10 ms·

Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems

209 points by alwillis 9y ago

bob_theslob646 9y ago
>Let’s recap the week of Apple software problems: - macOS High Sierra critical flaw with root admin access - macOS High Sierra update released, but breaks file sharing - iOS 11 crashing on some iPhones due to a date bug - macOS High Sierra fix not installing correctly on some systems -iOS 11.2 released early to fix iPhone crash bug Yeah I would say that is a pretty bad week
- pducks32 9y ago
  Don’t forget console being spammed with hundreds of “Month 13” messages a second!
  - daveorzach 9y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. I wonder what will happen first, Apple releases a fix or the logs fill up my disk?
  - fbelzile 9y ago
    That's what that was! I was up late last night trying to debug my app because of this.
    - pducks32 9y ago
      Yup something to do with mdworker IIRC.
- TheCoreh 9y ago
  They also released 10.13.1, which undid the patch for the root login issue.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    10.13.1 was released more than a month ago.
  - judge2020 9y ago
    That's basically this point > - macOS High Sierra fix not installing correctly on some system But 10.13.1 has been out for a while, the root issue only resurfaces if you upgrade from 10.13 -> 10.13.1 after the patch is automatically installed.
    - TheCoreh 9y ago
      Oops, my bad then, I misinterpreted the news yesterday about that. Do they at least prompt you to reapply the patch after updating?
- Alex3917 9y ago
  The transition to APFS also went flawlessly, above and beyond anyone's expectations.
  - mcny 9y ago
    Apparently, apple won't implement apfs for people on spinning rust so I can't get it on an iMac which made upgrading to high sierra easier. How did it go for people on macbooks?
    - qubex 9y ago
      Nor for RAID drives, whatever the substrate... except that by virtue of my participation in the beta programme, my Mac's RAID-0 array was converted before they decided to change track, and now after I wiped my system to restart anew I have literally no way of getting my system back to the initial state it was in.
    - TheCondor 9y ago
      You can convert those disks, they don’t do it automatically though. Diskutility has a convert option.
      - kristofferR 9y ago
        That's a dumb idea, the file system is designed for flash memory, not spinning disks.
  - chmars 9y ago
    AFPS has serious performance issues: https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macOS-HighSierra-FileCopySpeed.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macO...
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Really? That transition introduced “store encryption password in plaintext, as password hint” - http://mashable.com/2017/10/06/high-sierra-password-fix-apple-update/#bbIXCxKZRmq0 http://mashable.com/2017/10/06/high-sierra-password-fix-appl...
rosstex 9y ago
You are put in charge of Apple. How do you fix this?
- pducks32 9y ago
  Using an iPhone X only proves to me that Apple engineers make incredible software that just work....when they want to. The app switching on iPhone X is perfect bc there was probably a team on that. The problem isn’t new stuff it’s old stuff. Like is there a team just working on Disk Utility or maybe just one dude who checks iOS and macOS for date/time problems. They need a few more people.
  - heartbreak 9y ago
    I thought we had all decided that throwing more people at a software problem isn’t a viable solution.
    - Aaargh20318 9y ago
      This isn’t one software problem, it’s a shitload of software problems.
    - reificator 9y ago
      Throwing more people at a software problem isn't a viable solution to meet a deadline. Obviously there is benefit to adding more people, it's just that that benefit takes time to offset the cost of onboarding. Communication does place an upper limit on the number of people who can work on a specific project, and later the total number of projects that can interact. Something exploratory like what what the GP was suggesting doesn't require huge teams or a lot of interaction between teams, at least until the problems are identified and need to actually be resolved.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      That's only if we're talking about a single codebase. Throwing more people at different programs, where they are needed, e.g. some to work on Mail.app, some to work on a better Calendar, some to work on Pages, etc, is a totally viable solution.
marsrover 9y ago
Tim Cook is a less technically inclined version of Steve Ballmer. He was brought in to milk every current iteration of an Apple product until there is nothing left. Quality be damned.
- pducks32 9y ago
  Right I think that explains why so many hardware devices have been delayed until they were ready. Yea definitely couldn’t be Craig or other software mangers.
  - torstenvl 9y ago
    Blame always runs up, never down.
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      That's how it should be anyways. A good leader always assumed responsibility.
- oflannabhra 9y ago
  This is simply false. The following things have occurred under Cooks tenure: - Apple Watch - AirPods - Apple Pencil - Apple Music - HomePod - ARKit Each of those represent entirely new product categories, have captured the majority of a pre-existing market, or have opened up entirely new use cases for previously existing products. Apple has significant challenges in front of them, as evidenced by this week, and Cook shoulders the responsibility for that. But, he is not Ballmer, and Apple had major security bugs and issues under Steve. I hope the "Cook is Ballmer" trope will quickly die.
  - rdl 9y ago
    Yeah, completely unfair — under Ballmer, Microsoft seriously improved their security, going from a complete disaster to actually quite solid. It clearly wasn’t Ballmer’s engineering prowess which accomplished this, but resource allocation and prioritization in response to the market.
codazoda 9y ago
TLDR; Three problems have stemmed from the same bug. One patch had errors and required more fixing for a subset of users. The complaint seems to be that Apple moved too fast to fix this bug. I dunno... You really need to fix something like this quickly and you might not have time for a really good QA round; so you rush it. Could they do better, sure.
- efdee 9y ago
  If you don't do "really good QA", you end up causing more problems than you fix.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 9y ago
    It's almost like it's a ...tradeoff.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  You really need to ship an operating system that doesn't grant root access with an empty password. You really need to ship an operating system that doesn't get into a crash reboot cycle at the turn of a new month.
- wbkang 9y ago
  This is not a professional mentality. Releasing later is better than introducing the bug again, never mind a new one.
  - alangpierce 9y ago
