Luckily I haven't experienced any of the WiFi issues people have with 10.10.*, but the last update was still toxic, for a different reason: I had to disable all third party kexts or I would get kernel panics every 10 minutes or so. Incredibly frustrating.
PSA: If you use VPN software, Smoothmouse, or Hamachi, consider not updating to 10.10.3.
Isn't the whole idea of a massive company producing software for a very small restricted set of hardware that this sort of thing isn't supposed to happen? Random bullshit like this is expected with systems like Windows that aim to support a whole mess of possible hardware configurations, that's not really the case here.
What went wrong? Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?
10.10 has been failboat full steam ahead for wifi since the public beta. I'm not sure why, but their testing and QA seems to be terrible in this arena.
I'm curious if steve would get personally involved in when stories like this get a lot of attention on any influential site. For some reason, I can imagine him going down to the group responsible for a high profile fuckup and firing someone over the problem. That alone would probably serve as motivation (not a good source of motivation, but motivation nonetheless) for people to be more careful about the quality of the software they write. His mercurial and toxic way of dealing with things he's not happy about may have kept quality higher.
It is cliche because it is inane: plenty of stupid things happened under his watch. If you want to see software complaints from his era, just look up iTunes for Windows.
Totally subjective opinion, but it seems like since ~10.8 the reliability of OSX has gone down substantially. I remember 10.5 and 10.6 being rock-solid on a hackintosh, and now I have wifi / bluetooth issues all the time, sometimes the graphics go all 16-colors-only, consisting of bright red + black-only or a weird mix of like green, purple, orange (it's kind of trippy, but it requires a reboot to fix).
Display mirroring / resolution switches goof up my jazz sometimes, unlocking can take up to ~ a minute (from just the lid shut state), browsers eat RAM like it's their job, etc etc.
If this is the best we can do in a $2800 (late 2014 15" rMBP maxed out) computer where the company produces the hardware and software, color me unimpressed.
I get the sentiment of what you're saying and I agree with it, but I have to disagree with you - You can't blame the stability of your 'hackintosh', running the OS on a completely unsupported configuration.
I feel the same. For our build farm at work we have to reboot our Mac Minis every two weeks otherwise they just stop being able to talk to the network. This started when we updated to Mac OS 10.9 and hasn't been any better with 10.10. The lone circa-2006 Mac Pro we have in the farm has had no issues though.
I still have a Macbook running 10.6.8 (SL) and indeed, it's rock solid. Never crashes. Never an issue with wifi, either. It's a workhorse. I've replaced the battery a few times but I'm glad I've never upgraded the OS. And I use it for development from my couch and it never leaves the house.
Of course, the caveat there is that I'm a Python dev. If I were a front-end dev (or, say, a mobile dev who needed the latest XCode to write iOS 8 apps) there's no way I'd be able to get away with this.
Seems more likely that the opposite would be true. Small group of people, with zero-external oversight/review. They are far more likely to miss something.
I guess the fact that the hardware set is very tightly controlled helps, some, but still.
I'm not at all claiming that Open Source software doesn't have bugs - it obviously does. But you have a much larger test group, and many more people reviewing the code (usually).
I have two very competent friends that, in the past couple of months, have quit Apple because they were working in groups with toxic cultures. One was IS&T, the other was hardware (I don't want to name the exact group). They had very detailed accounts of the issues they encountered. They didn't have great things to say about other groups they were familiar with, or had previously worked in, either.
My last company worked extensively with browsers from various companies, at a deep level. Safari was, by far, the one that crashed the most and had the most general implementation problems. My experience with their other software is not much better, and I avoid what I can. And then there is the ghastly iWorks rewrite. The only software I've ever thought highly of from Apple is Mac OS X.
I would guess there are deep cultural problems at Apple that are being allowed to fester, and perhaps this extends to some OS X groups. Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits (okay, I admit, maybe iPhones are pretty nice). I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OSX-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.
* Apparently they did this once but the project was canned
> Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits. I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OS X-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.
Would you not class devices like Dell's XPS 13 (2015) [1], Microsoft's Surface 3 & Pro 3 [2][3], Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd gen) [4] as beautiful?
Windows can also run many of the productivity and creative apps that are commonly found on Macs. Which apps do you use?
I can imagine these devices are beautiful, and I'd love if I could run a good MAC OSX-like OS on them that also runs common productivity apps. I combined too many unrelated points the in above quote and made what I wrote confusing.
I had to turn off my Bluetooth to get my wifi working normally. That resolved the majority of the issues but strangely it was only on my older laptop. Macbook Pro Mid 2012
I've got the problem of OSX filling up gigabytes of space with no rhyme or reason. One minute I'll have 10gb fee then I'll have 900mb free. Then it'll free up again.
