4 ms·

Apple struggles with executing many things in parallel and doing them all well. That’s why we tend to see the most prioritized products getting all the love and

by wtmt 7y ago

Apple struggles with executing many things in parallel and doing them all well. That’s why we tend to see the most prioritized products getting all the love and the others languishing. I’m talking from the software perspective, where the changes in recent years and stability issues are way too painful and disruptive. Catalyst apps are third class citizens on the Mac. They cannot even be classified as Mac apps. Catalina is still plagued with different kinds of data loss issues (mail, iDevice integration, etc.). Of course, Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had glaring issues in almost every release, but the lack of design chops and inadequate testing across the software arena (like it was shown in one of the security issues exposed by Google Project Zero) are telling examples of Tim Cook being fine as a breadth guy but not a details guy or a focused guy who can drive his teams to double down on all the software quality issues.

72deluxe 7y ago
I have been extremely disappointed with Catalina. I am keeping my work MacBook on Mojave as long as I can. My home MacBook is still on High Sierra I think, because I risk having non-functioning external audio hardware (mic preamps) if I upgrade. I did install Catalina on an external USB disk but found issues straight away: a. You can’t create any directories on the root filesystem any more, eg. / so you have to set up a redirection system via the synthetic.conf in /etc b. When I run a program in Catalina under xcode for debugging, it asks me the first time to put a password in to let me debug it, every single time after reboot. Why?? c. The file system is now spread over 2 partitions (one safe modifiable one, one hidden secret one) but if you ask for the size of the partition via a system call or via df -h, it adds the TOTAL from both partitions, eg. 100GB and then tells you how much space is used for EACH parition (not total) so you get 25GB / 100GB 10GB / 100GB This is inaccurate - I do not have 200GB total capacity. I only have 100GB. The size for each partition should be just that - the size of that partition. d. Also, search for text in PDFs no longer works?? e. If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes). I found all of these issues in half-an-hour after installing when trying to set up a dev environment on it. It's rubbish!!
- neurostimulant 7y ago
  > If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes). My late 2012 mbp (also with upgraded ssd and 16gb ram) is also crashing about 20% of the time whenever I put it to sleep ever since I upgraded it to Mojave. I'm not upgrading it to Catalina since I got a feeling that the issue will only get worse.
  - 72deluxe 7y ago
    That's why I did this on an external disk, knowing the reliance on me actually being able to use the machine for work. I am dreading that 2012 finally giving up. It's a MacBookPro9,1 with 2.6GHz i7. I put a 1TB SATA3 SSD in and 16GB RAM like you - still going strong. I am impressed how I've got 8 years of life out of the thing, and it's like new other than the plastic shroud under the screen. I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you? I notice that my 2017 isn't any different in daily use; in fact the 2017 battery life is worse and I can hear the fan a lot of the time compared to my 2012.
    - neurostimulant 7y ago
      > I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you? Every year I've been waiting for apple to finally release a good mbp. The specs for the new 16 inch mbp seems great on paper (but without any user-upgradeable parts like the 2012, but that ship has sailed), so I'm waiting to see if any major issue shows up before getting one (probably early next year). The backup option if the 16 inch mbp turns out to be no good is building a kvm-based hackintosh with gpu pass-through. I could fully migrate to linux, but still need MacOS for iOS app development so this system might works for me.
      - 72deluxe 7y ago
        I'd be interested in the KVM-based Hackintosh - got any reading material? I won an 8086k processor (thanks Intel) and the machine is not taxed heavily (other than C++ dev in Windows and gaming) so any options for multiplatform development are always interesting to me. Now to investigate the associated licencing issues!

by wtmt 7y ago

72deluxe 7y ago

I have been extremely disappointed with Catalina. I am keeping my work MacBook on Mojave as long as I can. My home MacBook is still on High Sierra I think, because I risk having non-functioning external audio hardware (mic preamps) if I upgrade. I did install Catalina on an external USB disk but found issues straight away: a. You can’t create any directories on the root filesystem any more, eg. / so you have to set up a redirection system via the synthetic.conf in /etc b. When I run a program in Catalina under xcode for debugging, it asks me the first time to put a password in to let me debug it, every single time after reboot. Why?? c. The file system is now spread over 2 partitions (one safe modifiable one, one hidden secret one) but if you ask for the size of the partition via a system call or via df -h, it adds the TOTAL from both partitions, eg. 100GB and then tells you how much space is used for EACH parition (not total) so you get 25GB / 100GB 10GB / 100GB This is inaccurate - I do not have 200GB total capacity. I only have 100GB. The size for each partition should be just that - the size of that partition. d. Also, search for text in PDFs no longer works?? e. If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes). I found all of these issues in half-an-hour after installing when trying to set up a dev environment on it. It's rubbish!!

neurostimulant 7y ago
> If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes). My late 2012 mbp (also with upgraded ssd and 16gb ram) is also crashing about 20% of the time whenever I put it to sleep ever since I upgraded it to Mojave. I'm not upgrading it to Catalina since I got a feeling that the issue will only get worse.
- 72deluxe 7y ago
  That's why I did this on an external disk, knowing the reliance on me actually being able to use the machine for work. I am dreading that 2012 finally giving up. It's a MacBookPro9,1 with 2.6GHz i7. I put a 1TB SATA3 SSD in and 16GB RAM like you - still going strong. I am impressed how I've got 8 years of life out of the thing, and it's like new other than the plastic shroud under the screen. I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you? I notice that my 2017 isn't any different in daily use; in fact the 2017 battery life is worse and I can hear the fan a lot of the time compared to my 2012.
  - neurostimulant 7y ago
    > I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you? Every year I've been waiting for apple to finally release a good mbp. The specs for the new 16 inch mbp seems great on paper (but without any user-upgradeable parts like the 2012, but that ship has sailed), so I'm waiting to see if any major issue shows up before getting one (probably early next year). The backup option if the 16 inch mbp turns out to be no good is building a kvm-based hackintosh with gpu pass-through. I could fully migrate to linux, but still need MacOS for iOS app development so this system might works for me.
    - 72deluxe 7y ago
      I'd be interested in the KVM-based Hackintosh - got any reading material? I won an 8086k processor (thanks Intel) and the machine is not taxed heavily (other than C++ dev in Windows and gaming) so any options for multiplatform development are always interesting to me. Now to investigate the associated licencing issues!