That's also what I experienced. Yosemite UI Performance is super slow compared to Mavericks. Maybe by rewriting the UI Code they also got rid of speed optimizations from the Bertrand Serlet era :/
Funny you mention that. I interned at Upthere last summer and got to know Bertrand a bit. We had some good conversations about the NeXT days. I wish I was still there now so I could talk to him about this. I'm sure he has some interesting input since he knows the software inside and out.
Interesting. The flashing at least seems to be an isolated System Preferences bug, as I don't remember seeing it in any other applications.
Would be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.
Not only that, it only flashes in certain areas of Sys Prefs.
For me, I see flashes only in General, Security & Privacy and so on. It looks fine in Dock, Mission Control and so on. I think it is just a bug in certain layouts.
Tiger didn't have Mission Control, but I certainly think there are other tests that could be done that really compare all aspects of the OS.
I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.
Dashboard has become virtually unusable in Yosemite. "Laggy" is an understatement. If I'm activating it after a restart, it can take a full minute for the widgets to become active. The same selection is available instantly in Snow Leopard. Thank goodness I've got a partitioned drive, and can switch back and forth between Y and SL as needed.
It's because the preference pane is being drawn by an XPC service, which is a separate process from System Preferences that's drawing the window chrome. This is for improved security, but synchronizing animations across multiple processes is difficult.
I don't know anything of desktop/native applications, but web. My question to the people on the other side of the isle: why aren't all the view panes preloaded, and pre-rendered? In this day and age, where 64mb of RAM is easy to come by, I don't see (as a web developer) why this approach isn't taken.
You're only counting the application you're looking at though. Multiply that by all the applications running, and pretty soon 512MB of VRAM is looking kinda skimpy.
And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.
I wish SL were still getting updates, it was the best OS release Apple ever made. It went downhill the moment they went to annual release cycles.
I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.
I agree. I stuck with Snow Leopard as long as I could (enough software was no longer compatible). No other mac OS in my experience was as stable (I've been using system macos 7)
I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates.
My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.
Agreed. SL was released under unique circumstances: most engineers were working on the first version of iOS, and the remaining core OS folks had free reign to improve the architecture without management pressure to add features.
Even with "Reduce Transparency" enabled (blur disabled) I've had times when Mission Control operates at 2 frames per second on my 13" 2013 rMBP. This never happened using Mavericks.
If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.
This. I love the full screen zoom but had to turn it off for my thunderbolt display. Also I had a hot corner for Mission Control that was similarly laggy, had to turn that off too :(
This is one of the clear areas where performance is nowhere near previous versions. One solution is to switch to the "Picture-in-picture" zoom style under the Accessibility preferences.
Yeah, regardless of transparency settings, WindowServer seems to get really slow after it's been running for awhile (days? hours? it depends.) Restarting the login session or doing a full reboot seems to fix it ... for a little while.
Performance goes downhill faster for me with an external display connected.
Yosemite has been a major regression in almost every respect, I actually regret upgrading. Aside from the obvious and major performance and stability issues the major features are just plain broken. For example, try answering your phone from your computer. It takes way too long to actually pick up the call from the phone and then when you try to answer it bugs up so that in the end you can never actually answer the call. This is completely unacceptable behavior and a feature like this should have never been released unless it was exceptionally reliable and seamless.
It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore.
One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.
The phone thing was infuriating. After upgrading all of a sudden every device I own would start ringing like crazy: phone, computer, Apple TV STOPS airplay because the iPad streaming to it was also buzzing like mad. I KNOW I KNOW, you can turn it off, but I hate the fact that upgrading my OS has now become "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity", especially because after I pick up the call I completely forget about it (I'm not going to not take the call and then start going through the prefs on my x devices). So the other day I finally gave in and just hit accept on my computer -- and ... call failed. Great. I felt like I was on candid camera or something, the employees at Apple viewing me through my iSight camera on my monitor laughing at the sucker who finally took the bait.
As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.
All of the features you've just canned, I use regularly, and don't see the huge issue that you're talking about. I receive calls on my laptop daily and I've very rarely had it fail. I find being able to reply to texts and calls insanely useful. Regardless of my anecdote all new technology is prone to bugs. To say "turn off the 10 gimmick features so you can get back to some level of sanity" is ridiculous. The feature you're talking about is Handoff, its 1 checkbox in your device. Airplay not working? I use it regularly again, with Plex and Beamer, its one of the most useful things I have connected. You say its ruined through software updates, but then go on to say that your gripe is the interaction interface? And of all things, scrolling. Wouldn't that be a pre-existing condition?
I feel like your frustration could be solved with just simply setting up your devices in a way that suits your uses, not the common denominator.
If Yosemite, iOS 8 and other recent changes have shown anything, it is that that problems are not consistent across the user base -- some users are plagued by bugs, while others are somehow, inexplicably completely problem-free.
I myself have been hit hard by Yosemite bugs (graphics glitches, slowness, wifi not connecting at all, very slow wifi, Mac not coming out of sleep, AirPlay issues, Airdrop issues, Bluetooth suddenly disappearing etc., all this on a fast, fairly new MBP), but I have never experienced any iOS 8 bugs of note.
The corollary is that when someone complains, we need to take it seriously and not pretend everything is fine. Clearly many people are hit by problems, and the problems are very real.
>If Yosemite, iOS 8 and other recent changes have shown anything, it is that that problems are not consistent across the user base -- some users are plagued by bugs, while others are somehow, inexplicably completely problem-free.
Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.
It's true that there are plenty of possible explanations, but whether those explanations should still be possible as we head into 2015 is a different question.
Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.
This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.
I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.
If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.
The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.
>Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.
Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.
It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...
I honestly don't think it was ever as bad in those days as what we're seeing now, though, with the possible exception of high-end games where poor quality graphics drivers were notorious for causing crashes for a while (and still are, to some extent).
The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.
Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.
Similar story here, and I don't even bother complaining anymore. The product is perfect. My fault, that Wifi doesn't finds no APs (fixed now in Yosemite), Bluetooth works occasionally (better in Yosemite, not up to par with competition), camera works once in Skype + next time after reboot (still happens) and audio stutters (still happens, but not as bad as in Mavericks). Oh, and don't get me started on the power brick cable quality [1]... Neither Apple or user forums care, the posts just get deleted. Whatever. My next laptop won't have a fruity logo. I need something that Just Works. Like Macbooks once were.
My next laptop won't have a fruity logo. I need something that Just Works.
I'm right there with you, but the trouble is, I'm not sure anything satisfies that criteria any more. :-(
Not so long ago, I was expecting to go the other way, with our next laptops here having that fruity logo precisely because we expected OS X to Just Work where Windows 8 was just nasty.
However, right now, neither of the major commercial platforms is at all appealing, and anything Linux-based still has the fundamental problem that there aren't enough professional quality applications available to meet our needs yet. Relying on SaaS to break the OS strangleholds is also a questionable business move that we are increasingly glad we haven't made as the stories of broken "upgrades", sharp price increases, and outright cancelled services pile up.