I want to hope it's RAM OP is referring to. But if it's disk, that is way way too low of a margin. You should keep at least 10% of your disk empty especially if it's an SSD.
I'm having this - OP check the Memory Pressure section in Activity Monitor. The annoying thing is all I've got running are Spotify, Skype, Chrome (with a couple of tabs) and iTerm. I guess 4GB isn't enough anymore...
My early 2011 Macbook Pro isn't suffering from/causing anything related to this issue as far as I can tell. Is it possible it's only happening with certain wireless chipsets?
It is happening on my late 2013 Macbook Pro. It seemed like 10.10.2 either fixed the problem or reduced it to me not noticing. But the 10.10.3 update has made working remotely incredibly frustrating.
I'm using iStat Menus5 and Little Snitch, and am not experiencing the same issues. My MacBook Pro is the penultimate 17", and although I still lose Wifi randomly (under Yosemite and Mavericks) my machine's running acceptably, although the stable seems to have steadily degraded since Snow Leopard, which has been my favourite iteration of OSX so far.
I'm on 10.10.4 and am solid with wifi, but plugging into two monitors with the hdmi and thunderbolt ports runs my cpu full load. It's become extremely annoying.
With Mavericks I was okay connecting to two 30 inch Dell displays. Once Yosemite came out, I would face problems with resolution on the displays switching or even better I would be forcibly logged out. So I gave up on dual monitors for a while until recently but now I face CPU usage issues.
Disabling transparency will most likely help tremendously on the CPU load. In System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> Uncheck "Reduce transparency".
This. I was only pushing out to two 24" displays and I routinely experienced the forced logout. A touch disruptive. So now I sit at a desk with one dead monitor. Heck of a job, Apple.
Most drawing in OS X is done by the CPU. The GPU is used for compositing (layering the views drawn by the CPU over each other) and additional special cases (CoreImage effects, OpenGL, etc).
I have no information on what is going weird in 10.10.4 for OWaz but it's far more likely to be a Thunderbolt driver issue than anything else (i.e. simply related to pushing data over the cable).
Yosemite has not done well in the wifi connectivity arena in my house. My wife's Macbook will drop its wifi while sitting next to a Surface Pro that happily maintains connection. The wifi issues have meant that we both are moving away from Apple products and are purchasing alternatives.
As Apple has full control over their hardware and the selection is limited, I expect better QA from them. I dealt with spotty WiFi driver issues with them in the past and it took months to get a fix.
if you were trying to it wouldn't be a very strong argument since Windows has to support hardware from a million different vendors and deals with a lot more third party drivers.
You're trying to shift attention away from Apple by attacking another vendor. Unless Microsoft Windows updates have some affect on Apple's updates, your links have no relevance to the problems with Apple's wifi bugs.
I don't recall ever seeing Apple use an Intel solution for wifi, only Broadcom and Atheros. These are the only plugin kexts I see inside IO80211Family.kext:
AirPortBrcm4360.kext
AirPortBrcm4331.kext
AppleAirPortBrcm43224.kext
AirPortAtheros40.kext
They each support multiple chipsets so the kext names that appear so specific are a little misleading, but it's still just those 2 companies apparently.
Mythical man-month isn't even an excuse - Apple software isn't running late. Well at least, the cycle is well known and it should be easy to add more people from the beginning before it gets too late.
You truly can't speed up software dev by adding more people (beyond a certain point)---it's not just on late projects that it is true.
But you can do that on testing. If you want to run 1,000 tests 10 times each, to drive down the possible rate of errors to near zero, you just need to have 10,000 people run one test each.
So basically, you can make the entire process take only as long as the longest single test.
Ah, but you still need to design the tests, which requires knowing the exact design and behavior of the software, which is subject to late change due to tester feedback. So there is a lot of critical path forming at the end of a software dev cycle which more people cannot pull you out of.
The mythical man month reminds us that 9 women can't make a baby in one month. Adding people to a project bound by a critical path can only make it later. And the more you care about design and UX in your initial release, the more you will see that sort of thing.
That's true. However, it doesn't really negate my point, it complements it.
In this case, Apple could have a "test" that is: install the new OS under test on a machine, and see if performance degrades on other machines on the same network.
You could have 10 people test it with 10 different networks. It's expensive, but Apple could heat their HQ by burning cash if they wanted.
Admittedly, some things will still get through due to tests that you would only think to do in hindsight. But once you have the test, they won't get through again.
Mythical man month says that adding more people to an already late project only makes it even later. It explicitly says that if you start with more people, you can do it quicker (to an extent - after all, 9 women can't make a baby in one month)
Me too. My woes with my early 2011 Macbook Pro had me switch to 8.1 last summer and I've never looked back. While Windows 8.1 is far from perfect, my transition was super easy.
