High Sierra macOS freezing and stops • Hacker News Board

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#61

Post by ohthehugemanate » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

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 without quality control for things like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month.

I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#62

Post by valuearb » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

jarym wrote: post #21

valuearb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mediocre MBP with touchbar is the best selling MBP ever.

So what? Windows had been the best selling Operating System for a great many years. It turned into a pile of turd and continued to be the best selling OS.

Windows has a monopoly lock on it's customers. They can't run their applications on Linux or MacOS (or they certainly would) so they keep buying it.

Users don't have to upgrade to touchbar MBPs, they can

a) still buy newly manufactured old style MBPs, or

b) not upgrade

Yet they've bought the touchbar MBPs in massive volumes. I've heard lots of anecdotal complaints about the touchbars, the keyboards. But I've also heard lots of people love both.

I trust the sales numbers a little more than I do anecdotes.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#63

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#64

Post by adpirz » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

It’s not just me! My 2014 spec’d out MBP (i7, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 750) was all of a sudden lagging with just a few chrome tabs open for the first time since I’ve owned it. I thought the issue might have been a Chrome release.

This is really disappointing, I wonder if it’s a portent of more slip ups to come.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#65

Post by nanomoose » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

I have a MBP Mid 2014; it has always had a freeze problem. During 2016 probably twice a week. Drove me nuts. I forget the 2015 rate. The second half of this year, approx, has been really good to the point that I'd forgotten about freezes until a recent "your computer restarted 'cos it had a problem".

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#66

Post by pfarnsworth » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

Why is Apple software so terrible these days? They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company? It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job. Their debacle a few weeks ago with passwords, etc, and then tripping over themselves two more times in a week is shocking for such a rich company who can afford the very, very best.

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#67

Post by checkyoursudo » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:37 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #59

Not so long ago, I use to justify to myself that: * Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job. * Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know. * My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the o…

I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Chrome, but on my linux desktop, I use Chromium for Amazon (and the few websites that just don't work right with my firefox+privacy/security setup), and with Widevine I can even watch Prime Video just fine.

MPV has also worked pretty well for me, in addition to Mplayer.

CMUS is a nice command line music utility. Works great in my experience.

Obvs desktop != laptop, but I run two Dell 1440p monitors on my desktop and they look just as good as my 6 mos old MBP w/ Retina. (Maybe font rendering on the MBP is marginally better, but maybe my eyes are getting too old to tell.)

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#68

Post by mgkimsal » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:37 PM UTC

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.

the 'missing space' has hit me a few times over the years, but the highsierra/apfs made it worse. it will often slowly reclaim the space. I've deleted a multigig file, and, say, 30-40 minutes later, the space shows as 'available'. 2016 apple refurb SSD (2015 mbp model). It's all their own hardware and software, and it's buggy (or now designed to be confusing re: disk space).

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#69

Post by Shivetya » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:37 PM UTC

BTDT, have experienced numerous freezes on my 2013 iMac since my upgrade. At first I suspected the NVidia video drivers as it locked up in a few games I never locked up before in, yet reverting to the Apple drivers had no better result.

Interesting is that whatever is in my browers; usually watching streamers or listening to radio; still is active. I just have lost all input. Pulling the USB connections have no effect. Then there are the times it just freezes hard.

the annoying part is that since I have bootcamp in all instances after a hard freeze the system wants to boot to that volume instead and even more fun, keyboard use of the option key fails until I let it successfully boot into Windows. As in, the option key fails with either USB or BT keyboard until a successful boot occurs

Re: High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

#70

Post by Jyaif » Thu, Dec 28, 2017, 4:39 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #13

jarym wrote: post #2

Had the same issue - the Console App logs have taken a SERIOUS step back from earlier versions; lots of garbage that should clearly be DEBUG or TRACE level (I guess remnants of what developers have been working on). Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I think it was WebGL on Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers f…

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.