Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

discussions.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 340 posts

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#131

Post by mschuster91 »

valuearb wrote: post #108
mschuster91 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users don't have to upgrade to touchbar MBPs They have, if they want anything comparable in performance to the Windows world (even though 16GB RAM tops is just laughable when there are many 64GB laptops in the Windows world, and I guess 128GB is not far around the corner...).

1) You can still buy a new 2015 MBP with a processer nearly as fast as the 2017 models and 16gb ram. But the vast majority have chosen the touchbar MBP by pure preference. 2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.

> 1) You can still buy a new 2015 MBP with a processer nearly as fast as the 2017 models and 16gb ram

Speed is not everything. The 2015's Skylake can't do HEVC (and VP9 but I have no idea who outside YT might use VP9).

> 2) Laptops with more memory don’t have the same transfer speed or power efficiency.

Everything is faster and more power efficient than using swap - in fact, my MBP with nothing more than Chrome, Outlook, Slack and Excel open has 13.12GB of RAM occupied and 16.5GB swap usage. Not to mention all that swapping drastically reduces the life of the flash memory - which is, to make stuff worse, soldered on the motherboard on the 2017 model. Yet another thing that Apple forces down the throats of its users, no way to get data recovery on these when your mobo gets fried.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#132

Post by makecheck »

I blame strongly Apple’s inability to make developer-focused tools easy and unbreakable.

For instance:

- I do not file bugs anymore. Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front, and is then 100% opaque. Bugs stay marked New and untouched for months or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some other lame status (with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution). If their goal was to ensure no real participation in the process of helping their products become better, they’ve succeeded.

- Xcode 9.x routinely has failing background processes, even in response to explicit actions, and not just for obscure features. For instance, an ordinary build seems to spawn background tasks that frequently display old errors as new errors, only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build while still showing all those older errors; I have to Clean and Build to be absolutely sure!

- Xcode 9.x failures are somehow better than Xcode 8.x failures where Literally. One. Second. Can. Pass. In. Between. Every. Character. You. Type. Then, SourceKit can enter an unending failure loop, to the point where Xcode must be restarted lest you have to click OK on errors every second. And you would think I could simply move on to Xcode 9.x but I can’t stop using Xcode 8.x due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable.

Apple is showing signs that a split into sub-companies would be useful (kind of like Claris/FileMaker Inc.). There’s no particular reason why things like bundled apps couldn’t just become preferred 3rd-party downloads from the App Store, where spin-off companies make iThis/iThat or even things like Photos.

If that happened, Apple would be forced to actually communicate with several entities on a regular basis and improve their external-facing tools. You can bet that SpinOff, Inc. would not stand for having major problems with developer tools or SDKs for instance.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#133

Post by timdeneau »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #61

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out wit…

The fix: stop the annual release cycle. There isn't a customer demand for it, and it’s a hassle for basically everyone.

The issues in 10.12.x get fixed with 10.13, but 10.13 has the same amount of different issues, so it’s a wash. There’s no stable version anymore.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#134

Post by [deleted] »

garyrob wrote: post #115
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #61

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out wit…

I've been an apple fan since the '70's. My first Mac was a Mac Plus. At that point, I truly was a diehard fan because I viewed it as 10X better than the PC world. The engineering was amazing, both for hardware and software. It did have practical problems based mostly on not enough memory being available, but I forgave it because it was so darn beautiful in so many ways. I would tell everyone who would listen to get a…

[deleted]

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#135

Post by tomduncalf »

christoph wrote: post #11
jarym wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree, my biggest concern for putting it off was APFS so I waited until no one complained about it for long enough thinking 'everything else should still be ok' - big mistake. Stay away until Schiller praises the 'stability' release at 2018 Developer Conference.

I think it’s APFS that’s the cause of my biggest frustration, but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about. I normally run with about 50gb free space. After three to four days, I’m normally down to about 3gb and nothing will get it to show back up, other than a reboot. I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.

I had an issue with “purgable” space on a non-APFS system preventing me from creating a Bootcamp partition. Probably not what you describe but thought it was worth a mention. Followed this guide to “fix” it: https://www.jackenhack.com/mac-os-purgeable-remove-clear-spa.... Wasn’t best impressed.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#136

Post by lowbloodsugar »

krutzger wrote: post #120
chomp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Dell Precision 5510 with Skylake i7, 32gb RAM, NVMe I get about 10 hours of battery life on Fedora 27. Not too bad at all.

How is the Dell laptop in general? I'm about to ditch apple and was thinking to get either a Dell or a ThinkPad.

https://system76.com/laptops

8th gen i7s. Up to 64Gb ram. Or if battery matters, 8th gen i7u with same performance as 7th gen 7700, and 32Gb ram.

Three year warranties available.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#137

Post by chaostheory »

m3kw9 wrote: post #121
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #61

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out wit…

Nice blanket statement, i don’t think you speak for any die hard Apple fans here. I’m a die hard fan, and I still use all their native apps. I’m not sure how you say they are bloated, notes is probably the best in class of notes apps out there. The calendars and reminder features are stripped down to a fault, but still useful because it just works for me. The stability of the software is getting worse, but with any i…

> people are 10x more sensetive than other platforms that have all the same issues.

As a fellow current Mac user, I can understand why people, especially techies, are frustrated. Apple is well funded with high standards, making them a fashionable, luxury company that focuses on tech. They have a high price point for their products from which people expect high quality. More importantly, they control both the hardware and software stack. Unlike MS which has to cater to an infinite number of different hardware combinations from different vendors, Apple development teams just deal with a much smaller set of hardware products and components which theoretically should result in a more secure and stable product.

As other HN users have pointed out, there are hints as to why this is happening: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-m...

Apple is hollowing out the OSX/Mac OS team in favor of iOS.

While they did limit High Sierra's scope, maybe they needed to push back the release date as well given that they gutted the Mac OS team?

Regardless, the natives are getting restless.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#139

Post by username223 »

ninkendo wrote: post #90
baggachipz wrote: post #3

Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?

It’s... fine? Honestly I’ve upgraded on day 1 on every OSX release since lion, the only complaint I really have about High Sierra is that it doesn’t really change anything. I can’t even name one thing off the top of my head that changed since Sierra, and I use almost every built-in app (Mail, iTunes, Calendar, Safari, Terminal.) Safari has some new things (global and per-site reader view, disabling autoplay, privacy…

> It’s... fine? ... the only complaint I really have about High Sierra is that it doesn’t really change anything.

I'm running 10.13.2 on a 2014 MBP, and can say the same -- as praise, not complaint. I want my desktop OS not to break stuff more than I want it to add new features, and 10.13 mostly succeeds in not annoying me by breaking stuff.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#140

Post by aeontech »

taternuts wrote: post #116

Upgrading for me left me with missing apps and having to fix homebrew and a bunch of other CLI tools and their deps. First time I've ever run into problems upgrading my macos, and will definitely wait a while and look for threads like these before installing the next one.

In my experience you need to upgrade/recompile brew apps on every major upgrade (at least I have had to do it for last four or five).

I suppose you may have been able to avoid it if your installed apps happened not to link to any system libraries?

If they do though, and the system libraries change, how can the brewed apps possibly be unaffected?

Post reply on HN