I'm holding out some hope that either MS will come back with the next version of Windows and promote some sort of very-long-term stability and support (which is something they have historically been good at, but it seems unlikely with their new choice of leadership) or the FOSS work will finally start to take over (but this probably requires changes in the law, specifically making clear that patents are not enforceable anywhere that matters on things used for interoperability like data formats, communications protocols, and algorithms necessary to work with them).
> You say its ruined through software updates, but then go on to say that your gripe is the interaction interface?
Yeah, imagine that, multiple complaints: 1. Software updates made Apple TV AirPlay incredibly unreliable for me. And its not just me, lots of people have had this happen. I btw still think Airplay is a stellar feature and if it ever got fixed it would continue to make me stick with Apple TV. 2. The UI sucks:...
> And of all things, scrolling.
Navigating episodes/content/movies/whatever on the Apple TV is a very bad experience. Its hard to explain without first using a good experience. On Apple TV, if I'm on the last episode of a show on Season 1 that I own, getting to episode 1 of Season 2 which I don't yet own is very difficult. I have to go all the way up to "more on iTunes", then choose a season, then get to that episode. On Amazon Fire TV, its just the next episode on the list. Apple TV also strangely sorts episodes you don't own earliest to latest, but episodes you DO own latest to earliest. If I go to purchased Tv shows > all, I have no idea what the sort order is. I think it might be most recent, but then the very first show on the list I bought over a year ago, so that can't be it. And as far as I can tell I can't search the purchased section anyways, so I have to literally scroll down some non-alphabetical list of 220 shows in my case if there's a show I'm pretty sure I bought but I can't quite remember the exact name. I'm not sure how to properly describe this mess, which is why I just said "scrolling", because thats what the experience feels like on the Amazon Fire TV: you just scroll through content and don't find yourself endlessly going in and out of menu "sections". It sounds to me that you don't use the actual Apple TV UI but instead use Plex (on a jailbroken Apple TV?), which is fine, but it says nothing of the Apple TV experience.
Edit: BTW, your mention of Plex reminded me of another (long overdue) failing of Apple TV. I happen to also use Plex on my Amazon Fire TV. The install process was tapping the voice button on my remote, saying "plex", then selecting install from the app store. The process on Apple TV is either jailbreaking, running an app that pretends to be the the trailers server (which may break on any upgrade of Apple TV) or accessing your plex content somewhere else and airplaying it.
I share the same frustrations, but I guess I've also accepted that I'm not playing by the rules with my setup (especially with Plex). I hope that they do open Apple TV to more development so it isn't as foreign, it has a lot of potential, but seems to not be a focus.
Quick FYI--you can disable this on your phone if you want to globally disable on all devices. It's weirdly in Settings->Facetime, as "iPhone Cellular Calls".
I could not agree more with your frustrations and observations luciferre, I do hope someone out there from Apple will spot the concerns raised here and take them more seriously than those reported as bugs.
Answering calls on my Mac is one of my favorite new features. When it works, it works well. When it doesn't work, it fails upfront. You really have to play with your icloud and FaceTime settings to trick it into working. It's absurd how complicated the whole relationship between iCloud, FaceTime, iMessages, and my devices is. The settings need to be perfect for things to work correctly. I can't even imagine if it was someone who wasn't tech-savvy trying to use these features.
You should see what you have to do to get SMS Continuity working if you have a phone provider that hasn't been "verified" by Apple as supporting iMessage: http://www.theonlinemac.com/windhelp
I'm at my wits end with Yosemite. I'm very seriously considering switching to Linux or Windows. Of the numerous problems this OS has, my biggest problem is waking my rMBP from sleep. About 20% of the time, it just doesn't wake up and requires a hard shutdown. I never had that problem with Mountain Lion or Mavericks.
Same with me. Before upgrading I always used to close the lid to make my macbook to sleep. The wake-up experience was good. But after upgrading, after waking up the system becomes too slow to use. I have to restart. So stopped putting my mac book pro to sleep. Now I always have to shut down when not using. Apart from sleep-wakeup problem, in general this has become much slower compared to mavericks
Probably this could be related to hardware config. I have a mac book pro at work with 8GB ram and it works fine. My personal mac book pro has 4GB ram and it has problem.
None of the rMBPs, nor the minis have upgradeable ram. If I had to put money on it I'd bet a dollar the next-gen iMacs will be in the same boat. Just too hard to pass up that 400% markup.
Sure. But for now only Fedora 21 and ArchLinux actually release this in their official package repository because they're both very upstreamy Linux distros. You won't be able to install this without fiddling with PPAs in Debian or Ubuntu.
Gnome 3.14 appears to be the default desktop environment in Debian Unstable. Unstable is subject to change and occasionally things stop working for a bit but many people find it acceptable for non-critical use.
Gnome software has switched to an infuriating naming scheme.
The file manager (gnautilus) is now called "files". The video player (totem) is now called "videos". This is so obviously broken for people who are trying to web-search for answers to problems that they're having.
Whats worse os that the renaming is inconsistent - software will get one name in the menu, another name in the help > about, and another name on the Internet.
Gnome - and I say this as politely as I can - makes me fucking hate using a computer.
Who was the joker who kept insisting that iOS 7 was really better and very few complained? I warned about this, post-Jobs Apple design and attention to detail.
Just some very vocal individuals on a niche website, and some trolls.
My own experience of Yosemite has been the polar opposite of many here; better stability, faster, longer battery life etc. All on a 2011 MacBook Air. I never had any kind of issue with iOS 7 either. The odd reset over the last year on my iPhone 5, but the significant majority of the time (99% at least) it worked and it worked well. Sorry to rock your world view, but have you at least posited that these people vociferously complaining are not representative of the whole? Ditto iOS? I know you will chalk me up as another "fanboy"...
Obviously any one person's experience is only anecdotal, but I'm still waiting to discover that anyone I know in real life actually likes iOS since v7. However, I seem to know plenty of people who wish they hadn't upgraded, or even who returned a new iPad with a recent iOS because they thought they were getting what they'd seen before (iOS 5/6 generation tablets that friends/family had) and hated the new one so much.
Personally, we're still pre-v7 on our iPad here, after reading way too many reviews about severe performance drops on this device after the "upgrade" and learning that there is no way to go back once you've done it. We literally ignore any updates for the system from Apple and just carry on happily enjoying the product as we bought it, making us almost uniquely satisfied among iPad purchasers we know.
It has nothing to do with Jobs, there were plenty of bugs and other problems during his reign, too. So much that, in fact, it was an axiom for tech minded people not to install any new versions of the OS until at least 10.X.1 version.
I recommend running Linux (any stable distro) with Xfce. It's worked/looked exactly the same for years[0], and there won't be any sudden/unpleasant changes in the future either.
While I'm (we're) critical of the regressions when it comes to UI performance, switching to linux means giving up an entire ecosystem of apps, completely changing workflows, and in some cases depending on the kind of development that one does, making our jobs impossible.
That's ironic, considering the major wave of OSX adoption was due to linux-oriented developers who found it easier to keep working with their linux ecosystem on OSX than on Windows.
That's why for me Linux is the only sensible choice of platforms. All the other platforms means giving complete control over my tools to a single company.
