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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

That's a weird glitch, and generally I'm not a fan of apple hardware (I think it's overpriced, that their keyboards suck, that they don't have enough ports, and I don't enjoy working in osx), but this article comes off as almost biblically haughty. Apple should have tests around clock updates affecting external audio quality? I mean, maybe after this bug being discovered, sure, but before, was that a connection that could have been made in a QA engineers mind? Maybe it is, maybe it's fair? I don't know anything about manufacturing hardware, but I just find it surprising.

Like, off the top of my head, the x1 carbon is still loved by most Linux users (that I have encountered) despite the fact that out of the box, sleep literally does not work on it for Linux systems. You have to install a BIOS update. Yet Lenovo doesn't seem to get nearly the attention that apple does for this and the myriad of other mistakes I have discovered with them.

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The article comes from CDM which is a music production website, MacBooks are very popular in that field, and basically all audio producers use external audio interfaces, it's not an uncommon use case. This is not the first time that this type of issues happens (from memory, last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine, a very popular music software). So I think the point that the article is trying to make, is that music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. But at the same time I understand your point, this is a small market in the grand scheme of things.

music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. [...] this is a small market in the grand scheme of things.

This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?

> what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else?

Hipsters?

You are mixing up artisan single origin drip coffee with Macs.

The main market for Macs are people who want an expensive-looking, high perceived quality machine for emails, Facebook, and Slack.

Do you have data to support that claim?

Pretty much what I use my macbook air for - £900 back in 2013, battery still lasts several hours. The electrical tape over the webcam reduces the 'expensive looking' part.

For real work on the road I use my t410s and ubuntu (although the hinge has now gone, which is a right pain), but most of the time I do real work I'm at home and use my z440 HP workstation (also with ubuntu)

And Brew, Postgres, Atom, VIM, VirtualBox, tmux, fish and probably 100.000 more things. Why do you think Brew exists and with such stats??[1]

1. https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/install/365d/

> what is the large market for Macs

There are legitimate reasons to buy macs, but I'd say most people want them because they look nice and they consider them a status symbol.

Consumers. (i.e. casual computer users who aren't terribly demanding in any particular dimension) Unfortunately they've been flocking in for the 'just works' Apple reputation as it is being un-earned by Apple. But for many in this group, it's probably good enough vs. what they were using before.

They are so far ahead of Microsoft when it comes to not annoying of frustrating regular users that they can probably fall for a decade before people start abandoning the platform in any significant numbers.

I just tried switching from my MBP to a Surface Laptop, and the bullshit that win 10 makes you deal with is just insane O_O

Same here, I have Windows VMs for work but even Skype is a piece of crap that forces me to reboot the VMs regularly while having serious bugs that interrupt my meetings. 9/10 meetings are starting with fixing Skype issues. If people were serious about not wasting their time Skype would be not used in businesses at all.

I disagree with this actually. I've had a MacBook for a number of years and bought a new one (a 2018 MacBook Air). The keyboard on it was awful and stopped working properly resulting in duplicate key hits. I was also fighting half of the OSX software at this point. Mail was getting buggy, iPhoto is just horrid and I'm not even going to start writing the massive rant about Pages / Numbers.

Alas I took the MBA back and got a refund and grabbed my spare Thinkpad T440 out of the cupboard and put windows 10 on it. The OS is a shell to run Chrome, Excel, Word, Putty, iTunes, kicad, LTspice, WSJTX and I use Fastmail for mail. Literally nothing gets in my way. It just works. And everything like photos and videos are in FILES not weird opaque containers and buggy as crap apps. The CPU is about the same speed, I've got more RAM in this, it's got a FHD display which is good enough and the keyboard is amazing compared to anything Apple had to offer. Plus it cost me literally 1/5th of the cost.

Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.

I think after switching back I just had stockholm syndrome.

> Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.

As a long-time Win user, having wrist pain, this is the killer thing for me. Everything about a Mac feels extremely unergonomic to me. Many things are not doable from keyboard at all. AFAIU most of the Mac developers do all stuff with touchpad so they don't care though.

You may find Control-F2 helpful.

It focuses the menubar, at which point you can navigate the menus by typing/arrow key, Spacebar to focus, and Enter to select.

It helps me avoid a lot of mouse usage.

...come to think of it, I should probably give that a binding on my ErgoDox somewhere.

Cmd-Shift-/ triggers menubar search too, which lets you just type the name of the menu entry you want and hit enter.

Thanks. I did not know that one and it sounds nifty.

By default this is the case but once you learn how macOS is pretty keyboard friendly. I love the ability to set up a keyboard shortcut for literally anything, including third party software, through system preferences.

