Related, when I play H.265 videos on Windows 10/NVIDIA 10 series card the player app crashes after 4-5 seek operations. I assume it's video card related, but it has up to date drivers.
How old is your CPU? Age can be factor of it, it is possible that it didn't have the hardware to support it. I disabled the GPU acceleration in my player and put the CPU to work, it handles the HEVC 10-bits just fine floating around 20% of usage for this video (Intel Core i7-8559U).
If you said it is pretty heavy on the CPU, then it could be your CPU that is causing the issue.
Hardware decoders in general are very untrustworthy, to the point that browsers go to great lengths to handle decoder crashes and recover from them - if your hardware decoder crashes enough Firefox will quietly switch to software decoding where possible
It depends on how the players offload the files. Some players can offload it to GPU (if it have specific format hardware decoding support), some use the CPU to do the processing. Check your player setting and see which one it is using. My MPC-BE player will tell me if the player is using the GPU to decode.
And at the same time, it depends on if the file have 8-bits or 10-bits. Some CPU/GPU don't have the support for 10-bits which can offload it to the software decoding which can be resource intensive for your system to decode the file at the software level.
Saw one of these in person over the weekend, and I was subtly surprised by how intense the display blooming was. I knew that MiniLED would have some inconsistencies WRT brightness, but if you squint you can almost see the backlights scurrying around when you drag a window across a desktop (particularly a black background). It would probably be great for content consumption, but I have to wonder how reliable it would be for professional color work. Maybe an OLED revision could address that?
That thread seems to suggest it is not an issue for many users, similar to TVs and iPads, so I guess it would be a personal thing as to whether it bothers someone.
Yeah, I don't trust these at all. According to every review on the planet the iPad Pro has a fantastic screen, and my own(2021 M1 non-XDR) model has probably the worst screen of any device I own. I know it's IPS but it's almost unusable for watching media in a dark room, the contrast is just zero, would literally rather watch things on my phone. And it has an absolutely horrendous ghosting, like an LCD panel from 20 years ago. Get some white text on a grey background and scroll around - ghosting for daaaaays.
I have an m1 ipad pro 12.9" and the bloom was one of the things I'm most taken aback by. I routinely see it in dark media, whether it be apps in dark mode or a dark screen with white text. The colors are amazing, but the bloom is shocking. I actually miss my old lcd ipad pro because of it.
Your perception of contrast is entirely dependent on the ambient light level.
If you're in a room with big windows and direct sunlight, a cheap Dell will have a good contrast ratio. If you're in a windowless room in pitch darkness, a MacBook Pro XDR display will show clear blooming.
I have a 2017 iPad Pro that I use in what I would consider moderately dim lighting, and the contrast / black levels are fine.
I went to an Apple store over the weekend and tried to see if I could generate blooming. Put the display in dark mode and tried all kinds of app, but never noticed any blooming. Not sure why this seem so variable. Maybe it only is noticeable in very specific conditions?
It's sad that they don't provide context like MacOS crashes with Safari but not with Firefox or Chromium-based browsers. Would be interesting if it's actually the UMA memleak problem reported not long ago.
Notice: I don't know if any browser besides Safari can play HDR content on MacOS.
I think media playback is delegated to the OS by the browser through some API, I doubt every browser bundles its own decoding and playback engine. And it needs to handover to the OS for picture-in-picture as well, makes sense to delegate.
I think none of what you said is necessarily true. Safari certainly delegates as much as possible, but other browsers have a lot of baggage that OSes don't necessarily support. PIP is just a floating window, they have existed without explicit OS support for decades.
> I doubt every browser bundles its own decoding and playback engine.
Not sure if that is the case on Mac but I am pretty sure Firefox bundle its own decoding and playback engine on Windows. And the same for Chrome. ( They are practically a mini OS ) The only one using OS default is Safari. Hence why supporting VP9 or other codec require an OS update.
Unless of course it is Hardware Accelerated Decoding.
It really disappoints me just how easy it is to make macOS crash. USB and DisplayPort especially seem to trip it up. And now HDR in Safari. These are things that you'd expect from 90s era monolythic kernels. Not a 21st Century flagship OS for the most successful IT company on Earth.
>Ive been using macs for 11 years, probably half a dozen in that time. Ive never had a problem with crashing. And the usual uptime is months.
If I stick to web browsing I can have uptime in months too. But as soon as I start up xcode and run the simulator, then I consider myself exteremly lucky if I don't have to reboot (manually or spontaneously) every other day. And forget trying to run the simulator and any video activity on a browser - that seems to be a recipe for instant browser freezes (at least on this 2019 16" macbook pro).
The long and short of it seems to be (as it often is) that some people are seeing problems and some aren't, and without any real data, we're all just guessing about how prevalent the issues are.
FWIW, I can't remember the last time I had my Mac crash, either my M1 work machine or my personal Intel. Uptime is regularly measured in weeks.
I agree - macOS Mojave is pretty stable for me (apart from the irritating hiccups when you block some Apple services through firewall). As the headline points out, I think these issues may be particular to the new M1 (Apple Silicon) based macs. There was an HN discussion too a day or two ago on how macOS on M1 seems to be experiencing memory leak and out-of-memory issues.