So much this. I've settled on elementaryOS 0.2 (based off Ubuntu 12.04 LTS) for all my development, staging, and production environments, being netbook, notebook, All-in-One desktop, Mac mini and all my VPS servers. Software package consistency is a invaluable, and you don't even have to give up on the looks:
Arch Linux + Pantheon DE was very buggy the last I checked. I ended up just installing ElementaryOS and regretting/missing having pacman. After a while I just gave up on eOS Luna and switched back to Arch Linux with a very minimally themed Cinnamon DE.
So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.
On a laptop, the regression in battery life switching to Linux or Windows is just a no-go. Also, it's not like Linux is famous for "just working" when it comes to suspend/resume.
Ubuntu 9.04 onwards no big issues with suspend to ram. Hibernate to disk can be problematic if someone uses 'guided partitioning' as the swap space is sometimes a little small.
Hardware: Thinkpads (T41, X60, X200) and Dell Latitude (E5420), currently Debian Sid.
Go to "System Preferences - Accessibility" and enable "Differentiate without Color" and "Reduce Transparency". Made a world of a difference to me, and I no longer think about Mountain Lion.
Yosemite breaks rounded rect corners in UI overlays, like the ones triggered by volume and brightness changes. The masking is broken when the translucent blur shaders aren't applied.
You'd think that'd something they would easily catch in QA before 10.10 shipped, but it's still broken even in 10.10.1.
Same here. I installed Fedora 21 and dwm as the window manager. I didn't know this computer could be this fast (2010 MacBook Air). The bad thing is the battery duration, which is significantly worse than Mavericks (but approximately the same as Yosemite... I got around 5-6 hours of battery life with Mavericks, 3-4 hours with Yosemite and Linux).
I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.
I imagine Powertop is installed and that you have the cpufrequtils installed and set up. What areas does powertop highlight as taking a lot of power/triggering cpu higher states?
My (March 2011) MBP with an SSD booted Snow Leopard in about 7-8 seconds from the bong sound to the complete desktop... My current (September 2014) MBP takes so much longer (just under Mavericks, haven't gone to Yosemite yet)... I find this disappointing.. not being able to upgrade the ram doubly so.
This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.
Yosemite must be bad if you found Ubuntu good. I constantly get "a problem has been detected" messages whenever I boot. Got Manjaro (a user friendly Arch spin off) on my other laptop. Way less problematic and XFCE behaves predictably.
Apple provides security updates back somewhere between 36 and 44 months for the OS. Unfortunately, you won't know until they announce some exploit and don't patch your OS if you've been left behind or not.
My office recently started using Keynote for a lot of our presentations. Keynote presentations created on the version that is compatible with Yosemite (and nothing prior) cannot be opened on earlier versions.
Even if security updates still come for what...usually 20-30 months with Apple...they still don't care about any other kind of backward compatibility and happily break their own file formats at will.
I had this issue too with non-waking up from sleep. Somehow the problem dissapeared after I upgraded the HDD to SSD. Now everything is working fine. Nonetheless, I'm still on Mavericks, no Yosemite upgrade yet. Just a potential solution to your sleep problem.
I've always thought of Apple as a marketing company that happens to sell technology, and not a technology company that sells through marketing.
Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.
I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns
A marketing company that happens to sell technology would be selling some sort of standard solution. As Apple develops everything from their protocols to chips to operating systems to complete devices in house... I'd say they're a technology company who also takes marketing very seriously.
My point is, Apple is not successful because they have the best technology, they are successful because they have the best marketing (and cult followers)
They design their own CPUs, displays, operating systems, consumer and professional applications, connectors, development tools and languages, desktops, laptops and mobile devices in house.
Which company would you say has a greater engineering footprint across technologies and business sectors than Apple? There are a few tech companies that actually do one or two things that Apple doesn't, but I can't think of any that do everything that Apple does.
Windows doesnt really have licensing issues. You call a phone number, tell them you want to activate windows, read them a number, and a machine reads you a number. It takes about 6 minutes of your life, and Microsoft always activates when you ask.
For example, if you buy Windows 8.1 you have downgrade rights to every earlier version. All you do is speak with a person, say "I would like to activate windows" and they say ok. Its not a hassle unless you do it daily.
It's a hassle if you have to call the vendor at all. Not all Windows versions have downgrade rights (see Vista, certain editions of 7).
Also pricing is an issue: all recent desktop versions of MacOSX are either free or very inexpensive ($30 or less).
You could likewise say that filing an insurance claim is easy... sure, but for some folks even knowing to make the call is an undue burden - exactly how the vendor wants it.
As a counter argument, Apple fans are always telling me "just go to the genius bar, they'll sort it out". As if that isn't a hassle. I've never had the need to take any of my windows machines in to be serviced.
Old versions of OS X that you've previously downloaded are always available for re-download in the Mac App Store. You can use those downloads to downgrade.
One major drawback for me is a constant flickering in Intellij Idea and Emacs. I'm not sure who is responsible for this, but user experience is just terrible. I'll definitely downgrade to 10.9 when I'll have enough spare time.
I didn't see much problems besides it. I like new design, animations are smooth enough for me and everything works well enough.
I noticed the same flickering in PyCharm (Python flavored Intellij Idea). I hadn't realized it started after upgrading to Yosemite but it makes sense now. I had assumed it was caused by upgrading to PyCharm 4.0 from 3.x.
I noticed the same in IntelliJ 12. Tried 14 and still had issues. I noticed the flickering goes away once I've turned off Flux (or, at least it doesn't flicker as often).
Not saying it is Flux's fault but I'm curious if you're running Flux and get the same result when exiting.
I answer my mobile from my iMac regularly without issues. I don't have the 'continuity' feature due to Apple's choice to block old iMacs (mine is a late-08 model), other than that, it's a bit slower at app-launching but I didn't had any major issues.
this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)
It's a little less clear than that, unfortunately. Apple chose to not support third-party Bluetooth LE dongles, which might be a reasonable engineering limitation. However, if you upgrade your Mac with a BT-LE capable board used by other Continuity-capable Macs, you still can't use Continuity by default; you need to patch some kexts and disable kernel kext signing[1].
It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.
Mavericks and Yosemite have broken Finders and some major crashing problems. Lion was also pretty horrible. I wish Apple would do another "Snow Leopard" so we can get back to a stable system. Yosemite also has some weird issues with SMB connections to servers.
>One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.
Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.
When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.
You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.
But if you were serious, I'd look for a non-prism-compromised OS.
I do regret upgrading. My wireless trackball and mice no longer work smoothly and this is a known problem apparently with RF and bluetooth pointing devices. It's one thing to make things slower or for new features to be buggy, but making the system unusable is unacceptable, IMO. I'm looking at dual booting Linux now and possibly making the switch back. The only reason I haven't yet is because I luckily still have wired versions of the same trackball.
Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly.
The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI.
The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state.
I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were.
Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.
was heavily involved in the beta testing of 10.10, In my experience Yosemite is by far not only the most buggy, but also slowest release of OSX.
I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app).
A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about.
Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in.
My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums.
I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.
