I'm considering in staying with Yosemite and iOS 8, and haven't seen any singificant breakage over previous versions.
If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.
Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences tend to write.
Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them. Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame third party software issues to the OS maker.
(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike how they abandoned Aperture).
On the other hand, I'm still (on 10.10.2) experiencing severe window server bug where desktop just slows down to a crawl (all animations, window switching, missing control etc. run with less than 1fps) after some time of using the machine. Rebooting the system helps for awhile... and then it slows down again.
The issue seems to be limited to only nVidia equipped rMBPs, but honestly, I did not expect a brand new laptop (I have mid-2014) for 3kEUR to stutter just running desktop animations you know?
I have this too with Yosemite - mid-2012 rMBP, 16GB RAM. It feels snappy when freshly rebooted, but after a period of time (hours? Probably not minutes...) all desktop animations start to become really quite obviously sluggish. Swiping between spaces is painful.
You do not expect this on an expensive machine that is barely two years old.
I also have wifi dropout issues, Mail is increasingly slow and unpredictable, and iTunes... Christ, don't get me started on iTunes.
My wife's 4 year old MBP, with 4GB RAM, was usable with Mavericks but is now basically unusable with Yosemite. I'm hoping more RAM and an SSD might sort it out, but I'm not overly hopeful.
I've been a more or less full-time Mac user since about 2003 and I don't remember being this frustrated with their software before.
> or blame third party software issues to the OS maker
I think we are seeing exactly the opposite effect: People who use third-party software are complaining less.
Safari is buggy (swipe-to-go-back gesture sometimes freezes until I reboot), iWork has been ruined, Apple's photo ecosystem is a terrible mess, iCloud reliability (for documents) is a joke.
If I was using Chrome/Firefox, MS Office, Lightroom and Dropbox instead, I would have very few complaints about Apple's software quality.
Yeah, I have to add my voice to this viewpoint too.
I definitely have annoyances with Yosemite – GUI performance on a rMBP is lower, which is particularly noticeable during Mission Control use. I've also got the irritating slowdown/flickering menu bar bug that I've seen people report. But generally everything else has been pretty great.
I do wish Apple was more public about bug tracking – I'd love to see a public database of known bugs so we can track progress or something like that.
If anybody's interested in seeing some public information about known bugs, there's public user-driven "mirror" called Open Radar ( http://openradar.appspot.com ) that's really helpful. If you file a bug with Apple you can copy/paste the description (as well as any responses from Apple) there to help others
Unfortunately many bugs are not copied over there. I myself am guilty of not going through the hassle of mirroring every bug report I submit.
In the end, I believe it is more worthwhile to just file bugs [1] en-masse to have a "this issue is public" checkbox in their bug reporting interface. If enough people request this feature hopefully they will add it.
Agreed, upgraded since the beta and had few issues, and only then on beta releases that have since been fixed. Not sure how constructive this comment is, but thought it was worth seconding your experience.
I bought my Mom an iPad over an android tablet telling her that everything will just work. After the iOS 8 update, I am shying away from answering her questions about bugs, and questioning my decision about the iPad. People who are non-tech proficient form the biggest consumer-base for Apple, and it is terrible that Apple is forgetting how it gained this loyal consumer-base in the first place - through reliable software which 'just works'. It only makes more business sense to go back to their original software quality even if it requires dumping regular releases, because they will start losing (probably already have) customers real soon if they don't.
Kinda the same thing here. My parents wanted to buy a tablet and my father does not want an Apple product for various reasons.
I bought them a Nexus 10 (it was a year ago), anyway since I am an Android dev it is easier to provide support for this product.
Personally, I have found this tablet pretty meh, but they don't have the same usage than me at all and they just love this tablet for pretty much the same kind of usage you describe : surf the web, mails, hangouts, view pictures, ...
I just set up ssh, on a non-default port, long passphrase.
One of the worst things is if machine won't boot (happened once due to hard drive failing). Otherwise it uses a few dynamic dns sites so I can know its IP ( + a few links to the show me the IP links in her browser toolbar, just in case).
If there is a problem and need to help her with the desktop, there is x11vnc.
> I just set up ssh, on a non-default port, long passphrase.
Disallow password login, use key-based auth (using a dedicated, passphrase-protected key that you can copy around).