    A professional mentality is to do a risk analysis based on what you know and based on reasonable estimates of what you don't know. Here's how I'd model it. The main decision point on Apple's part is how long to QA the fix before pushing the release out. As soon as the build finishes? 3 hours of testing? 1 day? 3 days? 2 weeks? The longer you test, the lower the probability of introducing a regression or having an incomplete fix, but that probability never drops to zero. You could come up with an "expected after-patch defect severity over time" graph that goes down (due to more QA) in a way similar to exponential decay, and compare with that with the known before-patch severity of the root access bug (which was extremely bad in this case, obviously). A simple way to make the "how long to test" decision is to say that if the expected after-patch severity is lower than the known before-patch severity, then you should release. (That doesn't mean you need to stop testing, obviously.) A more nuanced decision-making process would take into account the confidence level from the QA process, the overhead of the release process, and the bad PR of releasing a buggy fix. But still, if the software has a terrible flaw and you have a fix that you're reasonably confident won't make things worse, it probably makes sense to release it. Apple ended up taking about a day to release a fix. My understanding is they also released it as a user-initiated update for a while, then later forced the update on everyone, which seems like a fine strategy to reduce risk of widespread regressions. Inventing a rating system, I'd say the severity of the root bug was 100 and the severity of the file sharing bug was 10, so the patch they released was an improvement even to users who ran into the file sharing bug. So over the course of multiple patches, their computers got better, even if was from terrible to bad to normal. I also think it's not obvious that another day of testing would have caught the file sharing bug, and taking 2 days to release a critical security fix is much worse than taking 1 day, in my opinion. So my impression is Apple generally made the right choices about how to release the patch, even if it's crappy that there was a regression and that such a bad security bug would exist in the first place.
torstenvl 9y ago
"When Jobs returned from his medical leave, Cook resumed his role as the person who kept the moving parts at Apple tightly meshed and remained unfazed by Jobs’s tantrums.... 'I’m a good negotiator, but he’s probably better than me because he’s a cool customer,' Jobs later said. After adding a bit more praise, he quietly added a reservation, one that was serious but rarely spoken: 'But Tim’s not a product person, per se.'" -Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
- pducks32 9y ago
  I’ll give Apple one full more year and see where Mac goes. Their hardware products are truly incredible...minus Macbook /Pro. And I personally love Apple Music over Spotify but I know many disagree.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    > Their hardware products are truly incredible For example? All I see is outdated design and hardware. Only "incredible" hardware I can think of is the new chip in iphone x.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      What "outdated design and hardware"? The Macbook Pro is the best laptop out there as a power/battery life/build quality combo (having to spend for a "dongle" or new USB-C cables is not a technical concern for its technical capacity). The iPhone X is top notch (pun intended) and has been praised in reviews all around the world. The AirPods have been described as mostly magical by their users (I'd add to that). The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches). It's the only one that was deemed most accurate in its health measurements (heart, etc) from all smartwatches too in competitive tests. The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise. So?
      - Nullabillity 9y ago
        > The Macbook Pro is the best laptop out there as a power/battery life/build quality combo (having to spend for a "dongle" or new USB-C cables is not a technical concern for its technical capacity). You have to be joking. Apple charges $2k just to get a quad-core CPU or more than 8GB of RAM. Soldered, mind you, so you can't just replace it later. Oh, and I hope you don't need more than 500GB of storage! Build quality tends to include things like, you know, being able to fix it when things inevitably go wrong, rather than throwing it in the bin and paying $2k+ for another lottery ticket. > The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches). And Trump managed to get elected president. I guess that says more about the average consumer than about the product they're selling. > The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise. When was it ever?
mtgx 9y ago
This is the result of Apple trying to become a "fashionable products company" instead of a "premium products company". Premium is about the whole package delivering high value - at a reasonably high cost, too. Fashion is almost 100% about aesthetics, at a much higher price. Not much value in relation to price except for branding and the exclusivity aspect (which is tied to the very high prices). But fashion often has little to do with the quality/price ratio of the product. See those ridiculous diamond-covered $50,000 phones with 3-year old specs and OS versions. I believe Apple is also selling some ridiculous $17,000 smart watches now. The similarly priced Xeon-based Mac Pros almost enter this category, too. It's about culture and priorities inside the company. The moment I saw them shift towards the "fashion" aspect, I knew things would start to go downhill for Apple in terms of quality as well as value per product. If they don't check and rectify their priorities soon, they're going to have much bigger problems in the long term, maybe unfixable problems.
- gaius 9y ago
  This is the result of Apple trying to become a "fashionable products company" instead of a "premium products company". Absolutely. Like what does "Pro" mean in Apple-speak right now? A workhorse for serious professionals who earn their living with their tools, or the luxury version of the regular consumer version? There's a TV ad in the UK that says the Macbook Pro would be perfect for a first-year undergrad... That's not who I'd imagine a real "Pro" product was aimed at.
  - remir 9y ago
    Apple should just make two laptops: Macbook and Macbook Pro. Convert the current Macbook Air into a 13" Macbook that is more in line with the Air's price. The Pro should be a pro machine. Plenty of ports and no touch bar non sence, but keep the Touch ID sensor.
    - gaius 9y ago
      Crippling the Mac Mini to force people onto the Mac Pro "tower" then leaving that to rot was likewise insane. It's like Apple have forgot they only sell iPhones because iPhones are first-class citizens for all the content authored and apps developed on Macs... Take away the ecosystem and the fruits will eventually wither...
zaroth 9y ago
I always assumed there would be someone standing with Tim and Jony to complete the troika. I think it was Scott for a while, but I think they are sorely missing the truly brilliant charismatic visionary on the software side.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Who would that be?
  - delinka 9y ago
    They’re missing therefore we don’t know.
  - egypturnash 9y ago
    Well, he WAS Steve Jobs.
crdoconnor 9y ago
