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.
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).
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.