None of these reiews answer the one question I always want answered; will this cause my MBP to crash more often than 10.8.5? I have all the features I need, I want fewer GPU panics.
I know these reviewers cannot answer this question, I just want to point out that it's the only relevant question for me. Given Apple's track record, this release will most likely cause my MBP to crash more often, but I want data on that. I want a review to actually explore this angle as opposed to simply talking about features that honestly mean nothing to me.
Yes, I've never had OS X crash as often as Mavericks. And some of the crashes are completely repeatable.
For example, open a lot of windows (20 terminal windows, 5-6 projects in Sublime, a bunch of browser windows used to test apps), turn on mission control and it just crashes every single time. I haven't done more test to figure the exact number of windows until it crashes but I know that it does for my workflow.
Admittedly, I tend to have more windows opened than most people, but then again that's what I have 16GB for.
I've also noticed that while expose was always smooth, mission control just doesn't work for me. If it doesn't crash it's dog slow, especially if it switches from integrated GPU to dedicated GPU just when I open it.
There are and have been real GPU HW bugs that this could be triggering. I just had my main logic board replaced twice due to these with a similar trigger.
Have you tested your RAM? I had a similar situation where I had upgraded my memory and everything worked fine until I went to play Quake3. Also running Linux was miserable while Windows seemed to work ok. I finally figured out it was a bad stick of RAM and it save a lot of frustration.
I helps me, because I always fat-finger Command-W close tab instead of Alt-W copy region to selection in Emacs, and it closes my tab. I can get it back when I run Emacs under screen!
iTerm2's Tmux integration (native tabs and panes backed by a tmux session) lets you have your cake and eat it too it's my standard dev flow for remote or local work. Just add -CC when firing up tmux within iTerm2.
Mine crashes a lot. Usually after I send it to sleep when I go home. Next time when I wake it up, it starts up from crashed state. It might have something to do with some app I installed but I didn't spend time to figure that out yet.
I went through a few of these. At least once the GPU burned up when it failed to go to sleep after disconnecting from my thunderbolt display and putting in my laptop bag for 18h.
I think I went through two MBPr 15" machines before I got one that didn't have the problem. I still think it's possible some software I had was triggering it initially, but once it happened a few times, even a clean install with nothing on it could trigger it. Was very frustrating.
Interesting you got yours to work (VMWare 6) - mine's never worked since I upgraded to 6. $50 upgrade down the drain, no workable support, no one can reproduce it or track down an issue from my logs. :(
I've had this problem with Mavericks on a 2010 MBP. I "fixed" it by switching the hibernation mode sleep (hibernatemode 0), suspend-to-disk and suspend-to-ram would kernel panic every time.
I had the exact same problem on an iMac. I've noticed, that it happened, when I've left my Wacom Cintiq "on" overnight, while designating it as a second monitor.
Lucky you. I've owned two, they both crashed, far more often than a top-tier OS should. It usually happened when playing video, and it was usually the GPU. That said, my Air has not crashed once since I purchased it last December.
I have been using the Yosemite beta and it has been pretty horrible. Constant visual glitches in Photoshop CS6, crashes with display glitches in Sublime Text and really long pauses anytime I try to save a simple document for the first time. e.g., save a new 100KB JPG in Photoshop? 1 min or more. Save a 100MB+ PSD that's already been saved? Instant.
Would've happily avoided the beta but the only way to screen record directly from an iOS device and the Apple-recommended way to create preview videos for the app store involved Yosemite and iOS8.
I've been using Yosemite since the early betas and it's been great for me. I don't use Photoshop, and I can certainly believe that Adobe might be doing nasty things, but all the apps I do use have been fine.
> really long pauses anytime I try to save a simple document for the first time
Is that actually what's happening, or is it a really long pause when trying to show the open/save dialog? I have a couple of NAS volumes mounted, and if I run an app with a Recent Documents entry that lives on one of the volumes, and the NAS is asleep, then the app will often pause when trying to populate the Recent Documents list. This normally happens during open/save. Previous versions of OS X did it too, though I feel like Yosemite might trigger it a bit more often for some reason.
