OS X 10.10.3 seems to have done something bad to wifi drivers
garrett.damore.org
garrett.damore.org
What went wrong? Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?
My last company worked extensively with browsers from various companies, at a deep level. Safari was, by far, the one that crashed the most and had the most general implementation problems. My experience with their other software is not much better, and I avoid what I can. And then there is the ghastly iWorks rewrite. The only software I've ever thought highly of from Apple is Mac OS X.
I would guess there are deep cultural problems at Apple that are being allowed to fester, and perhaps this extends to some OS X groups. Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits (okay, I admit, maybe iPhones are pretty nice). I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OSX-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.
* Apparently they did this once but the project was canned
Would you not class devices like Dell's XPS 13 (2015) [1], Microsoft's Surface 3 & Pro 3 [2][3], Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd gen) [4] as beautiful?
Windows can also run many of the productivity and creative apps that are commonly found on Macs. Which apps do you use?
[1] http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3
[3] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro...
[4] http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...
Display mirroring / resolution switches goof up my jazz sometimes, unlocking can take up to ~ a minute (from just the lid shut state), browsers eat RAM like it's their job, etc etc.
If this is the best we can do in a $2800 (late 2014 15" rMBP maxed out) computer where the company produces the hardware and software, color me unimpressed.
Of course, the caveat there is that I'm a Python dev. If I were a front-end dev (or, say, a mobile dev who needed the latest XCode to write iOS 8 apps) there's no way I'd be able to get away with this.
I get the sentiment of what you're saying and I agree with it, but I have to disagree with you - You can't blame the stability of your 'hackintosh', running the OS on a completely unsupported configuration.
Based on 10.10 and iOS 8, I think the answer's a pretty clear "yes".
I guess the fact that the hardware set is very tightly controlled helps, some, but still.
I'm not at all claiming that Open Source software doesn't have bugs - it obviously does. But you have a much larger test group, and many more people reviewing the code (usually).
The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone / iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example, with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10 seconds.
It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications
There is an application there called Wireless Diagnostics.
Worst of all it's easy for redundant syncs to happen. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well as "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB. (Edit: wrong info see post below)
The most fun I've had a few days ago with "WhatsApp". They introduced their own backup capability via "iCloud Drive" which also doubles their backup requirements if not configured properly. Default iCloud backup already backs up all of WhatsApp. WhatsApp's iCloud Drive backup then saves everything again. In my case WhatsApp backup got stuck and was indefinitely uploading the same file. Turning backup off in WhatsApp-settings did nothing. I had to rip out iCloud Drive access for the app to make it stop.
This was on my sisters device. Given that WhatsApp is heavily used for image sharing as well this meant that WhatsApp was (trying to) backup 2*2GB of data. Not possible at 52KB/s upload speed.
Bonus points: WhatsApp also saves all images to the Camera Roll so the image gets backed up once more.
Fun times.
That's a combination of misleading and outright false. What's misleading is you're suggesting that iCloud Backup and Photo Stream are doing redundant work. While it's true that both involve uploading your photos, Photo Stream only keeps the last 30 days (or 1000 photos), whereas iCloud Backup is a complete backup of everything. It must include your complete photo library, even the photos that are currently in Photo Stream, because there's no guarantee that the photos will still be available in Photo Stream when you decide to restore.
And what's completely wrong is your assertion that iCloud Photo Library is including redundant information yet again. This is wrong because if you enable iCloud Photo Library, then your iCloud Backup stops including the camera roll. If you have both iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream enabled, I hope it only uploads the photo once, but I haven't done any measurements.
So no, this does not "turn 5GB of pictures into 15GB". It's not even 10GB (1000 photos is significantly less than 5GB).
1000 Photos might not be 5GB but still every picture gets uploaded, just older ones disregarded once new ones arrive. Now if someone comes home after a day out with a 100 new pictures this puts some stress on your network once while it is updating photo stream (if not done over mobile data) and backing up.
Where some stress is: Complete congestion of the network since 100% of upload is used and at ~50KB/s speed around these parts it'll take forever to even sync 100 Pictures at 1.5-3MB each.
Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.
Super irritating how often updates have broken wireless on Mac. You'd think someone at Apple could focus on that since it happens so frequently.
AirPortBrcm4360.kext
AirPortBrcm4331.kext
AppleAirPortBrcm43224.kext
AirPortAtheros40.kext
They each support multiple chipsets so the kext names that appear so specific are a little misleading, but it's still just those 2 companies apparently.
https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...
https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...
You're trying to shift attention away from Apple by attacking another vendor. Unless Microsoft Windows updates have some affect on Apple's updates, your links have no relevance to the problems with Apple's wifi bugs.
It's as if Apple is no longer spending as much time on stability and performance and a lot more on flashy bells and whistles.
My bet would be that they never got around to bringing the core dev team back from the iPhone. I don't think it's a mistake that the last Mac OS X upgrade I was excited about happened in 2007. Still, that was 8 years ago! They should have noticed something was up with the replacements long before now!
