UI Performance Decline – OS X Tiger to Yosemite [video]
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It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore.
One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.
As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.
I feel like your frustration could be solved with just simply setting up your devices in a way that suits your uses, not the common denominator.
I myself have been hit hard by Yosemite bugs (graphics glitches, slowness, wifi not connecting at all, very slow wifi, Mac not coming out of sleep, AirPlay issues, Airdrop issues, Bluetooth suddenly disappearing etc., all this on a fast, fairly new MBP), but I have never experienced any iOS 8 bugs of note.
The corollary is that when someone complains, we need to take it seriously and not pretend everything is fine. Clearly many people are hit by problems, and the problems are very real.
Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.
Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.
This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.
I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.
If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.
The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.
Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.
It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...
The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.
Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.
[1]: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC461LL/A/apple-60w-magsaf...
I'm right there with you, but the trouble is, I'm not sure anything satisfies that criteria any more. :-(
Not so long ago, I was expecting to go the other way, with our next laptops here having that fruity logo precisely because we expected OS X to Just Work where Windows 8 was just nasty.
However, right now, neither of the major commercial platforms is at all appealing, and anything Linux-based still has the fundamental problem that there aren't enough professional quality applications available to meet our needs yet. Relying on SaaS to break the OS strangleholds is also a questionable business move that we are increasingly glad we haven't made as the stories of broken "upgrades", sharp price increases, and outright cancelled services pile up.
I'm holding out some hope that either MS will come back with the next version of Windows and promote some sort of very-long-term stability and support (which is something they have historically been good at, but it seems unlikely with their new choice of leadership) or the FOSS work will finally start to take over (but this probably requires changes in the law, specifically making clear that patents are not enforceable anywhere that matters on things used for interoperability like data formats, communications protocols, and algorithms necessary to work with them).
Yeah, imagine that, multiple complaints: 1. Software updates made Apple TV AirPlay incredibly unreliable for me. And its not just me, lots of people have had this happen. I btw still think Airplay is a stellar feature and if it ever got fixed it would continue to make me stick with Apple TV. 2. The UI sucks:...
> And of all things, scrolling.
Navigating episodes/content/movies/whatever on the Apple TV is a very bad experience. Its hard to explain without first using a good experience. On Apple TV, if I'm on the last episode of a show on Season 1 that I own, getting to episode 1 of Season 2 which I don't yet own is very difficult. I have to go all the way up to "more on iTunes", then choose a season, then get to that episode. On Amazon Fire TV, its just the next episode on the list. Apple TV also strangely sorts episodes you don't own earliest to latest, but episodes you DO own latest to earliest. If I go to purchased Tv shows > all, I have no idea what the sort order is. I think it might be most recent, but then the very first show on the list I bought over a year ago, so that can't be it. And as far as I can tell I can't search the purchased section anyways, so I have to literally scroll down some non-alphabetical list of 220 shows in my case if there's a show I'm pretty sure I bought but I can't quite remember the exact name. I'm not sure how to properly describe this mess, which is why I just said "scrolling", because thats what the experience feels like on the Amazon Fire TV: you just scroll through content and don't find yourself endlessly going in and out of menu "sections". It sounds to me that you don't use the actual Apple TV UI but instead use Plex (on a jailbroken Apple TV?), which is fine, but it says nothing of the Apple TV experience.
Edit: BTW, your mention of Plex reminded me of another (long overdue) failing of Apple TV. I happen to also use Plex on my Amazon Fire TV. The install process was tapping the voice button on my remote, saying "plex", then selecting install from the app store. The process on Apple TV is either jailbreaking, running an app that pretends to be the the trailers server (which may break on any upgrade of Apple TV) or accessing your plex content somewhere else and airplaying it.
Mom/Dad/Wife/Girlfriend/Boss: "Hey! Pick up your phone!"
"Can't. No phone calls where I live."
"Oh. Where do you live?"
"Yosemite."
"Oh. Sorry."