I've seen this behaviour, too. Could it be worse in Yosemite if you have iCloud Drive enabled? Of course, Apple ought to listen to their own advice of "never do I/O on the main thread" but then they don't bother with sandboxing their own App Store apps, either.
I haven't tried iCloud Drive, though that should not be related as, assuming it works anything like iDisk did, it would keep the drive local and sync changes back and forth, rather than doing direct network loading/saving.
As for I/O, last time I checked, the Recent Documents list is actually being loaded on a background thread, but the main thread is where the UI for it has to be populated. Normally the list would be loaded before the main thread goes to access it, but when the load is blocked by e.g. my NAS waking up, the main thread ends up waiting on a semaphore.
It is rather unfortunate, since nothing I'm doing actually needs to see the recent documents list. And if you're going to say that the main thread should be able to simply indicate that it's still loading, and refresh the list when the load finishes, then I completely agree. But I would not be surprised to find that the relevant code here is many years old, possibly written in C, with no maintainers, and not having been touched in those many years, so there's probably little chance of it being fixed :/
No, really long time to save after actually hitting the Save button. Something to do with creating a new file maybe?
On Friday when I went to reboot, after coming back up it spun overnight without finishing the boot. That started a process which took three days to get Internet Recovery working, restore from Time Machine and then upgrade to Yosemite and finally ditch that awful beta. Absolute waste of time and when I could least afford it.
The long saving times and visual glitches have disappeared with the full Yosemite by the way. Phew!
Photoshop CS6? Well that's not surprising. Adobe abandoned that and it isn't even supported on 10.9. Why are you surprised that there are problems on 10.10? You can hardly blame Yosemite for that.
n=1 of course, but I've been using the beta on a 2013 Macbook Pro for a couple months now with no problems besides Safari crashing more often than usual. No issues with Photoshop and performance generally seems better than Mavericks.
Same here, on a 2012 Air. Performance is great but I've noticed a couple Safari crashes/freezes. Finder crashed once I think. Also had trouble with Dark Mode+Reduce Transparency, but those are just beta issues and since GM1 the only issue has been the weird black corners of the volume popup.
At least iOS 8 has fixed a few critical security issues (which is doubly important if you use 2FA anywhere, or iCloud Keychain Sync). 10.9 will still receive a few years worth of security fixes.
I use gfxCardStatus ( https://gfx.io/ ) to avoid the GPU panics. I have to set my MBP to use the integrated Intel graphics and avoid using my nVidia discrete GPU. Yes, it would be nice if my OS didn't cause GPU panics (even if it's actually a bug with the GPU).
I was experiencing the GPU panics as well and it turned out to be a hardware issue. Did it only happen when you were using the NVidia GPU and not when using the on-board?
Is it risky to upgrade to Yosemite? When starting up cold, I sometimes have to force-shutdown the computer 30+ times before it will get past the Apple logo screen without going grey or black. I'm not sure if such a major software update is a good idea given the circumstances.
This is so common on the early 2011 MBP (I have one too, and experienced it - Apple replaced my logic board with their $300 flat-fee repair depot option) people have made a website for it:
I had this problem, went to the genius bar and was quickly offered to replace the defective component for free in under a week, if I remember correctly.
It's still much too long to go without a computer, but it's worth it when you realise you've been coding for three hours and haven't lost a single line of code to a crash.
That being said, before I got the part replaced, upgrading to... was it snow leopard? the latest version of OS X, anyway, increased the frequency of the issue by rather a lot. So, possibly, hold off on your update?
A little bit of both: my warrantee had long expired, but there was an extension for this very specific issue, since I believe it affects 100% of macbook pros from that series.
I've looked into this a bit more and it looks like my comment is entirely unhelpful: mine is a mid-2010 MBP, so while our issues look similar, they probably are not. Sorry about that, I should have checked before.
If it's indeed the same issue, I think you're out of luck, at least for the free part. Here's the Apple ticket about it: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4088
This explicitly states that your warrantee for this very specific issue is extended to 3 years after date of purchase. I doubt you purchased a 2010 MBP in 2012...
Still, if this looks like what you're experiencing, get a genius bar appointment. It's free, and they have an automated diagnostic system that detects this specific issue (and others). If it's the same one, you might be able to talk yourself into a free replacement.
