web dev circles I frequent.
OSX users tell me that they want both performance, reliable hardware with out of the box support. These days a good XPS or X1 Carbon will eat most or all Mac systems alive, have (in my experience) better build quality, and work well with Linux out of the box.
At the company where I work there is a growing number of users who are eschewing the latest turn of the Apple upgrade merry go round and are switching to Dell and Lenovo systems w/ Linux (and FreeBSD, in my case). Everything we need to do for our client still works, and we get more control, cheaper prices and an escape from the frankly "consumer" attitude Apple has these days (imagine - a pocket computer that won't let you install software of your choice!)
So if you're in the market for something better and cheaper than Apple, I suggest you take a look at Linux (maybe Ubuntu to start with?), FreeBSD or one of the many alternatives. You might just like it :)
Edited to add: Oh yeah, and don't forget the advantage of being able to continue using devices well past the point their manufacturers wish you'd buy something new (or force you to, in the case of Apple). I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine. Slow, sure, but fast enough to run Emacs, Firefox, and Ruby. In a (frustrating) pinch I could probably do around half of my daily work on it.
My Ubuntu tablet did not let me either. It was a major disappointment. Anyway, the OS is no longer maintained and the best thing to do is to use it as a large clock.
I'm now using a large iPad Pro, probably the best piece of personal computer hardware I've seen so far... 500GB SSD, fast ARM processor, 120Hz screen with fantastic colors and brightness, LTE, four speakers with excellent sound, ...
I cannot program Lisp on it, but I could not do that on the Ubuntu tablet either and the Ubuntu UI/UX was lacking.
I always liked SUN's hardware, incl. the SPARC machines. Solaris was nothing I would run on my machine. I never liked it. Not its UI, not the OS APIs, not the documentation, it's like food one does not like.
> I recently installed FreeBSD on a 16 year old laptop as an experiment, and it works fine.
My Macbook runs nicely a 4k screen with full scaling UI support. That's more important to me, than trying to use old hardware. I have old laptops around, but nothing is compelling to use. The new machines with fast/large SSDs, low-power CPUs, high-res screens, external 4k screens, are more interesting to me.
2018 again won't be the year of the Linux desktop - it is just not there for people who value UI/UX more than low-level configurability.
Perhaps my requirements are different.
Firefox, Emacs, SLIME, CCL, Roswell, Ruby, Node, RubyMine, and SyncThing run pretty much identically on all OSs I've tried. Spotify still doesn't support FreeBSD (no Widevine), so I run that in a Linux VM. Kerbal Space Program I haven't tried on FreeBSD, only Linux and OSX (I do have an old MBP I keep around as a gaming and movie machine, as it has a 15" screen and DVD drive).
I found Ubuntu configuration easier than Windows last I tried (Vista) and file based configuration in FreeBSD is the easiest of all, especially courtesy the excellent FreeBSD Handbook.
Also I run a tiling window manager (StumpWM) to avoid unnecessary window chrome, and also to avoid using the mouse.
The last time I used OSX extensively was back in 2011 or so, at Lonely Planet, where we had a fleet of iMac pairing stations. They were ludicrously hard to set up identically; all our attempts at the time to create a "pairing environment setup script" failed to varying degrees. And the screens, as large and beautiful as they were, were the devil in our weirdly lit office because they weren't available in matte options.
Possibly it comes back to your description of "food you don't like", but I really didn't enjoy my time on Apple devices.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI
Ubuntu/Linux is catching up with Wayland to the macOS compositor from years ago.
> Possibly it comes back to your description of "food you don't like"
I like that macOS deals nicely with hiDPI ('Retina') screens.
> Firefox, Emacs, SLIME, CCL, Roswell, Ruby, Node, RubyMine, and SyncThing run pretty much identically on all OSs I've tried.
Personally I prefer to use the LispWorks IDE (which has a nice port to macOS) and the Clozure CL IDE over GNU Emacs/Slime. GNU Emacs/Slime are not bad, but UI-wise it's a nightmare.
> and also to avoid using the mouse
I use trackpads since a few years.
Apple's machines are far less likely to exhibit issues like coil whine, interference on audio outputs, creaks and squeaks, physically broken connectors, electrical noise on USB bus, unstable network cards, poor battery life or longevity, display flickering, poor display uniformity, backlight bleed etc etc etc.
Dell's XPS range has had massive issues with Killer wireless dropouts, crackling audio jacks, mysterious battery drain, flickering screens, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now.
Lenovo's ThinkPads are consistently equipped with sub-par LCD panels (caveat: I have not tried their OLED models yet). I haven't yet met a ThinkPad that didn't have coil whine coming from either itself or its power adaptor. I haven't yet met a ThinkPad that didn't either have or develop some kind of creaking panel.
Until the last couple of years, Apple was about the only manufacturer that cared about making their laptops near-silent, whereas Dell and Lenovo were content putting in stock standard high-RPM fans and running them conservatively. I still find Apple machines superior in this regard.
These might seem like petty little things, but they are the sorts of things that drive me absolutely nuts over the ownership life of a machine.
I'd also posit that neither the high end ThinkPads, nor Dell's XPS, are actually really any cheaper than Apple's machines when you consider like for like.
I'll grant you the screen on my 2011-era X220 is inferior in almost every way to the current Mac screens (except that it's matte, which makes a big deal when working while commuting). But everything else is just fine.
That said I've owned a much more recent ThinkPad - a cheaper 'consumer'-class e550 that was a pile of crap. Keys wore flat, screen market, whole thing flexed ... just not up to traditional ThinkPad standards. Unsurprising at the price I guess.