"The great thing about Apple is that their stuff 'just works'". How much longer before this meme dies?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- raverbashing 9y ago
  > How much longer before this meme dies? It will die when the competition makes it better, and from what I've seen the competition seems to continue doing great at shooting themselves in the foot Linux distros lack product vision, Windows looks like every click you make go through 5 backward compatibility layers and a core dating from the first Windows NT that was never refactored.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    ChromeOS fits reasonably well in this category. Unfortunately it's still too limited to compete directly with Apple, but it's already pretty useful.
nowherecat 9y ago
I've been with apple since 1995, but it seems to me that the fruit has been rotting from the inside out for some time now and it is starting to become very obvious. I hope they get their act together, because a real alternative that "just works" does not yet exist.
- waynecochran 9y ago
  Apple has succumbed to the programming culture that is pervasive everywhere now -- "release early, release often." This isn't just an Apple problem, this is everywhere. We all use less stable software.
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    Release early/often is a mantra which fits free software development, one where there is often a second party between the software producer and the end user. This second party can be an integrator - Debian, Redhat, etc - or an IT department. Release early/often is categorically unsuitable for proprietary, closed software development, especially for a company like Apple which directly targets end users and has made a name for producing stuff which 'just works'. As such I don't think Apple actually follows release early/often, they just seem to think they can get by with less testing than they actually should. They also have a tendency to concentrate efforts on superficial 'improvements' while they lack the same drive to improve basic infrastructure.
l3robot 9y ago
Still on Sierra. The High Sierra installer has been downloaded without me knowing.. I receive an annoying weekly notification that try to make me install High Sierra. And now all these really concerning bugs too.. it makes it worse Apple..
- ratsimihah 9y ago
  Same here, not in a hurry to update to High Sierra now.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Still on Sierra. The High Sierra installer has been downloaded without me knowing.. But with you having enabled "download updates in the background".
- carlosrg 9y ago
  Me too. On macOS I like to be one version behind. I still get security updates and I get a "frozen" OS that has been tested by the entire Mac userbase for a year. New features can wait, I choose stability.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    High Sierra is the first Mac OS update that I haven’t downloaded on the first day. Still on Sierra here.
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    It’s great macOS High Sierra uses Metal because my MacBook Pro 2014 is now quiet when before the fan started spinning audibly in idle and annoyingly loud under mild load. On the flipside, WindowServer is unstable and causes freezes if the display resolution is scaled. It also causes freezes after some time when external monitors are plugged in/plugged out. Only a restart helps. If my 15" model weren’t so noisy on Sierra, I’d change back to it.
- jmull 9y ago
  Oh come on. Go to Systems Prefs > App Store and tell us what your preferences are set to. Apple has screwed up big time lately, but "hur-dur, muh mac is doing what it's supposed to do an I'm MAD bout that" isn't part of the problem.
kmfrk 9y ago
One of the really frustrating things is that it's still unclear whether people's iOS and High Sierra installations work now. I follow this stuff with a fair amount of interest and I'm still confused, god help the average consumer who just followed the nagging update prompts.
_arvin 9y ago
I'll admit, I used to be the first to update to their latest betas, now I'm terrified to even install the public releases. They have to do better than this. Having a Twitter user report one of the biggest bugs this decade? That's really weak. Releasing an update that undoes that? Pure amateur hour by the guys we really trust with privacy. Separately, lately they've treated me ridiculously bad (and it's _never_ been like this) at the Apple Store on a failed logic board for my 7 Plus to no fault of my own (saying I was 41 days out of warranty, sorry), so I called Apple Care and they promptly took care of it for me, but should I really have had to jump through all those hoops? Really soured me. I'm also on 3-month long thread with an iTunes Adviser (hi Grant) trying to convert some damn gift cards from iTunes to Apple Store. The easiest request ever. Now he's just no longer picking up his phone, voicemail, or responding to emails. Can't tell you the frustration involved in this (my dad had accidentally selected Apple iTunes instead of Apple Store when redeeming his Wells Fargo rewards) Having said all that, I'm still support these guys - why, I don't know anymore. That'll be changing soon, for sure.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  >Having a Twitter user report one of the biggest bugs this decade? ????
  - _arvin 9y ago
    You don't find that true? Anyone with physical (or remote) access can type in root, with no password, and have full control? ????
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      I think you have a very limited understanding of the state of software security in general if you think that is true. Bugs far worse than this are discovered on a weekly basis. This one is just easy to exploit so it’s been hyped up by people who would normally ignore slightly more technical descriptions of much worse vulnerabilities.
      - 9y ago
bpicolo 9y ago
They also managed to get in another autocorrect bug on a common word: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/27/ios-11-autocorrect-issue-it-to-i-t/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/27/ios-11-autocorrect-issu...
- vegardx 9y ago
  Maybe they can even get around to fix the issue for more or less every non-US ASCII keyboard where they seem to think character that look the same, are the same, or that they are often mistyped. In Norwegian we have "a" and "å", they are on completely opposites ends of the keyboard and are not used interchangeably, but they always changes one to the other. I've tried to contact support about it, even Google, as the problem persist on Android as well, but they never get back to me. So I'm assuming it's working as intentional. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - oculusthrift 9y ago
    in general i feel like american software companies do the bare minimum to support other languages and don’t think past that
jacksmith21006 9y ago
It is not only the bugs but look at Apple failing to get the Homepod to market for the holiday. Something is definitely off at Apple
Overtonwindow 9y ago
I keep seeing people post about that this would not have happened under Steve Jobs. I think that's unfair. I'm not a fan of Apple corporate, or Tim Cook, but I think in this new era they'll fix the issue, eventually, and all will be well. Under Jobs, countless people would have been fired and I think it would have taken considerably longer for them to admit there was a problem.