Probably this could be related to hardware config. I have a mac book pro at work with 8GB ram and it works fine. My personal mac book pro has 4GB ram and it has problem.
Oh wait...
Source: using 16GB here
Especially when the default RAM they sell with is usually too small.
The file manager (gnautilus) is now called "files". The video player (totem) is now called "videos". This is so obviously broken for people who are trying to web-search for answers to problems that they're having.
Whats worse os that the renaming is inconsistent - software will get one name in the menu, another name in the help > about, and another name on the Internet.
Gnome - and I say this as politely as I can - makes me fucking hate using a computer.
Same thing.
Who was the joker who kept insisting that iOS 7 was really better and very few complained? I warned about this, post-Jobs Apple design and attention to detail.
The majority of the population?
My own experience of Yosemite has been the polar opposite of many here; better stability, faster, longer battery life etc. All on a 2011 MacBook Air. I never had any kind of issue with iOS 7 either. The odd reset over the last year on my iPhone 5, but the significant majority of the time (99% at least) it worked and it worked well. Sorry to rock your world view, but have you at least posited that these people vociferously complaining are not representative of the whole? Ditto iOS? I know you will chalk me up as another "fanboy"...
Personally, we're still pre-v7 on our iPad here, after reading way too many reviews about severe performance drops on this device after the "upgrade" and learning that there is no way to go back once you've done it. We literally ignore any updates for the system from Apple and just carry on happily enjoying the product as we bought it, making us almost uniquely satisfied among iPad purchasers we know.
take a simple example: usually Ctrl Q (cmd q on os x) means quit. try doing on os x will quit the app 9 out of 10 times. on ubuntu? not really.
Soon thereafter, I did a tour of the usual window manager suspects and ended up with i3 <3
So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.
Hardware: Thinkpads (T41, X60, X200) and Dell Latitude (E5420), currently Debian Sid.
https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/538539277978972160
Yosemite breaks rounded rect corners in UI overlays, like the ones triggered by volume and brightness changes. The masking is broken when the translucent blur shaders aren't applied.
You'd think that'd something they would easily catch in QA before 10.10 shipped, but it's still broken even in 10.10.1.
I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.
This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.
Even if security updates still come for what...usually 20-30 months with Apple...they still don't care about any other kind of backward compatibility and happily break their own file formats at will.
Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.
I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns
Which company would you say has a greater engineering footprint across technologies and business sectors than Apple? There are a few tech companies that actually do one or two things that Apple doesn't, but I can't think of any that do everything that Apple does.
creepy..
For example, if you buy Windows 8.1 you have downgrade rights to every earlier version. All you do is speak with a person, say "I would like to activate windows" and they say ok. Its not a hassle unless you do it daily.
Also pricing is an issue: all recent desktop versions of MacOSX are either free or very inexpensive ($30 or less).
You could likewise say that filing an insurance claim is easy... sure, but for some folks even knowing to make the call is an undue burden - exactly how the vendor wants it.
I didn't see much problems besides it. I like new design, animations are smooth enough for me and everything works well enough.
For PHPStorm JetBrains has also released a version with a bundled JDK 1.8 which fixes the flickering for me [2].
[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-131593 [2] http://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2014/12/phpstorm-8-0-2-bu...
Not saying it is Flux's fault but I'm curious if you're running Flux and get the same result when exiting.
this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)
It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.
[1] https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/
Stability is not "completely lost"
I don't know why WindowServer keeps crashing in this fashion.
Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.
When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.
You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.
But if you were serious, I'd look for a non-prism-compromised OS.
When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools).
I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing.
I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps.
A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings.
Download and discussion about BeamSyncDropper can be found here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdroppe...
Also one thing about OS X running in VMWare is make sure you're using the specific CPU to the fullest potential. Graphics are rendered with the use of CPU. If you don't have the processor(s) / cores set properly you could be only at 50% overall performance. For example, I am currently using an i3 330UM. I've noticed a significant jump in performance switching from single processor 2 cores; to 2 processors 4 cores.