Perhaps you've had bad experiences with lower-end ThinkPads?
[Citation needed]
For instance:
- I do not file bugs anymore. Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front, and is then 100% opaque. Bugs stay marked New and untouched for months or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some other lame status (with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution). If their goal was to ensure no real participation in the process of helping their products become better, they’ve succeeded.
- Xcode 9.x routinely has failing background processes, even in response to explicit actions, and not just for obscure features. For instance, an ordinary build seems to spawn background tasks that frequently display old errors as new errors, only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build while still showing all those older errors; I have to Clean and Build to be absolutely sure!
- Xcode 9.x failures are somehow better than Xcode 8.x failures where Literally. One. Second. Can. Pass. In. Between. Every. Character. You. Type. Then, SourceKit can enter an unending failure loop, to the point where Xcode must be restarted lest you have to click OK on errors every second. And you would think I could simply move on to Xcode 9.x but I can’t stop using Xcode 8.x due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable.
Apple is showing signs that a split into sub-companies would be useful (kind of like Claris/FileMaker Inc.). There’s no particular reason why things like bundled apps couldn’t just become preferred 3rd-party downloads from the App Store, where spin-off companies make iThis/iThat or even things like Photos.
If that happened, Apple would be forced to actually communicate with several entities on a regular basis and improve their external-facing tools. You can bet that SpinOff, Inc. would not stand for having major problems with developer tools or SDKs for instance.
I've filed a small amount but stopped pretty quickly because the web app where you report bugs is just horrible. I literally ended up making 2 bug reports the first time, 1 for the bug I wanted to report and then another bug report for the web app. I can't even be bothered to check whether those issues have been resolved, but I don't even care anymore at this point.
Then your problems won't get fixed.
> Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front
Not really. Everything it asks for is useful information. It used to have a bunch of fields that, depending on the bug, you sometimes ended up just writing N/A in, they recently re-did the bug reporter interface so all of those free-form text areas are now a single text area pre-filled with a template, which makes it a lot easier to trim out an irrelevant section. And it's a lot faster than it used to be as well.
> Bugs stay marked New and untouched for months or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some other lame status
When was the last time you actually filed a bug? My dupes are generally marked as such in less than a week (presumably whenever the next bug review session happens, which is usually on a weekly cadence), and many times they get marked as such within one day. I can't remember the last time I had a non-brand-new bug get marked as a dupe.
> with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution
This is true. You can, however, post a comment on your dupe asking for an update.
Radar is mostly a black hole. This is just something you have to deal with. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't file bugs. If nobody files a bug report, then the bug will never get fixed. And I've lost track of the number of bug reports I've filed that have actually been fixed as a result of my report (e.g. I get asked to confirm the fix later).
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> For instance, an ordinary build seems to spawn background tasks that frequently display old errors as new errors, only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build while still showing all those older errors
Those errors aren't from the build. Those errors are from the "live issues" feature. Xcode does have an issue where a successful build often doesn't actually clear out the "live issues", but you don't need to clean to get rid of them! Just modify the line in question (e.g. add and delete a space), that will clear out the issue and force it to re-perform the "live issues" compilation check. I do hope that some day Xcode will get better at handling this. Perhaps you should file a bug report.
> I can’t stop using Xcode 8.x due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable.
Why do you need an older SDK? The only reason I can think off the top of my head to need the iOS 10 SDK instead of iOS 11 is if you're developing an iOS app, using a launch storyboard, and aren't prepared to support the iPhone X. I do wish Apple had a way to opt out of iPhone X support with Xcode 9 (e.g. an Info.plist key), but honestly, it's been months at this point since Xcode 9 came out, you should just spend the effort to support iPhone X. If you actually need the iOS 10 SDK for another reason, I'm quite curious as to what it is.
What are you referring to regarding "changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways"? I have to assume you mean the Swift compiler, but the transition from 3.1 to 3.2 is pretty painless. In most cases it should just work with perhaps a few warnings thrown in. I only know of a few edge cases surrounding Substring that are actually backwards-incompatible, but those are easy to fix.
Apple needs to make highly-visible changes to draw contributors back, such as a giant and reliable search feature, publicly-visible lists of bug reports, and public comment threads on everything (as a start). Otherwise, if I’ve already been burned many times before, why would I keep wasting time submitting bugs into a black hole?
Xcode builds need to work without any compromises. I didn’t mention Xcode because I need a work-around (and frankly, “add and delete a space” should never be a reasonable thing to have to do). I mentioned Xcode because its glaring list of bugs can only lead to conclusions that are bad for the platform: maybe it means “we don’t know what we are doing”, or maybe it means “we don’t care about developers”, or maybe it means “we barely use our own tools”; not good.
But not being public doesn’t mean filing reports is useless! Even duplicates are useful. Bugs are fixed all the time using information found in duplicates.
Regarding Xcode, it’s got bugs, but it is a pretty good IDE all around, and it’s constantly getting better. Hell, Xcode 9 has a brand new awesome code editor (though it’s missing my favorite feature, focus follows selection, and I hope that comes back soon!) in addition to a lot of other improvements, and you’re trying to claim they’re not investing in their tools? Just because you apparently can’t use Xcode 9 for ill-defined reasons doesn’t mean they don’t care or aren’t using their tools!
