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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware?

E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

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Apple does not accumulate a trail of old hardware. They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years. Their “tail” is always about the same length.

I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days. It “just works”. So, a “long tail” of hardware is no excuse anyway.

Apple is in the middle off a platform transition from Intel to their own silicon. Some of these problems could be a de-emphasis on the Intel experience. Some of it though seems to be lees quality and more philosophy ( such as the claim it actively deleted files from root ).

If you are going to play in the Apple garden, you have to play the way they want you to.

>They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.

And people give Microsoft shit for not supporting Windows 10 more than 10 years when Apple only does 5.

>I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days

That's incredibly brave (or foolish) to have no fear of upgrading Arch, considering Arch does indeed break, it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.

Also had EndeavourOS for a while when I attempted to switch to Linux and, gave up on it when an update left me without sound. It's a great "batteries included" Arch distro, but can't tolerate such risks on a daily driver machine that I need it to work 100% of the time, every time.

For daily driving without update anxiety I'd go for something boring like Ubuntu/Debian based OSs, Fedora if you want more up-date, or even OpenSUSE if you want a sane rolling distro, but I'd stay away from Arch if you want your computer to just-work(TM) and don't wanna be your own part-time sys-admin.

To be fair, with Arch, the more often you upgrade the less you have to fear - the migrations around breaking changes are normally pretty good.

> the more often you upgrade the less you have to fear

Why? If an update is broken, then it will break your shit when you update to it no matter from where the starting point was. The destination is still a broken system.

Arch breaks extremely infrequently these days. I run it on >10 machines at work and home, some even in internal prod.

How much are you willing to vouch for Arch? Will you give me $10k next time my Arch breaks at update?

i'll bite and take the action.. of course with an additional stipulation that you wield your wallet to all those daily driving osx that gets hit with this :)

I'm not taking any bets on how you setup and maintain your particular Arch. Partial upgrades are unsupported etc. You can definitely shoot yourself in the foot with Arch, but after a while it becomes easy not to.

> Some of these problems could be a de-emphasis on the Intel experience.

Unlikely since several of the issues seem to happen only on Apple Silicon.

> They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.

It's officially considered "vintage" 5 years after it is last sold, but that doesn't mean it won't receive OS updates. Apple considers hardware to be obsolete 7 years after sale ends, but is still likely to receive security updates for a while longer.

Their phones enjoy an even longer support window than their desktops/laptops if you consider security updates, the iPhone 5s (2013) just received a security update last year.

There's also cases where (shockingly to some) Apple just doesn't care.

I'm still more than bitter, after buying some nice 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors that Apple actively broke (and may still be broken) Display Stream Compression 1.4 for the Pro Display XDR.

When it was released, there were questions about how Apple was managing to drive that display.

Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.

Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.

This happened with many many users, across many screen types.

And if you downgraded to Catalina? Boom, back to 144 Hz.

Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.

Btw, do you mean you downgraded DP to 1.2? I think there isn’t a DSC 1.4 (only DP 1.4 which has DSC 1.2, and DP1.4a with DSC 1.2a).

Do you have any more info/links about this? I’m curious, since I do have a Pro Display XDR, and I’ve been trying to understand for some time how exactly it’s able to reach its bandwidth, which is definitely a rabbit hole.

Apologies, you're right. DP 1.4 - just looked at the manual (for the LG 27GN750-B, though I know that many other monitors were affected). Has been a couple of years now.

Ironically, I too, moved to the XDR.

Downgrading to DP 1.2 improved the display options from DP 1.4.

Alternatively, is this evidence of a changing news cycle that is spending more time on the always-present background noise of social media complaints about updates? Do we perceive the rate of failure to be higher because news these days often takes the form of "let's summarize some reddit threads" and outlets realized that warnings about errors when updating software reliably get clicks?

Yes, I think you have nailed it. I have seen this same phenomenon happen in nearly every niche that I pay attention to. Only thing I would add is that a lot of articles are based on tweets, often from random users where the article author did nothing to verify and just included the tweet as the source

To be fair, the media has been doing this for at least 10 years.

Yes, because Apple can do no wrong.

You ask any long time macOS/OSX user and they will point to Apple software quality worsening well before anything comes up in the news media.

