48 ms·

High Sierra macOS freezing and stops

319 points by mhasbini 9y ago

jarym 9y ago
Had the same issue - the Console App logs have taken a SERIOUS step back from earlier versions; lots of garbage that should clearly be DEBUG or TRACE level (I guess remnants of what developers have been working on). Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I think it was WebGL on Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers for my 2012 MBP and so far WebGL is working fine on Chrome without freezes. To be clear, the whole computer froze - couldn't even more the mouse pointer! Obviously, given the botched state of High Sierra in general others may be experiencing different causes for their freezing. Deeply unsatisfied at Apple over this, how hard does it have to be to take a perfectly fine OS (pre-High Sierra) and keep it that way?
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  This particular problem might not be Apple's fault. WebGL in Chrome doesn't seem to work on my Linux desktop either, just crashes. And Chrome always has issues with hardware acceleration, on some machines it just adds 1-2 second freeze before every page load, on others it has some weird flickering.
  - Jyaif 9y ago
    If an application can freeze the OS, then there's definitely a problem with the OS. In this case it's probably macOS' notoriously bad GPU drivers.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      Freezing the OS is rather easy to do and hard to protect from, especially if you want to permit an application to access a lot of fancy things for performance. I'm probably underselling how fragile these things are: I once killed Xorg and the laptop got bricked and never booted again. My point is that Chrome on Linux has many issues with GPUs too, so they at least share the blame, since they don't seem to be capable of properly handling GPUs in the wild.
- Ambroos 9y ago
  Exactly the same experience here. I've started using Firefox with Chrome completely shut down when I'm doing critical work. It's very annoying. Since about a week however it seems to have been fixed, might have been a recent Chrome Dev or macOS Developer beta build I've updated to (hard to keep track of).
baggachipz 9y ago
Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?
- jarym 9y ago
  Have to agree, my biggest concern for putting it off was APFS so I waited until no one complained about it for long enough thinking 'everything else should still be ok' - big mistake. Stay away until Schiller praises the 'stability' release at 2018 Developer Conference.
  - baggachipz 9y ago
    Apple has really been eroding their geek cred with their latest OS releases. It's going to take some time to build that goodwill again, and so far they've acted like nothing is wrong.
  - christoph 9y ago
    I think it’s APFS that’s the cause of my biggest frustration, but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about. I normally run with about 50gb free space. After three to four days, I’m normally down to about 3gb and nothing will get it to show back up, other than a reboot. I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.
    - JD557 9y ago
      Do you have the Time Machine enabled? I also have this problem in Sierra. If my Time Machine HDD is not connected, it stores the backups locally. I can only reclaim space if I disable the Time Machine and restart my mac.
      - christoph 9y ago
        Nope, Time Machine isn't enabled.
daBewt 9y ago
I had this issue a lot _before_ upgrading to High Sierra. In my case I did a clean install of my Mac and then installed High Sierra. The issue then went from happening 3-4 times per day to about 3-4 time per week. I suspect this (at least in my case) having a lot more to with the new Macbook Pro with Touch Bar than macOS. In any case, apple should do better
- vonseel 9y ago
  Touchbar == poop emoji
- dunham 9y ago
  There have been some reports that this is related to the graphics drivers. I don't know an easy way to disable the nvidia card, but perhaps disabling graphics switching in settings (so it always uses the fancy card) might help? The only issue I've had on my 2013 MBP is a black screen if I plug in an external monitor while it's asleep. Aside from that, it's been running fine. But I typically run it always plugged in to external monitor and some sources on the internet suggest that the secondary card is needed to run display port.
EGreg 9y ago
Can we have a conversation about how it can be that Apple, which used to proudly advertise on "It Just Works", is sitting on billions of dollars in cash AND YET, at the same time, iOS and MacOS experience some major regressions with every new release? I mean, Google has overtaken Apple in UI and UX user satisfaction and usability. Steve Jobs would be rolling around in his grave. Ever since the "skeumorphism" debate, Apple seems to have become a follower. I don't want knee-jerk downvotes but an actual discussion about why Apple isn't spending at least a billion dollars on a best-of-class program on establishing itself as the leader in Stability Usability User Satisfaction Testing & Regressions It's clearly abandoned the Mac store, for instance, and twice even forgot to renew its certificate, making apps crash on startup. Crazy!
- jarym 9y ago
  I can guess - as the corporation grew its culture changed. I bet management are so focussed on their big bets (Apple TV, movie streaming, iWatch, iPad) and enhancing their cash cow (iPhone) that they are totally not focussed on the 'mature and slow growth' areas of the business (Mac). This will undoubtedly bite them in the ass - it already did with the 2013 Mac Pro, the mediocre MBP with TouchBar and on the poor relative quality of the latest MacOS.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    The mediocre MBP with touchbar is the best selling MBP ever.
    - jarym 9y ago
      So what? Windows had been the best selling Operating System for a great many years. It turned into a pile of turd and continued to be the best selling OS.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        Windows has a monopoly lock on it's customers. They can't run their applications on Linux or MacOS (or they certainly would) so they keep buying it. Users don't have to upgrade to touchbar MBPs, they can a) still buy newly manufactured old style MBPs, or b) not upgrade Yet they've bought the touchbar MBPs in massive volumes. I've heard lots of anecdotal complaints about the touchbars, the keyboards. But I've also heard lots of people love both. I trust the sales numbers a little more than I do anecdotes.
macNchz 9y ago
I’ve been having this problem myself on my year-old top end MacBook Pro, it gives me flashbacks to Mac OS 9, which was the last time I had my computer regularly just lock up entirely. Not great.
jaequery 9y ago
after i upgraded, i see its sluggish and slower. i have 2013 mbp and upgraded to high sierra last week. it used to be snappy fast before but now even just on chrome i see sometimes it gets sluggish and choppy. i am frustrated i upgraded. anyone in the same boat as me?
okket 9y ago
FWTW, Late 2013 15" MBP: daily use, no problems with High Sierra
- valuearb 9y ago
  2015 MBP, no problems either
  - goldmouth 9y ago
    2017, VMware fusion causes mine to constantly freeze.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Well, i think you’ve identified the problem. I consider vmware fusion skin to a virus and would delete it the moment my employer allowed.
      - chowyuncat 9y ago
        It still has the most stable implementation for Linux development when compared to VirtualBox or Parallels. Docker for Mac is great for user space dev, but I haven’t figured out how to kernel debug yet. Two recent showstoppers, when I tried to switch from Fusion: The shared folder driver for VB will panic a Linux guest if a shared folder is accessed from a multithreaded compilation. The shared folder driver for Parallels will panic a Linux guest if you load a kernel module from a shared folder.
- bluedino 9y ago
  2010 13", 2013 15", and 2016 13", no problems here
- CharlesW 9y ago
  Also no problems here with High Sierra here on two daily-use machines, a MacBook Pro (13", early 2015) and a Mac mini (mid-2011). Tip 1: Anyone with problems can use Apple Bug Reporter[1]. In my experience Apple really does watch these — I reported an issue with an old USB headset in Sierra and it was fixed in a subsequent release. Tip 2: HN readers in Apple's developer program can use High Sierra betas to test if an issue still exists, and report that via Apple Bug Reporter or even open a Technical Support Incident (TSI). I think it's likely that Apple prioritizes (1) issues found in developer or public betas[2], and (2) issues coming from people in their developer program. None of this is to say that anyone should have to do work to get a bug-free OS experience. This is just to suggest actions to take for people who have a bias for that. [1] https://bugreport.apple.com/web/ https://bugreport.apple.com/web/ [2] https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
sarreph 9y ago
For those with Nvidia GPUs, may I suggest (as per previous comments[0]) that you download the Nvidia BETA drivers[1] for your system. (Disclaimer: at your peril — and for your relevant device... This can be hard to figure-out as what your Mac says your GPU is, in my case a 750M GT, is actually classed as a GeForce GTX 680 :') -- what I've linked to) Seems to have done a decent job at patching up some of the more serious un-usability that High Sierra caused me and my Mac. Moving to High Sierra was the worst performance-wise update I made to my Mac. I'm so disappointed with Apple's sluggish reaction to these issues, that have been reported in high numbers[2], from months ago... [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265 [1] - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-us http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-... [2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomment-345049249 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomme...
- pentae 9y ago
  In hindsight the best decisions I've made this year regarding the enjoyment of my Apple devices was not upgrading from iOS 10, and not upgrading to High Sierra. I really want to buy new Apple products and enjoy them but the company doesn't make hardware or software I want anymore.
  - sarreph 9y ago
    Don't even talk to me about iOS 11... Upgraded from a (somewhat sluggish, but usable) 5S on iOS 10, to a new iPhone 8 on iOS 11... The snappiness in apps is all there (which is what I wanted), but man the bugs! One of my current gripes is that I can only be 80% sure a photo I'm taking will save to camera-roll... I thought I'd lost all of my videos from Christmas Day morning until they spontaneously appeared 10 minutes later. Trying to post to Instagram Stories is another fun game that tends to fail 50% of the time.
    - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
      Interesting, I haven’t noticed any major issues with my iPhone 8.
alphabettsy 9y ago
My only issue is Chrome freezing multiple times per day. That doesn’t take the system down though.
- softinio 9y ago
  must admit I switched to Safari from chrome a few weeks ago and couldn't be happier. I have too many tabs open all the time using safari impacts my life in a negative way less :-) Also swipe works :-)
karmicthreat 9y ago
I get these freezes as well. Even my touch bar is frozen during them. I have not had any issues with APFS, but I usually have 100G or more free. That said I am not going to windows even with the Linux extensions. Those just are not quite there yet.
deleted 9y ago
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clord 9y ago
When this happens to me I SSH into the machine and kill chrome or one of the electron apps. Sometimes it will unfreeze enough to close terminal sessions.
sccxy 9y ago
For me it is impossible to get updates for High Sierra. App Store is not working and manual install is impossible. It tells my Macbook Air has Fusion drive which is incompatible with latest High Sierra. No Macbook Air has ever got Fusion drive.. Waiting for some free time to reinstall macOS.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  My wife recently installed Win10 on her Macbook Air. Seems to run perfectly now :D
  - Nexxxeh 9y ago
    For anyone who doesn't want to (re)install macOS just to use Bootcamp just to install the Win 10 drivers for hardware... https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier Grab the executable from Release, run it with -i . Apple don't offer current Windows driver download packs on the website. Their contempt for their own customers is beyond infuriating.
jordache 9y ago
I truly think this is an issue with the touchbar/usbc MBPs, less an issue with HighSierra. My MBP crashed all the time during wake w/ external monitor. Had weird video playback choppiness that required restart, TouchID profile going away on its own... This all occured before upgrade to high sierra and the issues persist with high sierra.
- bonniemuffin 9y ago
  Oh, interesting. I recently upgraded to a touchbar mac, and I've found that it often crashes on waking if I have an external monitor plugged in. I've learned to unplug my monitor before trying to wake it up. Thought it was just me...
LarryMade2 9y ago
High Sierra is a mess, I had someone whose computer was un-bootable because of it. I went through many "solutions" only to finally roll it back to a previous OS version via backup (thankfully they used Time Machine regularly), and told them do the current system updates but don't update the OS. I've worked through many update issues in OSX over the years, and the fixes were reasonable, but this one is really bad, and sometimes there isn't any workable solution than to roll-back. I've noticed the OSX/iOS upgrade push is really affecting a lot of people in different ways lately, another has iPad/iPod issues because you have to update OS to get a never version of iTunes to talk to upgraded iOS devices that are now locked out of previously compatible versions of iTunes - and with device signing theres no way to roll back the mobile devices iOS... and with Mac App store theres no way to get an update thats not High Sierra anymore so Macs that can do say Yosemite but not HS are S.O.L. (unless you already have the install media) Blegh.
- aaronbrager 9y ago
  You can still download old versions of macOS from the Mac App Store, eg Sierra is available here https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202
  - ohiovr 9y ago
    I want to do this with ios.
  - LarryMade2 9y ago
    I see they list of OSs but no location to actually download any older version except sierra. Where do you see that?
Pica_soO 9y ago
There should be a law for this if a company does no longer use/maintain a software properly for which a customer paid the customers should have a right to receive the source to effect repairs on their own.
shurcooL 9y ago
FWIW, late 2011 15" MBP here, latest public version of High Sierra, and no serious problems with it. Feels and acts the same as all previous macOS versions before it for me.
Willamin 9y ago
Happy user of a Macbook Pro 13" with Touch Bar chiming in here. No unusual problems to report. I only experience slows/freezes when: - I'm putting the machine under heavy stress - I've filled up all but a few hundred megabytes of disk space - the machine has 1-5% of its battery remaining
hitgeek 9y ago