An alternative is to have a "shortcut" that help them fire a SSH client connecting to a server of yours, with port forwarding allowing you to connect back, so you don't have to worry about firewalls and other appliances being reset.
Nice setup. I've used vnc before, not x11vnc so I'm not sure if it's similar. But vnc seemed to require a lot of bandwidth to run. But it's definitely nice.
x11vnc allows you to see the desktop the user is seeing. I think vnc by default creates its own sessions.
So for example, my mom would say "I am not sure where to find the pictures". I would move the folder to her Desktop from ssh, hoping the would see it. But if not I ssh in, then launch x11vnc then connect to it with a vncclient and then move around her desktop to see what the problem might be.
She would see the mouse move and buttons getting clicked.
Bandwidth is not a problem because, we have have something like 50Mpbs connections, latency is usually the issue as the signal has to go half way around the world.
I've considered changing from iPhone to Android mainly due to iOS 8 update. It was such a disheartening experience. Sometimes I wish I even still had iOS6 installed.
Don't get me started with iPads and iOS 8 - there is no way to set a screen time limit for children by their parents. I would like to keep Wikipedia, Alarms and a few other apps fully open, but to limit Youtube and gaming time. No way to do it with Apple's software or with third party software (iOS does not allow parental apps).
The iPad, as it is, is very tempting for kids (and not only kids). To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone. Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead. I have many other things to do than police children's gaming. We are in the age of computing now, if they haven't realized. I want nice stats with total time per app per day, like some parental control apps offer on Android.
In practice I was forced to confiscate their iPads and give them Android phones with big screens and good parental controls instead. Never gonna buy an iPad/iPhone for my kids again.
I am sure Apple does it for self serving reasons like "Don't limit their gaming time in any way, and sales with soar!"
> To leave such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone.
This is painful to read. There's very little chance of having a respectful conversation about this topic, so I should just move on silently. Shortly, I will. But not before suggesting that, respectfully, perhaps there's another way to approach the problem?
You currently have one downvote, and it isn't from me, but I feel so strongly repelled by your comment that I can understand the impulse to click the arrow and try to forget what you've written.
> Apple wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead.
I don't think Apple takes a strong position on parenting at all -- but if they did, and it was the position you describe, I would be emphatically in agreement with them. I wouldn't use the word "police" though.
This is a great comment - while many people are complaining about Apple adding too many features and introducing bugs, you are asking for more features.
This is exactly the dilemma Apple faces and is the reason that simplistic answers like 'stop releasing every year' are unhelpful.
The real interesting question is - is there a way for Apple to both maintain the pace of development and improve quality simultaneously.
That seems to be a challenge worthy of the most valuable company in the world.
What makes you think it would? Refactoring is generally a precursor to new features being added. If you don't know what is to be added then refactoring is usually counterproductive.
I agree that certain teams might need to slow down and reduce the scope of what they do in a cycle - but I think it would be better for them to calibrate to a sustainable scope rather than skipping a cycle altogether.
I am not astonished iOS lacks parental controls but admit they would be useful.
Establishing rules for my toddler is relatively easy when in the context of a physical object (e.g. don't touch the TV, you can only read books or do puzzles during quiet time).
The same toddler has a MUCH harder time recognizing the distinction when dealing with different apps on a single physical device. If I leave two devices in a room and tell him not to touch one, I'll get compliance. If I give him access to a device but tell he that he can't watch movies, compliance drops and he exhibits much less awareness that he broke a rule.
I don't fault apple at all for the lack of parental controls, but do see a use if they were included.
As a recent switcher to Android, I acknowledge iOS has flaws but I am so grateful my parents aren't on it. (everything having multiple menus with multiple nesting levels, no conventional behavior between apps, crazy carrier customizations, multiple levels of caches to clear)
No question that Apple's quality has gone done. However, who's has gone up? Or better yet: Who is actually building quality software systems?
Comparing only in the same problem domains as Apple:
All of my Android devices have been rife with equivalently bad issues. Windows? Different quality issues, but just as bad. Google web systems? Same case. Better in some aspects, worse in others.
Perhaps I'm old and jaded. Still, seems like we've reached a point in software development where building quality systems is not possible with existing methodologies. Where some problems, while we are able to develop 90% solutions, the last 10% might as well be impossible.
The even more jaded part of me wonders: Does it even matter?
Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to. Android has also gotten miles better, I haven't had any weird system-related bugs in so long (the worst I've gotten is some slowness).
The main issue is that Microsoft and Android developers (I guess mainly Google) are getting their shit together (resulting in some decent software), whereas Apple software quality is in a freefall, failing in some extremely basic use cases, and has been for a while.
Desktop OSs are one thing, but in 2 years do you think iOS will be more usable than Android on comparable hardware? I already don't think so. The momentum is definitely against Apple
>> Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate Windows with constant crashing like I used to.
This.
Apple's long term strategy on hardware had me getting ready to leave their ecosystem over a year ago (they discontinued the unibody Macbooks that I love so much, which were a perfect balance of size, power and end-user expandability). It didn't help that I have one of the early 2011 MBP's with the overheating and GPU issues. Mine just died over the Christmas holidays.
The only way my 2011 MBP would run without glitching and crashing was... surprise, surprise, running Windows 8.1 in Boot Camp. And in general, it felt and ran faster than OSX did.
That experiment led me to install Windows 8.1 on my 2008 Macbook -- which can't run anything newer than Lion. It was a pig, nearly unusable until I installed Windows on it, and now it's snappy enough to use daily.
While there's something to be said about Apple not looking to the past when providing OS upgrades, I think there's also something to be said about Microsoft's strategy of providing backwards compatibility to older hardware.
Updating your Android version is likely to break telephony and Android will probably never be secure for non technical users. Apple is pushing the limit with things like answering my phone on my laptop. Would someone even dare try this on Android? Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion, but they are certainly moving forward fast.
Via Google Voice/Hangouts the answering/calling of a phone through a Mac or other PC has been around before Apple's introduction of it. Also, things like SMS MightyText for Android were also things I've enjoyed on my Android/Mac combo well before Apple made it available within the OS:
Granted, I did use an iChat/AIM combo setup to text phones (and receive texts) via my Mac in the past, but it was a cumbersome utilization and didn't work with all carriers.
>Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion, but they are certainly moving forward fast.
Bugs that hinder workflow moves me backwards. And, these Mac OS and iOS bugs aren't just a matter of opinion. I don't think it's time to slam all that is Apple, but the company is overdue for some customer backlash and constructive criticism, in my opinion.
Then again, maybe this is all just bad karma from Apple completely ignoring the faulty early 2011 MacBook Pro GPU/logic board failures and not issuing a recall and replacement program as they should.
I haven't had any recent problems with iOS or OSX but I don't always agree with Apple's very opinionated design decision. I can understand why they do it but it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. The other shoe that hasn't dropped yet is security which is abysmal on Android but most users haven't noticed yet. Windows Phone could make huge inroads that way.
Precisely. One wonders exactly what Lovecraftian horrors Microsoft will have in Windows 10 that will allow them to compete with the new levels Google and Apple have reached.
The dreamy days of OS X Tiger on a G4 PowerBook now seem like they must have been figments of the imagination.
Others have said Windows. I'd say Windows Phone, too. It might be missing some things I'd like (Google stuff like Hangouts and Plus, which will likely never come) but otherwise it's a great OS, stable, fast, well designed and consistent.
If you only view the associated cost of these failures through the lens of quarterly profits, then they probably don't matter (at least in the short term).
But there has to be a point where as professionals we look at the opportunity cost of these failures and hold ourselves responsible for the damage they cause.
If you add up all the time and opportunity lost due to bugs, duplicated effort, and substandard solutions (which is nearly every piece of software today including my own) it just about makes one sick.
Apple is no more responsible for this than anyone else in the industry except for the fact that they are a platform creator. I feel that companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be held extra accountable not so much for the failure in where they have led us in the past, but our acceptance of their visions in the future.
I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every year. Users expect a lot of changes from iOS n+1 or OS X m+1. You can't just fix all bugs and release a new version. And constant feature improvement introduces new bugs and deadline frames won't allow to release properly tested fixes for old bugs.
I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9 with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but people will have a choice between new features and stability.
> I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice.
My feeling is that this embodies the problem pretty well. Apple releases, typically, weren't seen (by tech people) as "quite nice", feature-wise. The "ahhh" moments in keynotes were more or less experience-related. iOS 8 and Mavericks keynotes, however, were full of "ahh" moments related to technical advances.
It seems (to me) that they jumped on the "creeping featurism" bandwagon.