Its especially bad on the 13" rMBP which has a relatively weak GPU. When using scaled resolutions the UI lag is very noticeable, i also get some redrawing issues of icons. You can improve the situation by disabling transparency effects, but that produces some graphical glitches.
In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well.
Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.
> In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well.
I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points).
This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…
I used a 11" Macbook Air at uni before getting a rMBP. IT was buttery smooth, nothing could make it stutter on Mavericks. Great experience although the screen size was a tad on the small size. I eventually settled on a rMBP 13" (2014 edition) and couldn't be happier. Sure, i sometimes get stutter swiping through fullscreen apps or using Chrome on heavy pages but the retina and its scaling makes it so much worth it. Seriously, couldn't be happier. Reading text on this is phenomenal.
And it's not buyer's remorse or anything like that, i got it for free through a university programme and could have got the Macbook Air if i wanted to.
I don't understand why they insist on the fixed yearly release cycle. I'm convinced that's the real source of most of these problems; Yosemite might have been awesome with a few extra months of testing and polishing, it was a major release in many respects and 12 months is very little time for projects of this magnitude.
Is it just because iOS is forced to release in sync with hardware, and hence OSX has to follow suit in order to support new iOS features as fast as possible? What is the point, if the experience is then sub-par?
You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them: "look, this accelerated release cycle, it's not resulting in quality software. It's hurting our reputation. It's not performing on 2 year old hardware. People are losing faith in our ability to release stable bug-free builds. Users shouldn't have to cross their fingers when upgrading. This is Apple."
I don't even understand who they're competing with by doing yearly updates. It's probably a big scramble to get features released and for what? To beat Windows 8? To beat linux? They don't have any threats when it comes to desktop operating systems, so they should slow down and make some quality updates.
It keeps the size of each update much smaller and less error-prone. Each update contains a few significant changes and lots of minor ones.
It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons:
- it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis
- it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem
- it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.
- it lets the actual periodic security updates be used only for critical fixes. Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.
- Apple's biggest strength is attention to UX details. Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.
>it lets the OS theming feel fresh on a regular basis
I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception
>it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world
Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can
>Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.
> it lets apple break/disable bad apps that have entered the ecosystem
You can easily do that with patches and blacklists.
> it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.
That's hilarious, sorry. Nobody who cares for "OSS binaries" uses anything shipped by Apple -- we all use Homebrew and equivalents, because anything shipped by Apple is invariably ancient.
> Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.
That can be easily solved with release-specific service packs, and it's not an excuse to wreck the entire UI.
> Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
Such "massive" research, if it's anything remotely valuable, doesn't change every 12 months. You don't have breakthroughs in UI design every 12 months.
In terms of market share, OS X is to Windows as Windows Phone is to iOS. Sometime about a year ago, Windows 8 alone already had higher market share than all versions of OS X combined, and has only been increasing the lead since.
Windows 10 is looking to be the spiritual successor to Windows 7, combining the improvements that came in 8 with a UI that's more palatable for many. And, now there are ample PC hardware options that rival or surpass Apple's in many aspects, which is a lot of what sold MacBooks to average consumers in the past.
I would guess that Apple is taking Windows 10 very seriously.
> You would think with all the smart, detail oriented, outgoing people at apple, SOMEONE would have pulled the person responsible for shifting to a yearly cycle and tell them
Let me ask you a question off the topic, have you ever successfully take your boss aside and tell him he's not managing the situation right and the whole project stinks? (Paraphrasing what you're basically saying) A lot of people would be afraid to speak up.
I doubt the Apple managers are encouraging the engineers to speak their minds. Look at the recent reports of how badly the iCloud and Map divisions were managed, not to mention the ways SJ practically pushed his employees over the limits for his own vision and not listening to anything else.
Apple has smart engineers but I doubt they have managers that understand what QA is all about and focusing on quality than numbers.
I've also had lots of problems with Yosemite, but I don't think this comparison is useful at all. The Hackintosh looks like a fresh install with nothing else running, whereas the rMBP has other apps running.
When I don't have 100+ Safari tabs open, Yosemite runs a lot better.
My late 2014 rMBP 15" performs just like the video, and with nothing else running. It's the only thing that's disappointed me with my purchase - their flagship laptop (well, 2nd from the top, I have the 2.2GHz) should run the OS silky smooth. Like my 2010 MBP did when I bought it in 2010.
The graphical glitches that he notes however, happen even on a powerful, plugged-in 15" retina model. I just tried it myself. Some parts of each screen, including the blue (or grey) themed UI elements for tabs or dropdowns, take longer to move to a selected state. It's unclear whether the delay is due to the time it takes to load the preferences for the screen -- that it can't do so before you click -- or if the graphics themselves take that long to draw but already know what state they should be in. It's funny, I knew something had changed, but I couldn't pin-point it until this video. Until the side-by-side, I figured the glitches were a side-effect from it being "too fast" since there's no transition animation. But it's obvious the animated version simply felt smoother and more integrated as a UI.
Animation in general is just plain broken in Yosemite (and iOS 8). I'm not up to date with the latest frameworks, but I believe there's been a fundamental API change, because its basically possible to break any animation by just causing an event to happen before its finished. This happens all the time in iOS, you can get it to break mid-rotation and end up in a half and half state: https://twitter.com/tolmasky/status/532578692804124672
I feel like the entire compositor has a performance regression. This includes dragging windows, and seems to have nothing to do with transparency.
When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools).
I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing.
I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps.
A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings.
I use BeamSyncDropper v2 and have it open on startup. The only downsize is it takes a bit for the terminal window to load and execute the shell script. If you have an SSD this shouldn't be a problem, just be patient for that 2-3 seconds of painstaking peasantry. xD
Also one thing about OS X running in VMWare is make sure you're using the specific CPU to the fullest potential. Graphics are rendered with the use of CPU. If you don't have the processor(s) / cores set properly you could be only at 50% overall performance. For example, I am currently using an i3 330UM. I've noticed a significant jump in performance switching from single processor 2 cores; to 2 processors 4 cores.
Personally, Mavericks outperformed Yosemite on this little machine. I've experienced long window load times, hangs, and even guest crashes since the jump... My main desktop workstation is rocking an i7-930; I WILL NOT upgrade my main VMWare workstation to Yosemite. If I need to I will just clone my current VMWare image and run Mavericks / Yosemite in tandem. I would much prefer Mavericks > Yosemite...
I put this [1] in `~/Library/LaunchAgents/self.beamsync.dropper.plist` and it starts immediately in the background on login. (Make sure to change the program path).
I get this awful glitching when switching spaces and I can’t really see much of a speedup. Not sure about the awesomeness, but it is fairly easy to try out.
If you have my problem (bad perf running Yosemite on software rendering), it's far better than using Quartz Debug to disable Beam Sync. Pure curiosity: what's your computer?
I have the same problem, switching spaces will get stuck or glitch. Often times skipping the space i was trying to get to. didnt have this problem on mavericks. I wiped my system and reinstalled and its still there. Im not sure what the point of yosemite is, considering all these phone features google supports via chrome plugins why apple has to bake it into the OS perplexes me.