High Sierra on my MBP 2012 was atrocious. Not only was the Nvidia GPU literally slower than integrated graphics, the driver would crash the kernel sometimes. They did fix this in Mojave which I'm still using right now.
Observation and experience over years has led me to avoid discrete video cards in laptops entirely. They seem to be the cause of a solid 50% of all major problems, across all vendors, including Apple. They were an endless headache on my Windows and Linux laptops of old.
I didn't know any better when I was buying it. I do have an M1 Max on the way though. Apple sure can promptly fix issues with their own software running on their own hardware, can't they?
It used to be the same for me, when I started with Tiger until Snow Leopard, I never had crashes. Uptime was months.
Then I started getting some crashes occasionally but still relatively rarely. This increased a bit around Sierra then reduced again with Mojave.
Then Catalina happened and with the new 2019 mbp retina, I started having crashes about once every two weeks. Now, I have an mba m1 running Big Sur, and I think my average uptime is around 2-3 days. Crashes are now something typical, I no longer expect my computer to run for long stretches of time. For a few months, my mba couldn't even go to sleep with crashing, couldn't restart without crashing, this was only solved once I updated to 11.6.1 (I tried reinstalling mac os x before to solve this, it didn't help)
So, yes macs used to be very stable but not anymore, I don't know what happened with Apple's QA but it seems there's now major issues. I didn't change the way I use my mac, if anything now I don't use SIMBL or kernel extensions (which I used to use back when my mac didn't crash) so things should be more stable not less. Yet, despite having ever more control over our machines, being more restrictive over what we can do, Apple somehow is making their system less stable, more flaky than before.
Of course, this is anecdotal, I might be very unlucky but in the past year, I've had quite a few coworkers drop out of calls or be temporarily unavailable, telling me that their mac crashed and they needed to reboot. So, it does seem to be widespread.
Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air? I've had one for about 8 months, run it pretty hard (memory pressure is usually in the yellow, lot of applications and server-like processes running for both web dev and media production) and it hasn't crashed once.
Not contesting your experience at all, but if you're having crashes every 2-3 days it might be hardware-related?
It might, but isn't one of the goals of these modern hybrid kernels to capture hardware failures and log it instead of crashing the entire kernel?
Windows manages it (most of the time). Linux and FreeBSD manage it and they're technically still described as monolithic. macOS, on the other hand, throws a hissyfit and everyone then blames the hardware rather than the error handling.
I bet if we were talking about Windows people would take great pleasure in mocking Microsoft so I find it weird that Apple is exempt from the same criticism.
I don't use my M1 device enough to determine if they crash regularly, but I can definitely say that every release after Mojave has been a regression in stability. Me and my boyfriend at the time both upgraded to Catalina and the issues just wouldn't stop piling up. After 2 or 3 completely untraceable crashes, we both restored to Mojave and forgot about updates altogether. I might give Monterey a try soon, but between the space-wasting design language and ARM growing pains, I think I'll be contented with my trusty x86 Linux desktop for quite a few more years.
I have an M1 machine for a few months and use it daily. Not even a single crash in my case. I guess this is the experience of the large majority of users. But there might be faulty units that have this problem, you should contact Apple.
I have MBA M1 for almost a year and haven't faced any crashes yet. On the other hand, I have some app that just hang infinitely (beach ball of death) and ignored every input of my mouse and keyboard. So I have to do the last resort is to force shutdown on my MBA. And the app went back to normal. So I was wondering perhaps it is something do with the dependencies or the app itself is fighting with the system?
I have a few issues on my Windows 10 that I thought it was Windows issue since it kinda point to Windows that are causing the errors. When I investigate it further, turn out it is the app that are clashing with Windows which led Windows to freak out.
I wonder for this article, could it be the app, libraries or dependencies that are just behaving plain stupid and led macOS to freak out?
Catalina experience up to patch .6 was a huge fail, especially since it happened during the pandemic and my 2018 MBP was becoming unresponsive during long work hours and meetings and crashing, fully restarting on its own around 2 times per day. Big BT issues also, at some point I had to reinstall the OS to fix them. Big Sur was just fine and Monterey brought back BT issues... For someone jumping to MacOS 3 years ago the experience is just 50% either way which is not good
My 2018 Mac Mini would crash going to sleep every single time after the final Mojave point update. There was a ton of forum posts on the usual Apple sites so it wasn't just me. The "fix" was to upgrade to Catalina which is a pretty crap fix when it requires you dump all 32bit software.
I only ever experienced that with Linux (uptime in months, current Linux workstation uptime: 37 days, probably was on vacation or something and turned it off before leaving). I'm not saying my Mac do crash as often as Windows 95 did "blue screen" but my new M1 certainly does totally lock up once every x days. I don't know yet what's causing it but we're not all seeing things.
My work 16" intel MBP crashes about 50% of time I connect my thunderbolt dock. My solution? Do it once in the morning and use a caffeine app to prevent the machine from sleeping.
Terrible, but I haven't figured out a better solution.