After my Macbook Pro finally got fixed with the repair program announced a couple of months ago, I find myself a little lost on OSX on the occasions when I do use my old Macbook Pro.
We've seen something similar with a 10 - 25 MacBooks connected at once on an Airport Extreme, and I wonder if it's related – as it all worked fine before, for months.
Is the solution to downgrade everyone to 10.10.2 or upgrade everyone to 10.10.3?
This is probably a baseless notion, but having nursed along a mid-2010 Macbook Pro alongside a Linux/Windows Desktop, I find myself thinking that the Linux WiFi situation is now the easiest of the three (on Ubuntu, at least). Of course, there's a huge caveat about hardware selection, but I am always careful to buy something that I know to have decent driver support.
Why do you say strange? Linux has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of developers working on the kernel. The pace of progress is absolutely monumental.
This isn't strange, this is inevitability. OSX and Windows simply cannot compete, Im rather shocked that they are still trying.
Just under 5k contributors in total[0] – There's likely a lot less than that working on it actively, and the number working on the Linux kernel full-time will be much lower than that also.
This is likely not an accurate representation of who is actually working on the kernel. Whole teams of people might work on a patch which gets bundled up into a single commit.
Compete in which areas? As much as I love Linux, it is obvious that UX decisions aren't amenable to the bazaar model. Call Windows 8 UX a fiasco; it's still far more consistent that any Linux desktop environment.
>> This isn't strange, this is inevitability. OSX and Windows simply cannot compete, Im rather shocked that they are still trying.
While Linux is my go-to operating system for servers, it is still a distant third for me as a desktop OS.
I regularly try out Linux desktops of various distros, and I always end up preferring OSX and Windows over them. For me at least, clearly OSX and Windows can still compete.
In fairness to Linux, the desktop environment has advanced leaps and bounds over the past decade. Just not enough to win me over... yet.
QA has noticeably dropped, but it is a difficult job. WiFi is notorious, lots of buggy implementations of the same standard both on the access point and the laptop. And many times the work place WiFi won't update to the latest firmware that fixes the problem.
Wi-fi trouble in OS X 10.10.x is very hardware dependent, brand new MacBook Pro 2015 is just fine for example. But have heard so many users with nonstop wireless problems from 10.10, to 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, perhaps 10.10.4 as well, we'll find out soon enough.
The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone / iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example, with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10 seconds.
It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.
The ironic thing about all this is that the (largely) Apple mentality of hiding everything away makes it even more difficult to troubleshoot when something does go wrong, like this. Most users won't narrow down the problem so easily to their own machine if they only see the slowness described in the article... but what they will notice is a WiFi activity light that's blinking almost all the time, even when they aren't doing anything, when it used to not do that.
Every once in a while I'm troubleshooting why connection is slow again. With pings to google reaching 7-8 seconds. The offender was always an iOS device declaring itself king of the network. Finding the culprit is fun at times since some syncs stop once the device becomes active (e.g. iCloud backup, but not always).
Worst of all it's easy for redundant syncs to happen. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well as "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB. (Edit: wrong info see post below)
The most fun I've had a few days ago with "WhatsApp". They introduced their own backup capability via "iCloud Drive" which also doubles their backup requirements if not configured properly. Default iCloud backup already backs up all of WhatsApp. WhatsApp's iCloud Drive backup then saves everything again.
In my case WhatsApp backup got stuck and was indefinitely uploading the same file. Turning backup off in WhatsApp-settings did nothing. I had to rip out iCloud Drive access for the app to make it stop.
This was on my sisters device. Given that WhatsApp is heavily used for image sharing as well this meant that WhatsApp was (trying to) backup 2*2GB of data. Not possible at 52KB/s upload speed.
Bonus points: WhatsApp also saves all images to the Camera Roll so the image gets backed up once more.
> Worst of all there are several redundant syncs possible. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well ass "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB.
That's a combination of misleading and outright false. What's misleading is you're suggesting that iCloud Backup and Photo Stream are doing redundant work. While it's true that both involve uploading your photos, Photo Stream only keeps the last 30 days (or 1000 photos), whereas iCloud Backup is a complete backup of everything. It must include your complete photo library, even the photos that are currently in Photo Stream, because there's no guarantee that the photos will still be available in Photo Stream when you decide to restore.
And what's completely wrong is your assertion that iCloud Photo Library is including redundant information yet again. This is wrong because if you enable iCloud Photo Library, then your iCloud Backup stops including the camera roll. If you have both iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream enabled, I hope it only uploads the photo once, but I haven't done any measurements.