Have you used iOS 7.1+ on an iPhone 5/5S or better? I haven't noticed any performance issues since iOS 7.0. I think they've optimized the hell out of the blur effect at this point.
Bugs and generally poor software quality, however? Yes.
As a general experience it's 'good enough' on the iphone 5. It would of been cut otherwise. But for example if you compare starting and using any app on iOS 6 vs iOS 7, you'll find out that the exact same executable is far faster on iOS 6 than iOS 7.
They said at wwdc that the blur effect took a lot of 'optimization' work. You don't have a lot of control over how it works and in iOS 7 you had to hack it in by using a UIToolbar vs applying it to a UIView in iOS 8. If you have any view with a significant amount of the blur effect on screen, the animation speed will slow down considerably in the simulator.
They use the effect everywhere in iOS and I bet it does contribute to a decent chunk of performance reduction.
The glass blur effect is actually disabled in VMware and other unaccelerated graphics devices. You can disable it on intel/AMD/nvidia too, the setting is in the accessibility part of system preferences.
They've just removed the last remnants of pure 2D acceleration support in Yosemite, it's HW-accelerated OpenGL or nothing now. They also changed the timing of screen updates, which locks some drivers at 8FPS. Finally, the rounded corners on windows seem to be broken in the software renderer.
Before you go blaming VMWare etc. for not offering an OpenGL driver: Apple doesn't document those APIs at all, there aren't even headers files. They don't even officially support writing a graphics device driver at all (according to DTS), but they provide enough source code so you can figure out how to do so, albeit not providing 3D acceleration.
At some point I'm going to attempt shimming CoreGraphics or wherever it ends up to fake 3D acceleration by proxying the OpenGL calls to the host without using a real driver.
A little bit off-top, but what are you using as your Host Machine? I've been trying to get Yosemite to install on VBox w/ Ubuntu as the host to no avail.
This particular issue is probably due to process isolation and sandboxing.
In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported.
In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process.
That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.
Not sure what everyone is talking about, I loaded Yosemite on my 3 macbooks (2010 11" air, 2011 13" air, and 2014 13" pro) and it works perfectly on all with no glitching whatsoever.
I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge).
A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.
Yosemite uses a variation of a cross-dissolve transition when changing/showing content after a mouse click, whereas older versions do not. Give it a try and pay close attention to the window.
I noticed a lot of UI speed degradation as well, especially when using a dual monitor setup and changing focus from one screen to the other. This was the most visible when OSX tries to refresh the menubar icons. I did a fresh install (instead of upgrade to the beta) and things seem to be a little better but I guess this just has to do with the fresh install clearing my mac of all the bloat that it acquired in the past years.
The decline started with Lion. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of the OS. They were able to offset or mask some of this with SSD drives. But, it has become pretty sloppy for folks that really wanted to tune their systems for performance. Couple that with the questionable changes on the UI over the last couple major releases and I didn't see anything I wanted anymore.
A thousand times this. I stuck it out with 10.6 for the longest time. Eventually, "people" stopped bothering to release for 10.6 (Java 7... :/) and Apple lost me as a customer.
Which was a blessing in disguise - I'm very happy with Ubuntu + i3 and wouldn't go back even if they got their shit together.
Adium has had a huge decline in users, though, since then, so the percentage isn't as informative.
For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2].
I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else.
(I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.)
I am currently working on an OpenGL based UI toolkit and recently purchased a 4K monitor and a EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti to drive the display for testing purposes. As you might expect, it appears taxing to push 4X the content over the bus or have the card render content at a high resolution.
This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.
I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow. After 3 days with Yosemite I had to use my wife's 2009 Air for something, it's running Mavericks, and wow, the speed! That day I restored from a backup and now I am back to running 10.9. My battery is back to 6+ hours, and my laptop is flying.
I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade.
I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?
>I recently updated from Mavericks to Yosemite on my 2012 rMBP. Even with no transparency on my battery life was down from 6+ hours to less than 3.5 hours! And everything is so annoyingly slow.
Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain?
Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
>Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain?
>Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes.
>Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get.
Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.
You need at least 8GB to avoid pageouts while running Yosemite. Well, you can get away with running Safari all by itself in 4GB without getting too many pageouts, but that's about it.
Verified by observing vm_stat values on my 4GB 'Air and my wife's 8GB 'Air.
Interesting that this was the UI aspect that was chosen for a video. In my experience, Yosemite performed very poorly when clicking on a folder from the dock (very low framerate). My problems were worse than bad UI though, I was losing data. Yosemite frequently (every other day) crashed hard-core and the only option was to power cycle. Though I save frequently, sometimes I just hadn't hit Cmd+S yet, and in some running processes, it corrupted data. (On a Late 2013 MBP.)
Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.
241 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadWould be better to compare a larger number of UI interactions - Finder, Safari, Exposé/Mission Control, iTunes, etc., to more clearly establish a pattern rather than just claiming it anecdotally. Not saying the pattern isn't there, but proving it would be a breath of fresh in air in an area typically so subjective and dominated by perceptual biases.
For me, I see flashes only in General, Security & Privacy and so on. It looks fine in Dock, Mission Control and so on. I think it is just a bug in certain layouts.
I can tell you that Mission Control is, at times (far too frequently) extremely laggy for me on OS X Yosemite. Couple that with apps leaking memory, leaving me with mere megabytes of free RAM, and my top of the line rMBP slows to a crawl.
It highlights that the buttons are disabled then enabled when the animation has finished.
And one of those applications is a browser, which is liable to have a huge amount of prerendered stuff it wants to blit.
I rather wait 2-3 years for a new OS update that is stable, fast, and responsive than dealing with all weird glitches that's turning me off OS X for good. Windows 10 in alpha builds feels better than Lion-Yosemite.
I'm always hoping Apple will release the next os with no new features and the requisite performance and stability updates.
My work basically has issued a blanket, don't upgrade to yosemite, but the new app update system seems to always strongly suggest it.
If you try full screen zoom on Yosemite with an external display attached, it's similarly unusable.
I found if you enable the "Increase Contrast" accessibility feature, performance is improved, but it does negatively affect aesthetics.
I answered my own question about this on Apple StackExchange here:
http://apple.stackexchange.com/a/157118/70049
Performance goes downhill faster for me with an external display connected.
It seems Apple is more concerned with showing off the concepts behind these features than making sure they actually deliver a solid experience when their released. Another case in point is the changes to AirPlay for the AppleTV. The new approach to connecting a device should be a big improvement, instead it's a buggy mess that makes it nearly impossible for us to use it anymore.
One of the most refreshing things about moving from primarily using Windows/Linux to a Mac for me was the sensibility, stability and the fact that things just worked the way you expected them to. Now that seems to be completely lost.
As far as the Apple TV is concerned, I've completely given up. Its incredible how a product can be ruined through software updates. Forgetting the lack of attention, that thing was good. AirPlay was a good feature. Hardly works anymore. I've more or less completely switched to Amazon Fire TV/Stick. The voice search on that thing is seriously impressive. And even without that, just scrolling through shows doesn't drive you up the wall. Its like someone actually considered how someone would use the device.