Internal product churn and massive refactoring is bad. Make the UI themeable and keep the core mostly the same. However there is drive to converge the iOS and OSX APIs to where there may only be one platform.
I'd say a fixed cadence, especially when combined with a relatively inflexible scope (pre-announced features, features tied to new hardware, etc.), is, at a minimum, a significant contributor to the problem. If there's an unexpected problem late in the development cycle, what's going to give?
Contrary to this, as they experience more instances of the fixed cadence, they will have more opportunity to measure their capacity and adjust the scope accordingly.
What needs to 'give' is over-promising. And the best way to achieve that is to maintain a fixed cadence so that they can gather a more and more accurate understanding of what can be delivered with high quality in that timeframe.
The flickering menubar icons drive me insane. It's proof that Apple has is either unwilling or unable to commit enough resources to OSX to ensure that its quality is consistent with what users have come to expect.
Quality is important but it's also important to move the platform forward. This flickering menubar issue sounds like an issue maybe related to the changes with multi-monitor support and/or the changes made to improve UI performance on HiDPI displays. Just speculation so who knows but if so they might be a necessary evil. As far as the level of quality we expect this is where I start to wonder if I'm living in a parallel universe or something. My experience over the years is misbehaving menubar apps could make the entire menubar stop working sometimes even requiring a restart and icon cache issues in the dock/menubar were not uncommon. I haven't had any of those problems on 10.10 yet so maybe I'm more inclined to believe these changes (and bugs they may cause) are for the best interest of the platform over the long term. Who knows though -- if I was experiencing the blinking menubar problem I might miss the days of only dealing with an occasional menubar crash.
SJ used to be relentless about nitpicking to keep quality up. Probably not happening consistently across all apps and platforms as much. Tim may need to appoint a Quality Czar whom is detail-oriented, accepts no bull and has "wrath of God" authority to make folks take them seriously.
Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:
- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.
- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.
- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.
- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until reboot, and then future downloads fail.
- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications (probable not using a background queue).
Update: I forgot the worst. FileVault 2 + HFS+ corrupting metadata and becoming un-fsck-able (Repair). TimeMachine restore and 5 hours loss per incident.
Also Xcode 6.1 took a week to fix a docset feed bug that they duplicated a docset dmg url. I found the exact correct dmg url, and it still took 3 days to fix. Everyone had broken Xcode Tools docsets until they fixed it. (!)
iBooks can use 100% CPU trying to connect to the (nonexistent) internet when reading an ePub.
All-in-all, these aren't show stoppers, just a collection of things to whine about. It would cause more happiness if they were fixed, but they're mostly navigable.
Definitely not, it's 2 years old and memtest86+, prime95, iozone and iperf for 24 hours each. These are all independent soft errors. Furthermore, I'm continually running stuff that is doing gpg signing/verification and sha256 checksums in VMs... They would fail. Also, there would be kernel panics... I've had zero.
- App Store likely has a problem with storeaccountd / installer framework from the exception traces I've seen (debug menu on).
- HFS+ can corrupt itself irreparably (it's not ZFS). BTDTBTTS.
The funniest one is an auto correct bug. If you make a text area that is limited to n characters, and auto correct changes the word you are typing to be n + 1 characters Safari completely crashes. I learned this one several times filling out a very long web form and just gave up and moved to Chrome.
I bet there's multiple issues in the text input / autocorrect buffer bounds checking. It's possibly an exploitable security issue too, or at least a nice area for research.
To add one to your list, HealthKit hasn't worked on my iPhone 6 for months -- loads no step counts, pulls no data from third-party apps (despite settings), and renders some apps completely unusable (e.g. Jawbone UP when trying to use the M8 coprocessor as the pedometer).
HealthKit seems a bit half-baked. I can see it being really useful in the future once everything is "Healthkit enabled™," and data magically flows in, but it certainly has many bugs.
As an example, for a while I was manually entering my weight every couple days. After two weeks or so of doing this, the data simply vanished without a trace. This happened again after one of the early updates. After that, I simply gave up. Yes, a bug report was sent, but who knows what really happens once it goes through the 'Gates of Radar.'
The SOP is basically never give any feedback to users. You won't know until it's either fixed or it's not months later.
If OSX/iOS were more open source (beyond the kernel and some libs), I think it would be easier to get external developers contributing valuable fixes and offload some support to the community.