OS X is definitely getting Apple's C-team. Not only is the UI getting converted over to being an add-on for iOS users, but sooooo much core OS X functionality is broken because the team working on OS X has no clue how feature-rich the OS used to be.
Want a list of OS X bugs, limitations, and fallacies? I can EASILY put one together.
These posts seem to come up quite regularly and reliably generate a bunch of posts saying (a) "I have this problem; OS X has sucked since 10.X!", and (b) "I don't have a single one of the cited issues despite using the same hardware and software versions".
It seems more likely that the issues are either caused by specific software that doesn't come with OS X or possibly by bad batches of hardware. In this case it sounds like Photos may be responsible.
It would be better if people were able to identify the cause of the issue and file proper bug reports, rather than just berating OS X in general.
Sometimes the issue isn't even a bug - for example I've seen many people complain about sleep/hibernate issues that are actually the result of Apple complying with an EU directive (see autopoweroff on https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...)
After a few hours I just get used to it. But when I switch back to Snow Leopard I always notice that everything feels quicker and more solid. I also find that once I'm in Snow Leopard, I tend to stay there until I actually need something on the Yosemite side.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of nice touches and features in Yosemite that I like. And I've never had problems with crashes, or really any serious issues. I just wish it didn't feel quite so bloated.
Windows ME?
I'll stick up for Windows NT based versions of Windows on stability grounds. But while 95, 98, and 98SE were "mostly stable" Windows ME was "mostly unstable" even on good hardware.
The 9x based versions of Windows had a lot of problems. And as more LOC were added to Windows 9x it seems like the core design of that range showed that it couldn't scale (since an error in one sub-system "infected" another, due to limited memory protections across boundaries). So often something would crash, but it was actually a sister process which caused it (opps!).
Essentially what I am saying is that the 9x range had a "upper complexity limit," so as it became more complex, it inherently became less stable (since more complexity=more bugs=less stability). ME was the upper limit of how complex that model could become.
NT based versions of Windows (NT 3.xx, 4.0, 2K, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 (and server + embedded editions)) have no such problem since the core design is simply superior (in a large part due to x86 hardware improvements NT takes advantage of).
Edit: Just to clarify: "Simply superior" in the final paragraph is contrasting Windows 9x to Windows NT (not OS X). OS X and NT both take advantage of x86's memory protections and both try to restrict kernel hotpatching (which was a massive PITA for 9x/MS Dos). They're both "modern" operating systems relative to what 9x was (and Dos, and other similar systems of that time period).
Beyond flame-baiting, I don't think any of the major modern desktop OSes (including their most maligned versions - I'm looking at you Vista RTM) can even come close to the stability nightmare that was Windows 9x (not that OS9 was better, having no memory protection at all, I'd wager it was worse, but I never got to use it often).
I'm definitely not an Apple fanboy, and I never subscribed to the illusion than OS X is somehow more stable than Windows NT, but I wish people would stop bring up these irrelevant comparisons.
That's pretty unfair to say without giving examples.
http://i.imgur.com/pRNO7Oc.png
It doesn't for iTunes, just for volume and screen brightness changes.
Given that disabling UI transparency is for accessibility purposes and is only for certain graphics cards I wouldn't use this as an example of a major bug.
Are you 10?
Seriously, when did you start using Operating Systems if this is the buggiest, most unreliable OS you've ever used.
My team has a mix of MacBook Pros ranging from 2011-2014 - everyone has daily - yes daily problems with Yosemite.
I have never had an OS crash and lock up as much as I've seen in Yosemite.
- Beach balls are a daily occurrence.
- Finder crashing when switching from wired to wireless.
- iTunes refusing to launch for seemingly no reason.
- Failure to map network drives until finder is force killed.
- Poor wireless performance.
- Corrupt boot process.
- Excessive CPU usage from window server service.
My suggestion would be to create a new user and migrate your data across.
I suspect most of the issues with OSX are to do with their migration of preferences between releases.
The true deal breakers for us, though, is the terrible Wi-Fi performance. The Macs get spurious Wi-Fi failures; all Windows, Android, and iOS devices work fine on all our wireless networks.
As a result, about 45 of our Macs now run Windows 7 or 8. That means the users get a worse UI and not nearly so much functionality built in -- with the tradeoff being that the machines run predictably and reliably.
It seems everybody now has their "back in my day..." OS X version when things were stable; for me 10.7 was the last good version. All our problems started with 10.8, and things have been going downhill since then.
Also one trick is running "sudo fs_usage". Often misbehaved processes that are hammering the CPU are also doing the disk as well e.g. outputting lots of Console logs.
This information is not accessible from Activity Monitor.
I'm interested in how you might use fs_usage? It actually is a new utility to me, and when I turn it with fs_usage -e iTerm - I get a lot of activity, on a basically idle system. (At least one that Activity Monitor/ioStat shows as idle).
You truly can't speed up software dev by adding more people (beyond a certain point)---it's not just on late projects that it is true.