I upgrade an old 2011/2012 MacBook Pro to high Sierra so I could download the latest Xcode. there has been a few times since then that the machine will freeze then show a folder with question mark icon. surprisingly it boots up fine after turning it off and on again, but I'm worried it won't last long. its a bummer b/c even though the machine is old, I upgraded to 8gb of ram and 500gb ssd and the performance is comprisable to a new MacBook a just got.
lispm 9y ago
I have a Macbook 12" from 2015 with High Sierra. Works fine with the latest version. it took Apple a year to release a stable macOS for the Macbook. Now I have very little problems, but before it was common not to wake up reliably, running external screen had problems, etc. My Quadcore i7 Mac mini is still a mess under High Sierra. I see it freezing very often and especially when the machine gets some load. It's basically not usable for anything beyond reading mail and browsing the web. It was freezing once a month under Sierra. Under High Sierra it can freeze several times a day. Last days it was also rebooting on itself, twice. I had filed a bug report, but Apple asked for a full system diagnosis report, which is not something I can give away because it would contain restricted information.
reacharavindh 9y ago
Not so long ago, I use to justify to myself that: * Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job. * Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know. * My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the one that "Just works!" But, recent weeks of blunders and annoyances in my Mac after updating to High Sierra is making me rethink. I'm going to spend my weekend configuring my Dell XPS with VoidLinux and set it up with open alternatives for most of my use cases. True, I will miss some niceties like Retina Fisplay and crisp font rendering, but my self-made solution can be comfortably close to it. Although I will sorely miss the "Copy on the phone, Paste on Mac" functionality. I will setup Tarsnap or something with crown and forget about backups except for restoration testing every year. I will use Darktable on photo library that is synced to phone via NextCloud. Instead of Apple Photos. Recent Firefox with Adblocker and Ghostery as a web browser. Chrome for browsing Facebook and Amazon. KVM instead of Virtualbox for VM needs. Docker for container needs. Sublime Text for programming editor. Clementine as Music player VLC or MPlayer for media Will figure out the rest. And put all the install/configure commands on a Ansible playbook and commit it to Github. So that next OS install is completely automated. If y'all have any tips for including in my setup this weekend, I'll appreciate it very much!
- checkyoursudo 9y ago
  I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Chrome, but on my linux desktop, I use Chromium for Amazon (and the few websites that just don't work right with my firefox+privacy/security setup), and with Widevine I can even watch Prime Video just fine. MPV has also worked pretty well for me, in addition to Mplayer. CMUS is a nice command line music utility. Works great in my experience. Obvs desktop != laptop, but I run two Dell 1440p monitors on my desktop and they look just as good as my 6 mos old MBP w/ Retina. (Maybe font rendering on the MBP is marginally better, but maybe my eyes are getting too old to tell.)
- Nexxxeh 9y ago
  uBlock Origin for the adblocker. And upgrade to Android next phone upgrade cycle, Firefox and uBO on that too.
ohthehugemanate 9y ago
Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out without quality control for things like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month. I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?
- aaomidi 9y ago
  My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system. Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.
  - b11484 9y ago
    I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control. It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such. I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years. They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?
deleted 9y ago
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adpirz 9y ago
It’s not just me! My 2014 spec’d out MBP (i7, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 750) was all of a sudden lagging with just a few chrome tabs open for the first time since I’ve owned it. I thought the issue might have been a Chrome release. This is really disappointing, I wonder if it’s a portent of more slip ups to come.
nanomoose 9y ago
I have a MBP Mid 2014; it has always had a freeze problem. During 2016 probably twice a week. Drove me nuts. I forget the 2015 rate. The second half of this year, approx, has been really good to the point that I'd forgotten about freezes until a recent "your computer restarted 'cos it had a problem".
pfarnsworth 9y ago
Why is Apple software so terrible these days? They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company? It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job. Their debacle a few weeks ago with passwords, etc, and then tripping over themselves two more times in a week is shocking for such a rich company who can afford the very, very best.
- itomato 9y ago
  They have lost their way. Mobile should be a separate brand, or perhaps the other way around. They're all about content consumption, at the expense of creators.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  > Why is Apple software so terrible these days? This is nothing new. This is status quo. It's been going on for years. Even when Jobs was around. Thinking it wasn't happening is akin to someone now saying, "I don't see any issues." > They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company? Ask them why they colluded with other tech companies to keep salaries low and thereby affect an entire industry. They've chosen not to invest in their developers. > It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job. Again, this is nothing new. Apple has a long history of failures and horrible software that people conveniently forget about as time goes on. > such a rich company who can afford the very, very best. Again, they worked hard to ensure they don't have to pay it. Enough so that they were taken to court over it, and lost. But don't believe for a minute that other solutions are somehow better. Or that other companies don't benefit from Apple's collusion, even if they didn't take part.
Shivetya 9y ago
BTDT, have experienced numerous freezes on my 2013 iMac since my upgrade. At first I suspected the NVidia video drivers as it locked up in a few games I never locked up before in, yet reverting to the Apple drivers had no better result. Interesting is that whatever is in my browers; usually watching streamers or listening to radio; still is active. I just have lost all input. Pulling the USB connections have no effect. Then there are the times it just freezes hard. the annoying part is that since I have bootcamp in all instances after a hard freeze the system wants to boot to that volume instead and even more fun, keyboard use of the option key fails until I let it successfully boot into Windows. As in, the option key fails with either USB or BT keyboard until a successful boot occurs
Roberto_ua 9y ago
Very often, after opening a lid I have to restart MacBook. I see a black screen with a mouse cursor for a long time (the most I waited was 5 minutes). I assume this is a very common problem. MBP Mid 2014.
_Simon 9y ago
The sheer volume of these type of post is beginning to smell a lot like astroturfing. The faux outrage is comical. No issues with any Apple device with the lastest software for myself or anyone I know. I can only assume that these are either edge cases or unmitigated hyperbole.
- skc 9y ago
  Heh, now you know how those of us with smooth Windows experiences feel.
- sowbug 9y ago
  You're saying that more evidence makes something less likely to be true? I suppose Elvis is alive, too. Add this to your proof of conspiracy: my daughter's stock 12-inch MacBook, purchased this summer, updated to 10.13.1 and started having exactly the same problems. The only reason I know is she recently started borrowing my non-macOS computer to get her homework done.
siteshwar 9y ago
Reading recent discussions around Apple reminds me of this story[1]. I will not be surprised if marketing people are the ones who are affecting software quality. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt
kitsunesoba 9y ago
This definitely seems like a YMMV sort of deal. I’ve been using High Sierra and iOS 11 across several devices and haven’t encountered any issues that are more serious than minor annoyances. 2015 15” MBP, Late 2016 15” MBP, self built Hackintosh tower, iPhone X, iPad Pro 9.7”, iPhone 7+. All are more or less smooth with very occasional hiccups. I also tend to avoid third party apps where possible, particularly the more ungainly ones. Maybe that has something to do with it?
DonHopkins 9y ago
Whenever my MBP gets slightly hot (if for example I turn the room heater on, instead of opening a window to let in cold air, or if I dare to have too many tabs open in Chrome), the whole system grinds to a halt and becomes totally useless, while Activity Monitor shows the "kernel_task" pinned at 400% - 700% CPU, with the CPU LOAD graph showing a mostly red mountain of system time being burnt by kernel_task. I think it may be "SpeedStep" shitting all over itself and putting the CPU into a death spiral. I've had several generations of MBP that continuously fail this way, so it's not something new to High Sierra. I'm really disappointed that Apple keeps making each model of MBP thinner and thinner and hotter and hotter, instead of making it thicker with better cooling and ventilation. I don't fucking NEED it to be that thin! What I NEED is for it not to fucking freeze all the time.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  That drives me even more crazy with iMacs. They are on a table. The table is made out of wood! It's sturdy. Please make it 6" deeper, add a real graphics card and some real cooling.
- hd4 9y ago
  >several generations Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.
taternuts 9y ago
Upgrading for me left me with missing apps and having to fix homebrew and a bunch of other CLI tools and their deps. First time I've ever run into problems upgrading my macos, and will definitely wait a while and look for threads like these before installing the next one.
- aeontech 9y ago
  In my experience you need to upgrade/recompile brew apps on every major upgrade (at least I have had to do it for last four or five). I suppose you may have been able to avoid it if your installed apps happened not to link to any system libraries? If they do though, and the system libraries change, how can the brewed apps possibly be unaffected?
pastelsky 9y ago
After updating to High Sierra, my screen freezes and then glitches with psychedelic patters for a couple of seconds every time I log in. Not sure if it's just me.
makecheck 9y ago
I blame strongly Apple’s inability to make developer-focused tools easy and unbreakable. For instance: - I do not file bugs anymore. Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front, and is then 100% opaque. Bugs stay marked New and untouched for months or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some other lame status (with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution). If their goal was to ensure no real participation in the process of helping their products become better, they’ve succeeded. - Xcode 9.x routinely has failing background processes, even in response to explicit actions, and not just for obscure features. For instance, an ordinary build seems to spawn background tasks that frequently display old errors as new errors, only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build while still showing all those older errors; I have to Clean and Build to be absolutely sure! - Xcode 9.x failures are somehow better than Xcode 8.x failures where Literally. One. Second. Can. Pass. In. Between. Every. Character. You. Type. Then, SourceKit can enter an unending failure loop, to the point where Xcode must be restarted lest you have to click OK on errors every second. And you would think I could simply move on to Xcode 9.x but I can’t stop using Xcode 8.x due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable. Apple is showing signs that a split into sub-companies would be useful (kind of like Claris/FileMaker Inc.). There’s no particular reason why things like bundled apps couldn’t just become preferred 3rd-party downloads from the App Store, where spin-off companies make iThis/iThat or even things like Photos. If that happened, Apple would be forced to actually communicate with several entities on a regular basis and improve their external-facing tools. You can bet that SpinOff, Inc. would not stand for having major problems with developer tools or SDKs for instance.
- on_and_off 9y ago
  I would love this split especially since being unable to specify a default app for many actions on iOS is a pain IMO (one of the big reasons I don't use an iPhone right now).
- Improvotter 9y ago
  > I do not file bugs anymore. I've filed a small amount but stopped pretty quickly because the web app where you report bugs is just horrible. I literally ended up making 2 bug reports the first time, 1 for the bug I wanted to report and then another bug report for the web app. I can't even be bothered to check whether those issues have been resolved, but I don't even care anymore at this point.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
This thread is full of people who unknowingly played russian roulette, didn't die, and are passing the gun to the next player saying "You shouldn't listen to any of these people complaining about the problem. See, I didn't die."
mberning 9y ago
People don't seem to remember or appreciate they quality of pre-iCloud versions of osx and ios. I remember buying Snow Leopard in a cardboard box from Microcenter for $20. It had almost no truly new features. Everything was focused on making things work better and faster. And it showed. I would gladly pay $20 or $50 or $100 or whatever Apple wanted to charge for a true bug fix version of osx.
- wwweston 9y ago
  Snow Leopard was great. I ran it for over 4 years and it's been the best OS experience I've had.
- seehafer 9y ago
  Snow Leopard is arguably the best OS apple ever released
- mergy 9y ago
  10.6 was the best. I would absolutely beat on my old Macbook Pro with ffmpeg and compiles along with vmware and months of uptime with no memory leaks, no crashes. I think that was why it was such a shock when Lion arrived and started the decline on quality. I went to Ubuntu on the hardware and did quite well for another year or two before just exiting all Apple hardware entirely.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  You're remembering the marketing more than the reality of Snow Leopard. It had all sorts of issues in the initial release. It was only after about 10.6.3 that it started to develop a reputation for being solid. Snow Leopard ended up being a great release, but it didn't start that way.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