+1. I can remember one time I made macOS completely crash by mistakenly doing an intense memory op on a container. Other than that, I can’t say I get much crashing…
Well the HP docks are not even that reliable with HP computers anyway lol. I’ve been deploying the HP docks for a few years at the company I work for and I’ve been through a few different versions by now and I’ve gotten through all kinds of crap like the DisplayPort firmware just disappearing. Or the dock is detected but doesn’t put out video, or audio, or turns on but nothing else happens. They seem to have a lot going on internally in regards of firmware. But at least HP releases updates frequently.
Apple is a systems company. I would not bother with macOS for use on other hardware. I would not buy Apple laptops if not for macOS.
For a given feature, the user might not know how much of the implementation was done in software versus hardware. Apple excels at integrating their software with their hardware.
I was using Linux on laptops until 2004. When I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 and experienced WiFi, sound, and printing working reliably, I realized I could no longer bother with Linux on laptops. This reliability has suffered lately and I hope they can get it back.
Okay, I'll bite. Which distribution works on modern hardware and supports suspend/resume, WiFi, sound, external monitors, and printing without me digging into a config file at every different place I visit?
Just to be clear, I have been using Linux since 1992. I am completely comfortable with Linux on the desktop and the server. What I found is that Linux does not deal well with configuration, and configuration on laptops changes daily (or more).
The hardware support is pretty good nowadays, and almost everything works out of the box.
There's a few caveats:
* Sound works fine in general, but might be a bit buggy with Bluetooth. If you encounter any issues, installing Pipewire reportedly solves most of them.
* External monitors works fine, as long as you don't mix HiDPI and LoDPI at the same time. In the future, Wayland should fix this.
* HiDPI mostly works, but still requires some config tweaks for a handful of apps.
* Suspend/resume still sucks, mainly due to buggy nVidia/AMD graphics drivers. Only the Intel GPU drivers suspend reliably in my experience.
* WiFi works flawlessly, especially if you're using the Intel WiFi hardware, which is very common on laptops.
* Printing works fine except with Windows-only printers, but they are pretty rare.
* Distros don't really matter that much, but you'd might need to update your kernel if you use an LTS distro with newish hardware. The Ubuntu based distros, e.g. Mint/Ubuntu/Pop!_OS are good options and have the largest user base, so it's easiest to find solutions if you encounter any issue.
* If you just want to test hardware compatibility, I recommend trying Ubuntu 21.10 on a USB stick.
* You'd might want to look at /r/linuxhardware [1] for specific hardware recommendations for your needs. You can also look at the Ubuntu Certified Hardware [2]
My current situation is that everything works fine and I haven't rebooted in a few months. (I should get around to that soon, there's a new kernel waiting. Or probably a couple.)
This is a ridiculous thing to say considering all of their hardware is useless without their proprietary software.
If running the Linux kernel on Apple hardware did not require a massive reverse engineering effort (see https://asahilinux.org) then maybe you would have a point.
No. It's the software, stupid. (this is pretty much the tagline for 15+ years now with those exact literal words) And even then, people buy complete products from the company so in a way it's not really an 'either' company, they are far too vertically integrated. There is supply chain, semiconductor manufacturing and design, software engineering, hardware engineering, consumer products, consumer services, there is stuff like AppleCare, ABM, ASM, Developer interaction, events... the list goes on.
The hardware is only there to enable the software in this concept, not the other way around. This is also why if the UX conditions are met, more powerful/newer/shinier hardware was often not used since it doesn't improve any of the software enablement.
You can't sell a good UX with bad software on good hardware. You can sell a good UX with good software on anything.
Apple is a (system) software company. While that includes procuring and integrating individual hardware components, they're not a hardware company.
They've recently been branching out into designing their own hardware (or claiming to, it's not clear to me how much they've done in-house vs contracted out or off the shelf, but I digress) but they've been making software to put on other people's slightly-customized hardware for a much longer time.
Didn't most of the mainstream 90s OSes lack memory protection AND use cooperative multitasking, which meant one bug in an app and the entire system crashes or freezes?
Yep, to some degree at least. Even some more modern systems after that had some similar problems, where there was less or no direct interaction anymore and userspace and kernelspace was the 'best' boundary there was to offer. But the same problems still persisted within the space if the other one goes down.
Imagine having a fully functional app but you still can't do anything because the service 'on the other side' doesn't work. It's better because it won't crash the entire system, but it's the same because you still can't do the work you intended to do...
> (9x added /some/ level of protection and preemption)
I do remember games freezing windows 9x so much that you had to reach for that reset button. Also when the system threw up a BSOD if you ejected a CD when you weren't supposed to.
The latter was due to lack in error messaging to userspace - so you ended up with the only way the kernel could raise the error involved.
Games often did things that put the system out of whack, and while 9x had preemption for 32bit code (16bit was cooperative as separate thread, iirc) it wasn't impossible to break the OS state by simply putting bits of hw in weird state or by using a lot of resources.
There were user space errors when an application crashed[1]. Hardware operations run in the kernel space so if the hardware is in a weird space it doesn't matter how good your user space is coded, it's down to the kernel to capture that error handle it. In fact this was one of the big arguments in the 90s in favour of micro kernels vs monolithic kernels -- albeit history has now taught us that we can have monolithic kernels and protection against drivers and/or hardware failing.