It doesn't make much sense to keep the OS totally closed, because the business model is in selling good HW. Sure, control the platform end-to-end ensures quality, but delegating some can be mutually-beneficial.
It's like a small business owner "control-freaking" so they don't put out napkins for fear people will take too many, making it a pain for everyone to accomplish a common task. There is a reasonable amount of control / final say-so that's necessary, but there is "penny-wise, pound-foolish" also.
Funny how open source hasn't resulted in a desktop Linux or Android or ChromeOS or BSD that you want to use, yet. Not for want of effort or money or forks.
But maybe if Apple open source Mac OS X, which you do want to use despite the annoyances, then open source will magically help it become perfect?
On the privacy front:
iOS Spotlight still falls back to searching the web without permission, leaking privacy info. And all the Privacy and Spotlight settings are set correctly.
Jean-Louis was always pretty honest about stuff. The problem is Apple has too many things going on and only the big stuff gets attention. Take XCode for example, please take it way before I shoot something.
Xcode is the number one reason why I don't do more iOS development. It just takes so much longer to do anything compared to languages that I can edit in a fast, simple text editor and run/test from terminal.
What's so bad about it? I use it for native OSX development with C++ and I have found it very useful, particularly with integration into Instruments for monitoring memory usage, network usage, thread behaviours, as well as the static code analysis for finding dead stores, memory leaks, pointless bits of code etc. (very useful!)
The navigation bar makes navigating the projects easy enough, plus I have added steps in the script sections for builds to package up 3D models/resources into the app, set dylib target references, bundle resources into the executable etc.
Finding where functions are called (callers and callees) from the quick menu is a lifesaver too. I find that I miss the back/forward buttons when I use anything else for editing.
As the project is quite large I could not possibly imagine doing this in a text editor.
I can't imagine not using Xcode for a large Obj-C project either. The UI and tooling is not the issue. In that regard, I love Xcode, it's very helpful. The issue is that it's dog slow on my computer and it eats up all the memory it can get its hands on. That's why I prefer to do non-iOS development, where I don't need to use an IDE.
Comparing it to to dynamic languages is a bit unfair - there's good reasons why iOS apps need to be compiled for the device. The big issue with Xcode for me is not its development speed (I think it has a workflow speed that's not much off from Visual Studio and its profiler is bar none), the problem is that it has become so damn unstable and that certain features are obscurely hidden.
Same here. Three computers on Yosemite (including iMac from 2008), two iPhones, two iPads. I would not say zero problems, but those are mingo glitches at worst. Text messaging from any device alone was worth the upgrade.
Most of the articles I've read on Apple software quality seem like larger industry wide issues to me. For example with the iTunes issue mentioned in this article this is a problem that every metadata / library based media player has to deal. If you let more than one app touch your audio files then you're pretty much guaranteed to have problems. Different apps/services may not write or sort on the same tags. No one's fault exactly just the way things are. The example of dictionary / thesaurus lookup moving to a system wide text service is an instance of a feature clearly being improved but if the users aren't aware it changed is that really an improvement? The entire industry sucks at user education. There's no good reason every major software developer shouldn't have hours and hours of free training/how-to videos available for users to cope with change. For the issue of GMail SMTP rejecting iWork file format attachments it's the industry wide problem of users being stuck between the best interests of various companies. Apple wants to change/improve the iWork format but Google wants to protect users from files it can't scan. Again no one is really at fault it's just the way things are.
I disagree. Companies are at fault here. It's apple's job to test common use cases, such as sending emails through common 3rd party services. And it is googles job to send the files its users wish to send.
I would agree. Has anyone tried to upload a file such as a CV to a website using Safari? It's impossible - the file selection "browse" button area is entirely MISSING. As local file access is not possible on the iPad, they just pretend it doesn't exist and you have to resort to installing bloated massive stupid apps to work around a daft problem within Safari.
I think they have issues all over the chart. We've had severe problems with changes in Safari's handling of javascript. Other have had problems with network connections etc. There seems to be a number of problem in many places.
I just rated Yosemite 1 star on App store and wiped everything and installed Mavericks. It is so much better now. The last OS was just a shameless cloud infestation ridded with bugs.
I use Remote Screen for work, and EVERY time I disconnect my MacBook Pro freezes completely for 1-3 minutes (no mouse, just a froze desktop). Sometimes I need to hard reset it. Screen sharing used to work nicely in 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 and so on. Why was it necessary to mess with something good?