I have an Amazon "Smart Home Consultant" coming in a few hours to help me wire up my Echos and figure out what else I need to buy to get a seamless Amazon Music experience in my house. Bye-bye iTunes and iCloud. The Airports and Apple TV are already gone, replaced by luma, echo and roku. Next is a linux laptop instead of MBP. Works out about $500 cheaper for similar spec, or same price for much better spec. And they're upgradeable, so not having to buy another MBP in two years time means I can save probably another $1500 over four years. Even the ultrathin 13" has one NVMe and one 2.5" bay. I'll be getting a 17", like apple doesn't make anymore. Only this one has two NVMe bays and two 2.5" bays. Last straw was my 2011 MBP 17" had video problems (reboots under gpu load) and they refused to fix it. Finally this year it developed the pyjama stripes, and now they recognize it has a problem, but oh dear, its out of warranty since Dec 2016. There are five apple computers in this house. They are the last.
teilo 9y ago
We are a mac-first company. About 350+ machines. We experienced all of these issues while testing High Sierra. Multiple machines, some upgrades, some clean builds. They seemed to be isolated to touchbar models, because we had no such issues on any of our older models, nor the Macbook Esc. Thankfully, 10.13.2 has fixed all of these issues for me. Before I would get a lock up almost about half the time I tried to awake from sleep. Now I have gone 2 weeks without a reboot. New macOS releases have been plagued with sleep/wake issues for years, but this one was worse than normal.
juanmirocks 9y ago
My data point: I use my MBP for its hardware and OS (which I find reliable) but nearly all the software I use is from third parties, most significantly Google, which does a much better opinion in this matter IMO. Only notes and reminders get my attention.
kaffeinecoma 9y ago
Adding my own anecdote, there seems to be some kind of problem with high I/O loads on High Sierra. One of my projects involves indexing thousands of URLs. During development I use a large (80GB+) local cache of a few million files. Running the cache code (~100 lines of simple Golang) totally brings my iMac (3.8GHz Core i5, 24GB) to its knees. CPU shows as mostly idle & memory pressure is low, yet the machine can't redraw windows properly after about 5GB of I/O to local SSD. Completely frustrating. I moved the code over to an older (2010!) Mac running Ubuntu and it handles it without breaking a sweat.
- johansch 9y ago
  I doesn't sound all that unlikely to me that all these temporary UI freezes are related to the new APFS then. "How to skip converting to APFS when installing macOS High Sierra": http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sierra/ http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sier...
hitekker 9y ago
Does it feel like macOS has become a cost center to Apple?
hsxd 9y ago
This has been happening to me at least once a day ever since I updated. This is my first and last Macbook.
donarb 9y ago
The title (which includes the url attribution) of this article is misleading. Before clicking on this, I thought it was an official statement from Apple about this problem. It is not, it is a post on Apple's support forum that started back in October.
crdb 9y ago
There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now. Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated. The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today. If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.
- tonymet 9y ago
  Microsoft is seizing on the opportunity. Windows 10 is a great platform for developers fleeing from Mac OS. With Powershell, HyperV, Bash + Ubuntu for Windows (with a 1-click install from the Windows store), on top of the existing best-in-class Visual Studio tools, Windows 10 is an awesome developer experience. And considering the power and diversity of hardware to power your development workstation, there are few reasons to stick with OSX.
- martin1975 9y ago
  I've been preaching this for years... if MS adopts Linux, ups their GUI effort to create something useful atop Wayland, while providing a seamless way to run Win32 apps until the world migrates to Linux on the desktop helmed by Microsoft, they will completely destroy Apple on short notice. It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's droid pie. Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt, GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free. Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.
davidf18 9y ago
I've been using Mac since 2011. I use Mac 2016 Office including Outlook for reading mail. The Mac generally works well for me and I run all sorts of open source software on it. I recommend the following to minimize pain. If you do this, I have trouble understanding why you'd have software issues. 1. Every year with the .1 upgrade e.g. 10.13.1 I do a fresh install by backing up everything, clearing the disk to fresh install the software from a bootable USB (e.g. 10.13.1). 2. With each point upgrade, eg. 10.13.2, I apply the combo update. 3. I reboot every day or two, depending on what I've been doing. 4. Upgrade hardware every couple of years.
apatheticonion 9y ago
Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired MacOS from a distance as it appeared to be, essentially, a polished Linux distro. Bash along side consistent UX, sign me up. I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on MacOS, it's just that after I got using it for a while, I was shocked at how unintuitive it really was. The good things were really great (trackpad gestures, spotlight, it's aesthetic) but that bad things were silly bad (full screen apps, no intelihide on the dock, no window tiling, battery, finder, garbage filesystem support, etc) I felt betrayed. (NZD, 2017 13" best touchbar model) I paid 3000 of my hard earned dollars for dated specifications so I could have access to what I expected would be the ultimate user experience on a computer. I ended up selling my MacBook after 6 months because every time I looked at it, I remembered how much I paid and how much the UI frustrated me. High Sierra was the tipping point, I was hoping for an improvement to my experience, instead they gave me a new file system and "ES5 support in Safari" - according to Tim Cook. I'm keeping up with MacOS and hope they start caring about their MacBook/MacOS product(s), because as soon as they do, I'll buy one. For the record, Windows and Linux have their own sets of compromises, but I can run them on a Laptop I bought for $800, or a used Desktop I got for $200, being equally as productive. tl;dr - I was happy paying the premium for UX, however I got an incomplete product and I was mad. /rant
- sanderjd 9y ago
  Honestly, I just pay the money for the trackpad. I've never found a laptop from anyone else that had a usable trackpad. I think the differences between OSes these days are almost entirely superficial, and CPUs, disks, and RAM speeds are all firmly in the "more than good enough" category. The only things that matter are the amount of RAM, the display, battery life, and the trackpad. You can get 32 or 64G of RAM for anything, and higher-end machines mostly all have nice screens and similar battery life. But nobody else seems to know how to make a decent trackpad.
  - apatheticonion 9y ago
    Yeah the trackpad is so good. I found myself intuitively using it rather than the USB mouse I had plugged in. Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.
racl101 9y ago
Yikes. I have zero incentive to update to this OS.
FollowSteph3 9y ago
How many people actually program software for the Mac? Not develop on the Mac but program for the Mac? It’s my experience that those who program on the Mac versus FOR the Mac have different opinions on the quality of the OS :( I know from experience that we deal with a ton of Mac specific issues that are annoying and frustrating and are due to either low quality or they just won’t fix cause it will be obsolete soon. So many items. I’m OS agnostic but I will say that in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to deal with many more Mac spaecifc issues then Windows specific issues. All kinds of random stuff just not working that should be. I can’t speak for Linux distros cause we don’t support Linux directly, but in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to implement many a workaround to Mac specific OS bugs. Like things just not working. In some cases Apple stated thue had no intentions on fixing it. Not esoteric bugs but big ones that required big workarounds. Anyways I suspect the results would be the same her between people who develop on a Mac vs those that develop FOR the Mac :(
rajacombinator 9y ago
It’s somewhat of an intractable problem. You have a bunch of khaki wearing executives who have been with the company for 20+ years, whose stock has made them rich enough to not work again. Do they care about building high performance products? Do you care? (Whether you is CEO, board, investors, customers even.) Or is it easier to half ass it and add some useless bells and whistles? Even Steve Jobs, considered to be the ultimate perfectionist, didn’t care about 95%+ of the products his company made.
paulnevada 9y ago
High Sierra, after playing with the freeze-ups and slow typing recognition for about a week I think I finally found the problem IMO. When Apple decided to re-format to the APFS file system they had a huge re-format dilemma for folks with only one SSD available to boot with. So Apple decided to go to a running format of the solid state drive included in the High Sierra package. Guess what! It doesn't work! Way too much fragmentation to the point of the computer gets confused and lost trying to find needed data or a place to store it and it want's to play beach-ball. In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest. Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers. I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it. I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..
- Xophmeister 9y ago
  SSDs don’t suffer from access latency due to fragmentation like spinning disks do. In fact, one would probably be better off not defragmenting an SSD because all those writes will reduce the life of the disk.
  - paulnevada 9y ago
    Nope...OK, lets look at APFS here instead of HFS+.. Here's what I'm finding out today.. APFS understands which files will give the biggest performance boost once defragged. It works in the background when the machine is idle, so defrag won't impact system performance. For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. Apple will fix it, just a matter of time. For me a re-format did the job.. Why can my buddy buy a new Macbook formatted for APFS loaded from Apple with High Sierra and it runs perfect? Now take that same Macbook and install the HS update on a non APFS drive and re format to APFS and it runs like chit? Not my opinion but just what I'm seeing on other forums.. There is a serious flaw in the live update of the file system causing everyone problems.. I cured my problems completely simply by re-formatting the drive with Disk Utility APFS and re-installing the same data and using first aid.. I'm very happy with the results..
treyfitty 9y ago
It’s not just software. It’s hardware and service. Here’s my anecdote. I bought a 2015 MacBook Pro with AppleCare second hand. The AppleCare doesn’t expire until September 2018. So, I brought my laptop in because my webcam wasn’t working all of a sudden. This is where the proverbial shit hit the fan: 1. Required a full display replacement, and the Apple technician dropped my laptop and left scuffs on the bottom. This was noted, and they replaced the bottom without even bringing it up to me (but it took an extra day to wait for the part to arrive). Upon picking it up, I noticed there was a dent, an obvious dent, on the corner panel that they didn’t fix. The apple store was so crowded, and the tech was unwilling to reason with me (cosmetic damage isn’t covered, this is the way it was brought in... ya da ya da)so I left. 2. Emailed Tim Cook. No response (obviously). Escalated (maybe Cook deferred my case to them and they left a note on my account?) to customer relations and they said to bring it in for repair. 3. Brought it in for repair, and when I got it back, the headphone jack and thunderbolt ports weren’t working because the side panel was shifted to the point where the peripherals couldn’t be plugged in properly, unless I really jammed it in there (and even then it didn’t work). 4. Emailed Tim Cook again, bringing this to their attention that their 5th Ave. flagship store is really cutting corners on repairs. At this point, I just wanted a full blown replacement... call me entitled, but I wanted to exercise my insurance, which was purchased just in case shit broke. Well, shit broke and they mess up every repair. So, am I wrong to want a replacement? No response again, but customer relations said “we spoke to the manager of the store, they said to come back in.” Went back in, and the manager says “sorry, we can’t replace it. But we can fix it again.” I was like, ok... you couldn’t tell me that over the phone? I had to subject myself to the madness of the 5th Ave location for no reason? 5. The deemed the issue as a logic board issue. Replaced the logic board. When I came to pick it up, the Genius says “... idk why they replaced the logic board... your left ports are misaligned and damaged- it has nothing to do with the logic board.” My left ports still don’t work, but I don’t want to deal with Apple anymore. Granted, they shipped me a pair of AirPods as a compromise since my headphone jacks don’t work... but this was the worst experience I’ve had with any warranty/insurance process. Including car accident, and home insurance. Health insurance is still the absolute worst, but that’s a tough bar to pass- point is, Apples quality everywhere has deteriorated to the point where they’re almost trying to cut corners on purpose, rather than excelling at hardware + service, like they used to.
willhackett 9y ago
I thought it was just me. But to see so many people disappointed with the decline in quality of macOS and accompanying products is somewhat comforting—at least from the potential standpoint that Apple may make some response. I've been a die-hard Apple user since moving from Windows in 2009. I'm even powered by MobileMe from the days where you paid for your sync. Nothing has changed much since then. I find myself watching things like the Essentials Phone and Google's secretive desktop operating system for some escape from the Apple ecosystem. I love the hardware. I love the support. But the symphony of hardware and software working together as one isn't as special as it used to be. The desktop apps are inconsistent and distant to their iOS cousins. The experiences in the apps seems hinged on a time long past. Newer "features" in the operating system feel tacked on—not working effectively. I know they don't want to merge iOS and macOS—but I feel they have a better grasp on what's going on behind iOS than Mac. Perhaps it's time to put Mac out of its misery and bring iOS a little bit of Mac—terminal, filesystem and more.
Friedduck 9y ago
I’ve held off on High Sierra until the issues subside which doesn’t seem to be soon. The keyboard is second-rate on my 2017 MBP compared to previous models, and had I known what a nightmare USB-C would be I wouldn’t have bought it—full stop. The touch bar has occasionally been unresponsive, or outright crashes forcing a reboot. (I’ve seen learned how to restart it. A sentence I should never have to type.) The problem is Apple has become so much worse just as the competition has finally started to produce compelling options. They still have the lead (?) but it’s no longer a foregone conclusion that they’ll offer the best OS/hardware combination.
akm143 9y ago
fucking high sera stucks while formatting and reinstalling - Fuck you apple