I’m not even saying duplicates are useless. I’m saying that Apple’s method, taking months to ultimately communicate nothing except an unexplained status of “Duplicate”, is useless. Except it’s worse, because at that point I would have already: (A) painstakingly distilled a much more complex problem into a base test case purely for Apple’s benefit, (B) generated a system profile or whatever else was required, and (C) jumped through several other hoops. Also, during that whole time I must assume: the issue wasn’t known to Apple, hadn’t been seen yet by anyone else, and probably wasn’t going to be fixed; and, I required a work-around in the meantime that ultimately became the only solution that mattered.
Now, Xcode: it kind of doesn’t matter what else they’re doing when basic tools I need every day still have problems. In Xcode 4.x they reinvented their own window/tab manager and to this day I can’t get this “pretty good IDE” to put anything where it’s supposed to be and remember that next time. It still has problems automatically showing a source file and its header file side-by-side. Also, when I open projects explicitly, it likes to display a mixture of tabs showing source files from entirely different projects (a bug I actually did report, many many years ago, still unfixed). A tool that does some things right but fails with the basics is not a well-supported development environment.
If you want public bugs, go look at OpenRadar. It's a website where people can opt into posting their Apple bug reports publicly.
> taking months to ultimately communicate nothing except an unexplained status of “Duplicate”
Hyperbolic much? As I already stated, dupes generally happen within a week, often within a day or two. In fact, I've filed well over a thousand bugs and I've had something get duped over a month later maybe once or twice.
> In Xcode 4.x they reinvented their own window/tab manager and to this day I can’t get this “pretty good IDE” to put anything where it’s supposed to be and remember that next time.
What do you mean? The window manager is not custom, and the tabs, if not actually the OS-provided tab functionality at this point, sure seems pretty close. In all my years of using Xcode it's never had a problem remembering how I set up my window.
> It still has problems automatically showing a source file and its header file side-by-side.
It does? I admit I don't use the automatic Counterparts feature very often, but it's always worked for me. What issues are you seeing?
> Also, when I open projects explicitly, it likes to display a mixture of tabs showing source files from entirely different projects
Again, in all my years of using Xcode, I've never even so much as heard anyone mention anything remotely like this. What the heck are you doing with Xcode to cause this to happen?
Using OpenRadar regularly would even further increase the effort spent reporting bugs, and then: Apple doesn’t maintain it, Apple doesn’t check it, Apple certainly doesn’t synchronize with it, Apple does benefit greatly from it, despite Apple not accepting responsibility and providing a basic, foundational tool of its own.
This thread is starting to feel like a bug report in itself. Yes, everything behaves as I described, yes the issues were logged with Apple, yes it takes them months to respond sometimes (and I was being generous, sometimes it’s over a year), yes Xcode is still buggy in very obvious ways when doing very trivial things, and I’m even using recent Apple hardware and software.
I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.
I also have this problem in Sierra. If my Time Machine HDD is not connected, it stores the backups locally.
I can only reclaim space if I disable the Time Machine and restart my mac.
> In macOS High Sierra, Time Machine stores snapshots on every APFS-formatted, all-flash storage device in your Mac or directly connected to your Mac.
I'm curious how it's implemented? Does it use whole-filesystem snapshots? Some discussion: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/81171
Not sure, however, that APFS is the reason of slowdown, maybe other filesystems are slow too in this version. FS cache, however, still works, and after warmup system becomes fairly responsive (on 16 Gb of RAM).
$ df -k /; dd if=<(yes) of=$HOME/bigfile bs=1024 count=$((35 * 1024000)); df -k /; rm ~/bigfile; df -k /
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 976265452 360477544 612444948 38% 1399186 9223372036853376621 0% /
35840000+0 records in
35840000+0 records out
36700160000 bytes transferred in 1038.398720 secs (35343033 bytes/sec)
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 976265452 396346588 576575904 41% 1399343 9223372036853376464 0% /
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/disk1s1 976265452 360497876 612424616 38% 1399342 9223372036853376465 0% /for this reason i do only on-demand backups when i connect my external backup drive.
another worrying thing is that the time machine backup drives still use HFS+ because APFS does not support directory hard links. so now i am backing up APFS files to HFS+ "bit perfectly".
You probably already know just how excited I was to hear they will combine Mac OS and IOS into one OS. I can't wait for all the new bu..err.. features we'll be getting!!
\s
How's Linux doing with battery life on a laptop these days? I think my 2014 MacBook may be my last.
I get about 10 hours of battery life on Fedora 27. Not too bad at all.
I'm about to ditch apple and was thinking to get either a Dell or a ThinkPad.
8th gen i7s. Up to 64Gb ram. Or if battery matters, 8th gen i7u with same performance as 7th gen 7700, and 32Gb ram.
Three year warranties available.
My battery life is around 10-12 hours (watching video drops to about 6-7 hours) I did the following out of the box:
- Use the Intel graphics exclusively
- TLP
- Powertop adjustments
I also have the screen set at a low pretty brightness level as I find the 9550 screen pretty bright (too bright) at mid-high levels.
SPECS:
------------
Ubuntu 17.10
Dell 9550 XPS
i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60GHz
non-4K screen (doing this will really save your battery)
16GB RAM
Intel® HD Graphics 530 + NVidia
512GB SSD
If anything, it solved some Sierra headaches.
That said, most of the benefits aren't visible so unless you use Safari or an app which depends on Metal 2, etc. there's no massive reason to jump.
Safari has some new things (global and per-site reader view, disabling autoplay, privacy enhancements) but that doesn’t really count since it also works on Sierra.
I honestly don’t see what all the complaints are about, but I might just be lucky.
