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I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to mention the drop in performance and battery life and the discoveryd

I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to mention the drop in performance and battery life and the discoveryd and Wifi problems last year. These were not isolated issues and a lot of people suffered them, I'd say in a much higher proportion than any first release of OS X since 10.0. At least the Ars Technica people are smart and recommend people to wait until 10.11.1 if they can (although last year Yosemite 10.10.1 didn't solve anything). I have to chuckle when I see some reviews saying "UPDATE _RIGHT NOW_! THIS IS THE BEST OS EVER!". They said the same last year, what a coincidence. Personally, I feel that Yosemite 10.10.5 is very stable now, and I'll wait at least until 10.11.2 to upgrade, no matter how many times people tell me how wonderful El Capitan is.

kingnight 11y ago
It's tough to hold out on major OS upgrades as they come up with a number of new app features and enhancements that are coupled with the OS.
cake 11y ago
Same here, Yosemite is the new Windows Vista ! I'm finally stable enough with 10.10.4 after many kernel panics, not gonna rush it to upgrade. I'll wait for 10.11.1. El capitan seems promising though.
- dr_win 11y ago
  You are late. El Capitan GM which was released mid Sep to developers has been already marked as 10.11.1 (build 15B17c).
X-Istence 11y ago
I've got the 10.11 GM running on my 2012 Mac Mini (Core i7) with spinning rust, and it has made such a huge improvement over 10.10 in terms of snappiness and how fast the entire OS feels. It is a world of difference, to the point that I am happily using my Mac Mini for stuff again, whereas before I would avoid it as much as possible and instead reach for my MacBook Pro Retina to get anything done.
spike021 11y ago
The thing is, I've had 3 different Macbooks, young and old (2011 MBP, retina MBP, macbook air), all on Yosemite, and had none of those issues. It's not unreasonable to think the reviewers just didn't experience those issues.
- ubercore 11y ago
  That's true, but also kind of the point. If reviewers can't figure out a review process that illustrates the issues, how useful are they, really, other than a look at features?
  - spike021 11y ago
    That makes sense, but then would you expect them to test every configuration of every model that supports the OS they're reviewing?
  - on_ 11y ago
    I don't want to speak for spike021, but it is possible this is an edge case that is specific to carlosrg. If it was a localized issue specific to how the OS was installed or how that computers environment was set up, what can a reviewer do? There are as many programming environments as there are programmers. If a review can give as much insight as possible about how the subject changed from the previous version, as well as technical details I consider it a good review. If they themselves, have problems, it would be awesome if they include them as well as any other qualitative data. On balance, there will be subtle differences across hardware and software that can not be addressed in granular detail. The best way to get information is just to read several reviews, and see if any of those people had edgecases. edit: wiredfool pointed this out above, as I was writing this. Having purchased 2 equally specked computers at the same time and experiencing differing results. After upgrading from MAvericks, I personally experienced significantly better battery life. I have edited launch daemons and blocked some outgoing connections which caused coreaudiod to go into an infinite loop using >80% of the cpu. This KILLED my battery and performance. After fixing this issue, both of those metrics were amazing.
    - 11y ago
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
It's still not clear to me what is the actual, working, non-broken procedure to clear the DNS cache on 10.10.5
ljk 11y ago
Sadly a lot of reviews sound like iVerge these days - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA
joosters 11y ago
I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to... I think you are lying to yourself!
outworlder 11y ago
Doesn't happen to me. Nor to anyone I know. Now, there was a trend with OSX releases that, until about Lion or so, every new release was faster and more optimized than the previous one. We are used to expect just the opposite, specially from competing operating systems. I have not seen signs of that trend in the more recent releases.
- sz4kerto 11y ago
  > specially from competing operating systems. Windows is getting faster on the same hardware since Vista (7 was faster than Vista, 8 was faster than 7 and 10 is faster than 8). Linux is difficult to judge here because of the variety of DEs, but it's not really slowing down with time either. Newer iOS versions are slower on old hardware than older versions, and this is also more or less true for Windows Phone and Android.
song 11y ago
Yes, I've regretted upgrading to Yosemite when 10.10.1 came out... First thing, Filevault managed to crash and corrupt my hard disk. Had to restore from my backups (not a huge issue but a waste of time). Then, I cannot connect to either iphone or my wife iphone's hotspot without turning the wifi off first and then turning it on again. I have the same issue on both a macbook pro and a macbook (but didn't have that issue before Yosemite). And in term of performance, my macbook pro is nowhere as performant even with the latest Yosemite update as it was before. I also have noticed a strange issue. On yosemite, whenever the battery reaches 5%, everything slows to a crawl... I feel that the last really stable OS from Apple was Snow Leopard
- thorn 11y ago
  That is the feature of Maverick too, that on 5% of battery, CPU goes into throttle mode.

