Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy • Hacker News Board

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#181

Post by huffmsa » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:18 AM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #180

2rsf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe in the safety critical parts, but do they fix entertainment system bugs ?

That's quickly becoming the main point of differentiation in most reviews since cars in a certain class have become more or less the same performance wise. Speaking from the perspective of just wrapping up the car buying process. All of the reviews had just as many, if not more words devoted to the infotainment experience as to the driving experience. Here I am thinking Bluetooth is peak feature so I can play my musi…

But as I've been saying for a few years now, most people don't want to drive. They'd much rather be driven so they can mess with their phones.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#182

Post by pmjordan » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

arvinsim wrote: post #147

bluejekyll wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just speaking with an acquaintance at Apple this weekend that works in a group in this area at Apple, and they pretty much said exactly what you just said. Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform.

> Also, it doesn’t help that they can’t directly benefit from the general progress the industry is making in virtualization and container areas without rewriting for their own platform. Can you expand on this? Are there limitations on MacOS that prevents them from doing so?

The macOS kernel (XNU) does not have any kind of containerisation support. I believe "Docker for Mac" is actually a Linux kernel running inside a hyperkit/xhyve VM, and uses Linux's container support.

Apple hasn't put much public effort into making macOS work well inside a virtual machine. Recent versions in particular, where the window compositor uses Metal for drawing, don't run well. Apple hasn't opened the API for writing GPU drivers, so there are no drivers for the virtualised GPUs provided by VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox, or Qemu in their VMs. (The tightening of code signing requirements [see the 'library-validation' flag] even locked out nvidia from providing their own GPU drivers from macOS 10.14 onwards.) The only way to have GPU acceleration in macOS guest VM is to pass through a whole GPU at the PCIe device level. (I don't know if anyone has tried AMD's MXGPU tech, which allows GPU 'slices' to be passed to VMs, with Macs and macOS VMs; the GPUs that support it are a little too expensive for a weekend project.)

There are signs that Apple does use virtualisation internally; specifically, they've started adding drivers for virtio devices and one of Qemu's display adapters to macOS.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#183

Post by SCdF » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:21 AM UTC

acollins1331 wrote: post #179

SCdF wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Windows on and off since 3.11, and have used 98, xp, 7 and 10 a lot. As much fun as it is to hate on Windows, if I'm honest with myself 10 has been the most stable experience I've had with Windows, with the possible exception of 3.11 (though that was a long time ago).

This seems pretty far removed from most other people's experiences.

Which is why I was asking if there was any kind of quality study / survey / anything better than opinions around this, because as you say the anecdotes in my anecdote arsenal seem to be quite a bit different from other folk (or at least other highly verbal folk) on the internet.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#184

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:33 AM UTC

2rsf wrote: post #162

jwr wrote: post #104

I have a slightly different take on this. I think every company should dedicate a certain percentage of their revenue to handling bug reports from users. Yes, many bug reports will be bogus, but many will be pure gold (I speak from experience). Yes, it involves a lot of manual work. But it is so incredibly worth it — you get to catch the odd bugs that you will never catch with automated or in-house testing. In contra…

You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I used to work on a product at a big company, we took users input very seriously, not only from bug reports but also by analyzing telemetrics data and simple users "star" feedback. At the end of the day it's simply impossible to both fix everything and still go forward when the product is big and complex…

[deleted]

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#185

Post by Razengan » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:36 AM UTC

Crinus wrote: post #168

Razengan wrote: post #5

I can only surmise (hope) that their resources are diverted towards Something Big. Could be ARM macOS and/or AR glasses. Not that this excuses the bugginess of their current core products. Bringing up comparisons to Steve Jobs must be the tech equivalent of Godwin's Law, but if there was one thing about him, it's that he actually was a user of his own products, like us. It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other…

> It feels like there's no one at Apple (or other companies) like that anymore. There certainly are people like that, it is just that unlike Jobs they have no voice on the matter. Same with other companies.

Yes. I get that "passionate person in charge" vibe only from Elon Musk and some game developers.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#186

Post by jwr » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:38 AM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #177

jwr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are writing this based on gut feeling, big companies simply can't go over every bug report- it's not scalable. I often hear this repeated, and I keep wondering: why? Why is it not scalable? Apple had 265 billion dollars of revenue in 2018. I'm spending 10% of my budget on QA. So, in the case of Apple, if you had a 26 billion dollar budget (give or take a few billion) for your QA department, why couldn't you go…

Because software is just not something you can just throw more money and people at and expect it to get better. In fact, that is the surest way to make a piece of software worse. Software, despite all the attempts to come up with ways to commoditize its production, does not scale.

But we are talking about reading bug reports, not writing software. Also, I would argue that finding and fixing bugs actually does scale, as opposed to designing and writing new systems.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#187

Post by Razengan » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:39 AM UTC

Razengan wrote: post #35

odkamkfn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what are the bugs?

My earlier comment about files disappearing from Music.app: [0] Just now, I had taken some screenshots in a game. One of the screenshots insisted on sitting outside the Screenshots stack for some reason (Stacks automatically collapse similar items on the desktop.) When you open a book in Books.app, then view a different Desktop Space, the Books window automatically jumps to that space, even without the "Show on All D…

Some of these bugs like the Books issue have been there for years, on multiple machines/macOS versions.

If that doesn't happen to anyone else, I wonder if it's my iCloud-stored settings for Books.app

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#188

Post by systemtest » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

rogy wrote: post #167

jl6 wrote: post #71

The only iOS 13 bugs I’ve been bitten by are: 1. Safari’s back button now seems to lose the position on the previous page - sometimes. 2. The share sheet has a row of Messages contacts that I didn’t ask for, don’t want, and can’t turn off - and it creates the risk of super-inappropriate sharing, because all my work contacts are eligible for being on this row, seemingly at random.

God this, my number one share contact is my ex, who i broke up with almost 5 years ago, and literally havent contacted in over 4. This person isn't even a contact in my contacts anymore, yet still top HOW.

This is because Siri knows that you secretly still have a desire for your ex.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#189

Post by aldanor » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:44 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #44

I'm still on High Sierra on my 2015 Macbook Pro. I haven't upgraded my OS nor my machine and pretty happy with it (I only accept updates within my OS version itself) . On my home machine, I do use Mojave, which by itself is quite buggy and I'm waiting for some more fixes before I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Mojave as well. I never install Apple's newer OS'es because I have a lot of development related stuff setup on my…

Same here. The "You need a newer Xcode to compile this" pops up more and more often though (e.g. with vulkan stuff), so I guess I'll have to upgrade soon... probably to Mojave.

Re: Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy

#190

Post by Razengan » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 11:45 AM UTC

song wrote: post #142

Macos used to not have a yearly schedule. New versions took the time they needed. I think it's actually a better model, it allows engineers the time to test and make sure things work. Having arbitrary deadlines just increases the amount of crunch time which usually increases the amount of bugs. Other than that, I wish that Apple did another Snow Leopard and focused for one year purely on fixing bugs in macos x instea…

Although I like looking forward to the next macOS name unveiling and seeing new themed wallpapers, I think operating systems should get a regular stream of small updates for individual features and builtin apps, instead of monolithic yearly releases branded as distinct products.

As for API sets, SDKs and third-party app compatibility, they could still be tied to yearly milestones, e.g. "macOS 2020 January", so there would be no breaking changes for apps which advertise compatibility with that, at least until 2021.

Isn't that kinda what Windows 10 does now?