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Comment by santiagobasulto | Hacker News Reader

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I'll probably be tarred and feathered for this opinion, but "everything works out of the box" Mac feels like wishful thinking

Every time Apple pushes an update that causes some bizarre issue, people talk about it at length

On the one hand, software is written by humans. Humans make mistakes

On the other hand, Apple by design supports such a tiny set of hardware (that they largely build themselves and tightly couple to their software) that it's strange they're unable to iron out the issues in test before pushing the updates and ending making the tech news cycle when something goes wrong

> that it's strange they're unable to iron out the issues in test before ...

It's the deadlines.

"Must ship feature before WWDC"

I can't help but wonder if this requirement if secrecy for a big bang marketing event that is called wwdc is to blame as well. At least the different teams working in the same product should have access to the complete product, right?

Last major update broke all my vpns for a while. Really not fun having to switch to ssh bastions to do anything.

I don’t really share your experience, but otoh I rarely have problems with MacOS. Although to be fair, I also do my best to wait the better part of a year before updating. So I’m always ~1 year behind, but then I also avoid a lot of the teething problems.

I don't use a Mac so I can't exactly cite specific issues I've had. But I've definitely seen a lot of them posted and reported on HN, ArsTechnica, Reddit and other places

Due to how small Apple's hardware list is, issues directly impact a much larger percentage of their userbase

> On the one hand, software is written by humans. Humans make mistakes

That's why we had proceses and testing. But they are too expensive. /s

a) most thinkpads come with a physical camera shutter https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht512980-what-is-...

b) this story is about Windows. Linux has its own firmware update solution https://fwupd.org/

> I’m just gonna stay on my easy-to-use, reliable, everything-works-out-of-the-box Mac.

Where do I get one of those? I've ran into just as many problems with my Macs.

Latest is Airplay stopped working: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255783202?sortBy=rank

Another was Finder copy to SMB wouldn't error but file would be corrupted (copying from any other computer to the same SMB no problem. Copying by rsync from the same mac, no problem, just finder)

My Airpods often don't connect. Solution, reboot Mac (after trying several other things)

Network starts failing. Solution, reboot (after trying several other things)

I can catalog many many more. I also have a Windows 10 (now 11) machine. It's had no more (nor less) problems.

What kind of router are you using? I had a bunch of network issue when I turned on RSTP on my network for some reason. They’re all fixed since I turned that off and ICMP snooping (I have Ubiquiti equipment). Can’t say much about your SMB issue, we have a mount drive at work and been solid since I’ve been here.

> Solution, reboot Mac

They copied this feature from Windows. /s

Apple definitely knows their audience, unfortunately they've been straying a little bit from the mission lately on software reliability.

> software reliability is a general problem, not specific to Apple. Why test, when you are already working at the next release ? If there are issues, please upgrade to the latest version. Rinse and repeat. /s

Yeah, on Linux you get all of the same firmware issues, but with no vendor software support to update it!

I dual boot windows so that I can download all of my PC's firmware updaters.

What? I've been upgrading my laptops with fwupdmgr for years without any issue.

I've tried gnome-firmware (same backend) on literally every linux system I've ever owned and have never seen an available update for any of my hardware.

If you don't own supported hardware, that's not really super surprising: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/

Right. That’s the point of my initial comment. That list looks promising… if you own a Dell or Lenovo. Everything else is a pretty pitiful showing.

I’m actually booted into windows right now to update my monitor firmware.

It's definitely making me reconsider Dell for my next laptops, unless Framework starts commiting to lvfs more.

I miss the days where you could boot FreeDOS and downloading a .exe to update your firmware on about any hardware.

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