A list of macOS, tvOS and iOS bugs while helping my family over the holidays
njr.sabi.net
njr.sabi.net
It's sad, because I really like their whole infrastructure with iCloud and sync between devices.
I don't know what happened, maybe they just have too many products and operating systems to support.
However Microsoft's APIs are not "more stable" than Apple's - in fact the Microsoft APIs change constantly. See Win32 -> MFC -> WinForms -> Silverlight -> WPF -> UWP -> WinRT... Or for languages, maybe you want to use or C++/CLI or C++/WinRT or C# or VB.NET or F# or JavaScript or the language they'll introduce next week. The treadmill is real and exhausting; what is a modern Windows app anyways?
For comparison Apple wants you to write Mac or iOS apps in Swift, or in Objective-C if you can't use Swift.
Apple have mutated the same API over many years, however Xcode's default settings drift, deprecations are frequent, and the new macOS is rarely backward compatible with a large application. This means that each summer when the new Xcode/macOS combination is released you have to spend some time getting up and running again.
I doubt that the ideal situation of a continually developed API with perfect backwards compatibility exists. In that case the getting your code building and running with the new Xcode/macOS each summer is likely less time consuming than rewriting against a new API every 5/10 years. If you are maintaining well established code, then the opposite is true.
I recently installed something that was probably first targeted Windows 98.
The APIs listed by GP are deprecated and the platforms are not shipped/enabled by default, but that's worlds apart from intentionally breaking them (with almost no communication).
Of course, I still prefer a good package manager and direct access to the source on GitHub/GitSomewhere, but MSDN is very well maintained.
Apple doesn't have backwards compatibility for existing software and stuff breaks regularly from version to version. However, one can count on Objective-C to pretty much work (although Swift is still work in progress).
So both suck, basically.
The XAML developers will jump to whatever the next thing is when it comes around, but the conservative WinForm developers won't go anywhere anytime soon, forcing Microsoft to continue supporting and developing Winforms.
Throwing together a quick WinForm application is still much faster than building something using XAML, in my opinion. Especially if you don't know what you're doing, and that still how many in-house business applications seem to be built.
I can also pick up Objective-C class specific methods and classes that were dropped.
On the other hand, Microsoft's API screw-ups are legendary at this point... not even they know what developers should use for Windows apps. I think Windows Phone was recently canceled, so that simplifies things a bit.
And even if there was such a blessed SDK/language combination, they'd probably drop it or rename it next year ;-)
Which affected the way Objective-C was being used on Apple platforms.
You can pretty much always run apps for Windows XP (released 2001) on Windows 10. You can't run any apps from OS X 10.0 (released the same year) on modern macOS. Yes, there was a processor architechture change in there (and a subsequently dropped compatibility layer), but the APIs have changed enough that that isnt the main issue.
Fairly recently, I was looking in to controlling a service using C# and while the docs claimed that System.Management was deprecated, I could not find code samples anywhere that did what I needed without using System.Management.
It doesn't seem like it's actually deprecated, and I couldn't find any corroborating claims that System.Management was deprecated, the mention only seems to exist on a single MSDN page. This one, in fact: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
> Classes in the Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure namespace. (The System.Management namespace is no longer supported). For more information, see WMI .NET Overview.
What exactly does "no longer supported" mean if not deprecated? Why is it still in use if it's not supported? Why don't the System.Management docs mention this at all?
Full disclosure, I'm saying this as a very non-C# guy, so my relative inexperience with that ecosystem is absolutely a factor. But my thinking is that, if you're already a decently skilled programmer, you should at least be able to interpret documentation so long as it's not astoundingly terrible. In this case, there isn't a clear answer to my question, so I'm just left feeling like I'm writing doomed code.
Sorry for the rant. It's a relatively minor gripe, to be sure, but it needs fixing.
Some examples:
- It took them years to bring back features to Pages (e.g. linked text boxes).
- Keynote now crashes on presentations that worked with older versions of Keynote (e.g. presentations converted with PDFToKeyNote).
- XQuartz still doesn't permit native resolution in windows (meaning HiDPI-capable Gtk3+ are scaled up and blurry).
- Location services steals focus from XQuartz, making X11 applications unusable.
- macOS regularly crashes on my MacBook Pro with two external displays when the display configuration changes (e.g. one display is turned off)).