I think apple are facing the same problems a lot of other companies face - it's no longer green field development and the existing codebase means they're being weighed down by regression. Maybe not enough automated tests.
However some bugs are basic error really. Take the frequently visited icons on mobile safari. They keep getting the wrong favicon - that's just shoddy programming and testing.
I think it is not so much the legacy code that is the problem.
I think it is the fact that more and more features are being introduced and many seem to have effects on each other in a way apple has not foreseen.
Like the Wifi issue seems to have something to do with the ad-hoc networks being used for handoff or for making telephone calls from your Mac etc.
Ever since iCloud and its background services was introduced it seems the bugs happen more and more frequently. I think we need a maintenance release of Mac OS this year instead of yet another set of new features that will clash with the existing ones.
If more developers knew what backward compatibility is, I'd be happily using Snow Leopard right now. The most frustrating part is there's nothing fundamentally new worth all the bugs and a constant envy for new hardware.
From time to time I have thought about switching to Centos as my desktop, where every release is supported for ten years. The question is, in the year 2023, will I really still want to use an OS from 2014? I’m not sure about that. In the end I think I’m really better off sticking with OS X for the foreseeable future.
Has anyone found Safari under Yosemite and iOS8 to be of "disappointing" quality? I know of DNS being broken in Yosemite but my wife and I find Safari to be extremely irritating- it just sits there at 20% of address bar progress after entering an address and pressing Enter.
EDIT: And another thing - Spotlight now takes a significant amount of time to get results. I notice a large difference between my personal i7 2012 MBP with Yosemite and the 2008 single-CPU (quad core) Xeon running Mavericks at work. Maybe it's the disk difference, but I sometimes wonder if Spotlight is doing anything as there is no search indication / activity indication.
I currently have two Macs. A late 2013 rMBP 13" which works flawlessly, and an iMac 27" with 680mx(later 2012?).
The iMac has felt wonky for lack of a better word. It doesn't hang or crash more than Mavericks did, but f.lux causes WindowServer to crash randomly which makes all users to be logged out in a microsecond. I've reported this of course.
Another thing that troubles me is the amount of rubbish logging done by the system. Have Console.app open for a while and see what nonsense it barfs out. How can it work at all with all those problems?
I had a lot of WindowServer crashes with my 30" external monitor at work when I upgraded to Yosemite. Found huge discussion threads on it on Apple's forums - it's been fixed in 10.10.2, so if you get on the beta channel for updates that should hopefully solve it for you. It fixed it for me and the latest beta seems solid. It was happening to me every time I unlocked my computer, and I would lose all my windows/tabs - maddening.
that model of rmbp has flickering keyboard light issue. if you set your display and keyboard brightness to about 2 bars, in a very dark room keyboard will flicker.
I don't think there is as much of a fear of someone important getting angry like Steve Jobs used to. Without that fear, they are more likely to ship bugs.
That may be the case, but I've also noticed that too many Apple users have been less critical than they used to be and easily go on the attack of even the smallest constructive criticism of the company's products.
Maybe it's time for Mac users to get much more vocal and critical with Apple and quit apologizing for their mistakes to others?
I remember back in the day when there were Mac user uproars over the tiniest Mac OS flaws and I took pride that I was a part of a group of consumers that asked.. no, --demanded-- high quality products from Apple. Steve Jobs really seemed to take pride in that as well, in my opinion.
I hope threads like these are a sign that Apple consumers are ready to get back to our old-school roots of being demanding users that expect the best hardware and software for our money.
Consumer complacency breeds corporate complacency. I'm not critical of Mac products because I hate them. I'm critical of Mac products because I utilize them and need them for business. Otherwise, I frankly wouldn't give a shit.
I file bugs on every issue encountered. I suggest others do as well. The way Apple works (or used to) is that all bugs get read and possibly fixed, however there is little/no feedback as to timeline or whether a fix will occur. It's pompous, pseudotheatrical silence rather than engagement.
Slightly off-topic, but I also find some of Apple's software workflow philosophies baffling. E.g., sometime back they got rid of the Save As button.