mtsmithhn 9y ago
"Better" QA, more testers, more developers, etc. won't catch these types of bugs if there isn't a test scenario which triggers the bug in the first place.
chmars 9y ago
APFS, although not buggy per se, also has its disadvantages: 'macOS High Sierra APFS Performance is Inferior to HFS on Apple’s Fastest SSD: all cost, no benefit, at least not yet.' https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macOS-HighSierra-FileCopySpeed.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macO...
- Osmium 9y ago
  I wouldn't say no benefit ... instant directory size information, instant copies are both pretty cool.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    It's slower than the format it was replacing. And the upgrade destroyed quite a number of partitions. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8085383 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8085383
  - dilap 9y ago
    having a more reliable filesystem is a huge benefit! it's amazing how stuff will bitrot on HFS+.
    - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
      How does APFS prevent bitrot? I thought it doesn’t do checksumming and error correction, and instead passes this task on to the SSD’s memory controller.
      - dilap 9y ago
        hmm, actually, i just sort of assumed it would fix the bitrot issue! that would be bad if it didn't...
      - danieldk 9y ago
        It checksums metadata [1]: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/ From the same article: the engineers contend that Apple devices basically don’t return bogus data. NAND uses extra data, e.g. 128 bytes per 4KB page, so that errors can be corrected and detected. (For reference, ZFS uses a fixed size 32 byte checksum for blocks ranging from 512 bytes to megabytes. That’s small by comparison, but bear in mind that the SSD’s ECC is required for the expected analog variances within the media.)
fiatpandas 9y ago
Is MacOS considered “B team” internally? Curious
- thsowers 9y ago
  Last time I checked, there was no dedicated MacOS team [0]: > In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-alienated-mac-loyalists https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  The macOS team was dissolved and absorbed by the iOS team. It showed when I submitted a feature suggestion for a macOS app and the Apple employee apparently only skimmed the submission, didn’t check the category, and closed it because the feature exists in the iOS app. I resubmitted the feature suggestion and made sure to additionally mention in the description text this is meant for macOS (as the submission category states) so they don’t close it again.
LeoJiWoo 9y ago
Apple is tanking their good will with these. But more surprising Tim Cook is the target of rage from a lot of people, more so than Apple (from my social groups full of nontechies). I guess that's the burden of following Steve Jobs. His personal brand was pretty synonymous with Apple and Quality. IMO I think Tim Cook needs to go. He's a perfectly fine CEO for most companies but not Apple. Apple needs an opinionated CEO who is in touch with the average American(and the normal curve). Tim Cook says things like "If you only work for money, you will never be happy", which reveals how out of touch he is with most Americans.
ciconia 9y ago
Is anyone else here sick and tired of sensationalistic journalism? "Shockingly bad", "a nightmare"? It's just a fucking security bug, why can't you just report the news in a calm, responsible manner?
- thsowers 9y ago
  > It's just a fucking security bug No. It's a security bug, plus a botched fix at a time when the quality of Apple software has been lower than ever (keep in mind this macOS also had the "Shows password as password hint" bug). Moreover, it's a sign that quality control and internal processes at Apple are seriously lacking.
sorenbs 9y ago
Always wait for Service Pack 2!
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I've never participated in a class action before, but I would gladly participate if someone ever starts one. I honestly wonder why no one is doing a class action against Apple. If some lawyer decides to stand up against Apple and start a class action suit for breaking so many people's phones through iOS 11 to the point of being unusable, I'm sure they will get a lot of supporters. I really don't care for another iPhone and I don't like being forced to upgrade because my current iPhone which used to work perfectly fine and is not even an old phone is completely broken. All apps take more than ten seconds to boot up. And I know I'm not alone because I've seen other peoples phone in person. There should be a crowdfunding platform for class actions like this.
- ksec 9y ago
  forced to upgrade?
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Is this a rhetorical question? Yes I'm "forced to upgrade". 1. They keep popping up those notifications and block my workflow until I give in and upgrade to the latest iOS version. 2. My phone is virtually unusable right now. Like I said, all apps take about 10 seconds to "launch", during which all I see is a white screen. And in many cases it just crashes after the ten seconds. I have to reboot the app to even get it to launch after the ten seconds of loading. I think this counts as being "forced to upgrade" since I have no option to downgrade the OS and my phone is unusable.
- abrodersen 9y ago
  Probably because we've all signed away our class action rights in some TOS somewhere. Thanks Congress!
lostgame 9y ago
I honestly am about ready to go back to a 2009-era MacBook Pro or Mac Pro tower, shove 10.9 on it and tell my clients that I've quit iOS as a platform. It's beyond not worth it at this point. I refuse to watch my computers and phones get shittier and shittier, and with the phones, a downgrade isn't even possible. Apple, you have gone from one of my favourite companies in the world, to one of my most hated. I will never buy a new, non-upgradable, RAM-soldered-to-the-board, overpriced, underpowered, piece of shit computer from you again. And you can take my word on that.
ascom 9y ago
I recently upgraded to High Sierra on my MacBook, and I had random reboot problems: https://discussions.apple.com/message/32649321 https://discussions.apple.com/message/32649321 Downgrading to Sierra fixed it... I still don't know what was causing the reboots.
mbesto 9y ago
Apple needs to stop releasing functionality in their major releases. Seriously, I need more boring iOS vX.x and macOS vX.x releases that focus on performance, space saving, and security features, not ones that redesign f'n everything. They literally don't need any more marketing or market share, just make existing customer happy or they'll start losing the grip they already have.
ggg9990 9y ago
I've never upgraded Windows before the first Service Pack, and now Mac users are realizing that their claims that "Mac is different" were just cultish delusion. Don't rush OS upgrades!
- Feniks 9y ago
  Windows isn't perfect (as we all know) but at least rolling back to a previous version is a lot easier than how macOS does it.