Only complaint is you have to actually enable Full Keyboard Access from system preferences before you can use the keyboard to do things like select buttons in dialog boxes.

Edit: thanks for the tips, I created a living gist where I will document all the tricks:

https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/e893ffa9e91d08c6098966080978...

As far as driving OSX from the keyboard... yeah, it doesn't go out of its way to teach you how, but there are some pretty deep keyboard shortcuts. Of real note is readline, which is built into every text box. You can use emacs/readline shortcuts everywhere, and because of the ctrl / cmd separation it doesn't interfere with the basic shortcuts.

I've been using Windows 10 more and more over the last 2 years. Its fine. For the first time in a long time I don't feel like Windows is slowing me down, especially now it has sub-system for linux. Its still annoying that processes can lock access to files... but thats small potatoes.

I agree that keyboard navigation in macOS is shit. I don’t think it’s much of a pain point for me personally because i mostly use the laptop keyboard/touchpad combo But when trying to do desktop setups it gets annoying quickly, even the Magic Trackpad sucks in comparison since it cannot be positioned just below the keyboard.

I’ve actually been thinking about writing a keyboard assistant using the accessibility API. In theory it should be easy to drive anything that’s built using UIKit.

Could you give me example of windows specific headaches ?

Afaik, Windows is perfectly fine for casual users.

Apart from updates needing restarts and windows being inconvenient for programming, I don't see any clear disadvantages of using windows.

You sound like someone who has never had to deal with the horrific experience that is ASIO drivers. People use Mac because CoreAudio is great and obviously windows can't be trusted in a live setting due to the many already documented issues that it has with updating/crashing etc.

I don't doubt that there are numerous problems these days with the Mac/OS X and Apple overall.[1] My only point was that the group Apple is focused on today are general-purpose consumer users, not the traditional verticals (creatives, education, developers, etc.) that they built their reputation with. I suspect that's the reason we keep seeing articles like this: it's becoming painfully obvious to members of groups Apple used to serve that they are no longer Apple's focus.

[1] I left about a decade ago when I saw where things were headed with iOS-ification of the platform in general. I'm a developer so I feel/felt your pain as a member of one of the groups Apple used to care about. I moved to Linux which I know is no help to you... power user/pro audio features and software on Linux are still lacking.

The issue is there is great software such as [0] Supercollider and [1] Pd. As interfaces are class compliant the drivers actually work suprisingly well on Linux, its just stability and edge case bugs that will catch you out.

[0] - https://supercollider.github.io/

[1] - https://puredata.info/

Lots of salt in this thread. I have a Mac because I enjoy it the most for software development. It's not a status symbol because, well, almost everyone here has a Mac. The alternatives are Windows-based laptops - who often lag behind software development support (e.g. ports), or Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use. I use Windows at home for not-development and have used both Windows and Linux for software development so this isn't a biased opinion.

The hardware budget from my employer also helps.

I have been using linux desktops for almost 10 years as my primary environments. When I occasionally return to windows, I find that it is less usable for how I utilize my computer.

Funny I look at Linux on the desktop as less and less usable as things like systemd and KDE 4 and whatever version of Gnome that's equally broken.

> Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use.

For you perhaps. I've used desktop/laptop linux for nearly 20 years and it works just fine, millions of others do too.

After the windows 10 blunders lately I decided to give Linux on the desktop another shot. Decided to go with Ubuntu since it's the most popular distro so there's more likely to be support for it.

Developer tooling is really damn nice and using the command line is a joy. With proton on steam I can play a lot of the games I like.

But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get sound to work properly. I'm using a FiiO E10K and a pair of Sennheiser HD650 and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get it to sound right. I tried editing whatever configuration file I could find and I still couldn't get it to sound not choppy. Eventually I gave up and went back on windows. Maybe when I'll change my amp I'll give it another try.

I'm glad it's working for you though.

Windows is not a serious alternative. It is pretty unbelievable that MS did not learn a single thing from Apple over 20 years. The result of this ignorance shows. Their software is complicated, bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time. Apple got this right with the mandatory app menu where the most used things are the same (like CMD+P). I think for developers Linux is a better alternative today than Windows (if somebody does not like MacOS).

> bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time

And here's your MP3 player, iTunes...

Please have a look to the default screen of Outlook and iTunes. Which has more functionality showed into your face that you never use.

Windows hasn't learned from the Mac, because user experience was never a key selling point for Windows. Windows dominance was the result of selling large quantities of Windows licences to IT managers who were not chiefly concerned with user experience, but rather with easy management of a large number of machines, integration with other Microsoft products (Office etc), and backwards compatibility so they could continue running the software that their businesses depended on.