So no, this does not "turn 5GB of pictures into 15GB". It's not even 10GB (1000 photos is significantly less than 5GB).
Fair enough, that was me extrapolating from the experience I had so far. I didn't dream to turn on the new iCloud Photo Library so far to see that it'd turn off the iCloud backup part.
1000 Photos might not be 5GB but still every picture gets uploaded, just older ones disregarded once new ones arrive. Now if someone comes home after a day out with a 100 new pictures this puts some stress on your network once while it is updating photo stream (if not done over mobile data) and backing up.
Where some stress is: Complete congestion of the network since 100% of upload is used and at ~50KB/s speed around these parts it'll take forever to even sync 100 Pictures at 1.5-3MB each.
Your posting about iCloud uploading is rather misguided. First off, this only happens if you enable iCloud Photo Library, which is an explicit decision, not something that happens automatically. And secondly, it actually uploads fairly slowly (it certainly doesn't use all the available bandwidth) and has a fairly low per-day upload cap. If you have 45GB of photos (which strikes me as rather extreme for your phone) it will actually take a fairly long time to upload them all. I'm not sure what the daily cap actually is, but I think it's on the order of a few gigabytes.
Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.
> Its absolutely criminal that applying a recommended update with security critical fixes in it should turn my computer into a DoS device for my local network.
Let's be careful. Extremely irresponsible and horrible? Yes. Criminal? No.
We don't want to give the EU any more ideas about who to bully next. It could be me or you (in effect if not literally).
If you've signed a contract with Apple that there will not be breakage, then it's a matter for civil (not criminal) court.
Yosemite has been a massive mess since the day it was released - easily the most buggy, unreliable OS I've ever used. It is a stark contrast to the solid reliability and performance of 10.8/10.9 and every update seems to make things worse.
It's as if Apple is no longer spending as much time on stability and performance and a lot more on flashy bells and whistles.
It must be related to particular hardware combinations. We have 9 macs here of various ages on Yosemite with no problems. We had one machine go totally wonky for a while, but it turned out to have a bad memory chip (off-brand memory upgrade that we did).
These posts seem to come up quite regularly and reliably generate a bunch of posts saying (a) "I have this problem; OS X has sucked since 10.X!", and (b) "I don't have a single one of the cited issues despite using the same hardware and software versions".
It seems more likely that the issues are either caused by specific software that doesn't come with OS X or possibly by bad batches of hardware. In this case it sounds like Photos may be responsible.
It would be better if people were able to identify the cause of the issue and file proper bug reports, rather than just berating OS X in general.
Sometimes the issue isn't even a bug - for example I've seen many people complain about sleep/hibernate issues that are actually the result of Apple complying with an EU directive (see autopoweroff on https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...)
Given that disabling UI transparency is for accessibility purposes and is only for certain graphics cards I wouldn't use this as an example of a major bug.
I can replicate on a 2014 Retina MacBook and a 2012 MacBook Pro. Lots of people disable the transparency, not just for accessibility. I'm not a fan of burning up my whole battery doing Gaussian blurs.
You can suspect that but you'd be wrong. My early 2013 15" rM P experiences most of the issues the above poster describes. It also experiences graphics subsystem freezes even when the only app I have open is iTerm, requiring a power button reboot. Windows Server service can often be seen chewing 30% or more CPU, Wifi often needs to be turned off and on, while in range of my router (latest gen/firmware Express and Extreme). Every day I think I should go back to 10.9, but I'm worried for the day, if not already, that Apple refuses to back port security fixes (which may even have happened, recently). Especially a worry for me since I am involved in healthcare in my laptop.
Firstly I would try creating a new account and seeing if the issues persist.
Also one trick is running "sudo fs_usage". Often misbehaved processes that are hammering the CPU are also doing the disk as well e.g. outputting lots of Console logs.
Most of those issues sound OS related. The author is presumably technologically mature enough to check activity monitor - indeed, they probably have to live in it to kill their errant processes.
Activity monitor shows you Disk, Network, and CPU activity, and is a good first place to see if anything is going awry when your system is acting up.
I'm interested in how you might use fs_usage? It actually is a new utility to me, and when I turn it with fs_usage -e iTerm - I get a lot of activity, on a basically idle system. (At least one that Activity Monitor/ioStat shows as idle).
We have 60 Macs (Mac Pros, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs) purchased from 2011-2015. We see all the problems mrmondo mentioned except the iTunes one (we don't use iTunes).
The true deal breakers for us, though, is the terrible Wi-Fi performance. The Macs get spurious Wi-Fi failures; all Windows, Android, and iOS devices work fine on all our wireless networks.
