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Home truths about macOS

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Re: Home truths about macOS

#131

Post by kennend3 »

alwillis wrote: post #117
kennend3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They pulled something off I think would be difficult for many others and have shown they're not married to a single architecture. You mean like how MS Windows ran on the DEC Alpha as well as X86? Or how Linux runs on X86 and ARM CPU's? Running an OS on multiple CPU types goes back a very long time.

You mean like how MS Windows ran on the DEC Alpha as well as X86? Or how Linux runs on X86 and ARM CPU's? It’s not the same thing. A macOS hard drive could boot either an Intel or PPC Mac and all of the apps ran on both types of machines. Apps that were “fat binaries” ran natively on both processor architectures. Same thing today with the apps and the operating system running natively on Intel and ARM machines.

Nothing you wrote is accurate.

The apps ran on both types of machines thanks to rosetta and the performance hit this takes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)

It is doubtful that a PPC system can boot an intel MacOS HD. One is RISC the other CISC.

The reason you can "natively" run intel on ARM machines is Rosetta2

"Until recently, Mac developers only had to worry about creating Intel-based apps. However, that started to change when the first Apple silicon Macs arrived. For Intel-based apps to run on these computers, Apple introduced Rosetta 2."

Please read up before posting.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#132

Post by dangus »

Hard truths about software: they have bugs. There's no such thing as an OS that has zero bugs. All major versions of software become abandoned eventually. Then you either upgrade to a newer version of the software or you live with whatever bugs you have.

> Those residual bugs are often severe: El Capitan continued to cause many Macs to grind to a halt through its entire cycle, the cause not being addressed until Sierra. Sierra in turn was abandoned with a serious bug in its backup scheduling system that caused automatic backups to fail completely after a few days, and that was only fixed in High Sierra. More recently, Monterey initially suffered from three serious memory leaks, of which two were fixed early, but the third has only just been addressed in Ventura.

Citation needed. Citation needed. Citation needed. I had multiple Macs with all these versions of macOS and never noticed any issues like this. My system never "ground to a halt," nor did I have failed backups, nor did I suffer from a "serious memory leak."

> APFS is but one example of a critical sub-system that loses all support once Apple releases a new version of macOS.

Is this an unknown or unexpected phenomenon? Does Microsoft make updates to NTFS on Windows 2000? What's wrong with APFS that needs to be fixed? "Bugs," I guess.

> Many of us had suspected that, during those two security-only maintenance years, older macOS didn’t get all the fixes it could have.

Right, because it's an old version that's out of support. What's the problem?

> It’s safer to delay upgrading

Stop. No. Don't. Stop telling people not to update their systems. This reminds me of everyone who recommended that people disable patches for Windows XP due to the mild inconvenience of the whole thing and then wondered why they got infected with every virus under the sun.

> It’s a similar argument to that concerning vaccination of younger people against Covid or other generally non-fatal conditions. Most people under the age of 70 who are in reasonably good health should be safe from serious or prolonged illness or death.

Oh, the author is anti-vax. Great.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#133

Post by kennend3 »

leviathant wrote: post #94
goosedragons wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why buy 5 Windows laptops for the price of one Mac when one PC laptop can be supported for 2-3 times as long? You can run Windows 10 on a ThinkPad T60 from 2006. Windows 10 will get support until 2025. That's 19 years support from one machine. Use a Linux distro and get even more. Why spend more for a Mac if you get less useful life and are constantly having to repurchase software from OS upgrades breaking stuff?

As a lifelong Intel/MS user in my early 40s, I've been staring down an M1 Mac Studio and thinking hard about this. I had a 2006 Dell Inspiron Laptop that I got for less than $1000 from the Dell Outlet, that came with Vista XP, and through various promotions had been able to upgrade the OS all the way to Windows 10, legitimately - and I think I might have only paid $60 for the Win 7 upgrade. About six year ago, I dona…

> A lot of it was insufferable idolatry and ideological pontification - but I started to understand, if not necessarily agree with, the product lifecycle in Apple.

I have an iPhone and iPad as well as a hackintosh.

I will never for the life of me understand the apple ideology. It is almost like some of these people's whole identify is tied to a company they neither own or work for?

Sure apple does make some great stuff, but they also make crap and have a history of bad choices (dock, firewire and lightening come to mind).

what i have a serious issue with is the artificial limits on OS updates. Clearly if Opencore legacy patcher gets the OS on the laptop apple intentionally blocked it?

Many who have used Opencore are happy with the experience so why exactly did MacOS refuse to install?

Re: Home truths about macOS

#134

Post by dangus »

lizardactivist wrote: post #13

Sort of agrees with my own opinion, that your use of Macs and iPhones and your stay in the ecosystem is only secure as long as you keep paying up. More specifically, you're good for a year after you do a major upgrade. After that you may or may not see critical issues addressed, and after two years all bets are off. I'm not sure how long Apple supports their overly expensive things these days, but I will not be surpr…

The author glosses over the fact that you can upgrade to any new macOS version for free for around 7 years after your Mac was sold as new.

And even then there are ways to prolong the support window with projects like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

So you buy a brand new Mac, you get to upgrade to the latest version and then even if you don't use OpenCore Legacy Patcher you're still getting at least some of the security updates from the latest version of macOS.

I realize that the author paints the picture of that later reduced level of support as being a bad thing, but they don't actually go as far as supporting their arguments with any sort of evidence beyond "there are bugs!"