The Mac user experience is great in part because Apple is willing to compromise on backwards compatibility. This allows them to innovate in the user interface (which Microsoft also does) while at the same time keeping it relatively consistent, which is what Microsoft is prevented from doing.

Also, since Apple relies on selling directly to consumers, they really have to prioritise the user experience.

This glitch is just another nail in the coffin for using Macs in professional audio setups. Another serious issue is the massively outdated Mac Pro. Yes, a new one will come this year, but many people have switched already. See for instance

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2019/2/7/pro-tool...

I find that truly bizarre. Would people seriously prefer to run a commercial studio and Pro Tools on a windows machine? I've run Logic across a number of versions on various Mac Pros and they're rock solid. I could almost guarantee a very different experience on a PC ....

I find it truly bizarre that there are people who actually still buy a Mac Pro. Just look at the shop page. They sell that thing for 4k$ with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It's completely bonkers. If you need a high-powered audio machine with dedicated PCI-E ports today(!), there's simply no alternative to a Windows PC. And yes, Windows can do audio just fine; you either invest the work and carefully choose components and build it yourself, or you buy it readily from 3XS, VisionDAW, whatever.

There used to be some timing issues with Windows audio 10 years ago that forced people to go for alternatives but I think it got fixed in Windows 7. Now Apple's ignorance and total lack of innovation makes people move to Windows. I think it just shows that market forces work.

Yes, Windows used to be terrible when it comes to audio, but that was a long time ago. Of course, any badly written driver can still destroy everything, that is why you have to choose hardware carefully. But with a good ASIO driver you will achieve very low latencies without problems.

The difference between a $1.5k Windows machine and a $4k Mac, with the intention to use either for the next 4-5 years, is nothing compared to studio budgets. Audio engineers spend tens of thousands just on room treatments, thousands more on analog mic preamps, and you need a hefty collection of different microphones. This is all so that you can bill studio time at $500+ per hour and produce great recordings. Any time you're spending diagnosing blue screens and Windows driver issues is time not booking artists and preparing mixes. OS X happens to be the first-class platform for most DAWs like Ableton, and the only choice for Logic, so you're limiting yourself not using a Mac.

>Would people seriously prefer to run a commercial studio and Pro Tools on a windows machine?

Yes. A specialist system integrator can sell you a Windows machine with reliable low-latency audio performance and modern components. A lot of people can make do with a 2013 Mac Pro and don't want to deal with the inconvenience of switching; plenty of others have switched because they simply can't tolerate working on a machine with an Ivy Bridge processor and a maximum of 64GB of RAM.

In commercial environments the OS starts to not matter so much. The machine is literally bought for one purpose and that alone.

I have worked in environments where vendors actually give a proper legally binding guarantee that Windows boxes work as expected and they charge accordingly.

> Last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine

When you sell packaged software you'd better make sure it runs with the next version of the OS. All registered Apple software developers have access to beta software, including OSs, for a very long time before launch, precisely to prevent things like this.

It actually caused problems a large percentage of the most popular audio software and it was interesting to see which software developers could get the software out first.

The trouble with the beta was it wasn't exactly the same as what shipped which caused delays of several months in most instances.

I remember NI saying that there were issues accessing the beta so they (like other SW houses) were not prepared. I will try to find it and post a link if I'm successful

Edit: I could only find articles from 3rd party sources - NI did not release the statement on their website, but through their newsletter. For example it is mentioned here: https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/critical-co...

Also, I said "from memory [...] last year" but it was 2015! Wow, time flies! :-O

Not just the hardware. Apple also makes the second most popular DAW. It's a billion dollar business for them.

Good point, I forgot to mention. Yes Logic is very popular.

Reliable low-latency audio is the reason why musicians buy Macs. Linux isn't an option, because the proprietary software we need generally isn't available for Linux. Windows is massively problematic because of the Deferred Procedure Call mechanism - badly written device drivers can steal priority from the audio device driver, causing dropouts and glitches in audio playback and recording. If you're going to use a Windows machine for pro audio use, you really need to buy from a specialist system integrator.

Pro audio users have been loyal Apple customers through thick and thin, but a lot of us have lost faith in Apple's ability or willingness to serve creative professionals. The poor price-to-performance ratio of the trash can Mac Pro was a major source of frustration, especially given the loss of functionality compared to the "cheese grater" Mac Pro; it's really not fit for purpose without spending an extra $1500 on a Sonnet xMac rack kit. The complete lack of hardware updates since 2013 added insult to injury, leading a lot of people to defect to Windows out of sheer desperation. This bug isn't just a nuisance, it strikes at the heart of why musicians continue to pay a serious premium for hardware that often isn't particularly well suited to their needs.

