Mac OS update failed for the first time in 19 years
lapcatsoftware.com
lapcatsoftware.com
Fwiw n=1 my update to Big Sur went surprisingly smoothly in full clamshell mode connected to 2 external displays.
You could reasonably refer to running in clamshell mode as headless, but calling a system with external monitors connected headless does not make sense.
But I get what you mean.
One potential source of the long update installation time is going to be in how they ship firmware updates as part of their OS updates now and have done for a while (Note that they stopped shipping external firmware update packages for years).
Obviously there are always work arounds but we have to remember for 99% of users this is just the reality they're stuck with.
With Windows I'm doing regular updates and know that these take 15 min max. Make coffee and update is completed.
But with MacOS it is usually at least hour to complete update and it is always showing "2 minutes remaining" for 30 minutes...
There should be a hot key that can display the log of the software update process. That way the user can search for "MacOS update stuck on reticulating splines" to try to find possible solutions. I really don't understand why Apple makes it so hard to diagnose issues with their systems.
Jumping through hoops to keep (or retrieve) older SDKs etc.
Admittedly I haven't tried this in a year or so, but I imagine the experience hasn't improved.
In no other ecosystem have I found existing projects to break so quickly and reliably with every update to my IDE. I would dread Xcode updates for this reason.
You can work around it a little bit by installing the iOS device support files manually without updating Xcode, but it only allows you to deploy to the device. If you want to build against the newer SDK, you have to update.
Going forward this is one of the reasons I don’t want to personally develop any more apps, as I don’t want to be forced to buy new macs every five years or so.
* Mac software quality has indeed declined precipitously over the last decade.
* It is not “Apple bashing” to point out that fact.
* OP never claims the failed upgrade is the only example of said quality decline, but rather that it is one of many representative examples of that trend.
* One failed upgrade in 20 years is not good, nor is it anything to brag about. As the OP pointed out, what is a normal computer user supposed to do in this scenario? This simply should not happen, ever. Features should be dropped, deadlines should be eliminated, and work on everything else at Apple should stop until they can ship an upgrade that does not fail, or at least fails gracefully with an easy way to recover.
* For those who point out they upgraded just fine: “It works for me” is not a compelling argument. On the contrary, it is a terrible argument that should never be made, or be taken seriously, by anyone, ever.
In past years I always looked forward to upgrading to Apple’s latest and greatest. Now I dread upgrades and avoid them until I can’t avoid them any longer. I am still running Mojave, and experiences like the OP’s only reinforces my confidence in the validity of that strategy.
It is Apple bashing when you make dumb extrapolations out of a 1 in 19 year event that happens to 1 Apple computer out of how many millions (billions ?) that Apple have sold over the same 19 year period.
> what is a normal computer user supposed to do in this scenario? This simply should not happen, ever.
Failure of a software update should "not happen, ever" ?!?!!?!?!?!?
Have you ever worked in a technical role in IT (or any sort of technology) ?
My god !
I have worked in a technical role for many years, and if my department shipped Big Sur, I would find immediate replacements for everyone in that department.
It was a good 3-4 tries later I thought to free up the disk a bit and then the upgrade went through.
I think they can do a better job of surfacing error messages to the user. Insufficient disk space is a basic situation I would expect them to have a proper error for.
Either they should have modified and shrank the OS for those models or shouldn’t have shipped such a bad model that only exists to milk people to buy the next one up
Get a grip man. An OS update fails on one machine and you find it perfectly reasonable to extrapolate this to Apple going to the dogs and that Apple management should resign ? What planet do you live on ? Your blog post is the very definition of overexaggeration.
Those of us who manage larger number of Apple devices have not seen any issues with OS X updates.
Sure there is always the possibility of an edge-case where an OS update can go wrong. But that can happen on ANY OS ... Windows, Linux, BSD.
Sheesh !
Surely Apple is not going to the dogs but is doing a lot more things/software/hardware and macOS is not “quite perfect” as it was 20 years ago. Also with the ARM chips Apple is doing a lot of confusion, especially with recovery mode/reinstall/format.
PS: is not my blog.
When something is so rigorously guaranteed that it's almost absolute, it's able to change your behavior, dramatically. It's incredibly liberating. It's like turning on the water tap, and never fearing that you're about to drink something toxic. You can do things quickly and casually, because you know you've got a solid bit of "terra firma" to stand on. If we didn't have things like this, we couldn't have i.e. airplane travel.
It's absolutely commendable for them being at such a high watermark for reliability, but - much like a doctor saving sick patients, or the mail service delivering letters, aspirationally speaking "nothing less than perfection is acceptable".
One upgrade bug in 20 years. That's respectable.
One failure in 19 years is pretty damn good imho. I’ve had more macOS updates fail (and Windows and Linux and Solaris and OpenBSD) in that same time frame.
Sorry but this is a pointless post. I learned nothing other than the writer really seems to like to write.
As a counter point to his post. I’ve updated my 6 machines to Bug Sur and they have all been fine. In fact I would say Big Sur has been one of the “good ones” compared to recent years.
You get the response based on the expectations you set. And with both price and messaging, Apple puts the expectations very high, while sometimes failing to reach them.
does Apple still have a premium price? feels like all the manufactures have similar prices to Apple nowadays.
disclaimer: I just picked a random "professional" apple device and hunted for something close to compare. Sample is likely not representative.
(The largest constraint was selecting another device with a 2560×1600 display resolution.)
Here's another one:
‘This memory will never be erased from my mind”
The blog post states that the person has experienced a steady long-term degradation in the quality OS X delivers for them. I understand the failed upgrade was just the final straw before posting this writ.
And as a bystander, the post didn't even register as particularly harsh to me. It's what you write when you've seen things go down hill and you just hit another drop. Seems perfectly appropriate to me.
The problem with macOS, or Windows, is that they are proprietary operating systems, if something goes wrong, the only way to fix it is to reinstall everything, that to me is not an acceptable fix.
Proprietary OSes are less flexible but not to the extreme you're describing. In both instances there are faults you can recover from, and faults where you can't.
Edit, to rephrase my question as not rhetorical: I'm genuinely interested in knowing if troubleshooting this type of fault is a common occurrence to people outside of OS/kernel programming, as I lack experience with it.
We've got a few thousand Macs and have seen a higher than normal proportion of kernel panics on Intel models since the very fast 11.15.x run.
So far, in addition to the usual panics on T2 devices from HID changes, the new ones are being triggered shortly after login to certain user profiles, especially when external video is connected.
No funny kexts, no custom drivers, just jamf and some very light profile and application level management. It's happening primarily to profiles migrated from pre-MDM / open directory bound Macs, but I only saw it in person yesterday when plugging in for a conference. Unfortunately, so did everyone else.
maybe it was cosmic ray, cpu or other hardware bug, c'mon.
inb4: I don't use apple.
There are funny UX issues with Software Update. I press Restart now 3 times, nothing happens, after a while the system begins restarting and on the black screen I see a notification saying "We'll restart to update later tonight" or something. macOS is full of embarrassing stuff like this.