- I regularly run into a bug where my MacBook Pro does not charge when the adapter is plugged in (even though the status icon shows the charging status). Plugging out and in again fixes this.
- Many basic UNIX utilities are buggy and never updated or fixed. E.g. take grep:
$ echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o '^....'
1234
123
4 12
- Preview.app/PDF kit have become pretty much useless. E.g. form filling for a lot of work forms does not work correctly any more (it used to work find pre-10.12 or 10.11). And since 10.13 Preview.app crashes all the time while regenerating a PDF document using LaTeX (a use-case that worked fine before), sometimes when zooming. Moreover, going through a slide deck with the arrow keys often makes weird jumps through the slides.
...and I could go on for a while. macOS used to be so far ahead of the curve on the UNIX desktop (and perhaps the desktop in general) that even with all the current deficiencies, macOS is still a reasonable desktop. But it is clear that macOS is now beyond its high point. And if Apple does not lose their 'iOS is the future of the desktop'-blinders, things will only go further downhill.
What makes this even more sour is that Mac prices have gone up a quite a bit. A reasonable MacBook (and not the near-EOL Air) with more than one port and a 256GB SSD starts at 1749 Euro. When I started using a Mac as a student ten years ago, an up-to-date Mac Mini was 500 Euro and a reasonable specced (and upgradable) MacBook was ~1000 Euro.
I think the last Mac Pro and the iMac Pro show the disconnect with their traditional user base. People do not want overpriced works of art. They want a stable macOS. They want an upgradable tower Mac Pro, they want a memory-accessible Mac Mini, they want a MacBook Pro that stops optimizing for thinness but has a larger battery, MagSafe, and perhaps one or two USB 3.0 ports during the transition period.
This is the situation I'm in. I need a new laptop as my MBP (2010) has recently hit the hay, but I'm just putting it off and stalling being of things like this and the massive price increases. Instead of magsafe and useful ports I get touchbar... thanks Apple. Honestly trying to convince myself if I can get by with an alternative laptop with Linux (Windows isn't an option anymore).
* Razer Blade Stealth - 1 USB-C, 2 USB-A, concerns over build quality
* Dell XPS 13 - camera below screen (looks up your nose, fingers in frame), proprietary battery charger. They recently updated it; replaced SD card reader with microSD, USB 3.0 and power dropped for USB-C
* Thinkpad
* Precision 7xxx
* Surface - concerns over long-term build quality, USB-A only, magsafe-ish charger
I went with a MacBook Pro because soldered on RAM was standard on most all of them which took the price up within 20-30% of the MacBook Pro. With all of the PC laptops I had concerns about trackpad and general build quality and wasn't confident about battery life or resale value.
Out of the concerns we share I didn't find anything better on the PC side. The Razer Blade Stealth was closest, but with 1 USB-C port that is used for charging isn't reasonable, either. Why would I buy anything with USB-C on it if the only port is already occupied?
I've pretty much been looking at the same list as you but have concerns over build quality / trackpad / random design choices like a webcam pointing up your nose. Not sure what I will do yet, will likely hang on until next refresh and see if there's a new 15mbp without touchbar.
They only based it on UNIX, because they were going after Sun, and just like Microsoftm, UNIX compatibility was a way to bring software into their world, not to out of it.
Now Apple does not need to use that path any more for their survival nor do they care about servers, what matters are Objective-C and Swift OS APIs, not C ones and very latest version of POSIX CLI utilities.
When it eventually dies, I’ll need a replacement with a decent screen, keyboard and trackpad. Apple used to make those, but not any more.
I’ll probably end up running linux on some well-regarded windows laptop.
I have a newer Mac. I didn't like the keyboard at first and still hear about reliability/repair issues, but going back to the mushy keyboards on an older Mac is weird. What's wrong with Apple's trackpads and screens? Trackpads got larger (and get a lot of rogue input when using Linux/Windows), but work great as ever in macOS.
These days I prefer Stack Overflow answers to Apple's own documentation since it's more up-to-date
I recently got an AppleTV, allowing my to cancel my TV via fiber delivered by my ISP. While I have seen a little weirdness from the AppleTV, is not even close to leave of stupidity seen in the tv-box delivered by my ISP. Apple would pretty much have to send a guy to my house and jam a screwdriver into the AppleTV to hit the low level of quality found in other TV boxes.