Both were updated at the same time. I keep my work laptop (another rMBP) on Sierra and I might just skip updating that one altogether.
I'm not saying 10.13 has been perfectly reliable, but it doesn't seem less reliable than previous versions to me.
I'm running 10.13.2 on a 2014 MBP, and can say the same -- as praise, not complaint. I want my desktop OS not to break stuff more than I want it to add new features, and 10.13 mostly succeeds in not annoying me by breaking stuff.
I've just given up on having a computer sleep and wake up properly, especially a laptop, like I've given up on ever seeing reliable bluetooth on the same laptop (can't even play when the speaker is literally touching the laptop without dropouts; phone has no problems). I assume that laptops with reliable sleep is something we might see again in 2020 and beyond (2007 mbpro had it). On the other hand, I know for a fact I will not see reliable bluetooth connections in my lifetime or maybe ever, so compared to that, there's still hope.
When I get to work in the morning I just expect that I'll be rebooting this PoS as soon as I open it.
I returned it and went with a Thinkpad instead. On all my Windows laptops, sleep's never been a problem. Even on the cheap machines.
We've warned every other engineer not to apply the high sierra OS update until further notice.
We have 20-30 engineers all running the exact same hardware spec as engineer #1. So, it's sufficient evidence for us.
10.13 is terrible for people who use FileVault, in multiple ways:
1) If you upgraded to 10.13.0 your password is being leaked in the password hint.
2) APFS + FileVault performance is abysmal compared to APFS without Filevault or HFS + FileVault or HFS without FileVault.
As for reasons to upgrade, there's nothing particularly exciting, but things are just a little better. A lot of nice stuff in Safari, though at least most of it is available in Sierra as well, and I'm not actually sure offhand what (if any) requires High Sierra. HIEF support for photos so they take less space. Also better editing of photos in Photos, including the ability to muck about with live photos (e.g. looping them, bouncing them, etc), which is fun. Notes has some good stuff, such as tables, pinned notes, and sharing with other people (which I've made heavy use of lately). And so on.
The next iPhone is always going to be the one that ends Apple, the new OS always shows that Apple finally lost its way.
You’re better off ignoring that drivel and making up your own mind.
We use Acronis Connect (formerly ExtremeZIP) for AFP connectivity at present, but that only helps with the missing files problem. It's still painfully slow.
SMB on 10.13.2 is blazingly fast, almost as fast as Windows, and the missing files/folders problem is gone.
* Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job.
* Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know.
* My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the one that "Just works!"
But, recent weeks of blunders and annoyances in my Mac after updating to High Sierra is making me rethink. I'm going to spend my weekend configuring my Dell XPS with VoidLinux and set it up with open alternatives for most of my use cases.
True, I will miss some niceties like Retina Fisplay and crisp font rendering, but my self-made solution can be comfortably close to it. Although I will sorely miss the "Copy on the phone, Paste on Mac" functionality.
I will setup Tarsnap or something with crown and forget about backups except for restoration testing every year.
I will use Darktable on photo library that is synced to phone via NextCloud. Instead of Apple Photos.
Recent Firefox with Adblocker and Ghostery as a web browser.
Chrome for browsing Facebook and Amazon.
KVM instead of Virtualbox for VM needs. Docker for container needs.
Sublime Text for programming editor.
Clementine as Music player
VLC or MPlayer for media
Will figure out the rest. And put all the install/configure commands on a Ansible playbook and commit it to Github. So that next OS install is completely automated. If y'all have any tips for including in my setup this weekend, I'll appreciate it very much!
MPV has also worked pretty well for me, in addition to Mplayer.
CMUS is a nice command line music utility. Works great in my experience.
Obvs desktop != laptop, but I run two Dell 1440p monitors on my desktop and they look just as good as my 6 mos old MBP w/ Retina. (Maybe font rendering on the MBP is marginally better, but maybe my eyes are getting too old to tell.)
And upgrade to Android next phone upgrade cycle, Firefox and uBO on that too.
* No launchd or systemd mess. Runit takes care of the init process.
* xbps: a fast and simple package management software, that also resolves dependencies.
* Clean but scarse documentation, if you have used other distributions you should be fine.
* No automatic configuration of programs, you have to explicitly define what you want for sshd, nginx, etc.
I started GNU/Linux distribution hopping after archlinux's maintainers decided to migrate to systemd, back then I had been using it without problems and for experimentation purposes followed the migration; after a couple of updates I had an unbootable system were systemd wasn't able to run logind, diagnosis showed all files where in place, but run out of time and didn't want to discover what was wrong with it.
I use voidlinux on a T410s mainly for developing, learning programming languages and experiment from time to time with KVM and libvirt (which is another mess), hope to change completely to openbsd in a couple of months.
Recommend Debian for the distro. It does a lot of things for you, and correctly, but it is also infinitely configurable. It can be the "just works" distro you need, as well as the hacker's tinkerable distro you want. And it has staying power and consistent security updates. Mix stable with testing/unstable and get stability where you need it and recency where you need that. Plus the community and documentation are very good.
KDE Connect
Also, I'm using a Yoga with 3200x1800 13" display without bigger issues, so in general, "retina" screens are replaceable.
>Although, there is no way for me to know.
That's the absolute showstopper when it comes to privacy anyway, isn't it? They can say whatever they want, the fact is - they build devices I can't control and invest heavily in keeping their gardens walled, which is directly against me being sure about my privacy.
Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I think it was WebGL on Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers for my 2012 MBP and so far WebGL is working fine on Chrome without freezes. To be clear, the whole computer froze - couldn't even more the mouse pointer!
Obviously, given the botched state of High Sierra in general others may be experiencing different causes for their freezing.
Deeply unsatisfied at Apple over this, how hard does it have to be to take a perfectly fine OS (pre-High Sierra) and keep it that way?
My point is that Chrome on Linux has many issues with GPUs too, so they at least share the blame, since they don't seem to be capable of properly handling GPUs in the wild.
Since about a week however it seems to have been fixed, might have been a recent Chrome Dev or macOS Developer beta build I've updated to (hard to keep track of).
I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on MacOS, it's just that after I got using it for a while, I was shocked at how unintuitive it really was. The good things were really great (trackpad gestures, spotlight, it's aesthetic) but that bad things were silly bad (full screen apps, no intelihide on the dock, no window tiling, battery, finder, garbage filesystem support, etc)
I felt betrayed. (NZD, 2017 13" best touchbar model) I paid 3000 of my hard earned dollars for dated specifications so I could have access to what I expected would be the ultimate user experience on a computer. I ended up selling my MacBook after 6 months because every time I looked at it, I remembered how much I paid and how much the UI frustrated me. High Sierra was the tipping point, I was hoping for an improvement to my experience, instead they gave me a new file system and "ES5 support in Safari" - according to Tim Cook.
I'm keeping up with MacOS and hope they start caring about their MacBook/MacOS product(s), because as soon as they do, I'll buy one.
For the record, Windows and Linux have their own sets of compromises, but I can run them on a Laptop I bought for $800, or a used Desktop I got for $200, being equally as productive.
tl;dr - I was happy paying the premium for UX, however I got an incomplete product and I was mad. /rant
Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.
Full screen mode was annoying because you couldn't put windows on top of the full screened app. Might be that I have a particular uncommon use case, but I often use basic utilities like notepad or calculator on top of my main apps. Additionally, the top menu bar would auto-hide. Often, when I would move the mouse to the top of the screen to change what tab I'm on, the top menu would reappear. This is fine, but the animation would take years to disappear and doesn't detect if the user's intention was to show it, leaving me waiting idle for a few seconds for the menu to hide again.
Complete dock auto-hide is too much of a nuclear option. I want the dock visible when there is nothing on the screen.
I mean, most people aren't as bothered by UX problems as I am. I'm probably a bit pedantic, but I feel it's reasonable to feel this way when the product costs somewhere around twice it's competitor's price.
What drove me initially nuts is that on Windows you can do everything through the UI. That makes the UI cluttered, but you can find it. Under OS X there was lots more stuff that you just couldn't do via UI and you had to drop to Terminal. It took me a while to get a sense to when I should give up on doing something through the UI.
The build quality, dev environment, multiple desktops are all critical to me being productive.
I've been using all three major OSs for years and I feel the most productive on the mac and I feel like the UX is the best.
I've been investigating other comparable laptops on the market in an attempt to "see what else is out there" because there are some things I don't like about the macbook pro direction (touchbar gimmick).
All of this is leading into my question: What laptop competes with the macbook pro in terms of build quality (i feel like I'm holding a hunk of metal and it's really satisfying), screen (1880p), trackpad, keyboard, and battery life?
Not to mention on top of all of that I get facetime and imessage which integrates with my phone. My laptop automatically unlocks because I have the apple watch.
I have an open mind and would love a linux laptop, but it really feels like nothing even comes close in comparison.
I run Ubuntu LTS on a $150 Dell E6400 (2009~) with 4GB ram and a Core 2 Duo and it flies. As long as you have at least 2GB RAM, any recent Ubuntu should be fine.
Seems to have done a decent job at patching up some of the more serious un-usability that High Sierra caused me and my Mac.
Moving to High Sierra was the worst performance-wise update I made to my Mac. I'm so disappointed with Apple's sluggish reaction to these issues, that have been reported in high numbers[2], from months ago...
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265
[1] - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-...
[2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomme...
Trying to post to Instagram Stories is another fun game that tends to fail 50% of the time.
Problem solved! Move on to buying things you do want.
Every other solution requires major hacking and customization (VMs, emulators, obscure OS', lacking in compatibility, mobile integration, backups)
Apple users are complaining so loudly now because they had it good for so long and now it's fleeting.
I think it may be "SpeedStep" shitting all over itself and putting the CPU into a death spiral.
I've had several generations of MBP that continuously fail this way, so it's not something new to High Sierra.
I'm really disappointed that Apple keeps making each model of MBP thinner and thinner and hotter and hotter, instead of making it thicker with better cooling and ventilation. I don't fucking NEED it to be that thin! What I NEED is for it not to fucking freeze all the time.
Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
I've worked through many update issues in OSX over the years, and the fixes were reasonable, but this one is really bad, and sometimes there isn't any workable solution than to roll-back.
I've noticed the OSX/iOS upgrade push is really affecting a lot of people in different ways lately, another has iPad/iPod issues because you have to update OS to get a never version of iTunes to talk to upgraded iOS devices that are now locked out of previously compatible versions of iTunes - and with device signing theres no way to roll back the mobile devices iOS... and with Mac App store theres no way to get an update thats not High Sierra anymore so Macs that can do say Yosemite but not HS are S.O.L. (unless you already have the install media) Blegh.
Snow Leopard ended up being a great release, but it didn't start that way.
In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest.
Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers.
I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it.
I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..