319 points by mhasbini 9y ago

Had the same issue - the Console App logs have taken a SERIOUS step back from earlier versions; lots of garbage that should clearly be DEBUG or TRACE level (I guess remnants of what developers have been working on). Anyway, after days of experimentation, in my case, I think it was WebGL on Chrome. If I disabled GPU graphics acceleration in Chrome then the freezing would never happen. I downloaded the NVidia drivers for my 2012 MBP and so far WebGL is working fine on Chrome without freezes. To be clear, the whole computer froze - couldn't even more the mouse pointer! Obviously, given the botched state of High Sierra in general others may be experiencing different causes for their freezing. Deeply unsatisfied at Apple over this, how hard does it have to be to take a perfectly fine OS (pre-High Sierra) and keep it that way?

zzzcpan 9y ago
This particular problem might not be Apple's fault. WebGL in Chrome doesn't seem to work on my Linux desktop either, just crashes. And Chrome always has issues with hardware acceleration, on some machines it just adds 1-2 second freeze before every page load, on others it has some weird flickering.
- Jyaif 9y ago
  If an application can freeze the OS, then there's definitely a problem with the OS. In this case it's probably macOS' notoriously bad GPU drivers.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    Freezing the OS is rather easy to do and hard to protect from, especially if you want to permit an application to access a lot of fancy things for performance. I'm probably underselling how fragile these things are: I once killed Xorg and the laptop got bricked and never booted again. My point is that Chrome on Linux has many issues with GPUs too, so they at least share the blame, since they don't seem to be capable of properly handling GPUs in the wild.
Ambroos 9y ago
Exactly the same experience here. I've started using Firefox with Chrome completely shut down when I'm doing critical work. It's very annoying. Since about a week however it seems to have been fixed, might have been a recent Chrome Dev or macOS Developer beta build I've updated to (hard to keep track of).

baggachipz 9y ago

Despite the daily nag messages, I still haven't "upgraded" to High Sierra yet because I've heard nothing but bad things about it from friends and coworkers. What does it bring to the table besides headaches?