Heck, I'm in the camp that thinks Apple OSX software quality peaked at Snow Leopard and it has been all downhill since then, and this camp is massive.

I doubt we're being influenced by the "media".

Nobody is saying Apple doesn’t make mistakes but you don’t have to be an especially knowledgeable follower of the online media world to know that sites live and die by social media clicks driving ad revenue, and recycling a few tweets and Reddit posts into an article is one way to provide the constant churn of attention-grabbing posts which sites like Twitter demand.

People always assume that anyone defending Apple is a fanboy of some kind or other. I'm not. I personally can't stand their products and wish that I didn't have to use a Mac for work.

What I am is skeptical that subjective pulse checks of social media threads are a good way to measure software quality. They're a decent way to measure public sentiment, not actual error rates.

Yeah, I haven't seen an apple "fanboy" in the classic sense of the word in over a decade. I mean, the daring fireball guy always gives apple the benefit of the doubt, but I've ran into far more people with a borderline irrational hatred of apple to the point where they can't not complain.

I was a total apple advocate between 2004-2014. Now it's become just preferable to windows (although the trackpad on laptops is miles ahead of anything in PC land I've come across). I'm getting more and more annoyed at the iphone, but the alternative is a phone run by an advertising company...

I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not hardware getting old or battery problems, it's the OS.

So I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA, but I don't believe they're actually intentionally supported

I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA,

More likely neither. Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

(My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.)

> Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

So every major OS update is larger and more complex, so it's to be expected that after ~4 of those my machine lags when doing literally everything? It's not that I'm running tons of background apps, it's a powerful machine lagging on a clean install of a recent macOS version when doing basic operations like opening a webpage.

> My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.

I suppose it's Apple Silicon? Because that would still be in line with Intel-based macs becoming less performant over time

My intel MacBook lags in such a predictable and constant way, as if a process is running constantly at 99% CPU. Makes me a bit suspicious

How much have they /really/ added to the OS (which is enabled on my hardware) and consuming extra resources?

A while ago I went into a rabbit hole looking for something to support my hunch (which I now confirmed by installing old macos) and found some discussions about graphics/OpenGL APIs being deprecated and removed over time. I have a very uneducated guess that new-macos-on-old-hardware runs some translation for all graphics operations/APIs, which causes perceptible lag when doing _anything_, because everything draws on the screen. It does feel as if the OS is constantly struggling with some background tasks

This macOS version only supports models since 2017-19 (depending on product line). Apple don’t really have an excuse compared to Microsoft since they only have a few hardware options.

It’s amusing to compare the comments here to the comments on windows update threads. As nobody else has, let me add the reminder for everyone to switch to <different OS>.

Let’s be clear. 2017 is SEVEN years ago. Things could be far worse.

Seven years is nothing.

Appart from my 2y old corporate laptop the newest machine in my household is a lenovo Yoga X390 from 2019, nearly 5 year old. everything else is between 6 to 15 years old and they are all running a supported OS.

Also release date != purchase date.

Let's be clear. The Apple premium is LARGE. You expect more from them than any other computer company.

I have doubts it's the latter - just a day or two ago there was an article trending on HN that building Hackintoshes is becoming harder and harder because Apple is removing drivers for old hardware only found in Macs that are not supported anymore.

Also doubt it’s the latter: Compatibility with old hardware has never been high on Apple’s priority list.

Windows updates before MS fired their QA department were uneventful, after they fired their QA department, serious issues started popping up every single month. Including server systems not booting anymore.

That doesn't track for me.

One of the reasons MS introduced "patch Tuesday" in 2003 was because Windows updates until then had been notorious for years for causing issues randomly, which their corporate users hated firefighting without warning. By rolling out their updates on a predictable schedule, corporate IT depts could set their calendar to keep a day (or two) per month clear to do post-update firefighting, or (if they were really on the ball) to make time for their own QA before releasing the update to the rest of the org.

So unless the QA firing you're talking about was more than a quarter-century ago, Windows updates have always been issue-laden shitshows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday

Any issues were really minor. I worked for an MSP for most of the Windows XP through Windows 8 era and update problems were anomalies, not par for the course. If there were problems, they were newsworthy events.

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