Here's what I'm finding out today.. APFS understands which files will give the biggest performance boost once defragged. It works in the background when the machine is idle, so defrag won't impact system performance.
For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. Apple will fix it, just a matter of time. For me a re-format did the job..
Why can my buddy buy a new Macbook formatted for APFS loaded from Apple with High Sierra and it runs perfect? Now take that same Macbook and install the HS update on a non APFS drive and re format to APFS and it runs like chit? Not my opinion but just what I'm seeing on other forums.. There is a serious flaw in the live update of the file system causing everyone problems..
I cured my problems completely simply by re-formatting the drive with Disk Utility APFS and re-installing the same data and using first aid.. I'm very happy with the results..
Thankfully, 10.13.2 has fixed all of these issues for me. Before I would get a lock up almost about half the time I tried to awake from sleep. Now I have gone 2 weeks without a reboot.
New macOS releases have been plagued with sleep/wake issues for years, but this one was worse than normal.
In my case I did a clean install of my Mac and then installed High Sierra. The issue then went from happening 3-4 times per day to about 3-4 time per week.
I suspect this (at least in my case) having a lot more to with the new Macbook Pro with Touch Bar than macOS.
In any case, apple should do better
The only issue I've had on my 2013 MBP is a black screen if I plug in an external monitor while it's asleep.
Aside from that, it's been running fine. But I typically run it always plugged in to external monitor and some sources on the internet suggest that the secondary card is needed to run display port.
Mobile should be a separate brand, or perhaps the other way around.
They're all about content consumption, at the expense of creators.
This is nothing new. This is status quo. It's been going on for years. Even when Jobs was around. Thinking it wasn't happening is akin to someone now saying, "I don't see any issues."
> They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company?
Ask them why they colluded with other tech companies to keep salaries low and thereby affect an entire industry. They've chosen not to invest in their developers.
> It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job.
Again, this is nothing new. Apple has a long history of failures and horrible software that people conveniently forget about as time goes on.
> such a rich company who can afford the very, very best.
Again, they worked hard to ensure they don't have to pay it. Enough so that they were taken to court over it, and lost.
But don't believe for a minute that other solutions are somehow better. Or that other companies don't benefit from Apple's collusion, even if they didn't take part.
My Quadcore i7 Mac mini is still a mess under High Sierra. I see it freezing very often and especially when the machine gets some load. It's basically not usable for anything beyond reading mail and browsing the web. It was freezing once a month under Sierra. Under High Sierra it can freeze several times a day. Last days it was also rebooting on itself, twice.
I had filed a bug report, but Apple asked for a full system diagnosis report, which is not something I can give away because it would contain restricted information.
One of my projects involves indexing thousands of URLs. During development I use a large (80GB+) local cache of a few million files. Running the cache code (~100 lines of simple Golang) totally brings my iMac (3.8GHz Core i5, 24GB) to its knees. CPU shows as mostly idle & memory pressure is low, yet the machine can't redraw windows properly after about 5GB of I/O to local SSD.
Completely frustrating. I moved the code over to an older (2010!) Mac running Ubuntu and it handles it without breaking a sweat.
"How to skip converting to APFS when installing macOS High Sierra":
http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sier...
This is really disappointing, I wonder if it’s a portent of more slip ups to come.
I also tend to avoid third party apps where possible, particularly the more ungainly ones. Maybe that has something to do with it?
Two recent showstoppers, when I tried to switch from Fusion:
The shared folder driver for VB will panic a Linux guest if a shared folder is accessed from a multithreaded compilation.
The shared folder driver for Parallels will panic a Linux guest if you load a kernel module from a shared folder.
Tip 1: Anyone with problems can use Apple Bug Reporter[1]. In my experience Apple really does watch these — I reported an issue with an old USB headset in Sierra and it was fixed in a subsequent release.
Tip 2: HN readers in Apple's developer program can use High Sierra betas to test if an issue still exists, and report that via Apple Bug Reporter or even open a Technical Support Incident (TSI). I think it's likely that Apple prioritizes (1) issues found in developer or public betas[2], and (2) issues coming from people in their developer program.
None of this is to say that anyone should have to do work to get a bug-free OS experience. This is just to suggest actions to take for people who have a bias for that.
[1] https://bugreport.apple.com/web/ [2] https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
I know from experience that we deal with a ton of Mac specific issues that are annoying and frustrating and are due to either low quality or they just won’t fix cause it will be obsolete soon. So many items.
I’m OS agnostic but I will say that in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to deal with many more Mac spaecifc issues then Windows specific issues. All kinds of random stuff just not working that should be. I can’t speak for Linux distros cause we don’t support Linux directly, but in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to implement many a workaround to Mac specific OS bugs. Like things just not working. In some cases Apple stated thue had no intentions on fixing it. Not esoteric bugs but big ones that required big workarounds.
Anyways I suspect the results would be the same her between people who develop on a Mac vs those that develop FOR the Mac :(
Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated.
The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today.
If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.
And considering the power and diversity of hardware to power your development workstation, there are few reasons to stick with OSX.
It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's droid pie.
Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt, GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free.
Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt
I mean, Google has overtaken Apple in UI and UX user satisfaction and usability. Steve Jobs would be rolling around in his grave.
Ever since the "skeumorphism" debate, Apple seems to have become a follower. I don't want knee-jerk downvotes but an actual discussion about why Apple isn't spending at least a billion dollars on a best-of-class program on establishing itself as the leader in
Stability
Usability
User Satisfaction
Testing & Regressions
This will undoubtedly bite them in the ass - it already did with the 2013 Mac Pro, the mediocre MBP with TouchBar and on the poor relative quality of the latest MacOS.
