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High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

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Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#251

Post by apatheticonion »

legulere wrote: post #248
apatheticonion wrote: post #239

Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired MacOS from a distance as it appeared to be, essentially, a polished Linux distro. Bash along side consistent UX, sign me up. I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on…

Longterm (10 years) Linux User here who bought a MacBook to run Linux on it but switched to macOS. What’s bad about fullscreen modus? You can make the dock hide automatically if you mean that. I haven’t seen any comparable device with such a long battery lifetime. Sure you can buy something with better looking specs for cheaper but everything that’s not on the specs will be worse (keyboard, display quality, ...)

You're right on not being able to beat be the build quality of the Macbook.

Full screen mode was annoying because you couldn't put windows on top of the full screened app. Might be that I have a particular uncommon use case, but I often use basic utilities like notepad or calculator on top of my main apps. Additionally, the top menu bar would auto-hide. Often, when I would move the mouse to the top of the screen to change what tab I'm on, the top menu would reappear. This is fine, but the animation would take years to disappear and doesn't detect if the user's intention was to show it, leaving me waiting idle for a few seconds for the menu to hide again.

Complete dock auto-hide is too much of a nuclear option. I want the dock visible when there is nothing on the screen.

I mean, most people aren't as bothered by UX problems as I am. I'm probably a bit pedantic, but I feel it's reasonable to feel this way when the product costs somewhere around twice it's competitor's price.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#252

Post by eridius »

makecheck wrote: post #247
eridius wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not file bugs anymore Then your problems won't get fixed. > Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front Not really. Everything it asks for is useful information. It used to have a bunch of fields that, depending on the bug, you sometimes ended up just writing N/A in, they recently re-did the bug reporter interface so all of those free-form text areas are now a single text area pre…

Bug reporting and other forms of feedback are time investments, which are not cheap. If those investments seem to go nowhere, I reinvest in things that do go somewhere (like work-arounds). Of course a lack of reporting means that bugs won’t necessarily be fixed. Part of my point is that unfixed bugs making it into public releases is not surprising, given Apple’s lack of investment in their tools. Apple needs to make…

Radar is never going to be public. There’s too much sensitive information in there, and tons of bugs submitted every day that contain sensitive info. People include all sorts of info, such as closed-source source code, that they wouldn’t do if it was public. Not to mention a lot, if not most, of the reports are filed by Apple engineers and those definitely wouldn’t be public even if external ones were.

But not being public doesn’t mean filing reports is useless! Even duplicates are useful. Bugs are fixed all the time using information found in duplicates.

Regarding Xcode, it’s got bugs, but it is a pretty good IDE all around, and it’s constantly getting better. Hell, Xcode 9 has a brand new awesome code editor (though it’s missing my favorite feature, focus follows selection, and I hope that comes back soon!) in addition to a lot of other improvements, and you’re trying to claim they’re not investing in their tools? Just because you apparently can’t use Xcode 9 for ill-defined reasons doesn’t mean they don’t care or aren’t using their tools!

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#253

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

tjr225 wrote: post #225
garyrob wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck wit…

I've had a Late 2013 MBPR (basically maxed specs at the time) since 2013 and with every major OS update performance very noticeably gets worse. It's literally a matter of installing the update, rebooting and being more sluggish, it's not gradual, it's poor software.

Do you have a dedicated nVidia chipset? If so, you'll also be encountering a plethora of driver bugs introduced in High Sierra, most noticeable watching videos in a browser or viewing WebGL content.

The USB stack has been a joke since they rewrote it and made it closed source to hide their incompotence.

I would have stopped installing updates long ago if I wasn't regularly forced to update XCode.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#254

Post by api »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #194
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 actually think Jobs was responsible for this decline. If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhon…

Is there a reason innovative work always seems to feature such insane burn out? You hear it everywhere you see really major strides being made.

The thing I find disturbing is that moving slower doesn't just result in the thing coming slower. It seems to result in never shipping or a lack of innovation. It's like there is some kind of activation energy that must be overcome and the effect is non linear. Real innovation only ships at the threshold of collapse.

I find it disturbing because if true it means innovation is Molech, a god that demands a kind of human sacrifice in the form of burnout, destruction of health, loss of relationships, etc.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#255

Post by toyg »

fatbird wrote: post #199
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 feel like there's been a very noticeable decline in the quality of Apple software (and perhaps hardware, given issues like battery related shutdowns). Then I got a PC this summer so I could play a wider variety of games, and I find that Windows 10 has a whole host of issues like lost profiles that didn't exist before, and still some of the legendary video driver flakiness. Then I try to help my father with his Andr…

The industry does not optimise for reliability, we optimise for speed of release. See the explosion of Rails, followed by the explosion of browser-based UI kits: simplicity of development is what people want, because all pressure comes from time-to-market. This is a natural consequence of dealing with a still-booming field.