Any BSOD in Windows is a kernel panic. Most of the BSODs I recall were directly down Windows getting itself into a state that it couldn't recover from. Like IRQ errors, memory errors, etc. And it was often very easy for an application to force a BSOD. I remember this well as someone learning Win32 APIs "by experimentation".
Also to say you "it wasn't impossible to break 9x by using a lot of resources" but that is a huge understatement. Even today tou can still break modern operating systems by using too many resources and they have far better protections (OOM killer, smarter paging and stored on media with orders of magnitude higher IOPS, multi-core CPUs that offer true parallelism of operations, etc). 9x, on the other hand, had very little to protect you in that regard. I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've hit ctrl+alt+del on Windows 9x, preying there is enough capacity for the OS to kick in the task manager[2], which back then would also suspend all operations of other applications, thus allowing me to manually terminate whatever processes were causing Windows to grind to a halt.
As an aside, it was also possible for applications to hide themselves from task manager too. I had great fun playing around with writing a remote administration tool for college (sadly not for "official" purposes...) so figured out a number of tricks in 95 to work around user permissions, task management, and so on and so forth. Basically 9x was a playground where running applications could pretty much do whatever they wanted.
Yeah, most of them did; especially most of the holdovers from the 80s.
This was one of the big draws to pulling down "mainframe/workstation" systems like unix (or what MS did by hiring what IIRC was the VMS team to build NT) onto desktop machines. These mainframe systems actually had memory protection, and more generally, had been built to do what "pc OSes" hadn't been designed to do, which was running several programs at once, for long periods of time, and juggling resource contention between them.
DOS machines, CP/M machines, Apples, Macs, Commodores, and several other early machines were pretty tactfully designed to avoid the (too heavy for their hardware) complexity of that by simply building themselves to run only one program at a time. There were hacks to let you run multiple programs (like the Multifinder in MacOS 6, which got mainlined into being a permanent thing in 7), but they were just that — hacks. They were fragile.
As computers started taking on the burden of juggling tons of different simultaneous programs, this fragility really started to blow up on them, and these previously "seeming stable" systems started to crash all the time.
Windows 95 & 98 would crash pretty frequently. Not as badly as win 3 though.
NT 4.0 was no bastion of stability either. Windows didn't stabilize until well after Win2000 versions.
MacOS 7 & 8 also not great. The first versions of OS X were also pretty flaky.
In my experience dependable reliability of workstations and servers didn't happen until the mid-2000s
where just software couldn't simply blue screen an OS, or lock it up forever.
If I remember rightly it was about that time that MS got serious about driver reliability, which seemed to
help a lot.
Maybe they're not talking about the currently surviving mainstream consumer OSes? There were other contenders that weren't for consumers or didn't survive MS's bullying, and on the other end there's probably a reason mainframes are still in use in places.
The context here is desktop systems, not mainframes.
Though the interesting takeaway from your comparison is the fact that desktops these days run server kernels, which is a testament to the build quality of servers.
Which segues nicely into a recap of my point: 90s desktop systems didn't have memory protection et al so one buggy application would cause the system to crash. Everything was carefully layered like a house of cards. The switch to NT and UNIX largely fixed most of those issues but later builds of macOS seem as buggy to me as Win 9x and MacOS 8 and 9 were.
You're conflating workstations with personal computers.
In the 90s systems like OS/2 and NeXT were defined as "workstations" to make a distinction between the old lineage of personal computing platforms (like Win 9x and Mac OS running on typically budget hardware) from high end systems running typically multi-user systems (often literally mainframe OSs).
Post-90s and the "workstation" definition went away when NeXT became OS X and NT replaced the DOS-bootloaded Windows lineage; and dedicated workstation hardware became cost ineffective due to improvements in consumer hardware -- not least of all x86 (and later AMD64).
The middle versions seem to be the best ones somehow. Sire, the cooperative multitasking model of Mac OS 9 was a bit, crappy, but it was really reliable if you went to work at it from a task-oriented perspective. Same for Windows 2000, more stable than Windows XP for some reason.
For Mac OS X it was 10.3 to 10.5 that was the (seemingly) most stable.
I think the scope and size of hardware, software and interaction has just gone so large that it's not commercially viable anymore to test or QA the entire system to the same standard. It's also why service managers came along, we just assume that everything breaks and hope restarting it makes it go away...
My recollection of (Apple's) System 7 is that it really got bitten by the rise of programs running dynamic code (i.e. Netscape). When everyone was operating on relatively pre-vetted apps, which had their buffer overflows cleaned up, it played pretty nice, but when that wasn't the case, it really blew up.
System 7.5 was rather worse-off than 7.0, but it got absolutely slammed because it was the first major mac OS that got saddled with web browsing, and the OS was just not fit to handle apps that had buffer overflows.
That was the big thing about those mac OSes; since they had no memory protection, if any app on the system buffer overflowed, it'd crash everything. It was fine in an environment where you really were only running one or two apps that were known to be really rock-solid, but it wasn't able to police misbehaving apps.
Most people weren't running VMS nor Unix as their desktop OS in the 90s. Post-90s we had OS X (Unix) and Windows 2000/XP (NT)...basically the servers became consumer desktop operating systems because Microsoft and Apple realised exactly your point (and desktop hardware became powerful enough to run it too).