209 points by alwillis 9y ago

>Let’s recap the week of Apple software problems: - macOS High Sierra critical flaw with root admin access - macOS High Sierra update released, but breaks file sharing - iOS 11 crashing on some iPhones due to a date bug - macOS High Sierra fix not installing correctly on some systems -iOS 11.2 released early to fix iPhone crash bug Yeah I would say that is a pretty bad week

pducks32 9y ago
Don’t forget console being spammed with hundreds of “Month 13” messages a second!
- daveorzach 9y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I wonder what will happen first, Apple releases a fix or the logs fill up my disk?
- fbelzile 9y ago
  That's what that was! I was up late last night trying to debug my app because of this.
  - pducks32 9y ago
    Yup something to do with mdworker IIRC.
TheCoreh 9y ago
They also released 10.13.1, which undid the patch for the root login issue.
- mikeash 9y ago
  10.13.1 was released more than a month ago.
- judge2020 9y ago
  That's basically this point > - macOS High Sierra fix not installing correctly on some system But 10.13.1 has been out for a while, the root issue only resurfaces if you upgrade from 10.13 -> 10.13.1 after the patch is automatically installed.
  - TheCoreh 9y ago
    Oops, my bad then, I misinterpreted the news yesterday about that. Do they at least prompt you to reapply the patch after updating?
Alex3917 9y ago
The transition to APFS also went flawlessly, above and beyond anyone's expectations.
- mcny 9y ago
  Apparently, apple won't implement apfs for people on spinning rust so I can't get it on an iMac which made upgrading to high sierra easier. How did it go for people on macbooks?
  - qubex 9y ago
    Nor for RAID drives, whatever the substrate... except that by virtue of my participation in the beta programme, my Mac's RAID-0 array was converted before they decided to change track, and now after I wiped my system to restart anew I have literally no way of getting my system back to the initial state it was in.
  - TheCondor 9y ago
    You can convert those disks, they don’t do it automatically though. Diskutility has a convert option.
    - kristofferR 9y ago
      That's a dumb idea, the file system is designed for flash memory, not spinning disks.
- chmars 9y ago
  AFPS has serious performance issues: https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macOS-HighSierra-FileCopySpeed.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macO...
- dannyw 9y ago
  Really? That transition introduced “store encryption password in plaintext, as password hint” - http://mashable.com/2017/10/06/high-sierra-password-fix-apple-update/#bbIXCxKZRmq0 http://mashable.com/2017/10/06/high-sierra-password-fix-appl...

rosstex 9y ago

You are put in charge of Apple. How do you fix this?

pducks32 9y ago
Using an iPhone X only proves to me that Apple engineers make incredible software that just work....when they want to. The app switching on iPhone X is perfect bc there was probably a team on that. The problem isn’t new stuff it’s old stuff. Like is there a team just working on Disk Utility or maybe just one dude who checks iOS and macOS for date/time problems. They need a few more people.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  I thought we had all decided that throwing more people at a software problem isn’t a viable solution.
  - Aaargh20318 9y ago
    This isn’t one software problem, it’s a shitload of software problems.
  - reificator 9y ago
    Throwing more people at a software problem isn't a viable solution to meet a deadline. Obviously there is benefit to adding more people, it's just that that benefit takes time to offset the cost of onboarding. Communication does place an upper limit on the number of people who can work on a specific project, and later the total number of projects that can interact. Something exploratory like what what the GP was suggesting doesn't require huge teams or a lot of interaction between teams, at least until the problems are identified and need to actually be resolved.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    That's only if we're talking about a single codebase. Throwing more people at different programs, where they are needed, e.g. some to work on Mail.app, some to work on a better Calendar, some to work on Pages, etc, is a totally viable solution.

marsrover 9y ago

Tim Cook is a less technically inclined version of Steve Ballmer. He was brought in to milk every current iteration of an Apple product until there is nothing left. Quality be damned.

pducks32 9y ago
Right I think that explains why so many hardware devices have been delayed until they were ready. Yea definitely couldn’t be Craig or other software mangers.
- torstenvl 9y ago
  Blame always runs up, never down.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    That's how it should be anyways. A good leader always assumed responsibility.
oflannabhra 9y ago
This is simply false. The following things have occurred under Cooks tenure: - Apple Watch - AirPods - Apple Pencil - Apple Music - HomePod - ARKit Each of those represent entirely new product categories, have captured the majority of a pre-existing market, or have opened up entirely new use cases for previously existing products. Apple has significant challenges in front of them, as evidenced by this week, and Cook shoulders the responsibility for that. But, he is not Ballmer, and Apple had major security bugs and issues under Steve. I hope the "Cook is Ballmer" trope will quickly die.
- rdl 9y ago
  Yeah, completely unfair — under Ballmer, Microsoft seriously improved their security, going from a complete disaster to actually quite solid. It clearly wasn’t Ballmer’s engineering prowess which accomplished this, but resource allocation and prioritization in response to the market.

codazoda 9y ago

TLDR; Three problems have stemmed from the same bug. One patch had errors and required more fixing for a subset of users. The complaint seems to be that Apple moved too fast to fix this bug. I dunno... You really need to fix something like this quickly and you might not have time for a really good QA round; so you rush it. Could they do better, sure.