Users don't have to upgrade to touchbar MBPs, they can
a) still buy newly manufactured old style MBPs, or
b) not upgrade
Yet they've bought the touchbar MBPs in massive volumes. I've heard lots of anecdotal complaints about the touchbars, the keyboards. But I've also heard lots of people love both.
I trust the sales numbers a little more than I do anecdotes.
They have, if they want anything comparable in performance to the Windows world (even though 16GB RAM tops is just laughable when there are many 64GB laptops in the Windows world, and I guess 128GB is not far around the corner...).
2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.
Argument #2 is parrotting what Apple said. Laptops that get smaller and smaller tend not have the same power efficiency either. Blaming 'more memory' having lower power efficiency is a weak argument when you look at the whole picture. As for transfer speeds, its not true that more memory = lower transfer speed; it depends on a number of other factors (type of memory, clock rate..)
Weak argument or no, it is demonstrably true - the first Intel CPU to support LPDDR4 will be Cannon Lake, expected some time next year. The part that's missing is that Apple could have put a bigger battery in a device that was either the same size as the previous model (or anywhere between the thickness of the previous and current models), or offered customers the choice of trading RAM for battery life.
Apple does not want consumers to have a choice, or at least only the barely tolerable amount of choice. The more they control and have as uniform as possible the more profit they make.
It's always the same OS, with constant nagging if it is not the newest OS. On iOS, no choice between app stores and unless you don't like distributing source around and compiling yourself, no sideloading (to ensure Apple always gets their 30% cut). The hardware choices are not really choices either - it's like packages in cars: no way to get something really adjusted to my specific needs, Apple always thinks they know my needs better than I do.
Speed is not everything. The 2015's Skylake can't do HEVC (and VP9 but I have no idea who outside YT might use VP9).
> 2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.
Everything is faster and more power efficient than using swap - in fact, my MBP with nothing more than Chrome, Outlook, Slack and Excel open has 13.12GB of RAM occupied and 16.5GB swap usage. Not to mention all that swapping drastically reduces the life of the flash memory - which is, to make stuff worse, soldered on the motherboard on the 2017 model. Yet another thing that Apple forces down the throats of its users, no way to get data recovery on these when your mobo gets fried.
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/44
https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/383
and even though OnePlus has been caught cheating benchmark tests more than once!
https://www.xda-developers.com/oneplus-5-benchmark-cheating-...
https://www.androidauthority.com/oneplus-5-manipulates-bench...
The vast majority of Windows users do not use Windows-only applications. They're using a browser, probably an office suit; both can be done on macOS or even Linux just as well.
So no, Windows users are not all clamoring to actually run macOS, only held back by apps that run on Windows but not on macOS.
Ironically, the buying-because-of-lock-in argument most describes macOS and especially iOS.
The average sales price of a Mac is 3x that of the sversge Windows PC because Macs are used by professionals, whose time is valuable.
Windows users are running what their company tells them to run, usually an internal database application for managing customer interactions.
BTW I'm not saying Linux is not an alternative - I run it on my laptop - but getting it tweaked just right, dealing with some of the eccentricities of the desktop environment (gnome I'm looking at you) make it less than grand for a great out of the box experience.
However I will say it is worlds better than it was 5, 10 , 15 etc. years ago...
Finally, in regards to the touchbar - you really are not given a choice. If you want a powerful box you MUST get touchbar. I wonder what the adoption would be if it was an a la carte option?
"It's our best selling product ever" easily trumps "...But a lot of people hate the software and aren't really sure about the hardware."
Apple won't change until the entire edifice comes crashing down in some horrendous techno-corporate train wreck - possibly one where lives are lost.
Cook doesn't have the imagination or the empathy to understand the user POV. As far as he's concerned, as long as the company is making money everything is fine, even if it's bleeding goodwill from every shiny white polycarbonate pore.
Apple was constantly dealing with quality issues while Jobs was alive. Remember AntennaGate? Apple has more products and customers than ever now, meaning more anecdotal complaints than ever.
And no one uses the Mac App store, so no problems.
700 users who suffer from problems are super motivated to speak up, millions of users having a great experience have no reason to create and post on lengthy threads about how great High Sierra is.
How are people supposed to get apps for their Macs? Download from random websites? How do updates happen?
Like many publicly traded companies these days, however, it may be that they’re slowly shooting themselves in the foot by looking through the narrow lens of their quarterly metrics and focusing on near-term shareholder value.
The main reason why Apple, with billions of dollars in cash, is unable to establish itself as a leader as well as isn't doing even close to some other mediocre companies is because of its organization structure. Apple's structure doesn't allow having enough people to work on multiple things simultaneously and spread its attention. A much detailed explanation of this is on this article on Stratechery, titled "Apple's Organizational Crossroads". [1] It would do well for Apple's leadership to make changes in how it works, but so far there's not much evidence of anything like that happening on the software front.
[1]: https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad...
App Store is not working and manual install is impossible. It tells my Macbook Air has Fusion drive which is incompatible with latest High Sierra.
No Macbook Air has ever got Fusion drive..
Waiting for some free time to reinstall macOS.
https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier
Grab the executable from Release, run it with -i .
Apple don't offer current Windows driver download packs on the website. Their contempt for their own customers is beyond infuriating.
I've been a die-hard Apple user since moving from Windows in 2009. I'm even powered by MobileMe from the days where you paid for your sync. Nothing has changed much since then.