jarym 9y ago
Have to agree, my biggest concern for putting it off was APFS so I waited until no one complained about it for long enough thinking 'everything else should still be ok' - big mistake. Stay away until Schiller praises the 'stability' release at 2018 Developer Conference.
- baggachipz 9y ago
  Apple has really been eroding their geek cred with their latest OS releases. It's going to take some time to build that goodwill again, and so far they've acted like nothing is wrong.
- christoph 9y ago
  I think it’s APFS that’s the cause of my biggest frustration, but I’ve not seen anyone else complain about. I normally run with about 50gb free space. After three to four days, I’m normally down to about 3gb and nothing will get it to show back up, other than a reboot. I’ve even run a test which supports this - downloaded 35gb of files, deleted them and emptied the trash. Same thing... space is missing till I reboot.
  - JD557 9y ago
    Do you have the Time Machine enabled? I also have this problem in Sierra. If my Time Machine HDD is not connected, it stores the backups locally. I can only reclaim space if I disable the Time Machine and restart my mac.
    - christoph 9y ago
      Nope, Time Machine isn't enabled.

daBewt 9y ago

I had this issue a lot _before_ upgrading to High Sierra. In my case I did a clean install of my Mac and then installed High Sierra. The issue then went from happening 3-4 times per day to about 3-4 time per week. I suspect this (at least in my case) having a lot more to with the new Macbook Pro with Touch Bar than macOS. In any case, apple should do better

vonseel 9y ago
Touchbar == poop emoji
dunham 9y ago
There have been some reports that this is related to the graphics drivers. I don't know an easy way to disable the nvidia card, but perhaps disabling graphics switching in settings (so it always uses the fancy card) might help? The only issue I've had on my 2013 MBP is a black screen if I plug in an external monitor while it's asleep. Aside from that, it's been running fine. But I typically run it always plugged in to external monitor and some sources on the internet suggest that the secondary card is needed to run display port.

EGreg 9y ago

Can we have a conversation about how it can be that Apple, which used to proudly advertise on "It Just Works", is sitting on billions of dollars in cash AND YET, at the same time, iOS and MacOS experience some major regressions with every new release? I mean, Google has overtaken Apple in UI and UX user satisfaction and usability. Steve Jobs would be rolling around in his grave. Ever since the "skeumorphism" debate, Apple seems to have become a follower. I don't want knee-jerk downvotes but an actual discussion about why Apple isn't spending at least a billion dollars on a best-of-class program on establishing itself as the leader in Stability Usability User Satisfaction Testing & Regressions It's clearly abandoned the Mac store, for instance, and twice even forgot to renew its certificate, making apps crash on startup. Crazy!

jarym 9y ago
I can guess - as the corporation grew its culture changed. I bet management are so focussed on their big bets (Apple TV, movie streaming, iWatch, iPad) and enhancing their cash cow (iPhone) that they are totally not focussed on the 'mature and slow growth' areas of the business (Mac). This will undoubtedly bite them in the ass - it already did with the 2013 Mac Pro, the mediocre MBP with TouchBar and on the poor relative quality of the latest MacOS.
- valuearb 9y ago
  The mediocre MBP with touchbar is the best selling MBP ever.
  - jarym 9y ago
    So what? Windows had been the best selling Operating System for a great many years. It turned into a pile of turd and continued to be the best selling OS.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Windows has a monopoly lock on it's customers. They can't run their applications on Linux or MacOS (or they certainly would) so they keep buying it. Users don't have to upgrade to touchbar MBPs, they can a) still buy newly manufactured old style MBPs, or b) not upgrade Yet they've bought the touchbar MBPs in massive volumes. I've heard lots of anecdotal complaints about the touchbars, the keyboards. But I've also heard lots of people love both. I trust the sales numbers a little more than I do anecdotes.

macNchz 9y ago

I’ve been having this problem myself on my year-old top end MacBook Pro, it gives me flashbacks to Mac OS 9, which was the last time I had my computer regularly just lock up entirely. Not great.

jaequery 9y ago

after i upgraded, i see its sluggish and slower. i have 2013 mbp and upgraded to high sierra last week. it used to be snappy fast before but now even just on chrome i see sometimes it gets sluggish and choppy. i am frustrated i upgraded. anyone in the same boat as me?

okket 9y ago

FWTW, Late 2013 15" MBP: daily use, no problems with High Sierra

valuearb 9y ago
2015 MBP, no problems either
- goldmouth 9y ago
  2017, VMware fusion causes mine to constantly freeze.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Well, i think you’ve identified the problem. I consider vmware fusion skin to a virus and would delete it the moment my employer allowed.
    - chowyuncat 9y ago
      It still has the most stable implementation for Linux development when compared to VirtualBox or Parallels. Docker for Mac is great for user space dev, but I haven’t figured out how to kernel debug yet. Two recent showstoppers, when I tried to switch from Fusion: The shared folder driver for VB will panic a Linux guest if a shared folder is accessed from a multithreaded compilation. The shared folder driver for Parallels will panic a Linux guest if you load a kernel module from a shared folder.
bluedino 9y ago
2010 13", 2013 15", and 2016 13", no problems here
CharlesW 9y ago
Also no problems here with High Sierra here on two daily-use machines, a MacBook Pro (13", early 2015) and a Mac mini (mid-2011). Tip 1: Anyone with problems can use Apple Bug Reporter[1]. In my experience Apple really does watch these — I reported an issue with an old USB headset in Sierra and it was fixed in a subsequent release. Tip 2: HN readers in Apple's developer program can use High Sierra betas to test if an issue still exists, and report that via Apple Bug Reporter or even open a Technical Support Incident (TSI). I think it's likely that Apple prioritizes (1) issues found in developer or public betas[2], and (2) issues coming from people in their developer program. None of this is to say that anyone should have to do work to get a bug-free OS experience. This is just to suggest actions to take for people who have a bias for that. [1] https://bugreport.apple.com/web/ https://bugreport.apple.com/web/ [2] https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/

sarreph 9y ago

For those with Nvidia GPUs, may I suggest (as per previous comments[0]) that you download the Nvidia BETA drivers[1] for your system. (Disclaimer: at your peril — and for your relevant device... This can be hard to figure-out as what your Mac says your GPU is, in my case a 750M GT, is actually classed as a GeForce GTX 680 :') -- what I've linked to) Seems to have done a decent job at patching up some of the more serious un-usability that High Sierra caused me and my Mac. Moving to High Sierra was the worst performance-wise update I made to my Mac. I'm so disappointed with Apple's sluggish reaction to these issues, that have been reported in high numbers[2], from months ago... [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15729265 [1] - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-us http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/127670/en-... [2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomment-345049249 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/10736#issuecomme...

pentae 9y ago
In hindsight the best decisions I've made this year regarding the enjoyment of my Apple devices was not upgrading from iOS 10, and not upgrading to High Sierra. I really want to buy new Apple products and enjoy them but the company doesn't make hardware or software I want anymore.
- sarreph 9y ago
  Don't even talk to me about iOS 11... Upgraded from a (somewhat sluggish, but usable) 5S on iOS 10, to a new iPhone 8 on iOS 11... The snappiness in apps is all there (which is what I wanted), but man the bugs! One of my current gripes is that I can only be 80% sure a photo I'm taking will save to camera-roll... I thought I'd lost all of my videos from Christmas Day morning until they spontaneously appeared 10 minutes later. Trying to post to Instagram Stories is another fun game that tends to fail 50% of the time.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    Interesting, I haven’t noticed any major issues with my iPhone 8.

alphabettsy 9y ago

My only issue is Chrome freezing multiple times per day. That doesn’t take the system down though.

softinio 9y ago
must admit I switched to Safari from chrome a few weeks ago and couldn't be happier. I have too many tabs open all the time using safari impacts my life in a negative way less :-) Also swipe works :-)

karmicthreat 9y ago

I get these freezes as well. Even my touch bar is frozen during them. I have not had any issues with APFS, but I usually have 100G or more free. That said I am not going to windows even with the Linux extensions. Those just are not quite there yet.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

clord 9y ago

When this happens to me I SSH into the machine and kill chrome or one of the electron apps. Sometimes it will unfreeze enough to close terminal sessions.

sccxy 9y ago

For me it is impossible to get updates for High Sierra. App Store is not working and manual install is impossible. It tells my Macbook Air has Fusion drive which is incompatible with latest High Sierra. No Macbook Air has ever got Fusion drive.. Waiting for some free time to reinstall macOS.

dingo_bat 9y ago
My wife recently installed Win10 on her Macbook Air. Seems to run perfectly now :D
- Nexxxeh 9y ago
  For anyone who doesn't want to (re)install macOS just to use Bootcamp just to install the Win 10 drivers for hardware... https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier https://github.com/timsutton/brigadier Grab the executable from Release, run it with -i . Apple don't offer current Windows driver download packs on the website. Their contempt for their own customers is beyond infuriating.

jordache 9y ago

I truly think this is an issue with the touchbar/usbc MBPs, less an issue with HighSierra. My MBP crashed all the time during wake w/ external monitor. Had weird video playback choppiness that required restart, TouchID profile going away on its own... This all occured before upgrade to high sierra and the issues persist with high sierra.

bonniemuffin 9y ago
Oh, interesting. I recently upgraded to a touchbar mac, and I've found that it often crashes on waking if I have an external monitor plugged in. I've learned to unplug my monitor before trying to wake it up. Thought it was just me...

LarryMade2 9y ago

High Sierra is a mess, I had someone whose computer was un-bootable because of it. I went through many "solutions" only to finally roll it back to a previous OS version via backup (thankfully they used Time Machine regularly), and told them do the current system updates but don't update the OS. I've worked through many update issues in OSX over the years, and the fixes were reasonable, but this one is really bad, and sometimes there isn't any workable solution than to roll-back. I've noticed the OSX/iOS upgrade push is really affecting a lot of people in different ways lately, another has iPad/iPod issues because you have to update OS to get a never version of iTunes to talk to upgraded iOS devices that are now locked out of previously compatible versions of iTunes - and with device signing theres no way to roll back the mobile devices iOS... and with Mac App store theres no way to get an update thats not High Sierra anymore so Macs that can do say Yosemite but not HS are S.O.L. (unless you already have the install media) Blegh.

aaronbrager 9y ago
You can still download old versions of macOS from the Mac App Store, eg Sierra is available here https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202
- ohiovr 9y ago
  I want to do this with ios.
- LarryMade2 9y ago
  I see they list of OSs but no location to actually download any older version except sierra. Where do you see that?