And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so.
Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said.
> Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so.
I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced.
> Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more.
You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it.
> Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said.
I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation.
Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user.
> NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with.
This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.
MacOS in the mid-90s would crash if you sneezed. It would crash if you tried to scan a photo, crash if the network got unplugged, every Mac on the local network would crash if one of them crashed, it would crash if you touched the mouse while burning a CD, it would crash if you just left it alone for too long.
I think your nostalgia is talking. 90s crashes are what got me in IT and the badge of “the cousin you call when your computer doesn’t work”. All because of windows 98 crashes. Then my Masters was Windows Me. That was the boss to beat.
Liquid cash and total valuation. Before the government asked them to start divesting, they had something like 200 billion dollars in liquid cash, sitting around doing nothing.
Oh, for sure. The fact that a company with billions of dollars couldn't research a way to fit a 1080p webcam into their bezel is utterly hysterical, and it's pretty endemic of the pearls-before-swine attitude that the Apple Treasury takes.
I'm not getting HDR output from the Firefox browser on macOS (but I am on Chrome and Safari). 'Color' field in stats for nerds shows bt709 in firefox (i.e. not HDR) and smpte2084 (PQ) / bt2020 in Chrome/Safari (i.e. HDR).
Also side by side the Firefox picture is flatter and less bright.
The slight blooming is certainly noticeable in a contrived test, but I think you'd struggle to be bothered by it in any actual usage unless you're extremely picky, or spending a lot of time with very bright text on pure black backgrounds.
But yeah those play on Safari for me without issue (MBP M1 Pro, full screen).
I'm currently streaming a 4K HDR video on YouTube without issue.
Model Name: MacBook Pro.
Model Identifier: MacBookPro18,1.
Chip: Apple M1 Pro.
Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency).
Memory: 16 GB.
In playing with an M1 Pro 14" this weekend I noticed all HDR content I viewed was encoded in AV1. YouTube seems to have drawn a line between SDR and HDR with this codec. AV1 is amazing but still relatively early in its development and takes a ton of raw power for decode as M1* does not have a native decoder.
I almost guarantee this is the root of the issue. My friend doesn't have iStat Menus so I couldn't see the full resource picture but curious if the GPU is involved or its a pure CPU decode and the issue lays somewhere within that.
On my Intel Mac it still requires 4 thread with close to 100% CPU usage to play a 4K AV1 using latest VLC. ( Which I assume comes with latest dav1d ) This is easily 20W usage.
But on M1 this takes less than 1W.
This basically eliminate any argument against AV1. Even with software decoding. You could watch AV1 4K video with passive cooling on a MacBook Air without it ever getting warm.
It may be a good question to ask, with these kind of processing power, what can we do to further push the next gen video codec.
>Of course, I'm not against the idea of improvement, it's just funny how the goalposts continually move.
LOL Yes because we want to lower bitrate. Taking Youtube or Netflix aside, the vast majority of video on the internet haven't seen any improvement in quality. They moved to newer codec for bandwidth reduction at the same quality so they can serve more content. Until Bandwidth becomes cheap enough where like Audio we no longer want better quality at 64Kbps or lower bitrate, people instead are simply using higher bitrate. I mean 20+ years later, we still dont have what they promised was mp3 128Kbps quality at half the bitrate.
There is a question of how far we can push codec development within the video codec industry. Not because they have ran out of idea but the complexity of codec means to both encoding and decoding. That we may be edging towards a point where Software decoding is not a sustainable solution and does requires dedicated hardware, which in itself is a topic of discussion with different hardware manufacturers. And Video Encoding or Decoding Engine is already getting quite big in terms of Die area.
So what the M1 shown here is a door to a whole new world of possibilities. For example there are half dedicated AV1 hardware decoder and hybrid GPU decoder that uses more power than M1 in pure software mode.
And this is on a M1 with A14 Core, not A15, or the coming A16. We should be able to see another 30% reduction in energy usage within the next 2-3 years.
We could also question and ask, may be we could finally do Wavelet transform where previously was thought as too computational expensive.
We have a roadmap on 5G with 3GPP Rel 18, Massive MIMO is far from finished, we also have roadmap on Ethernet and Cost reduction on SerDes and Controller. Our Server is finally getting higher Core count with reduction in cost / performance. By 2030 vast majority of the world, even in developing nation could enjoy 1080P Video with very good quality at under 1Mbps.
And then the next frontier will be, how do we further improve Live Streaming Video quality with ultra low latency and bitrate. Actually that is what I am partly pushing for right now. That may be a task for another 10 years.
Is this easily reproducible? Not sure how widespread this problem is.
I have viewed 4k HDR content on YouTube in Safari AND Chrome several times. It was the first thing I did when I received my 16" M1 Pro. And I have not experienced a single crash with this laptop.
I tested VP9 and AV1 codecs on youtube without issue. I am on macOS 12.0.1
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadIf you said it is pretty heavy on the CPU, then it could be your CPU that is causing the issue.