I find myself watching things like the Essentials Phone and Google's secretive desktop operating system for some escape from the Apple ecosystem. I love the hardware. I love the support. But the symphony of hardware and software working together as one isn't as special as it used to be.
The desktop apps are inconsistent and distant to their iOS cousins. The experiences in the apps seems hinged on a time long past. Newer "features" in the operating system feel tacked on—not working effectively. I know they don't want to merge iOS and macOS—but I feel they have a better grasp on what's going on behind iOS than Mac. Perhaps it's time to put Mac out of its misery and bring iOS a little bit of Mac—terminal, filesystem and more.
Next is a linux laptop instead of MBP. Works out about $500 cheaper for similar spec, or same price for much better spec. And they're upgradeable, so not having to buy another MBP in two years time means I can save probably another $1500 over four years. Even the ultrathin 13" has one NVMe and one 2.5" bay. I'll be getting a 17", like apple doesn't make anymore. Only this one has two NVMe bays and two 2.5" bays. Last straw was my 2011 MBP 17" had video problems (reboots under gpu load) and they refused to fix it. Finally this year it developed the pyjama stripes, and now they recognize it has a problem, but oh dear, its out of warranty since Dec 2016.
There are five apple computers in this house. They are the last.
Interesting is that whatever is in my browers; usually watching streamers or listening to radio; still is active. I just have lost all input. Pulling the USB connections have no effect. Then there are the times it just freezes hard.
the annoying part is that since I have bootcamp in all instances after a hard freeze the system wants to boot to that volume instead and even more fun, keyboard use of the option key fails until I let it successfully boot into Windows. As in, the option key fails with either USB or BT keyboard until a successful boot occurs
The keyboard is second-rate on my 2017 MBP compared to previous models, and had I known what a nightmare USB-C would be I wouldn’t have bought it—full stop. The touch bar has occasionally been unresponsive, or outright crashes forcing a reboot. (I’ve seen learned how to restart it. A sentence I should never have to type.)
The problem is Apple has become so much worse just as the competition has finally started to produce compelling options. They still have the lead (?) but it’s no longer a foregone conclusion that they’ll offer the best OS/hardware combination.
I have not had any issues with APFS, but I usually have 100G or more free.
That said I am not going to windows even with the Linux extensions. Those just are not quite there yet.
there has been a few times since then that the machine will freeze then show a folder with question mark icon.
surprisingly it boots up fine after turning it off and on again, but I'm worried it won't last long.
its a bummer b/c even though the machine is old, I upgraded to 8gb of ram and 500gb ssd and the performance is comprisable to a new MacBook a just got.
My MBP crashed all the time during wake w/ external monitor. Had weird video playback choppiness that required restart, TouchID profile going away on its own... This all occured before upgrade to high sierra and the issues persist with high sierra.
I suppose you may have been able to avoid it if your installed apps happened not to link to any system libraries?
If they do though, and the system libraries change, how can the brewed apps possibly be unaffected?
I have too many tabs open all the time using safari impacts my life in a negative way less :-)
Also swipe works :-)
1. Required a full display replacement, and the Apple technician dropped my laptop and left scuffs on the bottom. This was noted, and they replaced the bottom without even bringing it up to me (but it took an extra day to wait for the part to arrive). Upon picking it up, I noticed there was a dent, an obvious dent, on the corner panel that they didn’t fix. The apple store was so crowded, and the tech was unwilling to reason with me (cosmetic damage isn’t covered, this is the way it was brought in... ya da ya da)so I left.
2. Emailed Tim Cook. No response (obviously). Escalated (maybe Cook deferred my case to them and they left a note on my account?) to customer relations and they said to bring it in for repair.
3. Brought it in for repair, and when I got it back, the headphone jack and thunderbolt ports weren’t working because the side panel was shifted to the point where the peripherals couldn’t be plugged in properly, unless I really jammed it in there (and even then it didn’t work).
4. Emailed Tim Cook again, bringing this to their attention that their 5th Ave. flagship store is really cutting corners on repairs. At this point, I just wanted a full blown replacement... call me entitled, but I wanted to exercise my insurance, which was purchased just in case shit broke. Well, shit broke and they mess up every repair. So, am I wrong to want a replacement? No response again, but customer relations said “we spoke to the manager of the store, they said to come back in.” Went back in, and the manager says “sorry, we can’t replace it. But we can fix it again.” I was like, ok... you couldn’t tell me that over the phone? I had to subject myself to the madness of the 5th Ave location for no reason?
5. The deemed the issue as a logic board issue. Replaced the logic board. When I came to pick it up, the Genius says “... idk why they replaced the logic board... your left ports are misaligned and damaged- it has nothing to do with the logic board.”
My left ports still don’t work, but I don’t want to deal with Apple anymore.
Granted, they shipped me a pair of AirPods as a compromise since my headphone jacks don’t work... but this was the worst experience I’ve had with any warranty/insurance process. Including car accident, and home insurance. Health insurance is still the absolute worst, but that’s a tough bar to pass- point is, Apples quality everywhere has deteriorated to the point where they’re almost trying to cut corners on purpose, rather than excelling at hardware + service, like they used to.
No issues with any Apple device with the lastest software for myself or anyone I know. I can only assume that these are either edge cases or unmitigated hyperbole.
Add this to your proof of conspiracy: my daughter's stock 12-inch MacBook, purchased this summer, updated to 10.13.1 and started having exactly the same problems. The only reason I know is she recently started borrowing my non-macOS computer to get her homework done.