Pica_soO 9y ago

There should be a law for this if a company does no longer use/maintain a software properly for which a customer paid the customers should have a right to receive the source to effect repairs on their own.

shurcooL 9y ago

FWIW, late 2011 15" MBP here, latest public version of High Sierra, and no serious problems with it. Feels and acts the same as all previous macOS versions before it for me.

Willamin 9y ago

Happy user of a Macbook Pro 13" with Touch Bar chiming in here. No unusual problems to report. I only experience slows/freezes when: - I'm putting the machine under heavy stress - I've filled up all but a few hundred megabytes of disk space - the machine has 1-5% of its battery remaining

hitgeek 9y ago

I upgrade an old 2011/2012 MacBook Pro to high Sierra so I could download the latest Xcode. there has been a few times since then that the machine will freeze then show a folder with question mark icon. surprisingly it boots up fine after turning it off and on again, but I'm worried it won't last long. its a bummer b/c even though the machine is old, I upgraded to 8gb of ram and 500gb ssd and the performance is comprisable to a new MacBook a just got.

lispm 9y ago

I have a Macbook 12" from 2015 with High Sierra. Works fine with the latest version. it took Apple a year to release a stable macOS for the Macbook. Now I have very little problems, but before it was common not to wake up reliably, running external screen had problems, etc. My Quadcore i7 Mac mini is still a mess under High Sierra. I see it freezing very often and especially when the machine gets some load. It's basically not usable for anything beyond reading mail and browsing the web. It was freezing once a month under Sierra. Under High Sierra it can freeze several times a day. Last days it was also rebooting on itself, twice. I had filed a bug report, but Apple asked for a full system diagnosis report, which is not something I can give away because it would contain restricted information.

reacharavindh 9y ago

Not so long ago, I use to justify to myself that: * Mac is good hardware and software I can count on. Just pay and focus on your real job. * Apple cares about privacy very publicly, so they are probably not selling my data or doing anything stupid with it. Although, there is no way for me to know. * My work is buying the hardware for me. Why bother spending time building one that I need to maintain so much. Get the one that "Just works!" But, recent weeks of blunders and annoyances in my Mac after updating to High Sierra is making me rethink. I'm going to spend my weekend configuring my Dell XPS with VoidLinux and set it up with open alternatives for most of my use cases. True, I will miss some niceties like Retina Fisplay and crisp font rendering, but my self-made solution can be comfortably close to it. Although I will sorely miss the "Copy on the phone, Paste on Mac" functionality. I will setup Tarsnap or something with crown and forget about backups except for restoration testing every year. I will use Darktable on photo library that is synced to phone via NextCloud. Instead of Apple Photos. Recent Firefox with Adblocker and Ghostery as a web browser. Chrome for browsing Facebook and Amazon. KVM instead of Virtualbox for VM needs. Docker for container needs. Sublime Text for programming editor. Clementine as Music player VLC or MPlayer for media Will figure out the rest. And put all the install/configure commands on a Ansible playbook and commit it to Github. So that next OS install is completely automated. If y'all have any tips for including in my setup this weekend, I'll appreciate it very much!

checkyoursudo 9y ago
I don't know if you have a specific reason for using Chrome, but on my linux desktop, I use Chromium for Amazon (and the few websites that just don't work right with my firefox+privacy/security setup), and with Widevine I can even watch Prime Video just fine. MPV has also worked pretty well for me, in addition to Mplayer. CMUS is a nice command line music utility. Works great in my experience. Obvs desktop != laptop, but I run two Dell 1440p monitors on my desktop and they look just as good as my 6 mos old MBP w/ Retina. (Maybe font rendering on the MBP is marginally better, but maybe my eyes are getting too old to tell.)
Nexxxeh 9y ago
uBlock Origin for the adblocker. And upgrade to Android next phone upgrade cycle, Firefox and uBO on that too.

ohthehugemanate 9y ago

Apple went from building fantastically reliable software on beautiful, powerful devices, to... Well, this. Even die hard apple fans don't use their built in apps for calendar, music, mail, or really anything, because the design is so bloated. Their hardware performance lags the rest of the market at their price point, and skirt the lines of programmed obsolescence. And now apparently their major OS updates go out without quality control for things like a blank root password, or random crashed and freezes. I tried to use OSX's logs last week - they were spammed to death with warnings and errors from OS components and bundled software. Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month. I know everyone called it after Jobs stepped out of the leadership chair, but is that really what's responsible for the decline? Can an apple insider comment here?

aaomidi 9y ago
My avoidance of their built in apps is just simply that I don't want to be locked in to the apple eco system. Apple has always took a closed approach to their software and it's going to hurt them in the long run.
- b11484 9y ago
  I feel like it might have been the right direction a few decades ago. There was a lot of shovel ware and crappy software that was produced. I think they had the right idea to lock down the software availability have better quality control. It's very similar to video game companies in the late 80's/ early 90's. Atari had a big problem with really bad games, and people lost faith in the quality of games. Nintendo started giving their games the "Nintendo Seal of Approval" to prove to consumers that the games had been thoroughly checked for bugs and such. I can see why Apple would take the same direction, but we've come a long way with software development, especially with the rise of open source development.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Apple has relied on closed software for 40 years. They are now fast approaching the first trillion dollar company. When exactly is this approach going to stop working for them ? And what evidence is there that people are suddenly going to flock to open source software ?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

adpirz 9y ago

It’s not just me! My 2014 spec’d out MBP (i7, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia 750) was all of a sudden lagging with just a few chrome tabs open for the first time since I’ve owned it. I thought the issue might have been a Chrome release. This is really disappointing, I wonder if it’s a portent of more slip ups to come.

nanomoose 9y ago

I have a MBP Mid 2014; it has always had a freeze problem. During 2016 probably twice a week. Drove me nuts. I forget the 2015 rate. The second half of this year, approx, has been really good to the point that I'd forgotten about freezes until a recent "your computer restarted 'cos it had a problem".

pfarnsworth 9y ago

Why is Apple software so terrible these days? They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company? It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job. Their debacle a few weeks ago with passwords, etc, and then tripping over themselves two more times in a week is shocking for such a rich company who can afford the very, very best.

itomato 9y ago
They have lost their way. Mobile should be a separate brand, or perhaps the other way around. They're all about content consumption, at the expense of creators.
jasonlotito 9y ago
> Why is Apple software so terrible these days? This is nothing new. This is status quo. It's been going on for years. Even when Jobs was around. Thinking it wasn't happening is akin to someone now saying, "I don't see any issues." > They have enough money to hire the very best programmers, why are they skimping on the most important part of their company? Ask them why they colluded with other tech companies to keep salaries low and thereby affect an entire industry. They've chosen not to invest in their developers. > It's really gotten very evident that the quality at Apple is slipping big time, a lot of resters-and-vesters instead of people who love their job. Again, this is nothing new. Apple has a long history of failures and horrible software that people conveniently forget about as time goes on. > such a rich company who can afford the very, very best. Again, they worked hard to ensure they don't have to pay it. Enough so that they were taken to court over it, and lost. But don't believe for a minute that other solutions are somehow better. Or that other companies don't benefit from Apple's collusion, even if they didn't take part.

Shivetya 9y ago

BTDT, have experienced numerous freezes on my 2013 iMac since my upgrade. At first I suspected the NVidia video drivers as it locked up in a few games I never locked up before in, yet reverting to the Apple drivers had no better result. Interesting is that whatever is in my browers; usually watching streamers or listening to radio; still is active. I just have lost all input. Pulling the USB connections have no effect. Then there are the times it just freezes hard. the annoying part is that since I have bootcamp in all instances after a hard freeze the system wants to boot to that volume instead and even more fun, keyboard use of the option key fails until I let it successfully boot into Windows. As in, the option key fails with either USB or BT keyboard until a successful boot occurs

Roberto_ua 9y ago

Very often, after opening a lid I have to restart MacBook. I see a black screen with a mouse cursor for a long time (the most I waited was 5 minutes). I assume this is a very common problem. MBP Mid 2014.

_Simon 9y ago

The sheer volume of these type of post is beginning to smell a lot like astroturfing. The faux outrage is comical. No issues with any Apple device with the lastest software for myself or anyone I know. I can only assume that these are either edge cases or unmitigated hyperbole.

skc 9y ago
Heh, now you know how those of us with smooth Windows experiences feel.
sowbug 9y ago
You're saying that more evidence makes something less likely to be true? I suppose Elvis is alive, too. Add this to your proof of conspiracy: my daughter's stock 12-inch MacBook, purchased this summer, updated to 10.13.1 and started having exactly the same problems. The only reason I know is she recently started borrowing my non-macOS computer to get her homework done.

siteshwar 9y ago

Reading recent discussions around Apple reminds me of this story[1]. I will not be surprised if marketing people are the ones who are affecting software quality. [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19970213_01.txt

kitsunesoba 9y ago

This definitely seems like a YMMV sort of deal. I’ve been using High Sierra and iOS 11 across several devices and haven’t encountered any issues that are more serious than minor annoyances. 2015 15” MBP, Late 2016 15” MBP, self built Hackintosh tower, iPhone X, iPad Pro 9.7”, iPhone 7+. All are more or less smooth with very occasional hiccups. I also tend to avoid third party apps where possible, particularly the more ungainly ones. Maybe that has something to do with it?