I had a GPU hardware problem too. When in I upgraded a few years ago to a beta at wwdc, it became quite unstable. Finally got Apple to replace the motherboard. Not sure why an upgrade would cause the problem, though.
Had this happen shortly after AppleCare lapsed, went with the $300 depot repair to swap out the motherboard. Sucks, but it fixed it (the GPU was dying in my case, I believe).
I have a mid-2012 rMBP. I had terrible crashing problems - twice a day. Worse than any PC I ever had.
I had to take it in. And pay $550. Even though it's clearly a common problem, if not a design problem, something similar. Go check out the big apple support log on the problem.
I lost two weeks of productivity, because they failed to fix it the first time (it got worse).
If you have GPU panics, and you don't get your hardware fixed, you get what you deserve. Sorry for that. It's hard to get to a repair center or genius place? Sorry for that too.
Nothing to do with 10.10.
I've installed 10.10. It's running nicely.
What should you expect? Look through Ars' list. The changes are updates to the on-board apps - none of which I use (message center? no. Mail? no. etc). There are additional internal APIs for IOS tooling - good for the long term, nothing for now.
Mavericks was an important release. It treats multiple screens in a sensible way - finally addressing a weakness inherent in macs since '85. There has always been the Special Screen with real estate taken by the menu bar, no matter how many screens you have, you drag the cursor back to that screen over and over.
10.10 is not Mavericks.
In 10.10, you'll see some newer, cleaner fonts and icons, that's it.
Pay $550? Why? Apple will do any repair for like $399 (or at least they used to) so long as you didn't mind it being sent out. I guess maybe that answers my question if you needed it back immediately. :)
For future reference, if they botched it the first time, you should call Apple corporate and yell. They messed something up in a repair for my work laptop once and it took one phone call to get a new one immediately. I had to make it clear that it was their fault and I had to have it for work and school, but they were super accommodating (and the new one worked like a charm).
I was crashing multiple times a day with GPU stacks in the crash log while viewing or editing video. It turned out to be memory with incompatible speed -- swapped out, no crashes since.
Every time I am intrigued by Apple's UI design I get taken back to reality by threads like these. Thank you.
FYI, there are OS distributions that do not crash. My sound card sometimes doesn't survive a hibernation but that's a known hardware fault. Not that a OS level crash would lead to any data loss.
> FYI, there are OS distributions that do not crash.
Yes, I have heard that LepriconSoft's UnicornOS runs quite well on the Hypothetica-9000 processor but everything else has the same real-world problems with faulty hardware and drivers.
You might have a stable setup but that's also true of well over 99% of Mac users – they just also don't tend to go on forums and say “Yeap, everything's still fine here!”.
I'd say LepriconSoft's UnicornOS is actually Windows 8.1, as strange/infuriating as that's going to sound to many HN readers.
I used Xubuntu or Fedora (dev), Windows 7 (Office), and OS X (XCode) for hours every day for years. I had two self-built machines running Linux, a laptop and a self-built machine running Win 7, and OS X running on a Mac Mini and later a MBA.
Since then, I've also had another desktop and a laptop running Win 7 and Win 8 (though enough coworkers use GDocs now that I've stopped using Windows at all).
Both Linux distros and all OS X versions (from Snow Leopard to Mavericks) have crashed countless times on me. How much they crashed has varied a lot between setups.
Windows hasn't crashed for me (or any of my friends or relatives for whom I'm their IT guy) since Vista came out. It's also never crashed on my old Mac Mini, which is my HTPC setup now.
Whatever you think about the finished products or companies behind them, it's really just a matter of testing and incentives. Windows 8 was tested for 1.2 billion hours before it was released, for example. Microsoft can do things slowly, but when they release something, it has to be rock-solid for their enterprise customers.
OS X, for Apple, isn't a moneymaker and its stability/security obviously isn't much of a priority. They didn't even give it a significant design refresh in years. That's how little they care about it.
The latest version of Ubuntu's desktop edition will ship with at least one head-slapping, show-stopping bug, even though it has a company backing it.
Windows 7+ does seem to be quite stable – Microsoft has obviously put in time improving the OS to be more resilient and, more importantly, pressuring vendors to write better drivers.