And at the same time, it depends on if the file have 8-bits or 10-bits. Some CPU/GPU don't have the support for 10-bits which can offload it to the software decoding which can be resource intensive for your system to decode the file at the software level.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/28/macbook-pro-display-blo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/qgkhku/noticeab...
It seems like the sighted equivalent of mp3 compression to an audiophile's ears.
If you're in a room with big windows and direct sunlight, a cheap Dell will have a good contrast ratio. If you're in a windowless room in pitch darkness, a MacBook Pro XDR display will show clear blooming.
I have a 2017 iPad Pro that I use in what I would consider moderately dim lighting, and the contrast / black levels are fine.
What a surprise they might not be objective.
Notice: I don't know if any browser besides Safari can play HDR content on MacOS.
Not sure if that is the case on Mac but I am pretty sure Firefox bundle its own decoding and playback engine on Windows. And the same for Chrome. ( They are practically a mini OS ) The only one using OS default is Safari. Hence why supporting VP9 or other codec require an OS update.
Unless of course it is Hardware Accelerated Decoding.
If I stick to web browsing I can have uptime in months too. But as soon as I start up xcode and run the simulator, then I consider myself exteremly lucky if I don't have to reboot (manually or spontaneously) every other day. And forget trying to run the simulator and any video activity on a browser - that seems to be a recipe for instant browser freezes (at least on this 2019 16" macbook pro).
FWIW, I can't remember the last time I had my Mac crash, either my M1 work machine or my personal Intel. Uptime is regularly measured in weeks.
Sucks if you need one, though.
Then I started getting some crashes occasionally but still relatively rarely. This increased a bit around Sierra then reduced again with Mojave.
Then Catalina happened and with the new 2019 mbp retina, I started having crashes about once every two weeks. Now, I have an mba m1 running Big Sur, and I think my average uptime is around 2-3 days. Crashes are now something typical, I no longer expect my computer to run for long stretches of time. For a few months, my mba couldn't even go to sleep with crashing, couldn't restart without crashing, this was only solved once I updated to 11.6.1 (I tried reinstalling mac os x before to solve this, it didn't help)
So, yes macs used to be very stable but not anymore, I don't know what happened with Apple's QA but it seems there's now major issues. I didn't change the way I use my mac, if anything now I don't use SIMBL or kernel extensions (which I used to use back when my mac didn't crash) so things should be more stable not less. Yet, despite having ever more control over our machines, being more restrictive over what we can do, Apple somehow is making their system less stable, more flaky than before.
Of course, this is anecdotal, I might be very unlucky but in the past year, I've had quite a few coworkers drop out of calls or be temporarily unavailable, telling me that their mac crashed and they needed to reboot. So, it does seem to be widespread.
Not contesting your experience at all, but if you're having crashes every 2-3 days it might be hardware-related?
I don't think so. I've got the same issue as GP. Well maybe not every 2-3 days but at least once a week I'd say.
If it's hardware-related, on basically a brand new machine, it's a quality-control issue.
Windows manages it (most of the time). Linux and FreeBSD manage it and they're technically still described as monolithic. macOS, on the other hand, throws a hissyfit and everyone then blames the hardware rather than the error handling.
I bet if we were talking about Windows people would take great pleasure in mocking Microsoft so I find it weird that Apple is exempt from the same criticism.
For years I’ve been convinced that they let go majority of the QA and have outsourced QA to the customers/public.
I have a few issues on my Windows 10 that I thought it was Windows issue since it kinda point to Windows that are causing the errors. When I investigate it further, turn out it is the app that are clashing with Windows which led Windows to freak out.
I wonder for this article, could it be the app, libraries or dependencies that are just behaving plain stupid and led macOS to freak out?
Terrible, but I haven't figured out a better solution.
For a given feature, the user might not know how much of the implementation was done in software versus hardware. Apple excels at integrating their software with their hardware.
I was using Linux on laptops until 2004. When I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 and experienced WiFi, sound, and printing working reliably, I realized I could no longer bother with Linux on laptops. This reliability has suffered lately and I hope they can get it back.
Just to be clear, I have been using Linux since 1992. I am completely comfortable with Linux on the desktop and the server. What I found is that Linux does not deal well with configuration, and configuration on laptops changes daily (or more).
There's a few caveats:
* Sound works fine in general, but might be a bit buggy with Bluetooth. If you encounter any issues, installing Pipewire reportedly solves most of them.
* External monitors works fine, as long as you don't mix HiDPI and LoDPI at the same time. In the future, Wayland should fix this.
* HiDPI mostly works, but still requires some config tweaks for a handful of apps.
* Suspend/resume still sucks, mainly due to buggy nVidia/AMD graphics drivers. Only the Intel GPU drivers suspend reliably in my experience.
* WiFi works flawlessly, especially if you're using the Intel WiFi hardware, which is very common on laptops.
* Printing works fine except with Windows-only printers, but they are pretty rare.
* Distros don't really matter that much, but you'd might need to update your kernel if you use an LTS distro with newish hardware. The Ubuntu based distros, e.g. Mint/Ubuntu/Pop!_OS are good options and have the largest user base, so it's easiest to find solutions if you encounter any issue.
* If you just want to test hardware compatibility, I recommend trying Ubuntu 21.10 on a USB stick.
