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Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.

(Often, when one application crashes, a couple others follow not long after.)

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> It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.

Your issues are not normal. For example, here on my Studio, the uptime is 9 days, with Sublime Text started from the beginning and used quite heavily during most days. It has 5 windows with 5 to 10 tabs in each with no issue whatsoever. My experience with my previous (Intel) Macs was about the same; I haven't seen visible effects of the ISA change besides not hearing any fan anymore (and a speed bump, but I tend to use my computers for a very long time, so there is always a speed boost when I get a new one).

If it is under warranty, it's probably worth having a chat with Apple support. Otherwise, I would recommend trying to diagnose hardware failures (particularly RAM; beyond 8GB it should not swap regularly-used applications).

MacOS is rightly criticised for becoming less robust in several ways, but that is mostly fancy new features. And Time Machine. For some reason they cannot seem to get it perfect, which is a shame because it is the best backup solution I have used yet. The core OS is quite reliable and really should not crash things like that.

[edit] There is a wealth of information about AS Macs here, the site is well worth a bookmark: https://eclecticlight.co/mac-troubleshooting-summary/

I’ve never had Sublime Text crash on any platform. I‘ve used it for years. Sounds like a hardware problem. Or if you’ve never done a clean install, bad configuration/apps buried in old data.

In general I find macOS very stable. Though I do not use any of the same apps you do aside from Sublime Text and qBittorrent

On qBittorrent specifically the application can often "feel" like it is hanging because it brings up modal windows behind the main window, meaning you need to drag the main window away to interact with the modal and the main window will be unresponsive in that time. This may make it feel like it is hanging, when really it's just down to a non-native macOS application not using the correct APIs to display modal sheets

I do occasionally get other application crashes, maybe a couple per month, usually it's down to the application doing something it shouldn't. My current macOS uptime is 28 days, which is when I last installed an update that required a restart

I mean specifically crashes, which generate those windows with reports with crashdumps sent to Apple.

To be fair, MacOS itself doesn't seem to have issues. There seems to be no upper limit to possible uptime. It's just applications.

How much memory do you have? I would suspect faulty ram or a faulty SSD that is causing issues when virtual memory is used.

16GB.

I can tell you my MacBook Pro with the M1 and Mac OS Monetary does not crash.

But without knowing the machine and OS version that you have my data point is perhaps not very helpful.

What’s Mac OS Monetary? :)

Ha ha. I think I'll let autocorrect win this one.

I'm using Mac Mini M1 with Mac OS Monterey.

We have somewhat similar machines (both you and I also having 16 GB).

I would definitely take it in to be looked at. That should not be happening. Crash logs will hopefully point a finger at the problem.

I can't remember the last time I had something crash on one of my macs, though I don't run any of the above. But it seems like it could be a problem with your machine

Kinda sounds like hardware problem

I am not experiencing any crashes on mine. Of the listed apps I use IINA, qBittorent, Sublime Text. I use around 30 apps frequently, none of them are crashing.

Have you tried reinstalling everything from scratch? If yes, then it is very likely a HW issue. If others suggest a better method for checking where the fault lies, other than reinstalling, then follow their advice.

No crashes on mine, maybe you got a lemon?

Yeah, compared to my 12th-gen i9 XPS laptop, my M1 Pro *never* crashes. Granted, the XPS now crashes much less since I switched to Linux 5.19, but it still hangs (mostly due to wake from sleep issues) much more often than my MBP.

There was info a while back that memory management issues become more obvious on Apple Silicon, problems that x86 is more forgiving of. Can’t find the source unfortunately.

Something is unusual in your situation. I am a very intense Mac user and I see maybe one application crash a year.

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