I think Apple are seriously underestimating the risk to their brand of losing creative professionals. The ubiquity of Macs in recording studios and edit suites and on DJ stages said something powerful about the kind of company Apple is and the kind of people who use Macs. It justified the status of Macs as the premium choice for serious creatives. It created an aspirational halo, even if you only really use your computer for web browsing, Google Docs and editing a few photos. Apple are haemorrhaging their most loyal and influential customers, because they don't seem to care about the Mac platform.

That doesn't really matter right now, because they're still selling huge volumes of iPhones at healthy margins, but it could come back to haunt them in a few short years. Chinese smartphone manufacturers are stealing Apple's lunch in emerging markets and making a serious dent in the west; iPhone revenues are declining and it's entirely plausible that the decline could mark the start of a long-term trend. Apple have in effect become a luxury brand that happens to make phones, which has created the existential threat of simply falling out of fashion.

I rally don't think Apple don't care about the Mac. They invested huge amounts of money and R&D resources into it in recent years. The problem is it mostly backfired.

Those ultra-slim butterfly keyboards didn't invent themselves. Likewise the Touch Bar. Not developing it and sticking with Fn keys would have been a heck of a lot cheaper and easier. All the things 'everyone' complains about took a huge amount of attention and investment to deliver. Even the jet engine Mac Pro took a lot of work to screw up so badly. They just seem to have got it wrong.

Apple is constantly under pressure to innovate, from themselves as much as externally, so they just feel they can't sit still even when where they are is actually the best place to be.

On the other hand I got a 5K iMAC when it came out and ... oh... m... g... is that thing gorgeous to use. But a lot of the very pretty, very well engineered, innovative bits and bobs they've come out with recently have just been wrong.

This. And I think everyone who works with pro audio is stuck with, "Well, where else are we supposed to go?" We'd switch platforms tomorrow if we thought we had a better option.

It's also important to understand the context. We spend thousands of dollars on near-field monitors, cables, interfaces, and other kinds of external hardware. If it's a fully rigged up studio, we're talking millions. The "Apple tax" is not really an issue for us, because it's one of the least expensive purchases in our tool chain. I own plugins that are more expensive than the laptop I use to run them.

Edit: You could argue that the people who are really getting burned here are the "prosumer" bedroom producers. That has to be put in quotes, because some of these "bedroom" folks are basically pro-level producers. I'm sure there are lots of people running USB 2.0 interfaces for an in-the-box rig with Ableton or whatever. They are paying the Apple tax, and they deserve way better.

You and the parent both "get it." I just hope that Apple gets it before it is too late.

> I own plugins that are more expensive than the laptop I use to run them.

For anyone curious about this statement, allow me to introduce you to Vienna Symphonic Library. It's the industry standard virtual orchestra, it's used by the vast majority of professional composers and a license for the complete library costs $14,332. We're not talking about a desperately price-sensitive market.

https://www.vsl.co.at/en/VI_Series/VI_Super_Package

> was that a connection that could have been made in a QA engineers mind?

That's not a connection that should be made in a QA engineer's mind, it's a connection that should be made in an architect or team lead's mind, or better yet, one that should already exist as part of the internal documentation. You don't throw tarballs over the wall at the QA team yelling "you dudes, tell me if this breaks!". You know what's being developed and how, and you design your tests to validate that. Otherwise there are infinitely many tests to run.

As for the connection: the article is low on technical details, and https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/anvufc/psa_2018_macs... suggests there might be several bugs at work here. That being said, if there were a list of top 5 things that could get screwed by date and time change, synchronous playback would definitely make it on that list.

If anything, the output from one of the bug reports ( https://openradar.appspot.com/46918065 ) hints that one of the thing that happens as part of the update is pausing the audio engine. The person who introduced the bug may not have figured it out at the time (which is okay, we all make mistakes), but the whole thing should have gone through code review, at least one round of documentation, and a testing process that's built to spot new problems along with the old ones, based on knowledge about what's new in the code. With the right process in place, there's no way that hits the market without serious testing, not at a pro-oriented company anyway.

Edit: tl;dr: IMHO, that's definitely a testing scenario that should have existed. By spending and commitment, the pro audio industry is probably 1/3rd of the Macbook Pro market, synchronous playback issues routinely creep up in software whenever time and clocking are brought into discussion, and (for at least one of the bugs) the source is not some strange interaction but a deliberate action in the code.