Personally, Mavericks outperformed Yosemite on this little machine. I've experienced long window load times, hangs, and even guest crashes since the jump... My main desktop workstation is rocking an i7-930; I WILL NOT upgrade my main VMWare workstation to Yosemite. If I need to I will just clone my current VMWare image and run Mavericks / Yosemite in tandem. I would much prefer Mavericks > Yosemite...
I put this [1] in `~/Library/LaunchAgents/self.beamsync.dropper.plist` and it starts immediately in the background on login. (Make sure to change the program path).
I also feel that since iOS 7 that stability and quality has gone down a lot, or they got too ambitious with the glass blur effect.
Bugs and generally poor software quality, however? Yes.
They said at wwdc that the blur effect took a lot of 'optimization' work. You don't have a lot of control over how it works and in iOS 7 you had to hack it in by using a UIToolbar vs applying it to a UIView in iOS 8. If you have any view with a significant amount of the blur effect on screen, the animation speed will slow down considerably in the simulator.
They use the effect everywhere in iOS and I bet it does contribute to a decent chunk of performance reduction.
They've just removed the last remnants of pure 2D acceleration support in Yosemite, it's HW-accelerated OpenGL or nothing now. They also changed the timing of screen updates, which locks some drivers at 8FPS. Finally, the rounded corners on windows seem to be broken in the software renderer.
Before you go blaming VMWare etc. for not offering an OpenGL driver: Apple doesn't document those APIs at all, there aren't even headers files. They don't even officially support writing a graphics device driver at all (according to DTS), but they provide enough source code so you can figure out how to do so, albeit not providing 3D acceleration.
I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app).
A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about.
Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in.
My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums.
I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.
In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well.
Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.
I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points).
This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…
And it's not buyer's remorse or anything like that, i got it for free through a university programme and could have got the Macbook Air if i wanted to.
Is it just because iOS is forced to release in sync with hardware, and hence OSX has to follow suit in order to support new iOS features as fast as possible? What is the point, if the experience is then sub-par?
Anybody with one of the new 5k imacs want to chime in? Similar graphics issues.
But no, that's probably not happening.
It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons:
- it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis
- it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem
- it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.
- it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes. Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.
- Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details. Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception
>it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world
Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can
>Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.
You can easily do that with patches and blacklists.
> it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.
That's hilarious, sorry. Nobody who cares for "OSS binaries" uses anything shipped by Apple -- we all use Homebrew and equivalents, because anything shipped by Apple is invariably ancient.
> Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.
That can be easily solved with release-specific service packs, and it's not an excuse to wreck the entire UI.
> Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
Such "massive" research, if it's anything remotely valuable, doesn't change every 12 months. You don't have breakthroughs in UI design every 12 months.
You know what changes every 12 months? Fashion.
In terms of market share, OS X is to Windows as Windows Phone is to iOS. Sometime about a year ago, Windows 8 alone already had higher market share than all versions of OS X combined, and has only been increasing the lead since.
Windows 10 is looking to be the spiritual successor to Windows 7, combining the improvements that came in 8 with a UI that's more palatable for many. And, now there are ample PC hardware options that rival or surpass Apple's in many aspects, which is a lot of what sold MacBooks to average consumers in the past.
I would guess that Apple is taking Windows 10 very seriously.
Let me ask you a question off the topic, have you ever successfully take your boss aside and tell him he's not managing the situation right and the whole project stinks? (Paraphrasing what you're basically saying) A lot of people would be afraid to speak up.
I doubt the Apple managers are encouraging the engineers to speak their minds. Look at the recent reports of how badly the iCloud and Map divisions were managed, not to mention the ways SJ practically pushed his employees over the limits for his own vision and not listening to anything else.
Apple has smart engineers but I doubt they have managers that understand what QA is all about and focusing on quality than numbers.
In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported.
In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process.
That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.
I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.
I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates.
My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.
A thousand times this. I stuck it out with 10.6 for the longest time. Eventually, "people" stopped bothering to release for 10.6 (Java 7... :/) and Apple lost me as a customer.