That said, in my experience that means it's caught up with OS X. I've had maybe one kernel panic in years and that was caused by a VMware driver bug. This has been true for most people I know.
The only people I know who have problems are either the ones who install a ton of low-level extensions (Windows or Mac) or a couple of Linux laptop users faced with the option of either having really slow GL performance or using indifferently maintained binary blob drivers.
Serious Question: I know that since Vista, Windows can handle graphics driver and sound card driver crashes by restarting the driver.[1] That often leads to the program to crash too, if its using 3d graphics for example, but it does not require a restart of the whole system.
Does Mac OS have something similar too?
I don't believe so but since neither has crashed for me in years I haven't looked into it. You definitely can restart Bluetooth, which I've needed to do a handful of times when playing audio.
FWIW, I have rarely if ever seen OS X crash. I'm unsure what that would even look like. Are we talking about kernel panics? A single built-in app crashing while you using it? Every app suddenly closing?
Usually, when I've seen a kernel panic in the past 5-10 years it's due to poor third-party hardware or drivers. I know someone who has an external sound mixer and plugging/unplugging the USB gives a 50/50 chance of a kernel panic.
Around two months ago, I switched from running 10.8.5 on my main machine to running the 10.10 betas full time and I've not had a single panic. (Late 2012 iMac 27").
However, If I were you I'd still wait for 10.10.1 though, just to be on the safe side.
I installed it on my iMac 27" from 2009. It does not boot now and goes into a panic. I haven't had much time to mess with it but there are no other partitions and it just does not load.
Its also weird because I have no media now. I have the discs it came with somewhere but that will also be Lion 10.7? Or possibly Snow Leopard. The re-install is going to be a bitch for me. UGH!
If you have a friend with a Mac they ought to be able to make you a bootable USB stick which you can use to install the OS - there are instructions online for Mavericks & I's guess that you can do the same thing with Yosemite.
I started experiencing GPU panics on rMBP in the past week as well, I guess NVidia or related circuits have some issues. I switched it off using gfxcardstatus and now it's stable running on Intel HD only. Try to do the same - if it stops crashing, your discrete GPU might be damaged.
I had the same issue with my mid-2010 MBP. They actually had a recall, but I was late to it! I'm somewhat disappointed that this issue still persists in some later models. gfxcardstatus helped a little in my situation, but the problem got so bad that I literally could not used the computer. $3K down the drain :(
I noticed Chrome crashing whenever I was in the Chrome store too many time. The 'graphics error happened' message after the crash was another clue. So I turned off native graphics acceleration in Chrome's setting and it's not crashed since then.
MBP retina 1st generation. Latest GM is better than 10.9 (don't really remember 10.8 crashes though) regarding crashes. Initial betas were bad (2-3 reboots a day) now latest GM seed seems quite stable. Haven't rebooted in days (except to update the OS)
It's humiliating to admit, but my rMBP crashes so much more often than cheapest Dell desktop with Windows 7 at work. Actually I doubt that it ever crashed.
Some of the issues were resolved by removing Soundflower as it was conflicting with VLC. But they still do happen.
That's highly unusual. You should ask yourself what peripherals/kernel extensions/weird software you have installed that maybe contributing to this. And I would definitely bring it in to Apple for service if the answer is "none."
My previous MBP went ~2 years of very heavy use without a single crash, and my 2012 MBA has only crashed once, right after I installed google hangout stuff.
These days I use VMWare, but I've got co-workers with Parallels installed and all day everyday they have random kernel panics and crashes. Uninstall Parallels and most likely all of that stuff will go away...
I had an issue similar to this that was related to a hardware problem with the GPU. I took it into the apple store and they ended up replacing the logic board.
It's ridiculous how many people report crashes in this thread; my friends have issues with every update of OSX, because every time MATLAB stops working. At this point I wonder how any developer can consider OSX a serious platform for anything else than XCode.
I know these reviewers cannot answer this question, I just want to point out that it's the only relevant question for me. Given Apple's track record, this release will most likely cause my MBP to crash more often, but I want data on that. I want a review to actually explore this angle as opposed to simply talking about features that honestly mean nothing to me.