As a result, about 45 of our Macs now run Windows 7 or 8. That means the users get a worse UI and not nearly so much functionality built in -- with the tradeoff being that the machines run predictably and reliably.
It seems everybody now has their "back in my day..." OS X version when things were stable; for me 10.7 was the last good version. All our problems started with 10.8, and things have been going downhill since then.
You're being a bit ridiculous here. OSX is not crashing every day for "most people". There are tens of millions of users. There would be a massive uproar on all the forums and in the media if the OS was that unstable.
I'll stick up for Windows NT based versions of Windows on stability grounds. But while 95, 98, and 98SE were "mostly stable" Windows ME was "mostly unstable" even on good hardware.
The 9x based versions of Windows had a lot of problems. And as more LOC were added to Windows 9x it seems like the core design of that range showed that it couldn't scale (since an error in one sub-system "infected" another, due to limited memory protections across boundaries). So often something would crash, but it was actually a sister process which caused it (opps!).
Essentially what I am saying is that the 9x range had a "upper complexity limit," so as it became more complex, it inherently became less stable (since more complexity=more bugs=less stability). ME was the upper limit of how complex that model could become.
NT based versions of Windows (NT 3.xx, 4.0, 2K, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 (and server + embedded editions)) have no such problem since the core design is simply superior (in a large part due to x86 hardware improvements NT takes advantage of).
Edit: Just to clarify: "Simply superior" in the final paragraph is contrasting Windows 9x to Windows NT (not OS X). OS X and NT both take advantage of x86's memory protections and both try to restrict kernel hotpatching (which was a massive PITA for 9x/MS Dos). They're both "modern" operating systems relative to what 9x was (and Dos, and other similar systems of that time period).
Just out of curiosity, have you considered doing a clean install? Yosemite was unusable on my MacBook Pro Retina--visual artifacts, misaligned GUI elements, and frequent crashes. I participated in the beta test program, so I suppose this left behind a lot of cruft on my system. A clean install eliminated all these issues.
You've probably never had the pleasure of using ME. Heck, even Windows 95 and 98 often meant daily crashes for the power users among us.
Beyond flame-baiting, I don't think any of the major modern desktop OSes (including their most maligned versions - I'm looking at you Vista RTM) can even come close to the stability nightmare that was Windows 9x (not that OS9 was better, having no memory protection at all, I'd wager it was worse, but I never got to use it often).
I'm definitely not an Apple fanboy, and I never subscribed to the illusion than OS X is somehow more stable than Windows NT, but I wish people would stop bring up these irrelevant comparisons.
If so, where are the bells and whistles? The UI has been stagnant or in regress since 10.5. They've, what, added blur shaders, scroll bars, and reskinned to a fisher-price icon set? It's not like they don't have the money to pay for a large enough, good enough dev team. They just gave $200B back to investors!
My bet would be that they never got around to bringing the core dev team back from the iPhone. I don't think it's a mistake that the last Mac OS X upgrade I was excited about happened in 2007. Still, that was 8 years ago! They should have noticed something was up with the replacements long before now!
10.6 came out in the infancy of iOS (summer '09). iOS sales weren't so astronomical as they are now. 10.6 was the last effective OSX update, with 10.9 being the start of the great downfall.
I'm really hoping that the next release is actually a "No New Features" release. The limitations in upgrading the hardware resources for stuff like iMac and the Macbooks are fine when you have a really efficient OS, but it's really horrible when you have a resource hog in terms of memory. I'm glad they addressed it in 10.10.3 but still, the only real option before that was getting a MacPro and there's no way I'm shelling out close to $4k for something that runs OSX smoothly again. In the end I had to ebay an old gen Mac Pro and upgrade that which really shouldn't be the case. There should be something in between an iMac and Mac Pro.
It's not the bells and whistles. They're making most of their money, and banking their future, on mobile. All of their A-team and B-team is in iOS and Apple Watch.
OS X is definitely getting Apple's C-team. Not only is the UI getting converted over to being an add-on for iOS users, but sooooo much core OS X functionality is broken because the team working on OS X has no clue how feature-rich the OS used to be.
Want a list of OS X bugs, limitations, and fallacies? I can EASILY put one together.
I have a partitioned drive on my MBP, and an install of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) that I still use periodically. Every time I switch back to Yosemite I get irritated by the way it makes my machine seems slightly but noticeably less responsive.
After a few hours I just get used to it. But when I switch back to Snow Leopard I always notice that everything feels quicker and more solid. I also find that once I'm in Snow Leopard, I tend to stay there until I actually need something on the Yosemite side.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of nice touches and features in Yosemite that I like. And I've never had problems with crashes, or really any serious issues. I just wish it didn't feel quite so bloated.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadHow do I fix this? I need my Macbook for work, but I also don't want my internet experience to suffer for it.