Which was a blessing in disguise - I'm very happy with Ubuntu + i3 and wouldn't go back even if they got their shit together.
https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion
It's painful to support these days but I'm still trying keep my apps compatible with it.
For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2].
I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else.
(I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.)
[1]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar [2]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar
After reading this article, I opened up System Preferences on an external WQHD monitor and... yes, indeed. That transition is not very smooth. Informally, it doesn't seem slower ...it's just not as smooth as the old effect.
As another poster noted, in Yosemite those panels now use a cross-dissolve effect instead the simpler slide and fade in earlier versions of OSX.
Thing is, I'm not sure I would have noticed this in a million years.
How much time do you guys spend clicking around in System Preferences every day? This really affects you?
I don't know of any other apps with preference panes that use this effect. I tried two other apps (iTunes and Pages) and neither one uses the cross dissolve.
I understand that this small regression is merely emblematic of the issues some of you are experiencing; none of you are claiming that System Preferences itself has a huge impact on your daily lives. But this is such a ridiculous regression to select as the poster child for Yosemite's perceived woes.
I was a hackintosh user for years. I got an old lenovo from 2007 with an intel core 2 duo and thought it would be fun to install OS X Tiger on it. Install went smoothly except the intel integrated graphics wasn't supported.
I decided to check out System Preferences to see how much had changed in all these years. I immediately noticed this perfectly smooth animation between panels. I couldn't believe it was so slow - and with no graphics driver! So I tried it on my rMBP and it was incredibly laggy. I just quickly recorded it with my phone and thought I'd show just one small part of OS X that really represents a much bigger picture of UI performance regressions.
This is slow because each pane is running in its own process and it's doing some complicated cross-process graphics stuff to get all the drawing into the same window. This changed in… maybe Lion?
Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.
For me, I see flashes only in General, Security & Privacy and so on. It looks fine in Dock, Mission Control and so on. I think it is just a bug in certain layouts.
I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.
It highlights that the buttons are disabled then enabled when the animation has finished.
I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge).
A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.
Discovering the glitchy flash in the system preferences pane was really unsettling. Almost a uncanny valley type situation.
I'm still on Mavericks. I've been waiting for bug fixes from Apple and application support for non-Apple apps before upgrading to Yosemite. But after seeing the glitchy-ness on the 5k and reading these comments..
Both recent upgrades are pretty disappointing. When I first got an iPhone 4, I was astonished by how there were practically zero bugs, especially compared to my previous no-name OS, bug-infested phones.
Are there actually more bugs in Yosemite/iOS8? And if so, can we identify potential factors?
Technical challenges shifting to Swift? Regular product life cycle growing pains? Decreased focus on OSs from Apple Increased product-lines/technologies? Pivot from price-skimming to market-capture business strategy?
No. There are some bugs and some glitches, like in every release.
Nothing to write home about, except from a small percentage of the population with a Mac from a faulty production run (but that's hardware, not the OS), or with some software that's hogging the cpu (but that's the software, not the OS).
I have this flashing in System Prefs -- it's a small annoyance, but nothing especially interesting or getting in the way. There are 2-3 more bugs. And some things introduced
I was there from OS X 10.2. People have complained for every single OS X release...
I need to see a video of this moment.
Turns out, they can't.
A 2000$ dollar machine stuttering when i drag windows around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUHfjD6qWc&index=1&list=UUE...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1xhpFRDNdQ&list=UUEhez4TDTd...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNGYjFRQrSM&index=3&list=UUE...
I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade.
I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?
Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain?
Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes.
>Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get.
Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.
Verified by observing vm_stat values on my 4GB 'Air and my wife's 8GB 'Air.
I used to be incredibly "gung ho" about upgrading to Apple beta's. Then, with iOS 7, that all changed. I had to do something I've never had to. I took the beta off my phone and put back on iOS 6. Same with iOS 8 -> iOS 7, despite the nagging feeling at the back of my head that I shouldn't upgrade.