I don’t think there is a solution unless we start talking laws, and you can bet everyone here would hate that.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#256

Post by carterehsmith »

nl wrote: post #250
carterehsmith wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so where is this 3-4x coming from? We would all love to have something comparable to MBP for 1/4 the price, but.. where is it?

Xiaomi Mi Air 12, 13 and 15.

Hmm that does not seem to be fighting the MBP... more like fighting the $1000-$1300 HPs, Dells, and so on

E.g. http://www.techradar.com/reviews/xiaomi-mi-notebook-pro/2

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#257

Post by makecheck »

eridius wrote: post #252
makecheck wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bug reporting and other forms of feedback are time investments, which are not cheap. If those investments seem to go nowhere, I reinvest in things that do go somewhere (like work-arounds). Of course a lack of reporting means that bugs won’t necessarily be fixed. Part of my point is that unfixed bugs making it into public releases is not surprising, given Apple’s lack of investment in their tools. Apple needs to make…

Radar is never going to be public. There’s too much sensitive information in there, and tons of bugs submitted every day that contain sensitive info. People include all sorts of info, such as closed-source source code, that they wouldn’t do if it was public. Not to mention a lot, if not most, of the reports are filed by Apple engineers and those definitely wouldn’t be public even if external ones were. But not being…

There are tons of ways to deal with sensitive data that don’t require hiding the entire bug reporting system. One is to allow links to things that not everyone can see (e.g. internal web sites or protected repositories) but still making the bug report itself and the comment thread entirely public and searchable. A lot of times, all I really need is a quick way to understand that someone else in the universe has my problem and that it’s being worked on.

I’m not even saying duplicates are useless. I’m saying that Apple’s method, taking months to ultimately communicate nothing except an unexplained status of “Duplicate”, is useless. Except it’s worse, because at that point I would have already: (A) painstakingly distilled a much more complex problem into a base test case purely for Apple’s benefit, (B) generated a system profile or whatever else was required, and (C) jumped through several other hoops. Also, during that whole time I must assume: the issue wasn’t known to Apple, hadn’t been seen yet by anyone else, and probably wasn’t going to be fixed; and, I required a work-around in the meantime that ultimately became the only solution that mattered.

Now, Xcode: it kind of doesn’t matter what else they’re doing when basic tools I need every day still have problems. In Xcode 4.x they reinvented their own window/tab manager and to this day I can’t get this “pretty good IDE” to put anything where it’s supposed to be and remember that next time. It still has problems automatically showing a source file and its header file side-by-side. Also, when I open projects explicitly, it likes to display a mixture of tabs showing source files from entirely different projects (a bug I actually did report, many many years ago, still unfixed). A tool that does some things right but fails with the basics is not a well-supported development environment.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#258

Post by wingworks »

tjr225 wrote: post #225
garyrob wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck wit…

My brand new (3 month old) MBP 15' "Y" key stopped working for a day, had to clean the keyboard. Sometimes when I power on this mac I hear this scratching sounds coming from the laptop. Trackpad is noisier than the previous gen. USB peripheral hell. Speaker issues. Several kernel panics.

Now my older Mac's were never perfect, but I don't recall having so many hardware issues so soon. And living somewhere, where there is no official Apple store, getting anything fixed is a week+ of no computer.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#259

Post by wingworks »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #253
tjr225 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really unreliable? I use a 2013 macbook pro (that I bought refurbished mind you) and it works just as well as the day that I bought it, except that the mute key doesn't work. The 2015 mbpr I used at my previous employer seemed just as sturdy. I also abused an iphone 5s for years until an upgrade to an iphone 7 earlier this year. Seems like a pretty stable device. I don't see these problems. Now I'm stuck wit…

I've had a Late 2013 MBPR (basically maxed specs at the time) since 2013 and with every major OS update performance very noticeably gets worse. It's literally a matter of installing the update, rebooting and being more sluggish, it's not gradual, it's poor software. Do you have a dedicated nVidia chipset? If so, you'll also be encountering a plethora of driver bugs introduced in High Sierra, most noticeable watching…

Agreed, I remember the day when I looked forward to OS updates as often they made your computer faster.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#260

Post by paulnevada »

High Sierra, after playing with the freeze-ups and slow typing recognition for about a week I think I finally found the problem IMO. When Apple decided to re-format to the APFS file system they had a huge re-format dilemma for folks with only one SSD available to boot with. So Apple decided to go to a running format of the solid state drive included in the High Sierra package. Guess what! It doesn't work! Way too much fragmentation to the point of the computer gets confused and lost trying to find needed data or a place to store it and it want's to play beach-ball.

In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest.

Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers.

I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it.

I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..

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