DonHopkins 9y ago

Whenever my MBP gets slightly hot (if for example I turn the room heater on, instead of opening a window to let in cold air, or if I dare to have too many tabs open in Chrome), the whole system grinds to a halt and becomes totally useless, while Activity Monitor shows the "kernel_task" pinned at 400% - 700% CPU, with the CPU LOAD graph showing a mostly red mountain of system time being burnt by kernel_task. I think it may be "SpeedStep" shitting all over itself and putting the CPU into a death spiral. I've had several generations of MBP that continuously fail this way, so it's not something new to High Sierra. I'm really disappointed that Apple keeps making each model of MBP thinner and thinner and hotter and hotter, instead of making it thicker with better cooling and ventilation. I don't fucking NEED it to be that thin! What I NEED is for it not to fucking freeze all the time.

ajmurmann 9y ago
That drives me even more crazy with iMacs. They are on a table. The table is made out of wood! It's sturdy. Please make it 6" deeper, add a real graphics card and some real cooling.
hd4 9y ago
>several generations Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

taternuts 9y ago

Upgrading for me left me with missing apps and having to fix homebrew and a bunch of other CLI tools and their deps. First time I've ever run into problems upgrading my macos, and will definitely wait a while and look for threads like these before installing the next one.

aeontech 9y ago
In my experience you need to upgrade/recompile brew apps on every major upgrade (at least I have had to do it for last four or five). I suppose you may have been able to avoid it if your installed apps happened not to link to any system libraries? If they do though, and the system libraries change, how can the brewed apps possibly be unaffected?

pastelsky 9y ago

After updating to High Sierra, my screen freezes and then glitches with psychedelic patters for a couple of seconds every time I log in. Not sure if it's just me.

makecheck 9y ago

I blame strongly Apple’s inability to make developer-focused tools easy and unbreakable. For instance: - I do not file bugs anymore. Their system is absurdly complex, requiring a lot of information up front, and is then 100% opaque. Bugs stay marked New and untouched for months or longer, only to be closed with Duplicate or some other lame status (with absolutely no way to search or read the apparently-similar bug reports to understand the issue and resolution). If their goal was to ensure no real participation in the process of helping their products become better, they’ve succeeded. - Xcode 9.x routinely has failing background processes, even in response to explicit actions, and not just for obscure features. For instance, an ordinary build seems to spawn background tasks that frequently display old errors as new errors, only to mysteriously produce a “Successful” build while still showing all those older errors; I have to Clean and Build to be absolutely sure! - Xcode 9.x failures are somehow better than Xcode 8.x failures where Literally. One. Second. Can. Pass. In. Between. Every. Character. You. Type. Then, SourceKit can enter an unending failure loop, to the point where Xcode must be restarted lest you have to click OK on errors every second. And you would think I could simply move on to Xcode 9.x but I can’t stop using Xcode 8.x due to other developer-unfriendly decisions Apple makes, such as ending support for SDKs or changing compilers in backward-incompatible ways, where using the Xcode 8.x suite (faults and all) is unavoidable. Apple is showing signs that a split into sub-companies would be useful (kind of like Claris/FileMaker Inc.). There’s no particular reason why things like bundled apps couldn’t just become preferred 3rd-party downloads from the App Store, where spin-off companies make iThis/iThat or even things like Photos. If that happened, Apple would be forced to actually communicate with several entities on a regular basis and improve their external-facing tools. You can bet that SpinOff, Inc. would not stand for having major problems with developer tools or SDKs for instance.

on_and_off 9y ago
I would love this split especially since being unable to specify a default app for many actions on iOS is a pain IMO (one of the big reasons I don't use an iPhone right now).
Improvotter 9y ago
> I do not file bugs anymore. I've filed a small amount but stopped pretty quickly because the web app where you report bugs is just horrible. I literally ended up making 2 bug reports the first time, 1 for the bug I wanted to report and then another bug report for the web app. I can't even be bothered to check whether those issues have been resolved, but I don't even care anymore at this point.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

This thread is full of people who unknowingly played russian roulette, didn't die, and are passing the gun to the next player saying "You shouldn't listen to any of these people complaining about the problem. See, I didn't die."

mberning 9y ago

People don't seem to remember or appreciate they quality of pre-iCloud versions of osx and ios. I remember buying Snow Leopard in a cardboard box from Microcenter for $20. It had almost no truly new features. Everything was focused on making things work better and faster. And it showed. I would gladly pay $20 or $50 or $100 or whatever Apple wanted to charge for a true bug fix version of osx.

wwweston 9y ago
Snow Leopard was great. I ran it for over 4 years and it's been the best OS experience I've had.
seehafer 9y ago
Snow Leopard is arguably the best OS apple ever released
mergy 9y ago
10.6 was the best. I would absolutely beat on my old Macbook Pro with ffmpeg and compiles along with vmware and months of uptime with no memory leaks, no crashes. I think that was why it was such a shock when Lion arrived and started the decline on quality. I went to Ubuntu on the hardware and did quite well for another year or two before just exiting all Apple hardware entirely.
snowwrestler 9y ago
You're remembering the marketing more than the reality of Snow Leopard. It had all sorts of issues in the initial release. It was only after about 10.6.3 that it started to develop a reputation for being solid. Snow Leopard ended up being a great release, but it didn't start that way.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

I have an Amazon "Smart Home Consultant" coming in a few hours to help me wire up my Echos and figure out what else I need to buy to get a seamless Amazon Music experience in my house. Bye-bye iTunes and iCloud. The Airports and Apple TV are already gone, replaced by luma, echo and roku. Next is a linux laptop instead of MBP. Works out about $500 cheaper for similar spec, or same price for much better spec. And they're upgradeable, so not having to buy another MBP in two years time means I can save probably another $1500 over four years. Even the ultrathin 13" has one NVMe and one 2.5" bay. I'll be getting a 17", like apple doesn't make anymore. Only this one has two NVMe bays and two 2.5" bays. Last straw was my 2011 MBP 17" had video problems (reboots under gpu load) and they refused to fix it. Finally this year it developed the pyjama stripes, and now they recognize it has a problem, but oh dear, its out of warranty since Dec 2016. There are five apple computers in this house. They are the last.

teilo 9y ago

We are a mac-first company. About 350+ machines. We experienced all of these issues while testing High Sierra. Multiple machines, some upgrades, some clean builds. They seemed to be isolated to touchbar models, because we had no such issues on any of our older models, nor the Macbook Esc. Thankfully, 10.13.2 has fixed all of these issues for me. Before I would get a lock up almost about half the time I tried to awake from sleep. Now I have gone 2 weeks without a reboot. New macOS releases have been plagued with sleep/wake issues for years, but this one was worse than normal.

juanmirocks 9y ago

My data point: I use my MBP for its hardware and OS (which I find reliable) but nearly all the software I use is from third parties, most significantly Google, which does a much better opinion in this matter IMO. Only notes and reminders get my attention.

kaffeinecoma 9y ago

Adding my own anecdote, there seems to be some kind of problem with high I/O loads on High Sierra. One of my projects involves indexing thousands of URLs. During development I use a large (80GB+) local cache of a few million files. Running the cache code (~100 lines of simple Golang) totally brings my iMac (3.8GHz Core i5, 24GB) to its knees. CPU shows as mostly idle & memory pressure is low, yet the machine can't redraw windows properly after about 5GB of I/O to local SSD. Completely frustrating. I moved the code over to an older (2010!) Mac running Ubuntu and it handles it without breaking a sweat.

johansch 9y ago
I doesn't sound all that unlikely to me that all these temporary UI freezes are related to the new APFS then. "How to skip converting to APFS when installing macOS High Sierra": http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sierra/ http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sier...

hitekker 9y ago

Does it feel like macOS has become a cost center to Apple?

hsxd 9y ago

This has been happening to me at least once a day ever since I updated. This is my first and last Macbook.

donarb 9y ago

The title (which includes the url attribution) of this article is misleading. Before clicking on this, I thought it was an official statement from Apple about this problem. It is not, it is a post on Apple's support forum that started back in October.

crdb 9y ago

There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now. Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated. The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today. If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.

tonymet 9y ago
Microsoft is seizing on the opportunity. Windows 10 is a great platform for developers fleeing from Mac OS. With Powershell, HyperV, Bash + Ubuntu for Windows (with a 1-click install from the Windows store), on top of the existing best-in-class Visual Studio tools, Windows 10 is an awesome developer experience. And considering the power and diversity of hardware to power your development workstation, there are few reasons to stick with OSX.
martin1975 9y ago
I've been preaching this for years... if MS adopts Linux, ups their GUI effort to create something useful atop Wayland, while providing a seamless way to run Win32 apps until the world migrates to Linux on the desktop helmed by Microsoft, they will completely destroy Apple on short notice. It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's droid pie. Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt, GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free. Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.

davidf18 9y ago

I've been using Mac since 2011. I use Mac 2016 Office including Outlook for reading mail. The Mac generally works well for me and I run all sorts of open source software on it. I recommend the following to minimize pain. If you do this, I have trouble understanding why you'd have software issues. 1. Every year with the .1 upgrade e.g. 10.13.1 I do a fresh install by backing up everything, clearing the disk to fresh install the software from a bootable USB (e.g. 10.13.1). 2. With each point upgrade, eg. 10.13.2, I apply the combo update. 3. I reboot every day or two, depending on what I've been doing. 4. Upgrade hardware every couple of years.