I was once playing around with editing a photo using Preview. I tried a crop etc. Eventually, I closed the app without committing to any of the edits (by Saving anything). Imagine my shock (and horror) when I discovered that the "playing around edits" I had done had all been permanently applied to my original image. Despite never having saved anything. All the edits were being applied in real-time, even if I was just trying something to see how it would look (without committing a save). So, they apparently have decided to even get rid of the Save button in some cases.
I continue to be flabbergasted that so many otherwise savvy observers believe that a random assortment of software annoyances constitutes a crisis at Apple. Articles like this could have been, and were, written at any time in the past fifteen years.
Apple is an incredibly mercurial company that sometimes gets too busy telling you what to do that they can't execute small things.
Look at poor iMovie, which has had most useful features stripped by this point. Or Pages, which actually broke file compatibility with little or no benefit. Or the situation with Wifi, which is a fuckup of monumental proportion.
On a mid 2012 13" non-retina (the 16 GiB hackable, 2 SSD one) MBP, fixed wifi by doing a clean Yosemite install, no transfer settings and then deleting network preferences plists. :(
Works, stable on 10.10.1. (Discoveryd mdns announce disablement doesn't flag doesn work at all though.)
Anecdotally, Yosemite (clean install) had an order of magnitude more breakage than Mavericks. YMMV. Perhaps we're so used to the unreasonable expectations of almost everything working that more breakage than usual precipitaes a whinefest "crisis" that gets picked up on TechCrunch as "news." That somehow Apple is "over" because of a few bugs that are fixed in the next patch release. (New releases are buggy, obviously. Best to wait for everyone else to sort them out or help catch them in beta.)
It's something that is noticeable though. Rather than things just working and maybe a few bugs, it's buggy as hell and might just work. We have up to the second major update beta and the volume level overlay is still buggy (transparent corners are black) on a lot of Macs when the UI transparency is turned off. It feels like there's no quality control at all.
IMHO currently the worst bugs are in discoveryd, which replaces mDNSResponder for Bonjour.
If you remove a service on OSX 10.10 it's removal will be broadcast. But it doesn't stop there. No... Most of the time the service will be published again after that and after a second or so it will be finally removed. How the hell did this pass even the most basic QA checks?!
discoveryd is shit. The unofficial no broadcast argument breaks WiFi. You can't disable discoveryd, or it breaks DNS and DHCP.
If there's somwthing you want to block (multicast DNS), get icefloor and/or (Hand Off OR Little Snitch). I use the former and latter.former. OSX Yosemite contains the awesome pf firewall forked from FreeBSD which was forked from OpenBSD. (Apple send some cash to FreeBSD and OpenBSD plz.)
I had an issue with Mac Mail and after the upgrade it just stopped synching my exchange files correctly and that was the end of it. Called apple support, very friendly guy, talked me through it, we tried a few fixes, there was a workaround but it wasn't the same again. Moved over to MS Outlook and haven't gone back. Kind of a shame.
As some others have pointed out elsewhere, OS X Yosemite used to bork your old XAMPP installation. I spent 1.5 entire days restoring my XAMPP. I believe the XAMPP people have released a fix that prevents the borking. "Madness" is right.
Apple: I am NEVER going to upgrade OS X again if my current version is working fine.
Ahh, finally a blog touching this! I've been quietly pissed off for a while at being unable to get Apple TV to connect or closing a full screen video tab in Safari without killing the whole process. And other bits and pieces that occasionally just don't work goddamnit.
It took Apple 2 years to correct the name of my local university in "Maps" (after I had filed 3 correction reports via Maps, each spaced a month apart).
I think a little expectations management might be in order here.
The first rule of Apple software quality is that you don't talk about Apple software quality. All Apple software is, by definition, perfect.
Look at Rolex watches. They're a pure status symbol. They don't keep time all that well. Rolex doesn't even submit them for Swiss chronometer certification any more.
Apple and Android are in a sack race to the goal line of Billions of dollars in profit. They're both stumbling a lot, but I think it's pretty clear that Apple is winning.
Quite honestly Yosemite is the most buggy Apple product I've ever used - it has made working with OSX a chore. Apple has not fixed one of the bug reports I filed during the beta phase (which I'm not convinced has finished).
I tried to downgrade to Mavericks yesterday, it was almost impossible. The installer refuses to wipe clean and install a lower version unless you do some magic to the disk first and use web install. It took over 5 hours and I downloaded Mac OS 4 times from different sources, including Apple.