efdee 9y ago
If you don't do "really good QA", you end up causing more problems than you fix.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 9y ago
  It's almost like it's a ...tradeoff.
ghostcluster 9y ago
You really need to ship an operating system that doesn't grant root access with an empty password. You really need to ship an operating system that doesn't get into a crash reboot cycle at the turn of a new month.
wbkang 9y ago
This is not a professional mentality. Releasing later is better than introducing the bug again, never mind a new one.
- alangpierce 9y ago
  A professional mentality is to do a risk analysis based on what you know and based on reasonable estimates of what you don't know. Here's how I'd model it. The main decision point on Apple's part is how long to QA the fix before pushing the release out. As soon as the build finishes? 3 hours of testing? 1 day? 3 days? 2 weeks? The longer you test, the lower the probability of introducing a regression or having an incomplete fix, but that probability never drops to zero. You could come up with an "expected after-patch defect severity over time" graph that goes down (due to more QA) in a way similar to exponential decay, and compare with that with the known before-patch severity of the root access bug (which was extremely bad in this case, obviously). A simple way to make the "how long to test" decision is to say that if the expected after-patch severity is lower than the known before-patch severity, then you should release. (That doesn't mean you need to stop testing, obviously.) A more nuanced decision-making process would take into account the confidence level from the QA process, the overhead of the release process, and the bad PR of releasing a buggy fix. But still, if the software has a terrible flaw and you have a fix that you're reasonably confident won't make things worse, it probably makes sense to release it. Apple ended up taking about a day to release a fix. My understanding is they also released it as a user-initiated update for a while, then later forced the update on everyone, which seems like a fine strategy to reduce risk of widespread regressions. Inventing a rating system, I'd say the severity of the root bug was 100 and the severity of the file sharing bug was 10, so the patch they released was an improvement even to users who ran into the file sharing bug. So over the course of multiple patches, their computers got better, even if was from terrible to bad to normal. I also think it's not obvious that another day of testing would have caught the file sharing bug, and taking 2 days to release a critical security fix is much worse than taking 1 day, in my opinion. So my impression is Apple generally made the right choices about how to release the patch, even if it's crappy that there was a regression and that such a bad security bug would exist in the first place.

torstenvl 9y ago

"When Jobs returned from his medical leave, Cook resumed his role as the person who kept the moving parts at Apple tightly meshed and remained unfazed by Jobs’s tantrums.... 'I’m a good negotiator, but he’s probably better than me because he’s a cool customer,' Jobs later said. After adding a bit more praise, he quietly added a reservation, one that was serious but rarely spoken: 'But Tim’s not a product person, per se.'" -Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

pducks32 9y ago
I’ll give Apple one full more year and see where Mac goes. Their hardware products are truly incredible...minus Macbook /Pro. And I personally love Apple Music over Spotify but I know many disagree.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  > Their hardware products are truly incredible For example? All I see is outdated design and hardware. Only "incredible" hardware I can think of is the new chip in iphone x.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    What "outdated design and hardware"? The Macbook Pro is the best laptop out there as a power/battery life/build quality combo (having to spend for a "dongle" or new USB-C cables is not a technical concern for its technical capacity). The iPhone X is top notch (pun intended) and has been praised in reviews all around the world. The AirPods have been described as mostly magical by their users (I'd add to that). The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches). It's the only one that was deemed most accurate in its health measurements (heart, etc) from all smartwatches too in competitive tests. The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise. So?
    - Nullabillity 9y ago
      > The Macbook Pro is the best laptop out there as a power/battery life/build quality combo (having to spend for a "dongle" or new USB-C cables is not a technical concern for its technical capacity). You have to be joking. Apple charges $2k just to get a quad-core CPU or more than 8GB of RAM. Soldered, mind you, so you can't just replace it later. Oh, and I hope you don't need more than 500GB of storage! Build quality tends to include things like, you know, being able to fix it when things inevitably go wrong, rather than throwing it in the bin and paying $2k+ for another lottery ticket. > The Apple Watch is the best in its kind technologically, and has overtaken the #1 traditional watch maker in sales (and moves more units than competitive smart-watches). And Trump managed to get elected president. I guess that says more about the average consumer than about the product they're selling. > The iPad continues to be the best tablet technology wise. When was it ever?

mtgx 9y ago

This is the result of Apple trying to become a "fashionable products company" instead of a "premium products company". Premium is about the whole package delivering high value - at a reasonably high cost, too. Fashion is almost 100% about aesthetics, at a much higher price. Not much value in relation to price except for branding and the exclusivity aspect (which is tied to the very high prices). But fashion often has little to do with the quality/price ratio of the product. See those ridiculous diamond-covered $50,000 phones with 3-year old specs and OS versions. I believe Apple is also selling some ridiculous $17,000 smart watches now. The similarly priced Xeon-based Mac Pros almost enter this category, too. It's about culture and priorities inside the company. The moment I saw them shift towards the "fashion" aspect, I knew things would start to go downhill for Apple in terms of quality as well as value per product. If they don't check and rectify their priorities soon, they're going to have much bigger problems in the long term, maybe unfixable problems.

gaius 9y ago
This is the result of Apple trying to become a "fashionable products company" instead of a "premium products company". Absolutely. Like what does "Pro" mean in Apple-speak right now? A workhorse for serious professionals who earn their living with their tools, or the luxury version of the regular consumer version? There's a TV ad in the UK that says the Macbook Pro would be perfect for a first-year undergrad... That's not who I'd imagine a real "Pro" product was aimed at.
- remir 9y ago
  Apple should just make two laptops: Macbook and Macbook Pro. Convert the current Macbook Air into a 13" Macbook that is more in line with the Air's price. The Pro should be a pro machine. Plenty of ports and no touch bar non sence, but keep the Touch ID sensor.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Crippling the Mac Mini to force people onto the Mac Pro "tower" then leaving that to rot was likewise insane. It's like Apple have forgot they only sell iPhones because iPhones are first-class citizens for all the content authored and apps developed on Macs... Take away the ecosystem and the fruits will eventually wither...

zaroth 9y ago

I always assumed there would be someone standing with Tim and Jony to complete the troika. I think it was Scott for a while, but I think they are sorely missing the truly brilliant charismatic visionary on the software side.

cptskippy 9y ago
Who would that be?
- delinka 9y ago
  They’re missing therefore we don’t know.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Well, he WAS Steve Jobs.