I feel like your frustration could be solved with just simply setting up your devices in a way that suits your uses, not the common denominator.
I myself have been hit hard by Yosemite bugs (graphics glitches, slowness, wifi not connecting at all, very slow wifi, Mac not coming out of sleep, AirPlay issues, Airdrop issues, Bluetooth suddenly disappearing etc., all this on a fast, fairly new MBP), but I have never experienced any iOS 8 bugs of note.
The corollary is that when someone complains, we need to take it seriously and not pretend everything is fine. Clearly many people are hit by problems, and the problems are very real.
Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.
Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.
This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.
I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.
If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.
The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.
Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.
It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...
The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.
Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.
[1]: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC461LL/A/apple-60w-magsaf...
I'm right there with you, but the trouble is, I'm not sure anything satisfies that criteria any more. :-(
Not so long ago, I was expecting to go the other way, with our next laptops here having that fruity logo precisely because we expected OS X to Just Work where Windows 8 was just nasty.
However, right now, neither of the major commercial platforms is at all appealing, and anything Linux-based still has the fundamental problem that there aren't enough professional quality applications available to meet our needs yet. Relying on SaaS to break the OS strangleholds is also a questionable business move that we are increasingly glad we haven't made as the stories of broken "upgrades", sharp price increases, and outright cancelled services pile up.
I'm holding out some hope that either MS will come back with the next version of Windows and promote some sort of very-long-term stability and support (which is something they have historically been good at, but it seems unlikely with their new choice of leadership) or the FOSS work will finally start to take over (but this probably requires changes in the law, specifically making clear that patents are not enforceable anywhere that matters on things used for interoperability like data formats, communications protocols, and algorithms necessary to work with them).
Yeah, imagine that, multiple complaints: 1. Software updates made Apple TV AirPlay incredibly unreliable for me. And its not just me, lots of people have had this happen. I btw still think Airplay is a stellar feature and if it ever got fixed it would continue to make me stick with Apple TV. 2. The UI sucks:...
> And of all things, scrolling.
Navigating episodes/content/movies/whatever on the Apple TV is a very bad experience. Its hard to explain without first using a good experience. On Apple TV, if I'm on the last episode of a show on Season 1 that I own, getting to episode 1 of Season 2 which I don't yet own is very difficult. I have to go all the way up to "more on iTunes", then choose a season, then get to that episode. On Amazon Fire TV, its just the next episode on the list. Apple TV also strangely sorts episodes you don't own earliest to latest, but episodes you DO own latest to earliest. If I go to purchased Tv shows > all, I have no idea what the sort order is. I think it might be most recent, but then the very first show on the list I bought over a year ago, so that can't be it. And as far as I can tell I can't search the purchased section anyways, so I have to literally scroll down some non-alphabetical list of 220 shows in my case if there's a show I'm pretty sure I bought but I can't quite remember the exact name. I'm not sure how to properly describe this mess, which is why I just said "scrolling", because thats what the experience feels like on the Amazon Fire TV: you just scroll through content and don't find yourself endlessly going in and out of menu "sections". It sounds to me that you don't use the actual Apple TV UI but instead use Plex (on a jailbroken Apple TV?), which is fine, but it says nothing of the Apple TV experience.
Edit: BTW, your mention of Plex reminded me of another (long overdue) failing of Apple TV. I happen to also use Plex on my Amazon Fire TV. The install process was tapping the voice button on my remote, saying "plex", then selecting install from the app store. The process on Apple TV is either jailbreaking, running an app that pretends to be the the trailers server (which may break on any upgrade of Apple TV) or accessing your plex content somewhere else and airplaying it.
Mom/Dad/Wife/Girlfriend/Boss: "Hey! Pick up your phone!"
"Can't. No phone calls where I live."
"Oh. Where do you live?"
"Yosemite."
"Oh. Sorry."
Probably this could be related to hardware config. I have a mac book pro at work with 8GB ram and it works fine. My personal mac book pro has 4GB ram and it has problem.
Oh wait...
Source: using 16GB here
Especially when the default RAM they sell with is usually too small.
The file manager (gnautilus) is now called "files". The video player (totem) is now called "videos". This is so obviously broken for people who are trying to web-search for answers to problems that they're having.
Whats worse os that the renaming is inconsistent - software will get one name in the menu, another name in the help > about, and another name on the Internet.
Gnome - and I say this as politely as I can - makes me fucking hate using a computer.
Same thing.
Who was the joker who kept insisting that iOS 7 was really better and very few complained? I warned about this, post-Jobs Apple design and attention to detail.
The majority of the population?
My own experience of Yosemite has been the polar opposite of many here; better stability, faster, longer battery life etc. All on a 2011 MacBook Air. I never had any kind of issue with iOS 7 either. The odd reset over the last year on my iPhone 5, but the significant majority of the time (99% at least) it worked and it worked well. Sorry to rock your world view, but have you at least posited that these people vociferously complaining are not representative of the whole? Ditto iOS? I know you will chalk me up as another "fanboy"...
Personally, we're still pre-v7 on our iPad here, after reading way too many reviews about severe performance drops on this device after the "upgrade" and learning that there is no way to go back once you've done it. We literally ignore any updates for the system from Apple and just carry on happily enjoying the product as we bought it, making us almost uniquely satisfied among iPad purchasers we know.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH14222?viewlocale=en_US
0: http://xfce.org/about/screenshots
https://github.com/vivaserver/MoonLion
take a simple example: usually Ctrl Q (cmd q on os x) means quit. try doing on os x will quit the app 9 out of 10 times. on ubuntu? not really.
Soon thereafter, I did a tour of the usual window manager suspects and ended up with i3 <3
So I agree that any distro + pantheon would be great for those looking for an OSX-like experience in Linux, but it seems the reality is not as straightforward. PantheonDE doesn't seem to be developed like KDE/Gnome/XFCE are -- i.e. with a distro-agnostic approach. Hence you're sort of tied to eOS if you want to keep any level of sanity while getting it to "just work". That was counterproductive in my experience.
Hardware: Thinkpads (T41, X60, X200) and Dell Latitude (E5420), currently Debian Sid.
https://twitter.com/Doomlaser/status/538539277978972160
Yosemite breaks rounded rect corners in UI overlays, like the ones triggered by volume and brightness changes. The masking is broken when the translucent blur shaders aren't applied.
You'd think that'd something they would easily catch in QA before 10.10 shipped, but it's still broken even in 10.10.1.
I still remember when people were impressed by the speed and smoothness of the UI with Tiger or Snow Leopard on my first Mac, a white MacBook. Good times. Now we have faster computers, SSDs instead of hard disks, but slower interfaces.
This will probably be my last mac hardware purchase... I like the screen and the touchpad so much better than any other laptop, but don't really use it that much, and even then I could have gotten something with similar hardware for half the price... I've thought about installing Ubuntu on it, but haven't taken the plunge just yet... I spend almost 2/3 of my time on my laptop in either a windows or linux vm, so it's kind of a wash.
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT1222
Even if security updates still come for what...usually 20-30 months with Apple...they still don't care about any other kind of backward compatibility and happily break their own file formats at will.