kingnight 11y ago

It's tough to hold out on major OS upgrades as they come up with a number of new app features and enhancements that are coupled with the OS.

cake 11y ago

Same here, Yosemite is the new Windows Vista ! I'm finally stable enough with 10.10.4 after many kernel panics, not gonna rush it to upgrade. I'll wait for 10.11.1. El capitan seems promising though.

dr_win 11y ago
You are late. El Capitan GM which was released mid Sep to developers has been already marked as 10.11.1 (build 15B17c).

X-Istence 11y ago

I've got the 10.11 GM running on my 2012 Mac Mini (Core i7) with spinning rust, and it has made such a huge improvement over 10.10 in terms of snappiness and how fast the entire OS feels. It is a world of difference, to the point that I am happily using my Mac Mini for stuff again, whereas before I would avoid it as much as possible and instead reach for my MacBook Pro Retina to get anything done.

spike021 11y ago

The thing is, I've had 3 different Macbooks, young and old (2011 MBP, retina MBP, macbook air), all on Yosemite, and had none of those issues. It's not unreasonable to think the reviewers just didn't experience those issues.

ubercore 11y ago
That's true, but also kind of the point. If reviewers can't figure out a review process that illustrates the issues, how useful are they, really, other than a look at features?
- spike021 11y ago
  That makes sense, but then would you expect them to test every configuration of every model that supports the OS they're reviewing?
- on_ 11y ago
  I don't want to speak for spike021, but it is possible this is an edge case that is specific to carlosrg. If it was a localized issue specific to how the OS was installed or how that computers environment was set up, what can a reviewer do? There are as many programming environments as there are programmers. If a review can give as much insight as possible about how the subject changed from the previous version, as well as technical details I consider it a good review. If they themselves, have problems, it would be awesome if they include them as well as any other qualitative data. On balance, there will be subtle differences across hardware and software that can not be addressed in granular detail. The best way to get information is just to read several reviews, and see if any of those people had edgecases. edit: wiredfool pointed this out above, as I was writing this. Having purchased 2 equally specked computers at the same time and experiencing differing results. After upgrading from MAvericks, I personally experienced significantly better battery life. I have edited launch daemons and blocked some outgoing connections which caused coreaudiod to go into an infinite loop using >80% of the cpu. This KILLED my battery and performance. After fixing this issue, both of those metrics were amazing.
  - 11y ago

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

It's still not clear to me what is the actual, working, non-broken procedure to clear the DNS cache on 10.10.5

ljk 11y ago

Sadly a lot of reviews sound like iVerge these days - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA

joosters 11y ago

I stopped caring about OS reviews after virtually every Yosemite (10.10.0) review failed to... I think you are lying to yourself!

outworlder 11y ago

Doesn't happen to me. Nor to anyone I know. Now, there was a trend with OSX releases that, until about Lion or so, every new release was faster and more optimized than the previous one. We are used to expect just the opposite, specially from competing operating systems. I have not seen signs of that trend in the more recent releases.

sz4kerto 11y ago
> specially from competing operating systems. Windows is getting faster on the same hardware since Vista (7 was faster than Vista, 8 was faster than 7 and 10 is faster than 8). Linux is difficult to judge here because of the variety of DEs, but it's not really slowing down with time either. Newer iOS versions are slower on old hardware than older versions, and this is also more or less true for Windows Phone and Android.

song 11y ago

Yes, I've regretted upgrading to Yosemite when 10.10.1 came out... First thing, Filevault managed to crash and corrupt my hard disk. Had to restore from my backups (not a huge issue but a waste of time). Then, I cannot connect to either iphone or my wife iphone's hotspot without turning the wifi off first and then turning it on again. I have the same issue on both a macbook pro and a macbook (but didn't have that issue before Yosemite). And in term of performance, my macbook pro is nowhere as performant even with the latest Yosemite update as it was before. I also have noticed a strange issue. On yosemite, whenever the battery reaches 5%, everything slows to a crawl... I feel that the last really stable OS from Apple was Snow Leopard

thorn 11y ago
That is the feature of Maverick too, that on 5% of battery, CPU goes into throttle mode.