crdoconnor 9y ago

"The great thing about Apple is that their stuff 'just works'". How much longer before this meme dies?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 9y ago
> How much longer before this meme dies? It will die when the competition makes it better, and from what I've seen the competition seems to continue doing great at shooting themselves in the foot Linux distros lack product vision, Windows looks like every click you make go through 5 backward compatibility layers and a core dating from the first Windows NT that was never refactored.
- Filligree 9y ago
  ChromeOS fits reasonably well in this category. Unfortunately it's still too limited to compete directly with Apple, but it's already pretty useful.

nowherecat 9y ago

I've been with apple since 1995, but it seems to me that the fruit has been rotting from the inside out for some time now and it is starting to become very obvious. I hope they get their act together, because a real alternative that "just works" does not yet exist.

waynecochran 9y ago
Apple has succumbed to the programming culture that is pervasive everywhere now -- "release early, release often." This isn't just an Apple problem, this is everywhere. We all use less stable software.
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  Release early/often is a mantra which fits free software development, one where there is often a second party between the software producer and the end user. This second party can be an integrator - Debian, Redhat, etc - or an IT department. Release early/often is categorically unsuitable for proprietary, closed software development, especially for a company like Apple which directly targets end users and has made a name for producing stuff which 'just works'. As such I don't think Apple actually follows release early/often, they just seem to think they can get by with less testing than they actually should. They also have a tendency to concentrate efforts on superficial 'improvements' while they lack the same drive to improve basic infrastructure.

l3robot 9y ago

Still on Sierra. The High Sierra installer has been downloaded without me knowing.. I receive an annoying weekly notification that try to make me install High Sierra. And now all these really concerning bugs too.. it makes it worse Apple..

ratsimihah 9y ago
Same here, not in a hurry to update to High Sierra now.
coldtea 9y ago
>Still on Sierra. The High Sierra installer has been downloaded without me knowing.. But with you having enabled "download updates in the background".
carlosrg 9y ago
Me too. On macOS I like to be one version behind. I still get security updates and I get a "frozen" OS that has been tested by the entire Mac userbase for a year. New features can wait, I choose stability.
- Angostura 9y ago
  High Sierra is the first Mac OS update that I haven’t downloaded on the first day. Still on Sierra here.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  It’s great macOS High Sierra uses Metal because my MacBook Pro 2014 is now quiet when before the fan started spinning audibly in idle and annoyingly loud under mild load. On the flipside, WindowServer is unstable and causes freezes if the display resolution is scaled. It also causes freezes after some time when external monitors are plugged in/plugged out. Only a restart helps. If my 15" model weren’t so noisy on Sierra, I’d change back to it.
jmull 9y ago
Oh come on. Go to Systems Prefs > App Store and tell us what your preferences are set to. Apple has screwed up big time lately, but "hur-dur, muh mac is doing what it's supposed to do an I'm MAD bout that" isn't part of the problem.

kmfrk 9y ago

One of the really frustrating things is that it's still unclear whether people's iOS and High Sierra installations work now. I follow this stuff with a fair amount of interest and I'm still confused, god help the average consumer who just followed the nagging update prompts.

_arvin 9y ago

I'll admit, I used to be the first to update to their latest betas, now I'm terrified to even install the public releases. They have to do better than this. Having a Twitter user report one of the biggest bugs this decade? That's really weak. Releasing an update that undoes that? Pure amateur hour by the guys we really trust with privacy. Separately, lately they've treated me ridiculously bad (and it's _never_ been like this) at the Apple Store on a failed logic board for my 7 Plus to no fault of my own (saying I was 41 days out of warranty, sorry), so I called Apple Care and they promptly took care of it for me, but should I really have had to jump through all those hoops? Really soured me. I'm also on 3-month long thread with an iTunes Adviser (hi Grant) trying to convert some damn gift cards from iTunes to Apple Store. The easiest request ever. Now he's just no longer picking up his phone, voicemail, or responding to emails. Can't tell you the frustration involved in this (my dad had accidentally selected Apple iTunes instead of Apple Store when redeeming his Wells Fargo rewards) Having said all that, I'm still support these guys - why, I don't know anymore. That'll be changing soon, for sure.

ryanlol 9y ago
>Having a Twitter user report one of the biggest bugs this decade? ????
- _arvin 9y ago
  You don't find that true? Anyone with physical (or remote) access can type in root, with no password, and have full control? ????
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    I think you have a very limited understanding of the state of software security in general if you think that is true. Bugs far worse than this are discovered on a weekly basis. This one is just easy to exploit so it’s been hyped up by people who would normally ignore slightly more technical descriptions of much worse vulnerabilities.
    - 9y ago

bpicolo 9y ago

They also managed to get in another autocorrect bug on a common word: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/27/ios-11-autocorrect-issue-it-to-i-t/ https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/27/ios-11-autocorrect-issu...

vegardx 9y ago
Maybe they can even get around to fix the issue for more or less every non-US ASCII keyboard where they seem to think character that look the same, are the same, or that they are often mistyped. In Norwegian we have "a" and "å", they are on completely opposites ends of the keyboard and are not used interchangeably, but they always changes one to the other. I've tried to contact support about it, even Google, as the problem persist on Android as well, but they never get back to me. So I'm assuming it's working as intentional. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  in general i feel like american software companies do the bare minimum to support other languages and don’t think past that

jacksmith21006 9y ago

It is not only the bugs but look at Apple failing to get the Homepod to market for the holiday. Something is definitely off at Apple

Overtonwindow 9y ago

I keep seeing people post about that this would not have happened under Steve Jobs. I think that's unfair. I'm not a fan of Apple corporate, or Tim Cook, but I think in this new era they'll fix the issue, eventually, and all will be well. Under Jobs, countless people would have been fired and I think it would have taken considerably longer for them to admit there was a problem.

mtsmithhn 9y ago

"Better" QA, more testers, more developers, etc. won't catch these types of bugs if there isn't a test scenario which triggers the bug in the first place.

chmars 9y ago

APFS, although not buggy per se, also has its disadvantages: 'macOS High Sierra APFS Performance is Inferior to HFS on Apple’s Fastest SSD: all cost, no benefit, at least not yet.' https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macOS-HighSierra-FileCopySpeed.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2017/20171124_2015-macO...