But you can do that on testing. If you want to run 1,000 tests 10 times each, to drive down the possible rate of errors to near zero, you just need to have 10,000 people run one test each.
So basically, you can make the entire process take only as long as the longest single test.
The mythical man month reminds us that 9 women can't make a baby in one month. Adding people to a project bound by a critical path can only make it later. And the more you care about design and UX in your initial release, the more you will see that sort of thing.
In this case, Apple could have a "test" that is: install the new OS under test on a machine, and see if performance degrades on other machines on the same network.
You could have 10 people test it with 10 different networks. It's expensive, but Apple could heat their HQ by burning cash if they wanted.
Admittedly, some things will still get through due to tests that you would only think to do in hindsight. But once you have the test, they won't get through again.
I'm rather interested in what might be causing what OP describes? Since it doesn't just affect the owners PC, it must be transmitting something over the network. Could this perhaps be from an application instead, that might have been affected by internal changes due to the update (someone mentioned the Photo app)?
Strange times.
This isn't strange, this is inevitability. OSX and Windows simply cannot compete, Im rather shocked that they are still trying.
While Linux is my go-to operating system for servers, it is still a distant third for me as a desktop OS.
I regularly try out Linux desktops of various distros, and I always end up preferring OSX and Windows over them. For me at least, clearly OSX and Windows can still compete.
In fairness to Linux, the desktop environment has advanced leaps and bounds over the past decade. Just not enough to win me over... yet.
[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/contributors
Both Microsoft and Apple can compete.
We have approx. 15 Macs in the office, all on Yosemite, mostly Retina MBPs with a couple of older laptops and have been seeing occasional WiFi dropouts on machines, although the situation seems to be resolved if the affected machine is restarted.
I'm not disputing that people may be getting a TOXIC ride on Yosemite, but the hyperbole seems a little extreme.
A number of commenters are saying good things about 10.8 - I've been on 10.8.5 for several months - and, for the first time in a couple years, I actually have to deliberately power cycle My MBAir to put in Security Patches; 10.8.5 is just that stable. I'm constantly amazed to check and see the uptime has been good for several months. The Beachball of death is (mostly) gone. The random freezes (with the exception of the Notification Tray Bug, which Apple hasn't bothered to fix, but they have somehow reduced) are almost completely gone. And, best of all - I haven't had a Kernel panic in 6+ months.
It's going to be a long, long time before I move off of 10.8.5 - life is to short to be screwing around with unreliable operating systems.
What I don't understand - is given that Apple controls the Hardware and the Software and the Drivers - why do they keep releasing such crappy operating systems for 6-9 months every year? Why can't they slow down their tempo, and release a new operating system every other year, but actually release a quality operating system, the way they release quality hardware?
Marco is absolutely right in http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-g... - Apple is seemingly taking pride in releasing shoddy software on a rapid pace, which is the antithesis of what you would think they would want to do to maintain their "quality" brand.
Another problem with Apple - is that the operating system that I would like to put my friends and family on, 10.8.5, is hard to do. At least with Windows, you can buy them a Windows 7 CD for $45, and give them a stable place to start.
After my Macbook Pro finally got fixed with the repair program announced a couple of months ago, I find myself a little lost on OSX on the occasions when I do use my old Macbook Pro.
How do I fix this? I need my Macbook for work, but I also don't want my internet experience to suffer for it.
Really not impressed with Apple as of late.
https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-...
There's also claims that 10.10.3 doesn't fix the vulnerability either:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/19/apple-...
http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/21/os-x-rootpipe-vulnerability-se...
Waiting for 10.10.4 might be the best choice for now...
PSA: If you use VPN software, Smoothmouse, or Hamachi, consider not updating to 10.10.3.
Hamachi has always been a buggy thing. I would get kernel panics in 10.8.x with it. I stopped using it because of that.
Have tried creating a new location and delete all access points and re-connect. Nothing works..
10.6 were the best Mac OS of all times. Super stable, no nonsens release. Since then, it's just gotten buggy, unreliable and slow. Really hope that Apple steps up the game with 10.11. I don't need new features. Make a release like 10.6 where you polish everything and make it rock stable.
Is the GPU not doing what it should be, and somehow the OS has fallen back to software rendering everything?
I have no information on what is going weird in 10.10.4 for OWaz but it's far more likely to be a Thunderbolt driver issue than anything else (i.e. simply related to pushing data over the cable).
Yes. I suspect that has always been the case.
So it seems like the OP may be onto something re: the actual update.
Updating to 10.10.4 shortly, hopefully that makes things better.
Every time people complain about wifi issues on OS X, I've either been very lucky, or just don't have right combination of wireless devices to cause the issue.
Is the solution to downgrade everyone to 10.10.2 or upgrade everyone to 10.10.3?
Let's be careful. Extremely irresponsible and horrible? Yes. Criminal? No.
We don't want to give the EU any more ideas about who to bully next. It could be me or you (in effect if not literally).
If you've signed a contract with Apple that there will not be breakage, then it's a matter for civil (not criminal) court.