Point taken about cable tv boxes though. The cable company keeps offering to pay me to put one in my house. I fell for that once. Never again. (It is not worth the closet space or hassle of returning the equipment after a few years.)
There was absolutely no documentation on this all happening, let alone any UI indicating it (even in Disk Utility!!!). All I saw initially was ~80GB of space used by mysterious “system files” (according to the system profiler). Except they weren’t files at all, it was all hidden in the file system.
So there was literally no way to diagnose this issue without using poorly documented Apple-proprietary command line utilities. Even fdisk didn’t reveal the issue!
If I, a computer science student, have to spend hours trawling forums to solve what should be a trivial issue, then I don’t know how the hell Apple expects the lowest common denominator to cope.
$ sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
To “thin” (basically force an auto delete) local snapshots:
$ sudo tmutil thinLocalSnapshots / 10000000000 4
... where the big number is the size in bytes you want to delete.
To delete specific snapshots (identified with the first command):
$ sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots [date]
... where [date] is the timestamp of the snapshot shown in listlocalsnapshots
Source: man tmutil, and [1]
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/solution-reclaim-storag...
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7275030 [2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/220067/cannot-save...
This ended up being such a crapshoot that we had to buy deepfreeze because even the freaking guest account doesn't consistently work the way it should(or, hasn't worked consistently across versions of OSX over the past few years) and basic things like auto updates of software/the OS kept breaking if someone didn't regularly sign into the admin account.
It turned from a quick project that should have been easy and apple-y with basic security settings and enabling auto updates into something that someone from the team has to grab a checklist and verify once a month. It's a complete joke.
It's worth noting apple literally buys deepfreeze for the systems in their own stores. You'd uh, think that their own functionality in the OS would be able to handle that.
Surely this can't be counted as bug. A system account changing to a new user account that does system things (that no normal user will ever touch) should have no impact on the system at all.
Apple is basically handing Microsoft a golden ticket. With Windows looking pretty dev friendly these days, there's finally some competition for an OS that's both UI and dev friendly.
The only caveat: libre Office sucks; I've switched to gdocs instead. Maybe it's a configuration thing, but the alternatives are just so easy now, I hardly bother.
Linux audio is pretty disappointing. It took me hours of googling and mucking around to get surround audio over HDMI working for my ubuntu HTPC.
I ended up having to completely disable PulseAudio which means there can't be any desktop sounds at all, but at least the audio works in surround from Kodi now.
Also every time I do an update I need to reinstall Nvidia drivers. Which might also break the fragile audio over HDMI setup, who knows?
Now that I don't game as much and get to choose the software I use, Ubuntu might work out.
I do enjoy Apples approach to system UI, though. Windows and Ubuntu have always "made sense" where as OSX makes sense and feels nice. Something weirdly intangible that I didn't understand until I was an OSX user.
Click the padlock and authenticate
Uncheck "Automatically check for updates"
[This is a bit diversionary, but I've often seen your username here and wondered if we went to the same school, or if it's coincidence. You'll recognize my username if so.]
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8181588
[I don't recognise your username but I have an astonishingly poor memory for names. School was Camberwell Grammar. If correct, my email is username at gmail.]
On a side-note, is there anything about high-sierra that's a notable improvement over sierra?
Thanks for the tip and the LMGTFY! That did the trick :)
http://h4labs.org/siri-next-monday-isnt-christmas/
If you ask Siri now, it thinks next Monday is the 15th.
Tonight’s bug occurred on the Watch. It told me to close my Activity rings like yesterday, even though I closed them several hours earlier.
—-
Update
I wanted to add that Alexa and Google define “next Monday” as I do. I didn’t add that to my blog because the point wasn’t to try and criticize Siri. Ambiguity will always be a problem.
I was surprised as an adult to discover that this is not universally held. Since it's pretty obviously ambiguous, I would expect my voice assistant to ask for clarification on which one I meant, and maybe learn from that if it's the kind of assistant which keeps user profile data (which is probably all of them).
So, what you said is exactly right: Siri should get clarification. And also when stating things in the form of "next Monday" Siri should clarify what is meant, or just avoid the form altogether by instead saying things similar to "this coming Monday" or "the Monday following this one."
Just "Monday" is the upcoming Monday ("på mandag") and "next Monday" is the one after that ("næste mandag").
Everything else just seems needlessly confusing.
*At least in the region where I live.