Also the capitalism of today with all of its lust for profits, sales, budgets, and deadlines its kind of luddite, can have a predatory behaviour for innovation and advancements in technology in general.
I think if tech companies want to survive for more than 10/20 years, they will need to get into the core of the system, of THE machine, and figure it out better ways to survive by really delivering good tech and innovation, and not by just promissing a world with rainbows and unicorns
Which company would you say has a greater engineering footprint across technologies and business sectors than Apple? There are a few tech companies that actually do one or two things that Apple doesn't, but I can't think of any that do everything that Apple does.
creepy..
For example, if you buy Windows 8.1 you have downgrade rights to every earlier version. All you do is speak with a person, say "I would like to activate windows" and they say ok. Its not a hassle unless you do it daily.
Also pricing is an issue: all recent desktop versions of MacOSX are either free or very inexpensive ($30 or less).
You could likewise say that filing an insurance claim is easy... sure, but for some folks even knowing to make the call is an undue burden - exactly how the vendor wants it.
I didn't see much problems besides it. I like new design, animations are smooth enough for me and everything works well enough.
For PHPStorm JetBrains has also released a version with a bundled JDK 1.8 which fixes the flickering for me [2].
[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-131593 [2] http://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2014/12/phpstorm-8-0-2-bu...
Not saying it is Flux's fault but I'm curious if you're running Flux and get the same result when exiting.
this wasn't a choice of blocking older Macs. The fact is that continuity requires Bluetooth LE (or you would be complaining about greatly reduced phone battery life) and your old iMac doesn't have BT-LE capable hardware (BT-LE and BT only share the name - aside of that they are quite disimilar)
It really does feel like Apple blacklisted older machines from using Continuity; only third-party kext hacking can get things started again.
[1] https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/
Stability is not "completely lost"
I don't know why WindowServer keeps crashing in this fashion.
Ha! No one cares about desktop any more.
When you're ready you can try Windows 8, a surprisingly mature and stable OS that runs on a hardware ecosystem several orders of magnitude more complex.
You get used to the fact that it was clearly designed to run on a tablet. The metro start page is actually quite good, even on desktop.
But if you were serious, I'd look for a non-prism-compromised OS.
Here's a very quick, unscientific comparison of one tiny aspect of UI performance in OS X Yosemite vs. OS X Tiger. Although this is just one example, I personally see these kinds of hiccups throughout OS X constantly. The machine running OS X Tiger is actually an Intel Core 2 Duo PC (hackintosh) from 2007 with no hardware accelerated graphics support in OS X (it's an unsupported intel integrated graphics chipset that was never used in a real mac, hence the unsupported graphics). Therefore, the Tiger demo is running without QE and CI. The machine running OS X Yosemite is a late 2013 15 inch retina MBP. Automatic graphics switching is disabled for the demo, forcing the machine to use the much more powerful Nvidia graphics card. I also have the power adapter plugged in so that the system isn't in a low power state. I've been using OS X for 8 years now. From 2007 to 2013, I used hackintoshes (custom built with compatible hardware). Those machines ran Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks. I got my rMBP in 2013 and it's now my primary machine. It first ran Mavericks, then I upgraded it to Yosemite this year. It's been my experience that the performance of all of my machines has noticeably declined since the release of Lion. In terms of UI performance, my rMBP running Mavericks/Yosemite is nowhere near as responsive as any of my Snow Leopard machines were. Fingers crossed that WWDC 2014 focusses on major speed and stability improvements for OS X and iOS. New features are great, but not at the cost of performance.
I am saddened to report that only one of the many performance regressions I reported was actually fixed (In that case within Mail.app).
A huge portion of the performance problems seem to be stemming from the graphics subsystem. If you use Yosemite on dual Retina or even WQHD displays you'll know what I'm talking about.
Add graphics glitches, immature theming and wireless problems to the over all poor performance and were talking about major issues in areas that OSX has been known as a leader in.
My biggest issue is that Apple seems to be ignoring most of the core performance issues that are being reported - just look at the number of unresolved posts on the Apple forums.
I do hope that Tim Cook is becoming aware of the drop in reputation that OSX has received since Yosemite and is leading his teams to perform more in depth performance soak testing before releases in the future.
In the end i disabled retina resolution and am running native 1680x1050 now. Definitely not as crisp but i got used to it and system load is considerably less (especially when playing back video and such) now and battery life improved as well.
Current GPUs in the Macbooks are just not ready to handle the massive resolutions used for scaling. Just try to run a 60fps youtube video in a scaled resolution and you will see your system load go up to the point the video might even stutter.
I don't think that 1680x1050 is native or even half-native on the 13. IIRC the Air is 1440x900 and the 13 rmbp is less than that (when you count the points).
This is why I keep telling people who want a 13' Mac to get the air, but sadly very few listen…
And it's not buyer's remorse or anything like that, i got it for free through a university programme and could have got the Macbook Air if i wanted to.
Is it just because iOS is forced to release in sync with hardware, and hence OSX has to follow suit in order to support new iOS features as fast as possible? What is the point, if the experience is then sub-par?
Anybody with one of the new 5k imacs want to chime in? Similar graphics issues.
But no, that's probably not happening.
It's a good strategy for a variety of reasons:
None of this excuses buggy releases, but overall it's significantly less buggy than any similarly ambitious OS out there.I doubt they will be making significant changes every year. 2014 was the exception
>it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world
Too many key utilities are extremely outdated due to GPL3. Apple also seems to be moving away from free software wherever it can
>Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
They seem to be letting the consumers do a lot of the testing (with the open beta for instance). Many features seem half baked, conceptually, and in execution.
You can easily do that with patches and blacklists.
> it keeps all the OSS binaries more in sync with the fast-paced OSS world.
That's hilarious, sorry. Nobody who cares for "OSS binaries" uses anything shipped by Apple -- we all use Homebrew and equivalents, because anything shipped by Apple is invariably ancient.
> Try loading Windows 8 and you immediately have over 200 critical hotfixes that take nearly a day to download and install on 2 year old hardware.
That can be easily solved with release-specific service packs, and it's not an excuse to wreck the entire UI.
> Each release contains the byproduct of massive amounts of research/data.
Such "massive" research, if it's anything remotely valuable, doesn't change every 12 months. You don't have breakthroughs in UI design every 12 months.
You know what changes every 12 months? Fashion.
In terms of market share, OS X is to Windows as Windows Phone is to iOS. Sometime about a year ago, Windows 8 alone already had higher market share than all versions of OS X combined, and has only been increasing the lead since.
Windows 10 is looking to be the spiritual successor to Windows 7, combining the improvements that came in 8 with a UI that's more palatable for many. And, now there are ample PC hardware options that rival or surpass Apple's in many aspects, which is a lot of what sold MacBooks to average consumers in the past.
I would guess that Apple is taking Windows 10 very seriously.
Let me ask you a question off the topic, have you ever successfully take your boss aside and tell him he's not managing the situation right and the whole project stinks? (Paraphrasing what you're basically saying) A lot of people would be afraid to speak up.