PSA: If you use VPN software, Smoothmouse, or Hamachi, consider not updating to 10.10.3.
Hamachi has always been a buggy thing. I would get kernel panics in 10.8.x with it. I stopped using it because of that.
What went wrong? Have they grown complacent? Cutting corners on QA?
Based on 10.10 and iOS 8, I think the answer's a pretty clear "yes".
Display mirroring / resolution switches goof up my jazz sometimes, unlocking can take up to ~ a minute (from just the lid shut state), browsers eat RAM like it's their job, etc etc.
If this is the best we can do in a $2800 (late 2014 15" rMBP maxed out) computer where the company produces the hardware and software, color me unimpressed.
I get the sentiment of what you're saying and I agree with it, but I have to disagree with you - You can't blame the stability of your 'hackintosh', running the OS on a completely unsupported configuration.
Of course, the caveat there is that I'm a Python dev. If I were a front-end dev (or, say, a mobile dev who needed the latest XCode to write iOS 8 apps) there's no way I'd be able to get away with this.
I guess the fact that the hardware set is very tightly controlled helps, some, but still.
I'm not at all claiming that Open Source software doesn't have bugs - it obviously does. But you have a much larger test group, and many more people reviewing the code (usually).
My last company worked extensively with browsers from various companies, at a deep level. Safari was, by far, the one that crashed the most and had the most general implementation problems. My experience with their other software is not much better, and I avoid what I can. And then there is the ghastly iWorks rewrite. The only software I've ever thought highly of from Apple is Mac OS X.
I would guess there are deep cultural problems at Apple that are being allowed to fester, and perhaps this extends to some OS X groups. Yet Apple continues to produce beautiful devices that people buy for their dopamine hits (okay, I admit, maybe iPhones are pretty nice). I wish Microsoft would seize the opportunity and make an OSX-like OS* that runs common productivity and creative apps so we could not be beholden to Apple, as I am for Mac.
* Apparently they did this once but the project was canned
Would you not class devices like Dell's XPS 13 (2015) [1], Microsoft's Surface 3 & Pro 3 [2][3], Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd gen) [4] as beautiful?
Windows can also run many of the productivity and creative apps that are commonly found on Macs. Which apps do you use?
[1] http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-13-9343-laptop/pd
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-3
[3] https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro...
[4] http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x1-ca...
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204015
https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-...
There's also claims that 10.10.3 doesn't fix the vulnerability either:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/04/19/apple-...
http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/21/os-x-rootpipe-vulnerability-se...
Waiting for 10.10.4 might be the best choice for now...
Really not impressed with Apple as of late.
Yes. I suspect that has always been the case.
Is the GPU not doing what it should be, and somehow the OS has fallen back to software rendering everything?
I have no information on what is going weird in 10.10.4 for OWaz but it's far more likely to be a Thunderbolt driver issue than anything else (i.e. simply related to pushing data over the cable).
Super irritating how often updates have broken wireless on Mac. You'd think someone at Apple could focus on that since it happens so frequently.
https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...
https://www.google.com.mx/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=JaBFVd6SBoKO8QfbqoHQ...
You're trying to shift attention away from Apple by attacking another vendor. Unless Microsoft Windows updates have some affect on Apple's updates, your links have no relevance to the problems with Apple's wifi bugs.
AirPortBrcm4360.kext
AirPortBrcm4331.kext
AppleAirPortBrcm43224.kext
AirPortAtheros40.kext
They each support multiple chipsets so the kext names that appear so specific are a little misleading, but it's still just those 2 companies apparently.
You truly can't speed up software dev by adding more people (beyond a certain point)---it's not just on late projects that it is true.
But you can do that on testing. If you want to run 1,000 tests 10 times each, to drive down the possible rate of errors to near zero, you just need to have 10,000 people run one test each.
So basically, you can make the entire process take only as long as the longest single test.
The mythical man month reminds us that 9 women can't make a baby in one month. Adding people to a project bound by a critical path can only make it later. And the more you care about design and UX in your initial release, the more you will see that sort of thing.
In this case, Apple could have a "test" that is: install the new OS under test on a machine, and see if performance degrades on other machines on the same network.
You could have 10 people test it with 10 different networks. It's expensive, but Apple could heat their HQ by burning cash if they wanted.
Admittedly, some things will still get through due to tests that you would only think to do in hindsight. But once you have the test, they won't get through again.
After my Macbook Pro finally got fixed with the repair program announced a couple of months ago, I find myself a little lost on OSX on the occasions when I do use my old Macbook Pro.
Is the solution to downgrade everyone to 10.10.2 or upgrade everyone to 10.10.3?
