Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?
I keep seeing reports of stuff breaking as a result of upgrading to High Sierra. Does anyone know why this new version of the OS breaks so many different things?
Yosemite: https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/the-worst-bugs-in-os-x-yosemi...
Mavericks: https://www.wired.com/2013/10/mavericks-issues-and-fixes/
El Capitan: https://www.imobie.com/support/mac-os-x-probelms-and-solutio...
Personally, I remember this as far back as the first upgrade I participated in, from Leopard to Snow Leopard: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/backstage/comments/problems...
I had trouble finding lists of Sierra's issues due to naming conflicts with High Sierra, but off the top of my head I think that was the version that broke Homebrew's permissions scheme, requiring manual intervention on the part of many users.
https://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-AppleCoreRot.ht...
Is a interesting tesis...
Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky coined [the term "frequency illusion"] in 2006 to describe the syndrome in which a concept or thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere. It’s caused, he wrote, by two psychological processes.
The first, selective attention, kicks in when you’re struck by a new word, thing, or idea; after that, you unconsciously keep an eye out for it, and as a result find it surprisingly often.
The second process, confirmation bias, reassures you that each sighting is further proof of your impression that the thing has gained overnight omnipresence.
–"There's a Name for That: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon..."
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/153166/what-is-t...
When Apple was struggling for success against Microsoft a decade ago, it seemed like a lot of tech folks gave them a pretty big benefit of the doubt. OS releases had problems then, but the reaction was usually balanced by a sense of, "this is progress though."
Now that they are the most valuable company in the world, there's not really any benefit of the doubt anymore.
I think a similar effect was at work in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The widespread assumption was that Clinton was by far the stronger candidate, so there was very little benefit of the doubt for anything.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/02/apple-inc-valuati...
The annoying thing is I tried to upgrade to a new Macbook Pro, but I just couldn't get on with the new machine (I detailed my thoughts here https://blog.willj.net/2017/08/14/why-i-returned-my-macbook-...).
I feel like Apple are pushing me away. My mac is still better for me than a Linux machine, but it's getting close now.
The thing with this is that I don't really think Apple cares that much. Apple is a phone company now, and OS X and Macs feel like an afterthought.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the next few years Apple slowly winds down all things Mac. Marketing, updates, upgrades etc. and while doing that makes XCode Windows compatible.
What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been released. And yet Apple have previously managed good releases like this - Snow Leopard (my all-time favourite OS) and Mountain Lion were successful. High Sierra is a train wreck. I am holding all company laptops back from upgrading because I can't trust the thing.
iOS is in the exact same place. The number of weird bugs and subtlety broken interactions I’ve seen has been growing exponentially.
Even as I type this my Safari address bar is pushed halfway into my status bar, making them overlap.
A couple of weeks back my phone became unusable in the middle of the Everglades as I was relying on it to get back to my hotel. A message notification got stuck on screen and it blocked input with anything system related.
I couldn’t even turn it off because the strange new reset procedure isn’t exactly discoverable and the normal slider couldn’t be intersected with!
Those are just anecdotes, but it happens often enough I’m sure most users of iOS 11 will be able to identify that this is just par for the course on iOS these days.
This gets trotted out a lot, but I have trouble believing it. I don't think Apple considers developers to be in short supply--and if they do, it's very stupid of them and they should reexamine that thinking.
I know that demand > supply for skilled developers right now, but Apple has enormous amounts of money in the bank. They can't use a tiny fraction of that to get themselves more, or better developers? I doubt that shareholders would notice/care if a few millions of dollars went towards a hiring blitz for, say, 100 really good engineers with salaries so competitive that Apple could poach them from wherever else they work.
I'm not saying that "throw bodies at the problem" is always a good solution, but Apple can easily afford to throw really, really talented bodies around, and if short-staffing is their problem, it seems like the solution is obvious.
Am I missing something here? Would adding a bunch of beyond-competitive senior developer salaries dent Apple's numbers more than I think they would? Are there really just not that many developers willing and able to work on this at any price? If not, is the problem with "willing" or with "able"?
If the answer is simple, it probably has to do with culture/QA. But I don't think it's that simple.
Mac updates are a lot slower if ever.
Fortunately, the only apps I really care about besides the browser are developer related tools. Those are usually updated relatively fast on Macs and Windows.
There also haven't been widespread reports that Apple told people that couldn't make calls on there phones to buy another phone - if that were true there would be yet another class action suit. The lawyers would have been salivating.
It wouldn't surprise me if in the next few years Apple slowly winds down all things Mac. Marketing, updates, upgrades etc. and while doing that makes XCode Windows compatible.
I’d be pretty surprised though. The Mac line may not be Apple’s biggest seller, but it’s not like it’s losing them money. It’s a huge revenue stream.
Also don’t underestimate the impact of the fact that every employee at apple uses Mac.
> The Mac line may not be Apple’s biggest seller, but it’s not like it’s losing them money. It’s a huge revenue stream.
Totally, though one that's only getting smaller as a % of their revenue. At some point it might start to seem like a distraction.
I've seen companies drop profitable products before, even those that were a larger % of overall business than Mac is to Apple, so it's not clear that it won't happen. I hope it doesn't, but it might :)
> Also don’t underestimate the impact of the fact that every employee at apple uses Mac.
It will be interesting to see what happens here. Could be an early warning sign of things to come.
Why Apple can’t do that? 1. Pressure from investors “we want to see new stuff”. 2. If they stop hiring new “talents” that would benefit other companies including competitors. 3. You can’t hire good developers and ask them to fix bugs for a year because they would run away from you which would compromize 1. And 2.
It is a tough problem for Apple it ain’t easy to fix. In other words, Apple needs a Steve Jobs. It needs to focus and disconnect from the world for a little while no matter the short term consequences. If you’re confident enough you’re doing the right thing for your customers, it’ll pay off in the long run.
Really? I've never experienced that in the workplace. However, I'm not that widely travelled and not in SV, so I guess I'd be "unsurprised but depressed" to learn that this degree of idiotic entitlement is common. And idiotic is exactly what it is: truly quality software is the product of lots and lots of bugfixing. It's like the "10% inspiration/90% perspiration" thing, but for initial development and bugfix/gradual improvement work. Especially on huge (OS-sized) software, people hiring on should not be surprised that this is the bulk of their day-to-day.
I get that greenfield development is more fun up front. I just (perhaps naïvely) hope that most professionals understand that a) "fun" and "good for the product" aren't the same thing, and b) that it can also be very personally rewarding to spend a long time fixing bugs (yours or others') and see the quality of/user happiness with a product noticeably increase.
Also, I think being able to say "I fix bugs to maintain an operating system used by millions" is at least as rewarding as being able to say "I make buggy websites for startups whose marketing buzz reaches millions".
But to add up to my previous comment - only a few people get to implement new stuff each year, they don't test their code and fall under very tight deadlines, so they produce buggy stuff. This generates tones of new bugs constantly tracked by QA (QA doesn't fix anything, they just report problems), bugs quickly pill-up in Radar and developers are already assigned onto something else. Most of the bugs reported by customers are duplicates... they're usually already tracked, either not assigned yet or simply lower priority than something else. So what it the problem? Well, everything I mentioned ;)
> Management doesn't even reward bug fixing
I think that's the moral of the story. It's not that developers are childish, stamp their feet, and refuse to do bugfix work; it's that they're incentivized to not do it.