* You'd might want to look at /r/linuxhardware [1] for specific hardware recommendations for your needs. You can also look at the Ubuntu Certified Hardware [2]
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/
2. https://ubuntu.com/certified
If I would create a similar list of issues for Windows or macOS, it would be much longer.
YMMV, so you might need to try it yourself before making a more informed decision.
Testing the hardware support from a USB stick is something that can be done rather quickly.
If running the Linux kernel on Apple hardware did not require a massive reverse engineering effort (see https://asahilinux.org) then maybe you would have a point.
The hardware is only there to enable the software in this concept, not the other way around. This is also why if the UX conditions are met, more powerful/newer/shinier hardware was often not used since it doesn't improve any of the software enablement.
You can't sell a good UX with bad software on good hardware. You can sell a good UX with good software on anything.
https://allthingsd.com/20111005/iphone-4s-its-the-software-s...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2476239/apple-and-wear...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3353038/apple-in-2019-...
https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/15/what-android-can-learn-fro...
They've recently been branching out into designing their own hardware (or claiming to, it's not clear to me how much they've done in-house vs contracted out or off the shelf, but I digress) but they've been making software to put on other people's slightly-customized hardware for a much longer time.
Imagine having a fully functional app but you still can't do anything because the service 'on the other side' doesn't work. It's better because it won't crash the entire system, but it's the same because you still can't do the work you intended to do...
I do remember games freezing windows 9x so much that you had to reach for that reset button. Also when the system threw up a BSOD if you ejected a CD when you weren't supposed to.
Games often did things that put the system out of whack, and while 9x had preemption for 32bit code (16bit was cooperative as separate thread, iirc) it wasn't impossible to break the OS state by simply putting bits of hw in weird state or by using a lot of resources.
Any BSOD in Windows is a kernel panic. Most of the BSODs I recall were directly down Windows getting itself into a state that it couldn't recover from. Like IRQ errors, memory errors, etc. And it was often very easy for an application to force a BSOD. I remember this well as someone learning Win32 APIs "by experimentation".
Also to say you "it wasn't impossible to break 9x by using a lot of resources" but that is a huge understatement. Even today tou can still break modern operating systems by using too many resources and they have far better protections (OOM killer, smarter paging and stored on media with orders of magnitude higher IOPS, multi-core CPUs that offer true parallelism of operations, etc). 9x, on the other hand, had very little to protect you in that regard. I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've hit ctrl+alt+del on Windows 9x, preying there is enough capacity for the OS to kick in the task manager[2], which back then would also suspend all operations of other applications, thus allowing me to manually terminate whatever processes were causing Windows to grind to a halt.
As an aside, it was also possible for applications to hide themselves from task manager too. I had great fun playing around with writing a remote administration tool for college (sadly not for "official" purposes...) so figured out a number of tricks in 95 to work around user permissions, task management, and so on and so forth. Basically 9x was a playground where running applications could pretty much do whatever they wanted.
[1] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...
[2] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...
This was one of the big draws to pulling down "mainframe/workstation" systems like unix (or what MS did by hiring what IIRC was the VMS team to build NT) onto desktop machines. These mainframe systems actually had memory protection, and more generally, had been built to do what "pc OSes" hadn't been designed to do, which was running several programs at once, for long periods of time, and juggling resource contention between them.
DOS machines, CP/M machines, Apples, Macs, Commodores, and several other early machines were pretty tactfully designed to avoid the (too heavy for their hardware) complexity of that by simply building themselves to run only one program at a time. There were hacks to let you run multiple programs (like the Multifinder in MacOS 6, which got mainlined into being a permanent thing in 7), but they were just that — hacks. They were fragile.
As computers started taking on the burden of juggling tons of different simultaneous programs, this fragility really started to blow up on them, and these previously "seeming stable" systems started to crash all the time.
Windows 95 & 98 would crash pretty frequently. Not as badly as win 3 though. NT 4.0 was no bastion of stability either. Windows didn't stabilize until well after Win2000 versions.
MacOS 7 & 8 also not great. The first versions of OS X were also pretty flaky.
In my experience dependable reliability of workstations and servers didn't happen until the mid-2000s where just software couldn't simply blue screen an OS, or lock it up forever.
If I remember rightly it was about that time that MS got serious about driver reliability, which seemed to help a lot.
Next-gen NT 3.X was rock-solid (from memory).
Though the interesting takeaway from your comparison is the fact that desktops these days run server kernels, which is a testament to the build quality of servers.
Which segues nicely into a recap of my point: 90s desktop systems didn't have memory protection et al so one buggy application would cause the system to crash. Everything was carefully layered like a house of cards. The switch to NT and UNIX largely fixed most of those issues but later builds of macOS seem as buggy to me as Win 9x and MacOS 8 and 9 were.
In the 90s systems like OS/2 and NeXT were defined as "workstations" to make a distinction between the old lineage of personal computing platforms (like Win 9x and Mac OS running on typically budget hardware) from high end systems running typically multi-user systems (often literally mainframe OSs).
Post-90s and the "workstation" definition went away when NeXT became OS X and NT replaced the DOS-bootloaded Windows lineage; and dedicated workstation hardware became cost ineffective due to improvements in consumer hardware -- not least of all x86 (and later AMD64).