Strange times.
This isn't strange, this is inevitability. OSX and Windows simply cannot compete, Im rather shocked that they are still trying.
[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/contributors
Both Microsoft and Apple can compete.
While Linux is my go-to operating system for servers, it is still a distant third for me as a desktop OS.
I regularly try out Linux desktops of various distros, and I always end up preferring OSX and Windows over them. For me at least, clearly OSX and Windows can still compete.
In fairness to Linux, the desktop environment has advanced leaps and bounds over the past decade. Just not enough to win me over... yet.
The enormous ping post 10.10.3 update can also be from iCloud Photo Library from Photos app, which if you let it, attempts to upload every single picture from iPhoto and your Mac to iCloud, and download thumbnails from your iPhone / iPad to the Mac. This is frequently many GB, I have a 64GB iPhone for example, with 45GB of Photos. So, do you want that to upload from iPhone to iCloud and download thumbs to the Mac at the same time? No not really but thats what it tries to do, making the network very slow much like you describe. The send/recv network congestion from that alone will easily send your ping to 10 seconds.
It's hard to imagine such low quality software could be coming out of Apple lately. I hope they figure this out, maybe hire a larger Mac QA team if needed. And the OS X Public Beta program is kind of a joke, all bug reports go ignored. Not a single bug report I have filed has been addressed.
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications
There is an application there called Wireless Diagnostics.
Worst of all it's easy for redundant syncs to happen. "iCloud backup" on default config backs up the entire device, including your Camera Roll. "My Photo Stream" also uploads every picture as well as "iCloud Photo Library". This turns 5GB of pictures into 15GB. (Edit: wrong info see post below)
The most fun I've had a few days ago with "WhatsApp". They introduced their own backup capability via "iCloud Drive" which also doubles their backup requirements if not configured properly. Default iCloud backup already backs up all of WhatsApp. WhatsApp's iCloud Drive backup then saves everything again. In my case WhatsApp backup got stuck and was indefinitely uploading the same file. Turning backup off in WhatsApp-settings did nothing. I had to rip out iCloud Drive access for the app to make it stop.
This was on my sisters device. Given that WhatsApp is heavily used for image sharing as well this meant that WhatsApp was (trying to) backup 2*2GB of data. Not possible at 52KB/s upload speed.
Bonus points: WhatsApp also saves all images to the Camera Roll so the image gets backed up once more.
Fun times.
That's a combination of misleading and outright false. What's misleading is you're suggesting that iCloud Backup and Photo Stream are doing redundant work. While it's true that both involve uploading your photos, Photo Stream only keeps the last 30 days (or 1000 photos), whereas iCloud Backup is a complete backup of everything. It must include your complete photo library, even the photos that are currently in Photo Stream, because there's no guarantee that the photos will still be available in Photo Stream when you decide to restore.
And what's completely wrong is your assertion that iCloud Photo Library is including redundant information yet again. This is wrong because if you enable iCloud Photo Library, then your iCloud Backup stops including the camera roll. If you have both iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream enabled, I hope it only uploads the photo once, but I haven't done any measurements.
So no, this does not "turn 5GB of pictures into 15GB". It's not even 10GB (1000 photos is significantly less than 5GB).
1000 Photos might not be 5GB but still every picture gets uploaded, just older ones disregarded once new ones arrive. Now if someone comes home after a day out with a 100 new pictures this puts some stress on your network once while it is updating photo stream (if not done over mobile data) and backing up.
Where some stress is: Complete congestion of the network since 100% of upload is used and at ~50KB/s speed around these parts it'll take forever to even sync 100 Pictures at 1.5-3MB each.
Which is to say, uploading photos to iCloud Photo Library is something that should hardly even be noticeable, let alone something that would make your network unusable. I didn't do any measurements of the downloading process, but I saw absolutely no network disruption during the download process either when I switched over to iCloud Photo Library.
Let's be careful. Extremely irresponsible and horrible? Yes. Criminal? No.
We don't want to give the EU any more ideas about who to bully next. It could be me or you (in effect if not literally).
If you've signed a contract with Apple that there will not be breakage, then it's a matter for civil (not criminal) court.
It's as if Apple is no longer spending as much time on stability and performance and a lot more on flashy bells and whistles.
These posts seem to come up quite regularly and reliably generate a bunch of posts saying (a) "I have this problem; OS X has sucked since 10.X!", and (b) "I don't have a single one of the cited issues despite using the same hardware and software versions".
It seems more likely that the issues are either caused by specific software that doesn't come with OS X or possibly by bad batches of hardware. In this case it sounds like Photos may be responsible.
It would be better if people were able to identify the cause of the issue and file proper bug reports, rather than just berating OS X in general.