I think the real issue is, that ideals like Facebook's "move fast and break things"[0] (important to note they've stopped using that technique) has become the moral of big companies to fight the decreasing return on investment each new developer brings. To compare, the impressive thing to me about Google is that they ship so fast, with so few issues.
Despite Tim Cooks solid leadership, I think Apple is really in a grey area right now. Yeah, their profits are at an all time high, but the reason the profits exist is because they have the best hardware and software combination. As soon as one side of that edge goes away, then it might be prime time for a dedicated Microsoft to step back in.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/reflecti...
Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly. The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI. The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state. I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were. Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.
This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.
I think they are paying attention, since 10.10 performance has improved considerably since the first DP, but they need to do more. I wish they would stop fucking with it on a yearly cycle and just release a stable, fast operating system with no new features. The graphics system needs more optimization and they need to kill HFS+ (but that's a whole different can of worms).
(Edits: wording)
The experience contained quality, responsiveness, stability as well as productivity enhancements. Hadn't missed Windows and Linux at all.
The experience remained perfect as the OS was gradually getting updates up to 10.6.8, the latest Snow Leopard version and the hard disk drive was changed to a solid state drive.
At that time I bought a MacBook Pro 13" with an i5 processor, and was introduced to Lion.
Believe it or not, I used my older MacBook more. It "felt" much more solid and responsive. Well at some point I gave it away, and was stuck with the Pro model.
As the OS updates where coming along, things were expected to get only better, just like I had previously experienced. But no! I'm currently using the latest Yosemite, and hate it when I notice tiny buggy things happening.. [ for example, try to disable the transparency in accessibility features, and get clunky black corner edges around the volume box as you adjust the volume up/down ]
As I became a more experienced programmer, I realized that good software is perfect software. Thus anything I notice that's not right (and doesn't get fixed when it's a known issue) is a hint for a lot more bugs that I might never get to experience. So essentially I feel like I've lost the stability and security feelings that used to keep me close to the Mac OS.
I really miss Snow Leopard, and hate the path Apple is following. I could bitch about their phones too but that would be more derailing.
PS: I wish there was an image out there of Mac OS 10.6.8 I haven't got a spare Apple machine to boot 10.6.7, update it to 10.6.8 and create a bootable disk for my MacBook Pro
Does anyone know if such an image exist, or perhaps can create it?
If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.
I found if you enable the "Increase Contrast" accessibility feature, performance is improved, but it does negatively affect aesthetics.
I answered my own question about this on Apple StackExchange here:
Performance goes downhill faster for me with an external display connected.
Let's remember that they did a fairly major overhaul of everything with Yosemite. This is just how software works sometimes. But you're right, there was a certain amount of UI stability during the Tiger through Snow Leopard era that I wish that Apple would get back to.
Try switching between the tabs in the "About this Mac" dialog. The framerate is truly shameful. Astonishing that it got approved at all. I had to try it on a couple different Macs at the Apple Store to believe that it wasn't some random problem I was seeing.
From colleagues who use it, and the various KEXTs that I also have, it looks like Mavericks, and KEXT support for it, actually hit a pretty good stability plateau around June/July of this year - so I"m looking forward to upgrading to it sometime early in the next year.
There is zero chance that I'm going to be considering 10.10/Yosemite as my production platform (if at all) any earlier than 2016. I'm always slightly bemused at how quickly people feel the need to rush into the next operating system. Was the older one really all that bad? About the only thing I'm missing right now is Omnifocus doesn't support 10.8 (10.9 or newer). Other than that, I can live with the various warts on 10.8.5 (particularly now that FTDI drivers don't kernel panic my system every time I pull out the USB cable) - Kernel Panics are now a biweekly (instead of every couple days)event, and my only real need to reboot the system is when my USB devices aren't recognized (usually after a sleep) - but a 3 minute reboot and everything is fine again.
Still - I think it's good to call Apple on their crap - 10.6 was actually a pretty decent release, and I don't think they've managed to get one that good out since then.