I doubt the Apple managers are encouraging the engineers to speak their minds. Look at the recent reports of how badly the iCloud and Map divisions were managed, not to mention the ways SJ practically pushed his employees over the limits for his own vision and not listening to anything else.
Apple has smart engineers but I doubt they have managers that understand what QA is all about and focusing on quality than numbers.
On OS X, its the same thing. Here's me easily repro-ing in Safari: http://tolmasky.com/letmeshowyou/Yosemite/Safari%20Animation...
When running OS X virtualized inside VMWare Fusion (which does not have hardware accelerated video drivers for the guest), Mavericks was very usable. Yosemite dropped to 2fps (measured using Quartz Debug tools).
I had to use Quartz Debug (available in the Graphics Debug Tools here [1]) to disable beam sync to make it usable again. In VMWare, this takes me from 2fps to around 50fps for basic operations like dragging a window around and typing.
I've observed noticeable improvements disabling Beam Sync in a native environment as well. Unfortunately, I've found no way to do it without leaving Quartz Debug open. Quartz Debug also has an FPS meter in the menu bar under "Window -> FrameMeter". My framerate when dragging a large window in Yosemite with "Beam Sync: Automatic" is around 40fps. With "Beam Sync: Disable" it's almost a steady 60fps.
A stable test in System Preferences for me is the Dock settings.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/downloads/
Download and discussion about BeamSyncDropper can be found here: http://www.tonymacx86.com/customization/92201-beamsyncdroppe...
Also one thing about OS X running in VMWare is make sure you're using the specific CPU to the fullest potential. Graphics are rendered with the use of CPU. If you don't have the processor(s) / cores set properly you could be only at 50% overall performance. For example, I am currently using an i3 330UM. I've noticed a significant jump in performance switching from single processor 2 cores; to 2 processors 4 cores.
Personally, Mavericks outperformed Yosemite on this little machine. I've experienced long window load times, hangs, and even guest crashes since the jump... My main desktop workstation is rocking an i7-930; I WILL NOT upgrade my main VMWare workstation to Yosemite. If I need to I will just clone my current VMWare image and run Mavericks / Yosemite in tandem. I would much prefer Mavericks > Yosemite...
I put this [1] in `~/Library/LaunchAgents/self.beamsync.dropper.plist` and it starts immediately in the background on login. (Make sure to change the program path).
[1] https://bochs.info/p/8k7aj
I also feel that since iOS 7 that stability and quality has gone down a lot, or they got too ambitious with the glass blur effect.
Bugs and generally poor software quality, however? Yes.
They said at wwdc that the blur effect took a lot of 'optimization' work. You don't have a lot of control over how it works and in iOS 7 you had to hack it in by using a UIToolbar vs applying it to a UIView in iOS 8. If you have any view with a significant amount of the blur effect on screen, the animation speed will slow down considerably in the simulator.
They use the effect everywhere in iOS and I bet it does contribute to a decent chunk of performance reduction.
They've just removed the last remnants of pure 2D acceleration support in Yosemite, it's HW-accelerated OpenGL or nothing now. They also changed the timing of screen updates, which locks some drivers at 8FPS. Finally, the rounded corners on windows seem to be broken in the software renderer.
Before you go blaming VMWare etc. for not offering an OpenGL driver: Apple doesn't document those APIs at all, there aren't even headers files. They don't even officially support writing a graphics device driver at all (according to DTS), but they provide enough source code so you can figure out how to do so, albeit not providing 3D acceleration.
In Tiger, all of those pref panes were loaded into the System Preferences app, and each pane could access all the same data as any other. 3rd party pref panes are supported.
In Yosemite, each of those panes is its own process.
That doesn't excuse it, just saying something about what's going on.
I recommend a clean install of Yosemite. After upgrading from the beta versions to the final release, I still had UI elements misplaced (e.g. the address bar in Safari was 1/3 the width and stuck on the left edge).
A clean install fixed the UI alignment and some other minor quirks. I still notice occasional black squares in Safari which cover a portion of the screen; a page refresh seems to resolve the issue. But Firefox developer edition, on the other hand, is snappy and responsive.
Therefore most of the time the performance benefits are eaten by additional software.
It's most apparent on older hardware that was already running close to max capacity.
A thousand times this. I stuck it out with 10.6 for the longest time. Eventually, "people" stopped bothering to release for 10.6 (Java 7... :/) and Apple lost me as a customer.
Which was a blessing in disguise - I'm very happy with Ubuntu + i3 and wouldn't go back even if they got their shit together.
https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion
It's painful to support these days but I'm still trying keep my apps compatible with it.
For example, if you look back to a couple years ago, we had ~180k stats pings for the same week period[1] as we do now at ~20k[2].
I think what you're seeing/reporting here is that users who still use Adium are not entirely upgrading. That's probably true, but has more to do with Messages.app in newer versions supporting iMessage than anything else.
(I was one of the Adium developers for years. I don't even use it anymore because of the prevalence of iMessage and the decline in general IM.)
[1]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2012&week=01&graph=bar [2]: https://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2014&week=51&graph=bar
This may not be the effect seen here, but it is the first thing that came to mind. I am not sure how well system hardware has kept up with display technology.
I also updated my iPad 3 from iOS 6 to iOS 8. Now it's unusable! So, so, so slow. And that I can't even downgrade. If you are going to screw things up, Apple, can you at least give me an option to downgrade.
I think the main problem is the monolithic aspect of the OSX and iOS. Why is the Mail or Face Time app part of the OS?
Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Since this is HN, do people do basic investigation, or assume that anything that doesn't seem to work is a lost cause and just switch OSs, re-install, or complain?
Your experience for example seems more like some rogue app with extensive CPU/memory usage driving the battery down. Have you checked Activity Monitor to try to spot if that was the case?
Yes, I did perform basic investigation. I switched from Chrome to Safari, because Chrome was eating battery like crazy. I shut down anything that I wasn't using. Browsing the internet on Safari I was getting 3.5 hours on a charge. I even timed it! And I am not the only one, read the Apple forums complaining about this. I even reset the PRAM, as Apple recommends. It didn't help. Now I am running a lot more apps, using Chrome, compiling stuff in the background, and still getting my usual 5.5-6.5 hours of battery life (depending on the load). So, yes, I did spent over 20 hours of my life trying to make Yosemite work, and then gave up and switched back to Mavericks. I had a CC backup, so it only took 20 minutes.
>Actually your memory usage should go down with Yosemite -- they have new technologies just for that. Same for battery file, it should go up.
Also, I didn't not mention anything about memory usage, but you are right, the memory footprint was lower. About 1.6gb on average, vs 2.6gb with Mavericks. But I don't care about that, I have 16gb, so I have RAM to spare. On the other hand, I can use all the battery life I can get.
Apple does some amazing things, and some really bad things. It's important to give them due credit for the mazing things, and call them out on the crap that they put out as well. Yosemite is very slick looking and a very pretty operating system. But it is very buggy, and what Apple put out as a GM release is beta quality at best.
Verified by observing vm_stat values on my 4GB 'Air and my wife's 8GB 'Air.
Reverting to Mavericks made everything silky smooth again. Not a single crash or performance hiccup. I think I'll stay here for a while.