Osmium 9y ago
I wouldn't say no benefit ... instant directory size information, instant copies are both pretty cool.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  It's slower than the format it was replacing. And the upgrade destroyed quite a number of partitions. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8085383 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8085383
- dilap 9y ago
  having a more reliable filesystem is a huge benefit! it's amazing how stuff will bitrot on HFS+.
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
    How does APFS prevent bitrot? I thought it doesn’t do checksumming and error correction, and instead passes this task on to the SSD’s memory controller.
    - dilap 9y ago
      hmm, actually, i just sort of assumed it would fix the bitrot issue! that would be bad if it didn't...
    - danieldk 9y ago
      It checksums metadata [1]: http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/ From the same article: the engineers contend that Apple devices basically don’t return bogus data. NAND uses extra data, e.g. 128 bytes per 4KB page, so that errors can be corrected and detected. (For reference, ZFS uses a fixed size 32 byte checksum for blocks ranging from 512 bytes to megabytes. That’s small by comparison, but bear in mind that the SSD’s ECC is required for the expected analog variances within the media.)

fiatpandas 9y ago

Is MacOS considered “B team” internally? Curious

thsowers 9y ago
Last time I checked, there was no dedicated MacOS team [0]: > In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there's no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power. [0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-alienated-mac-loyalists https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple...
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
The macOS team was dissolved and absorbed by the iOS team. It showed when I submitted a feature suggestion for a macOS app and the Apple employee apparently only skimmed the submission, didn’t check the category, and closed it because the feature exists in the iOS app. I resubmitted the feature suggestion and made sure to additionally mention in the description text this is meant for macOS (as the submission category states) so they don’t close it again.

LeoJiWoo 9y ago

Apple is tanking their good will with these. But more surprising Tim Cook is the target of rage from a lot of people, more so than Apple (from my social groups full of nontechies). I guess that's the burden of following Steve Jobs. His personal brand was pretty synonymous with Apple and Quality. IMO I think Tim Cook needs to go. He's a perfectly fine CEO for most companies but not Apple. Apple needs an opinionated CEO who is in touch with the average American(and the normal curve). Tim Cook says things like "If you only work for money, you will never be happy", which reveals how out of touch he is with most Americans.

ciconia 9y ago

Is anyone else here sick and tired of sensationalistic journalism? "Shockingly bad", "a nightmare"? It's just a fucking security bug, why can't you just report the news in a calm, responsible manner?

thsowers 9y ago
> It's just a fucking security bug No. It's a security bug, plus a botched fix at a time when the quality of Apple software has been lower than ever (keep in mind this macOS also had the "Shows password as password hint" bug). Moreover, it's a sign that quality control and internal processes at Apple are seriously lacking.

sorenbs 9y ago

Always wait for Service Pack 2!

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

I've never participated in a class action before, but I would gladly participate if someone ever starts one. I honestly wonder why no one is doing a class action against Apple. If some lawyer decides to stand up against Apple and start a class action suit for breaking so many people's phones through iOS 11 to the point of being unusable, I'm sure they will get a lot of supporters. I really don't care for another iPhone and I don't like being forced to upgrade because my current iPhone which used to work perfectly fine and is not even an old phone is completely broken. All apps take more than ten seconds to boot up. And I know I'm not alone because I've seen other peoples phone in person. There should be a crowdfunding platform for class actions like this.

ksec 9y ago
forced to upgrade?
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Is this a rhetorical question? Yes I'm "forced to upgrade". 1. They keep popping up those notifications and block my workflow until I give in and upgrade to the latest iOS version. 2. My phone is virtually unusable right now. Like I said, all apps take about 10 seconds to "launch", during which all I see is a white screen. And in many cases it just crashes after the ten seconds. I have to reboot the app to even get it to launch after the ten seconds of loading. I think this counts as being "forced to upgrade" since I have no option to downgrade the OS and my phone is unusable.
abrodersen 9y ago
Probably because we've all signed away our class action rights in some TOS somewhere. Thanks Congress!

lostgame 9y ago

I honestly am about ready to go back to a 2009-era MacBook Pro or Mac Pro tower, shove 10.9 on it and tell my clients that I've quit iOS as a platform. It's beyond not worth it at this point. I refuse to watch my computers and phones get shittier and shittier, and with the phones, a downgrade isn't even possible. Apple, you have gone from one of my favourite companies in the world, to one of my most hated. I will never buy a new, non-upgradable, RAM-soldered-to-the-board, overpriced, underpowered, piece of shit computer from you again. And you can take my word on that.

ascom 9y ago

I recently upgraded to High Sierra on my MacBook, and I had random reboot problems: https://discussions.apple.com/message/32649321 https://discussions.apple.com/message/32649321 Downgrading to Sierra fixed it... I still don't know what was causing the reboots.

mbesto 9y ago

Apple needs to stop releasing functionality in their major releases. Seriously, I need more boring iOS vX.x and macOS vX.x releases that focus on performance, space saving, and security features, not ones that redesign f'n everything. They literally don't need any more marketing or market share, just make existing customer happy or they'll start losing the grip they already have.

ggg9990 9y ago

I've never upgraded Windows before the first Service Pack, and now Mac users are realizing that their claims that "Mac is different" were just cultish delusion. Don't rush OS upgrades!

Feniks 9y ago
Windows isn't perfect (as we all know) but at least rolling back to a previous version is a lot easier than how macOS does it.