The difference with this release is that it's a pretty big UI overhaul and some developer features such as storyboards for Mac aren't available on older versions. People who develop for the Mac or iOS have little choice but to upgrade.
I've been running Yosemite since DP 1, and haven't had any major problems yet. There are minor annoyances, but on the whole, Yosemite's feels like a step up over Mavericks(after using it for a little while). Although I should mention that I have a pretty beefy computer with 12Gigs of RAM and a decent graphics card.
More about kext itself; it contains the list of supported graphics cards (poor one) and power states for them. Some states are badly done even with supported graphics cards. I had a lot fun with this kext back in the ole' days after Intel switch.
Easiest way is to make backup of applegraphicspowermanagement.kext or just rename it to applegraphicspowermanagement.kext.bak and then rebuild you cache with app like Kext Utility.
Only drawback I see is that graphics card will now use native power management and not Mac OS one. One thing I've noticed, applegraphicspowermanagement.kext has list of graphics cards, so if your card is not identified it appears that generic power / sleep states are being used thus producing glitches.
A bit more about power / sleep states. You've probably noticed that when you have certain animation first time in OS X, it is choppy, but second and third time it's animated perfectly. That's where applegraphicspowermanagement.kext is messing up the states. You can try it on Launchpad or Mission Control animations.
Here's more info on the issue, it's for nvidias but it applies to every graphics cards although ATI is generally more supported on OS X.
http://www.rampagedev.com/?page_id=311
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/266036-guide-edit-app...
I have an older machine (2010 Mac Pro tower), but it's been upgraded to 16GB RAM and an SSD over the years. I experienced an initial degradation in UI performance with Mavericks, but after the first OS update it was as fast as ever. Yosemite comes out, and now it takes over second to switch between Safari tabs on an otherwise idle machine. I had hoped that like Mavericks, this would be resolved in the first OS update, but no such luck. I enabled the "reduce transparency" option (this was recommended to speed up the UI) but it didn't help.
My mid-2012 MBr doesn't seem to suffer from this. I wonder if Apple just didn't consider video cards in older hardware. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but I'd have preferred a "sorry, this machine can't run the latest OS" message instead.
I intent to buy a 80 euros 8GB RAM upgrade, but still, it's quite sad to see such solid hardware with such crappy OS. No official way to downgrade. The processor has 3MB of L2 cache and honestly I'm sure a C++ IDE would run better on a linux-running, 300 euros, celeron laptop.
I feel like I fell for the apple hype.
I really feel apple is now worse than microsoft regarding screwing users. Now you can run windows 7 without a product key, and it won't really bother you too much.
On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...
I am not sure what to think of our current era of Apple products. The software seems to be more slapdash now, as if they are trying to do too many things at once.
On the other hand, this was the first time I upgraded the OS and all my development tools worked without my wasting time on silly problems. They do seem to be more developer-friendly now, but I mean that purely in a technical sense. In terms of developer relations they are perhaps worse than ever.
Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.
Two systems, with different specs, different resolution and different apps running yielding different UI performance is really useless.
If anyone have a spare mac and a few hours doing nothing, please re-do this experiment using fresh OSX installs on same hardware and then we actually have SOMETHING to talk about.
Not so long ago I grabbed myself a G4 MDD with 768M of RAM — it was much more responsible in terms of UI. 3-4 browser tabs slowed it down though, while my current rMBP13" from 2012 works ok with a lot more.
And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.
https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/800/1*EdAxsHqdZmZ7...
Really, this bug was reported in the original beta, 6 months ago!
I'm on a previous generation rMBP 13".
If you slightly shift your upgrade schedule you're only 3 or 4 months behind. No big deal.
Many people don't like the look of the new Yosemite UI. That's fine. It's a radical change. But don't make ungrounded statements about the perfomance until you have done some proper testing.
Therefore most of the time the performance benefits are eaten by additional software.
It's most apparent on older hardware that was already running close to max capacity.