But in the 90s the distinction was real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workstation
For Mac OS X it was 10.3 to 10.5 that was the (seemingly) most stable.
I think the scope and size of hardware, software and interaction has just gone so large that it's not commercially viable anymore to test or QA the entire system to the same standard. It's also why service managers came along, we just assume that everything breaks and hope restarting it makes it go away...
System 7.5 was rather worse-off than 7.0, but it got absolutely slammed because it was the first major mac OS that got saddled with web browsing, and the OS was just not fit to handle apps that had buffer overflows.
That was the big thing about those mac OSes; since they had no memory protection, if any app on the system buffer overflowed, it'd crash everything. It was fine in an environment where you really were only running one or two apps that were known to be really rock-solid, but it wasn't able to police misbehaving apps.
"I run Solaris, so you know my machine restarts as often as I get laid."
And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said.
NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced.
> Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more.
You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it.
> Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said.
I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation.
Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user.
> NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with.
This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.
By what measure?
I'd rather have a thicker laptop with ports and longer battery life. I would rather have a higher quality camera than having a smaller bezel.
It allowed Apple to continue to pay its retail employees when the stores were closed for the pandemic. Seems like the opposite of "bad."
I had been saying this for nearly the past decade. I'm done saying it.
macOS is still much better than the alternatives, but the golden age of it being in another universe entirely is over.
my macbook pro did the same before it.
Here's a good one if you want to fall in love with the display: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MieluM0c6c&t=28s
And here's a good one if you want to feel a little disappointed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYtvehF9-Z8&t=20s
Well, that's in part because Firefox doesn't play HDR Youtube at all:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/kvqec5/its_2021_an...
Also side by side the Firefox picture is flatter and less bright.
But yeah those play on Safari for me without issue (MBP M1 Pro, full screen).
Both times it was when I moved my mouse after 20 minutes or so of watching fullscreen via my USB-C monitor in Safari.
Model Name: MacBook Pro. Model Identifier: MacBookPro18,1. Chip: Apple M1 Pro. Total Number of Cores: 10 (8 performance and 2 efficiency). Memory: 16 GB.
I almost guarantee this is the root of the issue. My friend doesn't have iStat Menus so I couldn't see the full resource picture but curious if the GPU is involved or its a pure CPU decode and the issue lays somewhere within that.
https://singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-video-power-cons...
On my Intel Mac it still requires 4 thread with close to 100% CPU usage to play a 4K AV1 using latest VLC. ( Which I assume comes with latest dav1d ) This is easily 20W usage.
But on M1 this takes less than 1W.
This basically eliminate any argument against AV1. Even with software decoding. You could watch AV1 4K video with passive cooling on a MacBook Air without it ever getting warm.
It may be a good question to ask, with these kind of processing power, what can we do to further push the next gen video codec.
I love it.
I assume you saw no problem with quality of the 4k video on a laptop screen, but you automatically want it to do more.
Of course, I'm not against the idea of improvement, it's just funny how the goalposts continually move.
LOL Yes because we want to lower bitrate. Taking Youtube or Netflix aside, the vast majority of video on the internet haven't seen any improvement in quality. They moved to newer codec for bandwidth reduction at the same quality so they can serve more content. Until Bandwidth becomes cheap enough where like Audio we no longer want better quality at 64Kbps or lower bitrate, people instead are simply using higher bitrate. I mean 20+ years later, we still dont have what they promised was mp3 128Kbps quality at half the bitrate.
There is a question of how far we can push codec development within the video codec industry. Not because they have ran out of idea but the complexity of codec means to both encoding and decoding. That we may be edging towards a point where Software decoding is not a sustainable solution and does requires dedicated hardware, which in itself is a topic of discussion with different hardware manufacturers. And Video Encoding or Decoding Engine is already getting quite big in terms of Die area.
So what the M1 shown here is a door to a whole new world of possibilities. For example there are half dedicated AV1 hardware decoder and hybrid GPU decoder that uses more power than M1 in pure software mode.
And this is on a M1 with A14 Core, not A15, or the coming A16. We should be able to see another 30% reduction in energy usage within the next 2-3 years.
We could also question and ask, may be we could finally do Wavelet transform where previously was thought as too computational expensive.
We have a roadmap on 5G with 3GPP Rel 18, Massive MIMO is far from finished, we also have roadmap on Ethernet and Cost reduction on SerDes and Controller. Our Server is finally getting higher Core count with reduction in cost / performance. By 2030 vast majority of the world, even in developing nation could enjoy 1080P Video with very good quality at under 1Mbps.
And then the next frontier will be, how do we further improve Live Streaming Video quality with ultra low latency and bitrate. Actually that is what I am partly pushing for right now. That may be a task for another 10 years.
I love continually moving the Goalpost :)
HDR content should default to and only be viewed with VP9 on Safari. Since Safari does not support AV1.
I have viewed 4k HDR content on YouTube in Safari AND Chrome several times. It was the first thing I did when I received my 16" M1 Pro. And I have not experienced a single crash with this laptop.
I tested VP9 and AV1 codecs on youtube without issue. I am on macOS 12.0.1