Not sure about this in English, but in French you could have the same problem with humans. Most people would think of "lundi prochain" as the first Monday that follows today, but some (including me, at least before I moved to a place with a different usage) would think of it as the Monday after that. Some regions have an alternative unambiguous way of saying it, some don't.
So while the situation might not be the same in English (I don't know enough about English regionalisms to say), there are cases where usage is just ambiguous and neither Siri nor anyone can really be sure what you mean, unless they have spent enough time talking with you and paying enough attention to learn about these particularities. I guess it might happen with Siri, but I think it's not there yet (for now it's not going to understand that if you say "no Siri, the 18th of December" then it has to change its conception of "next Monday", but it could be done).
For everyone else, there is an understood "week's" inserted into the phrase "this Monday" or "next Monday" (that is, they mean this week's Monday, even if it was in the past, and next week's Monday, respectively).
Context cues help as well. The question "what did we talk about this Monday?" is obviously past tense and couldn't be interpreted to be referring to the following Monday. But if someone asked me today "lets plan to meet this Monday", its a nonsensical statement that would require clarification, because Monday was 3 days ago.
And I never have considered or heard of the "this week's Monday" "next week's Monday" interpretation, although I guess I've heard people speak this way occasionally.
It’s intersting that “This Monday” and “Next Monday” are different.
And Genius bar. And phone support, second tier support. And replaced the actual physical device with a brand new one via AppleCare. And then repeated the entire cycle with the new device.
I only ask because I'm still on Sierra and see this list of broken features under High Sierra as troubling.
Hopefully they can do a "Snow Leopard" next release - 0 new features, loads of bug fixes.
Eventually the Time Capsule disk (3TB) fills up, from my 1TB laptop, without ever having finished a backup.
It was happening on Sierra for me too.
I'll never understand how such a massive company can have such poor quality control on their flagship products.
I really have had no other problems, which is a rather nice surprise if I'm honest.
You can work around it by the way, by tapping on now playing -> triple dot -> album cover -> artist.
And randomly later as well. Every few weeks my terminal will complain it can't run sudo because the user doesn't exist. Reopen the terminal -> everything's fine :(
I'm accessing an NAS from multiple macs and a PC. The performance and reliability with the PC is flawless when it comes to file transfers, browsing and general access. With the macs it's often uncertain whether finder.app will be able to connect, ask for my credentials again, fail to connect, seem to be connected, but really isn't, requiring a restart of the process, not show the NAS in the sidebar or anything inbetween.
And that's not even touching the subpar performance during transfers and listing of large directories.
Of course the NAS might be to blame but I see the same issues at work with the NAS.
Yes. Photo library handling is still pretty bad on all the popular OSs. Everyone wants to sell cloud products to do this, rather than any kind of "local" sync. One of these days I'll write the application to do this.
I remember when Apple introduced Force Touch (now the more politically-correct 3D Touch), and Tim said he used force touch to preview emails "all the time". No you don't dude, no one does. That's the most ridiculous made-for-a-demo feature ever.
(I would happily disable 3d touch completely except for it artificially turns off the camera and flashlight buttons on the home-screen. The feature would be useful if they'd just used it as a shortcut for long press.)
But it could be just that nothing has been falsely advertised to me with Android and I knew what to expect :P
While some things are understable due to the security issues of using C and C++, having to use JNI to call native libraries on device (Skia, libpng, ...) or C for C++ APIs, feels less understandable.
Or how gdb support is hit-and-miss, depending on device's firmware.
Oh and the fun of combining CMake, ndk-build and Gradle experimental plugin builds.
What I meant is the overall quality of implementation, not the system designs themselves, where both have their obvious upsides and downsides. What I mean is that you can't have WebGL context in WebView on iOS without risking crashes when your app goes to the background, because you can't use OpenGL when in the background and Apple's own WebView doesn't respect their own rule on that (which turns out is why AdMob users are often having seemingly random crash reports for their apps, I've learned from googling this issue). What I also mean is that I've found some reproducible UI glitches in Android during a few months of usage, and I've found similar amount of them during a few days of iPhone usage.
It feels messy, even though Apple is in position where it's way easier for them to keep it tidy than in the every-vendor-can-do-anything-they-want-kindergarden of Android. Which is really telling.
Reported this several times from multiple devices to Apple from normsl support up to Tim Cook.
Apple is synonymous with Bugs.