The ram it on our throats with free upgrade, then block our path to downgrade, unless we have a time machine backup to restore from. I didn't.
My wife and I have identical MBAirs, except that I got mine when it was shipping with Mavericks and she got Yosemite. I get about twice the batter life, and a lot less trouble with Pages/Numbers.
I'm thinking of wiping hers and installing from TimeMachine, then pulling in just her user data.
You didn't use the first few versions of OS X then? Or System 7? Or for that matter the first release of OS8? The newton, whilst technologically interesting, was flaky as hell. Actually, Lion was pretty ropey...
System 7.0, and 7.1 especially, were terrific: a consistent, understandable UI and (in my experience at least) pretty stable.
The issues came with 7.5 and onwards, when Apple kept bolting on more and more features without any regard to either interface consistency or stability. Draw your own parallels.
I remember my poor LCII practically grinding to a halt under 7.5! Just awful. And that's my point; we've been here before, in fact I'd argue same as it ever was! With OS X, the first few releases were painful. Yes, Apple need to up their game on the quality of their software and (IMHO) the quality of their internet services especially, but this is nothing new. Perhaps the rose-tint is wearing thin?
I don't think anyone has claimed that the decline in Apple's software quality was unprecedented. Even if it happens every three years, there is nothing wrong with begging for a stable release once in a while. 10.8 will stop being supported soon and then we will be left with the choice between 10.9.5, 10.10.x and a brand new, unstable 10.11.0. High time for a stable release.
You are absolutely right. My point was that the hyperbole around it all in some cases seems, well, hyperbolic. Other than the mdns issue, both Yosemite an iOS 8 have been fine for me. Obviously others aren't as lucky, which really does suck.
Maintaining software is not as fun as greenfield development, and Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old devices seems not to work out any longer.
>Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old devices seems not to work out any longer.
Yeah, as I've been saying...
Some may call all of this growing Apple consumer angst and issues "back luck", but I bet Steve Jobs would call it "bad karma".
Consumers with early 2011 MacBook Pros that died after 2-3 years didn't feel like they got a very good ROI on a 3-4,000 dollar laptop, go figure. Especially those that paid hundreds more for extended Applecare and had the defective GPU fail quickly after it expired.
Skimming this, I just wanted to reply to this one bit:
> Befuddled users found they couldn’t send Pages 5 files through Gmail. It’s now fixed, as the What’s New in Pages screen proudly claims…
> > ° Updated file format makes it easier to send documents via services like Gmail and Dropbox
> …but how could such an obvious, non-esoteric bug escape Apple’s attention in the first place?
And the answer, if I recall correctly as to what was going on, was that this wasn't a bug with Apple's software at all. It was a consequence of the file format actually being a package, meaning it was really a document. Apple software all worked with documents just fine, and you'll find that if you tried to use Mail.app to send it, it would all Just Work™. The issue is that Gmail and other such services never even considered the idea that a user might want to send a whole folder and did not have any way to support that.
So the "fix" was to change the file format to actually be a compressed archive of the package (I assume it was a zip file, but I don't know how to go back and check). This made it work with all of the stupid software out there that assumed users would only want to transfer individual files.
Sure, perhaps the Pages team could have foreseen this issue. But that doesn't make it a bug in their software, just a case of only prioritizing compatibility with other aspects of Apple's software ecosystem.
Claiming that "this is not a bug" sounds a lot like "you are holding it wrong".
Software that doesn't perform as the user expects is almost always a bug. Yes, these folder-packages have been a problem for years. No, that doesn't mean Apple can just leave the problem as is.
For example, try emailing an app. Doesn't work. You need to zip it first. But why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?
Why doesn't Safari automatically zip any package that I select for uploading?
Apple came up with the idea of packages, so they better fix the issues around them. Saying that Google should fix Gmail helps no-one.
Folders yes, packages no. I often email prerelease builds of my app to people. If I forget to zip the app, it arrives broken (but i havent checked yet what exactly breaks)
I just emailed myself an app from one computer to another using Mail.app and it worked perfectly.
The only thing I can think of is that maybe your email provider modifies the message in-flight because it contains an executable. And that's something Mail.app can't possibly work around. Although if manually zipping your app fixes it then I don't know why that would be.
If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.
Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences tend to write.
Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them. Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame third party software issues to the OS maker.
(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike how they abandoned Aperture).