Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It used to be the same for me, when I started with Tiger until Snow Leopard, I never had crashes. Uptime was months.

Then I started getting some crashes occasionally but still relatively rarely. This increased a bit around Sierra then reduced again with Mojave.

Then Catalina happened and with the new 2019 mbp retina, I started having crashes about once every two weeks. Now, I have an mba m1 running Big Sur, and I think my average uptime is around 2-3 days. Crashes are now something typical, I no longer expect my computer to run for long stretches of time. For a few months, my mba couldn't even go to sleep with crashing, couldn't restart without crashing, this was only solved once I updated to 11.6.1 (I tried reinstalling mac os x before to solve this, it didn't help)

So, yes macs used to be very stable but not anymore, I don't know what happened with Apple's QA but it seems there's now major issues. I didn't change the way I use my mac, if anything now I don't use SIMBL or kernel extensions (which I used to use back when my mac didn't crash) so things should be more stable not less. Yet, despite having ever more control over our machines, being more restrictive over what we can do, Apple somehow is making their system less stable, more flaky than before.

Of course, this is anecdotal, I might be very unlucky but in the past year, I've had quite a few coworkers drop out of calls or be temporarily unavailable, telling me that their mac crashed and they needed to reboot. So, it does seem to be widespread.

I don't use my M1 device enough to determine if they crash regularly, but I can definitely say that every release after Mojave has been a regression in stability. Me and my boyfriend at the time both upgraded to Catalina and the issues just wouldn't stop piling up. After 2 or 3 completely untraceable crashes, we both restored to Mojave and forgot about updates altogether. I might give Monterey a try soon, but between the space-wasting design language and ARM growing pains, I think I'll be contented with my trusty x86 Linux desktop for quite a few more years.

I have an M1 machine for a few months and use it daily. Not even a single crash in my case. I guess this is the experience of the large majority of users. But there might be faulty units that have this problem, you should contact Apple.

I have MBA M1 for almost a year and haven't faced any crashes yet. On the other hand, I have some app that just hang infinitely (beach ball of death) and ignored every input of my mouse and keyboard. So I have to do the last resort is to force shutdown on my MBA. And the app went back to normal. So I was wondering perhaps it is something do with the dependencies or the app itself is fighting with the system?

I have a few issues on my Windows 10 that I thought it was Windows issue since it kinda point to Windows that are causing the errors. When I investigate it further, turn out it is the app that are clashing with Windows which led Windows to freak out.

I wonder for this article, could it be the app, libraries or dependencies that are just behaving plain stupid and led macOS to freak out?

Catalina experience up to patch .6 was a huge fail, especially since it happened during the pandemic and my 2018 MBP was becoming unresponsive during long work hours and meetings and crashing, fully restarting on its own around 2 times per day. Big BT issues also, at some point I had to reinstall the OS to fix them. Big Sur was just fine and Monterey brought back BT issues... For someone jumping to MacOS 3 years ago the experience is just 50% either way which is not good

Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air? I've had one for about 8 months, run it pretty hard (memory pressure is usually in the yellow, lot of applications and server-like processes running for both web dev and media production) and it hasn't crashed once.

Not contesting your experience at all, but if you're having crashes every 2-3 days it might be hardware-related?

> Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air?

I don't think so. I've got the same issue as GP. Well maybe not every 2-3 days but at least once a week I'd say.

If it's hardware-related, on basically a brand new machine, it's a quality-control issue.

It might, but isn't one of the goals of these modern hybrid kernels to capture hardware failures and log it instead of crashing the entire kernel?

Windows manages it (most of the time). Linux and FreeBSD manage it and they're technically still described as monolithic. macOS, on the other hand, throws a hissyfit and everyone then blames the hardware rather than the error handling.

I bet if we were talking about Windows people would take great pleasure in mocking Microsoft so I find it weird that Apple is exempt from the same criticism.

I was starting to wonder too but then I updated to 11.6.1 and the problem disappeared so it would point to this being a software issue?

My 2018 Mac Mini would crash going to sleep every single time after the final Mojave point update. There was a ton of forum posts on the usual Apple sites so it wasn't just me. The "fix" was to upgrade to Catalina which is a pretty crap fix when it requires you dump all 32bit software.

> I don't know what happened with Apple's QA

For years I’ve been convinced that they let go majority of the QA and have outsourced QA to the customers/public.

You'd think a company that profitable could hire a few extra QA people. Especially considering their entire brand is "it just works"

My Snow Leopard Mac has been up 449 days. (Had to replace the UPS battery.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com