> the pro audio industry is probably 1/3rd of the Macbook Pro market

Citation needed - I seriously doubt that the the professional audio market is large enough.

To be fair, a MacBook pro is the highest end premium product in this space being used with official software for a well-defined industry use case.

That's hardly the same thing as a bunch of developers installing an aftermarket OS on a midrange laptop. And even then, "you have to install a BIOS update" is just shorthand for Lenovo fixed the problem, right?

> Midrange laptop

I mean, a topped out x1 carbon is pretty much the non-macbook business laptop, so this is a bit unfair.

People have a special affection to soldered-on memory that tops out at 16GB?

I think this is a good point against calling a computer professional device in 2019 - or was "business" meant from a pure quality/design /luxury perspective?

I know we aren't talking about servers but not-self-serviceable hardware with strict limits is what I usually associate with mid-range, not professional users, not even prosumers.

That laptop costs around 2000€ though. The price itself is enterprise-level indeed.

Not much different from having to install brew to get usably recent versions of basic developer utilities on macOS or installing WSL on Windows. Atleast with the Thinkpad I still have my arm and leg to get it done and I love the keyboard.

> You have to install a BIOS update.

To be fair though even without S3 sleep it is easy to drop Linux power consumption on the X1C6 to ~2.5-3W with display off and no Linux user worth their salt is afraid of installing a BIOS update which literally adds a 'Linux' mode for sleep after which it's flawless.

The BIOS update even installs without needing Windows now a days - LVFS even.

ugh I need to install that update. My X1 doesn’t even sleep right in Windows

Well there is no sleep in Windows - it's connected standby - which puts everything in low power mode but running. I ran W10 on it few months but don't recall having issues with conn stdby. Yeah definitely update to the latest BIOS though - 1803 issues maybe sorted by the update.

You can normally enable classic sleep in Windows by setting the CsEnabled key in registry to zero. That's how I'm doing it on my XPS 15 9570. Still trash of a laptop, but now it sleeps proprly :)

> ugh I need to install that update. My X1 doesn’t even sleep right in Windows

So, it is even Thinkpad guys who can't write proper bioses these days?

Is there a single laptop out there where you can say the bios is truly flawless?

> Is there a single laptop out there where you can say the bios is truly flawless?

Board firmware (laptops, desktops, servers) is pretty much always crap.

If only it actually did work flawlessly. YMMV

So even though Macs are the de facto standard in the music industry and Apple makes software for music composition (logic pro) that supports all the external audio devices mentioned here, they couldn't plug one of these in to test? Are you kidding me? That's some atrocious testing process especially for a company whose slogan is "it just works". Clearly, this isn't the case anymore. The literally did not test their own software with their own hardware, yet we're supposed to excuse them? Like the article says, Apple's QA is basically non-existent. This is the most obvious testing scenario for the audio subsystem used by professionals I can think of. Apple should be ashamed of themselves. This is not an industry where even one audio skip can be tolerated. But it sure goes along with their new marketing strategy of bringing out garbage, untested, broken systems and pretending they are still pro equipment. This fiasco does away with that for the audio industry, that's for sure.

Technically, nothing works for Linux on the X1C out of the box, because the X1C ships with Windows. Or "no OS" if you're a corporate buyer.

I love that several distributions of Linux are basically turnkey solutions for most systems (I run Ubuntu on both of my Thinkpads!), but it's not quite fair to compare Lenovo hardware running a 3rd party OS with Apple's vaunted "it just works" hardware/software combination.

It's what integration tests are for! Have a lab full of machines running popular workflows on lots of existing applications. One would hope their rigs compare sound out the audio port with expected waveforms; they certainly have the budget for it.

There is no comparison between Apple and Lenovo. Apple is notorious for being a closed ecosystem company. They charge a premium price, control the app store, control the hardware, practice planned obsolescence all in the name of "providing a premium user experience". If they are going to overcharge me a "premium tax", they better earn it.

Most linux users expect some problems when deciding to go the linux route. When you decide to use linux as your daily driver, you expect to sometimes get your hands dirty. Also, companies like system76 offer laptops created for running linux so you are bound to have a much much better experience out of the box.

with Linux you have chosen to step outside of the mainstream, and for support that means figuring it out yourself. the fact that lenovo released the patch actually goes beyond what we would expect. when you go with Apple, you are paying a premium so that everything "just works". they should be held to a higher standard.

The difference is Lenovo markets it as an "Ubuntu-ready" machine.

Last time I checked sunflower audio wasnt working either.

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