apatheticonion 9y ago

Makes sense. I'm going to use this as a venue to bitch about my experience with MacOS. I have been a long time Windows/Linux user but have long admired MacOS from a distance as it appeared to be, essentially, a polished Linux distro. Bash along side consistent UX, sign me up. I purchased a MacBook Pro 8 months ago. I walked into the experience loving it. I wanted to love it. I wasn't some Windows fanboy who hates on MacOS, it's just that after I got using it for a while, I was shocked at how unintuitive it really was. The good things were really great (trackpad gestures, spotlight, it's aesthetic) but that bad things were silly bad (full screen apps, no intelihide on the dock, no window tiling, battery, finder, garbage filesystem support, etc) I felt betrayed. (NZD, 2017 13" best touchbar model) I paid 3000 of my hard earned dollars for dated specifications so I could have access to what I expected would be the ultimate user experience on a computer. I ended up selling my MacBook after 6 months because every time I looked at it, I remembered how much I paid and how much the UI frustrated me. High Sierra was the tipping point, I was hoping for an improvement to my experience, instead they gave me a new file system and "ES5 support in Safari" - according to Tim Cook. I'm keeping up with MacOS and hope they start caring about their MacBook/MacOS product(s), because as soon as they do, I'll buy one. For the record, Windows and Linux have their own sets of compromises, but I can run them on a Laptop I bought for $800, or a used Desktop I got for $200, being equally as productive. tl;dr - I was happy paying the premium for UX, however I got an incomplete product and I was mad. /rant

sanderjd 9y ago
Honestly, I just pay the money for the trackpad. I've never found a laptop from anyone else that had a usable trackpad. I think the differences between OSes these days are almost entirely superficial, and CPUs, disks, and RAM speeds are all firmly in the "more than good enough" category. The only things that matter are the amount of RAM, the display, battery life, and the trackpad. You can get 32 or 64G of RAM for anything, and higher-end machines mostly all have nice screens and similar battery life. But nobody else seems to know how to make a decent trackpad.
- apatheticonion 9y ago
  Yeah the trackpad is so good. I found myself intuitively using it rather than the USB mouse I had plugged in. Battery was extremely poor on my MacBook though. It was 5 hours (possibly a defect, or maybe the touchbar drained too much of it?). My previous laptop was rocking a gen 4 i7, 4k screen and it gets 7+ hours.

racl101 9y ago

Yikes. I have zero incentive to update to this OS.

FollowSteph3 9y ago

How many people actually program software for the Mac? Not develop on the Mac but program for the Mac? It’s my experience that those who program on the Mac versus FOR the Mac have different opinions on the quality of the OS :( I know from experience that we deal with a ton of Mac specific issues that are annoying and frustrating and are due to either low quality or they just won’t fix cause it will be obsolete soon. So many items. I’m OS agnostic but I will say that in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to deal with many more Mac spaecifc issues then Windows specific issues. All kinds of random stuff just not working that should be. I can’t speak for Linux distros cause we don’t support Linux directly, but in terms of OS specific issues we’ve had to implement many a workaround to Mac specific OS bugs. Like things just not working. In some cases Apple stated thue had no intentions on fixing it. Not esoteric bugs but big ones that required big workarounds. Anyways I suspect the results would be the same her between people who develop on a Mac vs those that develop FOR the Mac :(

rajacombinator 9y ago

It’s somewhat of an intractable problem. You have a bunch of khaki wearing executives who have been with the company for 20+ years, whose stock has made them rich enough to not work again. Do they care about building high performance products? Do you care? (Whether you is CEO, board, investors, customers even.) Or is it easier to half ass it and add some useless bells and whistles? Even Steve Jobs, considered to be the ultimate perfectionist, didn’t care about 95%+ of the products his company made.

paulnevada 9y ago

High Sierra, after playing with the freeze-ups and slow typing recognition for about a week I think I finally found the problem IMO. When Apple decided to re-format to the APFS file system they had a huge re-format dilemma for folks with only one SSD available to boot with. So Apple decided to go to a running format of the solid state drive included in the High Sierra package. Guess what! It doesn't work! Way too much fragmentation to the point of the computer gets confused and lost trying to find needed data or a place to store it and it want's to play beach-ball. In the old Apple days we had to defragment drives constantly to keep from experiencing a beach-ball state of rest. Anyway I had to do a bunch of invoicing in Quickbooks this morning. QB writes to the drive constantly to avoid any loss of financial data in a crash or outage. Ever since I installed High Sierra my typing response time slowed to a standstill. I could drink half a cup of coffee before it would finish a sentence or row of numbers. I thought wow, this is just like the old days with my IIx. LOL And than it hit me! Ah, fragmentation! Being as I have 4 drive bays in my 5.1 Mac Pro and I had a CCC cloned copy of all my data with High Sierra on another SSD drive. I re-booted and used Disk Utility to erase and format APFS to my original boot drive. Then I transferred the cloned data back to that drive, re-booted and ran first aid on it. I've had a smile on my face ever since! I used Quickbooks this morning for 4 hours without ONE freeze or typing slowdown. In fact, if I blinked my eye I couldn't see the page changes. It's now lightning faster than any previous OS X system I've used and I only have a 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core. Not one error or stall in this message or anything I have done all day for that matter so I'm a happy High Sierra user again..

Xophmeister 9y ago
SSDs don’t suffer from access latency due to fragmentation like spinning disks do. In fact, one would probably be better off not defragmenting an SSD because all those writes will reduce the life of the disk.
- paulnevada 9y ago
  Nope...OK, lets look at APFS here instead of HFS+.. Here's what I'm finding out today.. APFS understands which files will give the biggest performance boost once defragged. It works in the background when the machine is idle, so defrag won't impact system performance. For macOS, High Sierra automatically converts the system drive to APFS as part of the installation process. The process does not move your file data. It does copy and reformat file system metadata, but does not erase the old metadata until the rewritten metadata has checked out. The metadata provides information about other data and I believe this is where the problem is. Apple will fix it, just a matter of time. For me a re-format did the job.. Why can my buddy buy a new Macbook formatted for APFS loaded from Apple with High Sierra and it runs perfect? Now take that same Macbook and install the HS update on a non APFS drive and re format to APFS and it runs like chit? Not my opinion but just what I'm seeing on other forums.. There is a serious flaw in the live update of the file system causing everyone problems.. I cured my problems completely simply by re-formatting the drive with Disk Utility APFS and re-installing the same data and using first aid.. I'm very happy with the results..

treyfitty 9y ago

It’s not just software. It’s hardware and service. Here’s my anecdote. I bought a 2015 MacBook Pro with AppleCare second hand. The AppleCare doesn’t expire until September 2018. So, I brought my laptop in because my webcam wasn’t working all of a sudden. This is where the proverbial shit hit the fan: 1. Required a full display replacement, and the Apple technician dropped my laptop and left scuffs on the bottom. This was noted, and they replaced the bottom without even bringing it up to me (but it took an extra day to wait for the part to arrive). Upon picking it up, I noticed there was a dent, an obvious dent, on the corner panel that they didn’t fix. The apple store was so crowded, and the tech was unwilling to reason with me (cosmetic damage isn’t covered, this is the way it was brought in... ya da ya da)so I left. 2. Emailed Tim Cook. No response (obviously). Escalated (maybe Cook deferred my case to them and they left a note on my account?) to customer relations and they said to bring it in for repair. 3. Brought it in for repair, and when I got it back, the headphone jack and thunderbolt ports weren’t working because the side panel was shifted to the point where the peripherals couldn’t be plugged in properly, unless I really jammed it in there (and even then it didn’t work). 4. Emailed Tim Cook again, bringing this to their attention that their 5th Ave. flagship store is really cutting corners on repairs. At this point, I just wanted a full blown replacement... call me entitled, but I wanted to exercise my insurance, which was purchased just in case shit broke. Well, shit broke and they mess up every repair. So, am I wrong to want a replacement? No response again, but customer relations said “we spoke to the manager of the store, they said to come back in.” Went back in, and the manager says “sorry, we can’t replace it. But we can fix it again.” I was like, ok... you couldn’t tell me that over the phone? I had to subject myself to the madness of the 5th Ave location for no reason? 5. The deemed the issue as a logic board issue. Replaced the logic board. When I came to pick it up, the Genius says “... idk why they replaced the logic board... your left ports are misaligned and damaged- it has nothing to do with the logic board.” My left ports still don’t work, but I don’t want to deal with Apple anymore. Granted, they shipped me a pair of AirPods as a compromise since my headphone jacks don’t work... but this was the worst experience I’ve had with any warranty/insurance process. Including car accident, and home insurance. Health insurance is still the absolute worst, but that’s a tough bar to pass- point is, Apples quality everywhere has deteriorated to the point where they’re almost trying to cut corners on purpose, rather than excelling at hardware + service, like they used to.

willhackett 9y ago

I thought it was just me. But to see so many people disappointed with the decline in quality of macOS and accompanying products is somewhat comforting—at least from the potential standpoint that Apple may make some response. I've been a die-hard Apple user since moving from Windows in 2009. I'm even powered by MobileMe from the days where you paid for your sync. Nothing has changed much since then. I find myself watching things like the Essentials Phone and Google's secretive desktop operating system for some escape from the Apple ecosystem. I love the hardware. I love the support. But the symphony of hardware and software working together as one isn't as special as it used to be. The desktop apps are inconsistent and distant to their iOS cousins. The experiences in the apps seems hinged on a time long past. Newer "features" in the operating system feel tacked on—not working effectively. I know they don't want to merge iOS and macOS—but I feel they have a better grasp on what's going on behind iOS than Mac. Perhaps it's time to put Mac out of its misery and bring iOS a little bit of Mac—terminal, filesystem and more.

Friedduck 9y ago

I’ve held off on High Sierra until the issues subside which doesn’t seem to be soon. The keyboard is second-rate on my 2017 MBP compared to previous models, and had I known what a nightmare USB-C would be I wouldn’t have bought it—full stop. The touch bar has occasionally been unresponsive, or outright crashes forcing a reboot. (I’ve seen learned how to restart it. A sentence I should never have to type.) The problem is Apple has become so much worse just as the competition has finally started to produce compelling options. They still have the lead (?) but it’s no longer a foregone conclusion that they’ll offer the best OS/hardware combination.

akm143 9y ago

fucking high sera stucks while formatting and reinstalling - Fuck you apple