Sometimes the issue isn't even a bug - for example I've seen many people complain about sleep/hibernate issues that are actually the result of Apple complying with an EU directive (see autopoweroff on https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...)
That's pretty unfair to say without giving examples.
http://i.imgur.com/pRNO7Oc.png
It doesn't for iTunes, just for volume and screen brightness changes.
Given that disabling UI transparency is for accessibility purposes and is only for certain graphics cards I wouldn't use this as an example of a major bug.
Are you 10?
Seriously, when did you start using Operating Systems if this is the buggiest, most unreliable OS you've ever used.
My team has a mix of MacBook Pros ranging from 2011-2014 - everyone has daily - yes daily problems with Yosemite.
I have never had an OS crash and lock up as much as I've seen in Yosemite.
- Beach balls are a daily occurrence.
- Finder crashing when switching from wired to wireless.
- iTunes refusing to launch for seemingly no reason.
- Failure to map network drives until finder is force killed.
- Poor wireless performance.
- Corrupt boot process.
- Excessive CPU usage from window server service.
My suggestion would be to create a new user and migrate your data across.
I suspect most of the issues with OSX are to do with their migration of preferences between releases.
Also one trick is running "sudo fs_usage". Often misbehaved processes that are hammering the CPU are also doing the disk as well e.g. outputting lots of Console logs.
This information is not accessible from Activity Monitor.
I'm interested in how you might use fs_usage? It actually is a new utility to me, and when I turn it with fs_usage -e iTerm - I get a lot of activity, on a basically idle system. (At least one that Activity Monitor/ioStat shows as idle).
The true deal breakers for us, though, is the terrible Wi-Fi performance. The Macs get spurious Wi-Fi failures; all Windows, Android, and iOS devices work fine on all our wireless networks.
As a result, about 45 of our Macs now run Windows 7 or 8. That means the users get a worse UI and not nearly so much functionality built in -- with the tradeoff being that the machines run predictably and reliably.
It seems everybody now has their "back in my day..." OS X version when things were stable; for me 10.7 was the last good version. All our problems started with 10.8, and things have been going downhill since then.
Windows ME?
I'll stick up for Windows NT based versions of Windows on stability grounds. But while 95, 98, and 98SE were "mostly stable" Windows ME was "mostly unstable" even on good hardware.
The 9x based versions of Windows had a lot of problems. And as more LOC were added to Windows 9x it seems like the core design of that range showed that it couldn't scale (since an error in one sub-system "infected" another, due to limited memory protections across boundaries). So often something would crash, but it was actually a sister process which caused it (opps!).
Essentially what I am saying is that the 9x range had a "upper complexity limit," so as it became more complex, it inherently became less stable (since more complexity=more bugs=less stability). ME was the upper limit of how complex that model could become.
NT based versions of Windows (NT 3.xx, 4.0, 2K, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 (and server + embedded editions)) have no such problem since the core design is simply superior (in a large part due to x86 hardware improvements NT takes advantage of).
Edit: Just to clarify: "Simply superior" in the final paragraph is contrasting Windows 9x to Windows NT (not OS X). OS X and NT both take advantage of x86's memory protections and both try to restrict kernel hotpatching (which was a massive PITA for 9x/MS Dos). They're both "modern" operating systems relative to what 9x was (and Dos, and other similar systems of that time period).
Beyond flame-baiting, I don't think any of the major modern desktop OSes (including their most maligned versions - I'm looking at you Vista RTM) can even come close to the stability nightmare that was Windows 9x (not that OS9 was better, having no memory protection at all, I'd wager it was worse, but I never got to use it often).
I'm definitely not an Apple fanboy, and I never subscribed to the illusion than OS X is somehow more stable than Windows NT, but I wish people would stop bring up these irrelevant comparisons.
My bet would be that they never got around to bringing the core dev team back from the iPhone. I don't think it's a mistake that the last Mac OS X upgrade I was excited about happened in 2007. Still, that was 8 years ago! They should have noticed something was up with the replacements long before now!
OS X is definitely getting Apple's C-team. Not only is the UI getting converted over to being an add-on for iOS users, but sooooo much core OS X functionality is broken because the team working on OS X has no clue how feature-rich the OS used to be.
Want a list of OS X bugs, limitations, and fallacies? I can EASILY put one together.
After a few hours I just get used to it. But when I switch back to Snow Leopard I always notice that everything feels quicker and more solid. I also find that once I'm in Snow Leopard, I tend to stay there until I actually need something on the Yosemite side.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of nice touches and features in Yosemite that I like. And I've never had problems with crashes, or really any serious issues. I just wish it didn't feel quite so bloated.