Out of the box Apple is giving you ~10 years of at least partial updates and you can prolong it further using third party solutions like the OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

For example, you can use Monterey on the Mac Mini you bought in 2009, and the only way to go back to an older model is to start talking about Macs that are physically incapable of running modern macOS because they have physically incompatible 32-bit processors.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#135

Post by [deleted] »

kennend3 wrote: post #33
calvinmorrison wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just rereading the ppc history for Apple as they're doing it again for ARM and it seems quite reasonable to be honest. They pulled something off I think would be difficult for many others and have shown they're not married to a single architecture. Still RIP my favorite machine the last ppc Mac tower

> They pulled something off I think would be difficult for many others and have shown they're not married to a single architecture. You mean like how MS Windows ran on the DEC Alpha as well as X86? Or how Linux runs on X86 and ARM CPU's? Running an OS on multiple CPU types goes back a very long time.

[deleted]

Re: Home truths about macOS

#136

Post by kennend3 »

lioeters wrote: post #104
gorbypark wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ~6 year old MacBook Pro (13" late 2016 model (with touchbar), purchased new in 2017) is no longer "supported" (no Ventura). As far as I can tell, linux does not support WiFi or audio on it, so it's pretty much a piece of trash as far as being a laptop once apps stop supporting macOS Monterey.

Recently my old MBP (2013 model) stopped working, with a mysterious kernel process taking up max CPU to grind everything to a halt on every boot. Fortunately I had its files backed up to a disk in Linux-compatible format (ExFAT32?), so I finally decided to wipe it clean and install Pop!_OS. https://pop.system76.com/ It gave new life to the laptop - I'd recommend trying it, you might be able to get more mileage out of…

I use to be a huge Ubuntu fan but decided to move back to a hackintosh ~2 years ago.

I still use ubuntu often so i went with Ubuntu Budgie https://ubuntubudgie.org

It has that whole "MacOS" dock look and feel right out of the box.

Good that you found an alternative OS and kept your old mac running. So many people seem content to spend big money on a Mac laptop, have it reach EOL and become landfill as they run out and buy a new one.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#137

Post by dangus »

lapcat wrote: post #119
kmfpl wrote: post #48

This is simply how Apple does things. They provide software support for ~10 years and then they drop it. Is it wrong? I’m not entirely sure. You can call that greedy, but take a few things into consideration. Firstly, Apple provides highly specialized software that runs extremely well and efficiently on their own hardware. Continuously providing support for old hardware while simultaneously maintaining the same level…

> This is simply how Apple does things. They provide software support for ~10 years and then they drop it. Monterey was released in 2021 and dropped support for my 2014 MacBook Pro, so that's only 7 years. It's fair to say that you can continue to run macOS N-1 and N-2, which would add years of life, but the author of the linked article is trying to argue that you're not safe unless you're running the latest major ve…

But then you get a few more years of your software not being 100% current but still getting a good chunk of the security updates and generally being compatible with current software, which adds up to that full 10 years.

Your MacBook Pro is compatible with the OpenCore Legacy Patcher: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

Re: Home truths about macOS

#138

Post by bengale »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #69
gw98 wrote: post #24

Got to be honest I rarely get any issues with macOS for a couple of years now. The only notable one I remember was the date selection in reminders on 12.6 stopped working and that was fixed in 12.6.1. Workaround was to manually key it in. You do have to keep within the 2-3 year update cycle though. Quite frankly it pays for itself though in less eye poking than windows.

Yeah, I’ve been riding the edge of the macOS upgrade wave for several years at this point and it’s never brought me any trouble. I wonder if some people’s usage patterns are more likely to stir up trouble than others.

Yeah I tend to do day one upgrades and can’t recall any real trouble. I sometimes think I must have some sort of lucky charm the way people go on about bugs online.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#139

Post by eric-hu »

macintux wrote: post #96
LoganDark wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running an OS on multiple CPU types goes back a very long time. Yet moving the entire world onto this new architecture and getting all developers on board to start creating software for it is nearly unheard of outside of Apple.

That’s the strategy that Microsoft can’t/won’t pursue: be willing to abandon legacy vendors/customers by forcing a migration.

I’m fan of how Apple does things for their ecosystem. I think only this strategy could have let them make the transition to arm as smooth as it’s been.

That said, I also have deep respect for Microsoft for being so deeply committed to backwards compatibility. You can find developer stories about how they’ve gone out of their way to hard code support for legacy apps (even space pinball) in major Windows updates. That sounds really gross from a code perspective, but from a business/product perspective, it buys trust/loyalty from enterprise customers. We see the opposite issue with Google, who has established a reputation for unreliable long term support. Despite their reputation for strong engineering, their new product lines suffer from distrust. Potential customers ask themselves why pay the onboarding cost for a Google product when it’s unclear if it’ll be around in two to three years.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#140

Post by obscurette »

Aloha wrote: post #86
geraneum wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Macbook Pro 2015 and the latest OS it supports officially is Monterey. The new Ventura (2022) is not supported anymore. I consider my device to have had software support for about at least seven years so far and until when they stop releasing security fixes for Monterey. I believe this to be sufficient for my needs and the frequency of which I upgrade the laptop. P.S. I don’t think that it’s ok for Apple to…

I wish apple would do 'best effort' support on older macs. Meaning, it'll let you install after you click thru two pages of warnings, and might work, or might not.

Apple ships all drivers with OS. So, if Apple drops hardware support, it removes drivers and other support for not supported hardware. For example for Ventura they dropped support for Nvidia GPU-s, Metal is built now to require AVX2 and much more. "Best effort" support is not trivial in such cases. Yes, I know about OCLP and use it myself, but it's a hack.
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