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Comment by freitzkriesler2 | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve a feeling this truly ended with the iPod. No more iPods and Apple software quality is going downhill pretty fast :(

My top-specced 14" M3 Max has all kinds of weird issues I've never seen before - half of the screen going pink when I switch between local users too often, getting completely unresponsive with only power off helping, not mounting USB sticks by default with only some window appearing for a millisecond on the screen, battery lasting 5 hours in VSCode (!!!) etc.

Not to say that the quality of OS updates has been stellar in the past several years, but Sonoma stands out as an especially buggy release.

I've encountered a lot of weird bugs, including it occasionally becoming completely unresponsive, that I've not had on this particular machine before. This machine being a 16 inch M1 Max.

That you mention a specific app in regards to battery life suggests it's more likely an app specific problem.

I don't think it's a coincidence you're having poor battery life with an electron app.

Surprisingly I don't have that issue on my other two Macbooks. Also WiFi goes randomly down without any notification and so does USB charging. M3 Max for $8000. One would expect something less messy for that price.

What model are the other MacBooks? Possibly it's something not optimised or even not compiled for arm.

Wifi can be a very mixed bag, the usb-c charging issue sounds like something worth taking/sending it back for (assuming it's not something obvious like a crappy usb charging brick).

Other MacBooks are Intel and never drop WiFi. USB-C charger is the original 140W Apple one. If I send it back, I'll get a refurb mobo with another set of issues as returned by somebody else and not a new one, and all my data wiped out. I pay yearly AC+. I still hope some future OS release will fix it but I am not so sure.

If you're not willing to take it in to have what sounds like a hardware fault fixed under the warranty you're paying for and not using, I'm not really sure what you want, except something to complain about.

Warranties exist for a reason, if you choose not to make use of it, that's on you, not the manufacturer.

From my past experience Apple replaces the faulty board with another (previously) faulty board they attempted to repair and which passed their initial stress test, only giving up ghost within 2 years. Happened to me twice before. If I had a guarantee they put in a new board, that would be different.

Are you running the apple silicon vs code? The performance difference (and battery life I imagine) is night and day. I had similar issues with an m2 and getting a m3 max has fixed them all, so might just be a hardware problem.

You could, you know, take advantage of Apple's best-in-class support and service?

Also: the 5 hours in vscode thing is almost certainly some extension you're running that is constantly spinning its wheels. This isn't hard to figure out - just look in Activity Monitor.

Nothing shows up eating more than 4% CPU. Also when I go to sleep with battery at 100%, turn off the WiFi for the night and close the lid, I often find battery at around 30% the next morning. Don't tell me it's a user problem. I suspect 128GB RAM is eating too much power or something. I also refuse to visit Apple "geniuses" as they don't honor appointment times (fed up from waiting 2 hours until somebody talked to me) and then going through 30 minutes of trivial questions before they actually do something. Not mentioning they always wipe out drives when they "fix" something and I end up with some refurb motherboard that failed for somebody else before.

Apple support has not been best in class for years now.

Is there any other laptop manufacturer that offers generally better support than Apple? I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested.

I mean, I’ve found Apple support has become incredibly disappointing in the last 5 or so years, and Lenovo support has actually improved, though you usually have to mail your device in.

I’m legitimately unsure what changed in Apple to make their support go from “pretty damn good” to “honestly a waste of damn time”.

It is, apparently no one can handle sarcasm on this forum.

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