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High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

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Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#201

Post by themagician »

givinguflac wrote: post #197
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…

Your comment is ridiculous. You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums as the sky is falling? I use high Sierra daily on my 2013 mbp and have had 0 freezes.

Of course it’s ridiculous. Has the number of reported problems with Macs increased over the last 10 years? Sure. Their market share has also increased like crazy.

Today’s Mac doesn’t seem anymore unpolished than yesterdays. They just support a lot more software and devices than they ever used to.

Get a Mac and use it the way you might have 10-15 years ago when they only supported a few dozen peripherals and 3rd party software titles and you probably won’t ever have a problem either.

And don’t act like Macs never froze. The pinwheel/beachball of death has been a joke since OS X was first released. The biggest difference is back then you probably didn’t spend 12 hours a day in front of the machine.

People have this ridiculous hindsight bias. Were some cars in the 1950s more reliable or better? Well, yeah. They had no electronics, no features other than a radio and you didn’t drive as much because there were fewer places to go. And they even seemed safer because there was less reporting on accidents when in reality you were like 7 times more likely to die in a car accident in the best car in the 50s than the cheap east piece of crap made today.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#202

Post by zzzcpan »

Jyaif wrote: post #70
zzzcpan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This particular problem might not be Apple's fault. WebGL in Chrome doesn't seem to work on my Linux desktop either, just crashes. And Chrome always has issues with hardware acceleration, on some machines it just adds 1-2 second freeze before every page load, on others it has some weird flickering.

If an application can freeze the OS, then there's definitely a problem with the OS. In this case it's probably macOS' notoriously bad GPU drivers.

Freezing the OS is rather easy to do and hard to protect from, especially if you want to permit an application to access a lot of fancy things for performance. I'm probably underselling how fragile these things are: I once killed Xorg and the laptop got bricked and never booted again.

My point is that Chrome on Linux has many issues with GPUs too, so they at least share the blame, since they don't seem to be capable of properly handling GPUs in the wild.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#203

Post by jjoonathan »

27182818284 wrote: post #92
threeseed wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices When ? Seriously when. I have used MacOS since 4.1 and never remember a period where there was the case. Especially during this phase of the development lifecycle i.e. we have only just had the 2nd point release update. I worked at Apple pre and post Jobs and nothing changed. Because he never managed any of the teams directly an…

Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks. Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the l…

Ditto on Snow Leopard. I had to muck through the version history to figure out which release I was considering the "last good, exciting release." Turns out we all agree. The divide is... stark. That said, High Sierra seems to trend back up towards the level of ambition we saw in the 200x releases.

    2001 10.1 Puma:          First OS X to ship by default
    2002 10.2 Jaguar:        GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4
    2003 10.3 Panther:       Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine
    2005 10.4 Tiger:         Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video
    2007 10.5 Leopard:       Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel
    2009 10.6 Snow Leopard:  App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM
    2011 10.7 Lion:          Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch
    2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center
    2013 10.9 Mavericks:     iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration
    2014 10.10 Yosemite:     Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff
    2015 10.11 El Capitan:   San Francisco font, Metal API
    2016 10.12 Sierra:       Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift
    2017 10.13 High Sierra:  HEVC, APFS, VR

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#204

Post by mnm1 »

azinman2 wrote: post #142
mnm1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Sierra was bad enough requiring a bunch of expensive software upgrades (vmware). There hasn't been any difference in os x in years. My MacBook Pro never slept properly and needs to be hard booted in all of the four past os x releases so there's no need to upgrade even to get the bugs. I wonder if I'll ever own a laptop that sleeps properly, but at this point I doubt that just like I doubt anyone can write a…

Your mbp doesn’t sleep properly? I haven’t heard of such a thing. What all do you have running on it?

Never has. To be clear, it sleeps, just never wakes up sometimes. It's actually quite often that this happens. Often it won't even wake up after opening the lid and tapping on its internal keys, so it's not just a USB issue. I'm not running anything unusual. Jetbrains IDEs, Chromium, iTerm2, vmware fusion, slack, sublime, etc. This is an ongoing issue for 4 OS X versions since I bought the laptop.

I've just given up on having a computer sleep and wake up properly, especially a laptop, like I've given up on ever seeing reliable bluetooth on the same laptop (can't even play when the speaker is literally touching the laptop without dropouts; phone has no problems). I assume that laptops with reliable sleep is something we might see again in 2020 and beyond (2007 mbpro had it). On the other hand, I know for a fact I will not see reliable bluetooth connections in my lifetime or maybe ever, so compared to that, there's still hope.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#205

Post by donarb »

The title (which includes the url attribution) of this article is misleading. Before clicking on this, I thought it was an official statement from Apple about this problem. It is not, it is a post on Apple's support forum that started back in October.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#206

Post by eeks »

givinguflac wrote: post #197
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…

Your comment is ridiculous. You're seriously taking a 4 post thread on apple support forums as the sky is falling? I use high Sierra daily on my 2013 mbp and have had 0 freezes.

YMMV certainly. As it does for all of us.

What I can say however is that the overall perceived stability and performance of my Mac has declined since the good old days of Moutain Lion. My 2017 MBP often freezes upon resume, there is a palpable lag with the overall UI experience, and the OS experience is bloated with the App Store/iCloud/iTune Store shenanigans.

For the last part, I know things have been adding up for a while, but I feel we are now reaching a tipping point. Enough of a tipping point that I now find myself relying more and more on my 2015 OpenBSD Thinkpad for work, music and movies although it has half the computing power of my Mac.

The downside is the missing ecosystem, the lack of seamless synchronization with my other iThings, which keeps me one foot in. For the moment that is, because I am slowly exploring self-hosted alternatives. And once I am confident my self-hosted system can match Apple's for most of the required features, I'll say goodbye to a 15-year relationship for good.

small edit

It's a two-way street: my expectations are probably higher that what they used to be.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#207

Post by yborg »

lostgame wrote: post #193
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, iOS 11 is a dog. A buggy, wet, smelly one. So while most of their income comes from iOS devices, this doesn't in itself explain the decline in quality for Macs because it has been a decline across the board.

Why is this downvoted? Has nobody used iOS 11? It’s caused nearly as many problems for people as High Sierra.

It was a step back from iOS 10 on older hardware. I upgraded an iPad Air and iPad Pro first gen and the UI stuttering/stalls makes both machines feel slower. I decided beforehand not to even try on the 5S, which was a good decision except that Apple constantly nags to update and downloads the entire 1.1 GB update file to my 16 GB device without asking me (yes, I have background App updates turned off) and forces me to delete it manually to get storage back. It's infuriating.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#208

Post by crdb »

There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now.

Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated.

The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today.

If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#209

Post by dcow »

breatheoften wrote: post #150
timdeneau wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree with this assertion 100%. They should keep making investment in and improvement to the yearly release process and build the knowledge necessary to do this with fewer errors...

I found the scrum master (;

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#210

Post by dcow »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #130
malz wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes 90% of their revenue from iOS devices. The answer to "why the decline" is it's not material to their business or stock market performance.

But, iOS 11 is a dog. A buggy, wet, smelly one. So while most of their income comes from iOS devices, this doesn't in itself explain the decline in quality for Macs because it has been a decline across the board.

I stayed on iOS 10.1. Other than 10.1 being RAT-able, it was a great choice.
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