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Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

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Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#111
Apple seems to suffer from cloning envy even if it makes very very little sense. It first started with iOS copying Windows Phone's look (ugh!), even if their original design was considered the golden standard and everybody was copying it. Then they adopted weird 16:9, which Google promptly used and jumped on Apple's original format. Now they took "black magic" tricks from Microsoft that had massive backslash from their userbase and MS still didn't recover from them.

This tells me that Apple's originality is now gutted, the ship is rudderless, the company went beyond "bozo horizon" and MBAs with no vision took over. Sad, but expected.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#112
post #99
post #90

I feel like I'm seeing a trend here. An OS reaches a very stable point where users are happy. But the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse. I think it's why people were stuck on Windows XP for so long, and now Windows 7 will be the one people hold onto as long as possible (if they weren't automatically upgraded). The most recent versions of iOS and macOS are in the s…

> the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse It isn't the company that feels the need to stay relevant, it's the UI designers & developers. They have to keep changing thins to justify their existence.

Well considering corporations aren't sentient beings and are made up of these employees it's the same thing.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#113
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having significant problems with High Sierra on MBPR 2013. WindowServer memory usage can get up to 5-8 GB before it starts to consume insane amounts of CPU and the system basically locks up and I need to reboot the system. Also simple application drawing starts to fail too, I've encountered visual errors like this https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-2... in multiple applications, Xcode's co…

This bug frustrated the hell out of me and was fortunately fixed in 10.13.1 update. There are a couple more window manager related bugs (I think), it crashes and logs me out frequently while watching videos in VLC.

I was running into a bug with Sierra where the Cocoa version of Emacs would sometimes trigger a bug in DisplayServer that made it use 100% CPU. Fortunately, that is solved in High Sierra.

Unfortunately, I have some other fun regressions:

- Preview has become pretty much unusable. It crashes often when zooming PDFs. It also often doesn't linearly go through pages/slides when pressing the down key when a thumbnail is selected.

- The other day my MacBook Pro (2016) showed the charge icon, but it didn't actually charge. I noticed when it was at 5%. Unplugged and plugged the charger and it works again.

- Keynote doesn't open (some?) presentations produced with PDF2Keynote anymore. This worked fine in the previous version of Keynote.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has became the new normal it seems. Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work (or to start it in the middle of the night and not switch it back off). This is purely something that these companies do for their own good without any regard for the user. They probably think "What are you going to do about it? Install Ubuntu?"

> Just like it's acceptable to reboot a computer without a user's permission, losing all their work To play devil's advocate, the system provides great APIs for preserving work during reboots (above and beyond just saving to files, full state restoration of all UI in the system frameworks). It's arguably only poorly designed software that does not do this. I don't fully believe this, but it's one way of looking at it…

Applications shouldn't need to care, because the computer should not ever be rebooted for the vast majority of security updates --- the ones that everyone will be fine with (even those who otherwise hate upgrading), the ones that fix things like buffer overflows, the ones that actually matter to security.

It is highly irritating to see that the "patch" to fix one unchecked buffer copy turns out to require half a dozen whole-file-replacements and takes tens of MB, when ultimately only a handful of bytes needs to be changed. Perhaps these companies should learn from the crackers and reverse-engineers and make patches that are actually patches: find and modify the appropriate bytes in memory, and also the file on disk. Those who have used crack/noCD/etc. patchers will know how fast and painless the experience is. The changes are instant and persistent, with no disruption at all.

If such a system was used, I would guess that security updates may, instead of the hundreds of MB or even GB they take today, and take tens of minutes or more to install (not even counting the productivity lost by the obligatory reboots), only be MB at most --- with the majority being several KB, install instantly, and present absolutely no disruption.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15720923

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#115
post #34

I also don't like how much they are pushing for me to install IOS 11 on my 5S. I know it's going to be unbearably slow but I intend to keep this phone for another year, so I want to stay on IOS 10

You intend to use your phone for a year without installing any security updates? Some people like living dangerously, I guess. For the rest, it's a good thing iOS strongly encourages people to keep up to date.

It would be a good thing if iOS was stable as it should be. iOS 11 is a buggy mess that I regret updating to.

I'd rather miss out on few security updates for a year, than have my phone completely freeze, require reboots, etc quite often - and this isn't even an old phone, it's 7+. And let's be honest, the security issues aren't even that easily exploitable or can be mitigated some other way.

I will never again update macOS and iOS until at least few months, and newer fix versions, after release - I've had nothing but problems with both.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#116

If you do not want your Mac to automatically download updates: uncheck "Download newly available updates in the background" in the App Store section of your computer's Control Panel. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207251

I found this too late--I was traveling overseas and purchased metered internet--woke up to find 5/12 GB gone...

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#117
post #15

It is a shame to see Apple using the same tactics as iOS with macOS, which in my opinion a different beast when it comes to upgrades. I really regret upgrading to High Sierra, because — thanks to a still unfixed graphics driver issue, my 2014 rMBP reboots/lags/breaks when using the GPU. Fortunately, I managed to remedy it with a beta Nvidia driver; without a pro-user mindset, I can only imagine how many people are fr…

> Part of me misses the days when getting an OS X update was an event that required a trip to an Apple Store to pick up

Part of me misses updates like Snow Leopard where the only reason I wanted it was because it saved 7GB of HD space and improved performance. I would 100% buy OS updates that all they did was optimize existing code.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#118
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the company needs to keep pushing updates to stay relevant and generally makes things worse It isn't the company that feels the need to stay relevant, it's the UI designers & developers. They have to keep changing thins to justify their existence.

Well considering corporations aren't sentient beings and are made up of these employees it's the same thing.

No, it's the difference between the company being relevant to the market, and the employees being relevant to the company. That isn't the same thing.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all the trouble you went through, would you really call your experience an "upgrade"? It sounds like you are barely tolerating upgrades. In terms of user experience, Apple has terrible UX because they impose on their users so much. There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2…

I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple employees tended to test on the newer Apple gear, and older models sat somewhere as part of a bulk testing unit, meaning they don't personally experience the same slowdowns as you.

Actually, Apple is extremely stingy with gear internally. Most employees complain about having to use minimum spec refurb hardware all the time.

Re: Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout

#120

Unfortunately my mom fell for this and the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install. Hopefully her documents are still there; she really enjoys looking at pictures of her kids and grandkids. Apple seriously needs to take heart of this message: https://youtu.be/e_hnG7kuam8

> the upgrade did not succeed destroying her operating system install.

You should use a comma there. You probably meant "the upgrade did not succeed, [thus] destroying her OS install". But without the command, it means "the upgrade did not succeed [in] destroying her OS install", which is the exact opposite.

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