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There's really no excuse for this. How is it that Apple wants to tightly integrate their hardware and software but then seemingly miss testing major OS updates

There's really no excuse for this. How is it that Apple wants to tightly integrate their hardware and software but then seemingly miss testing major OS updates on all supported hardware? Apple needs to fix their QA, and fast. No amount of marketing can undo the damage I've seen over the last few years.

p_l 6y ago
The same way that installer is broken for at least 5 or more years, hitting infinite loops resulting in users rebooting till finally upgrade or install passes through. Tight integration between OS and hw is mostly used to half-arse firmware interfaces, with huge amounts of "quirks" surfaced by hackintosh enthusiasts.
bgorman 6y ago
This type of problem has been around for a decade. Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. There is simply no direct business value to make sure the update works well on all devices. I have a 2020 Intel Macbook Air and I am going to be extremely conservative upgrading to Big Sur, and in fact may not do it at all since Apple seems to support security updates for years on older releases.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Maybe there is no direct business value but maybe indirectly some of the people hit by this problem could wonder if they should buy their next laptop from a different manufacturer or advise their friend to do so. By the way my HP laptop from 2014 did well with every single Ubuntu LTS from 12.04 (I bought at the beginning of the year) to 20.04.
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    My Samsung Series 9 was bricked on it's first Ubuntu LTS update. Learned a hard lesson that day.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      Something like this? https://www.anandtech.com/show/6713/samsung-laptops-bricked-by-booting-linux-using-uefi https://www.anandtech.com/show/6713/samsung-laptops-bricked-...
      - rubicon33 6y ago
        Wow. Yes. Just wish I had read this prior to updating. Lost everything back in 2013. Sucked.
        pmontra 6y ago
        I always wait at least a few months before upgrading to a new version, to let Canonical and the community sort out bugs and be reasonably sure that nothing breaks or to have workarounds. By the way, did you ever recover the laptop or your data?
- chongli 6y ago
  There is always business value to support and backwards compatibility. Think of how much goodwill Microsoft has built up for their backwards compatibility. Heck, the story of the version of Doom that runs on DOS->Win3.1->Windows 10 hit the front page today! Now think of how little goodwill Google has, due to their pernicious habit of killing off popular products that don't meet their very high standards for revenue production. Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it. Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.
  - barnacled 6y ago
    >Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work. Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
    - chongli 6y ago
      Only one case so far? Apple has taken the Mac from Motorola 68000-series chips to PowerPC to Intel x86 and now to the ARM-based M1. That’s 4 different architecture in less than 4 decades.
      - barnacled 6y ago
        I mentioned M1 and specifically excluded it since it is unreleased. Is that fully released such that I can buy it right now? Apple site says 17th Nov. Can't know if it breaks things until it is released. I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything? I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things. So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2. But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. This is the first time I've heard that, and I've never experienced it. If you have a compilation of "driver support disappears" issues, I'd like to read it. It's very common for folks to be using 5- and 6-year-old Macs with a recent version of macOS. macOS Big Sur supports 7-year-old Macs.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. I've done Mac IT for a long time and I've never seen this be the case. To be honest, I've experienced this a ton of times with Windows, where the only driver available was for an older version of Windows and not the one the customer has. I have a nearly 10-year old iMac and I never experienced what you're talking about.
    - walshemj 6y ago
      Apple as well as Windows dropped support for a few class compliant audio cards awhile back so I have a £200 sound card that is just dead weight
      - alwillis 6y ago
        Wonder if the Apple thing was the vendor not upgrading their drivers to be compatible with current operating systems. Apple has warned developers for several years that support for 32-bit apps (for example) was going away. Same thing with kernel extensions.
        walshemj 6y ago
        This was a "class" compliant sound card we are talking about here.
  - kefyras 6y ago
    Early 2008 MacBook4.1 with GMA X3100 originally shipped with 10.5 were only supported up to 10.7, and Lion was hot garbage.
fauigerzigerk 6y ago
It's not surprising that OS upgrades can fail on some machines. No amount of QA can ever guarantee 100% success. What I do find surprising though is that there is no bulletproof rollback mechanism.
- DennisP 6y ago
  All true but given that Apple makes all the hardware too, I'm really curious whether they keep one of every version of the hardware to test OS installs.
  - SwiftyBug 6y ago
    They could even automate those tests
- fbelzile 6y ago
  Apple's unique value proposition is that they control the hardware and software so that things "just work." It shouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a room full of older hardware where it's the job of some poor intern to update each device during the alpha/beta phase. Bricking supported hardware on a software update goes directly against Apple's core business strategy and should have been top of mind for the QA team.
  - danlugo92 6y ago
    The low amount of possible configurations in their hardware should make this doable.
- totalZero 6y ago
  > No amount of QA can ever guarantee 100% success. You're too quick to let them off the hook. Compared to the ecosystem of Windows-supported devices, Apple only has to serve updates to relatively few SKUs. If they can afford to buy back a hundred million dollars' worth of stock every year, they can afford to test upgrades on affected older devices before rolling them out. When an upgrade is supported on an Apple machine, then there should be 100% success -- or at least, as you suggest, a painless way to catch the upgrade failure and roll the device back. They sell the hardware and develop the software, so they have to own the problem. No mumbo-jumbo. No excuses. No passing of the buck to the customer who trusted them at the moment of downloading/installing the upgrade. If they can't guarantee success for an OS upgrade on a particular machine, then they shouldn't offer it for that SKU -- and they should lower the retail price of the MBP because it doesn't "just work." People who own these machines paid a premium for them over every other comparable laptop. I have a late-2013 MBP 13 (one of the potentially affected machines), on which I am currently running Mojave because Apple has been guilty of this kind of garbage so many times in the past. Think of how horrible it would be to put your daily driver laptop in the shop for a few days when you have important work to handle. That's the reason why Apple can't just mail it in when rolling out OS upgrades. I have had similar situations in the past, and you know what the result has always been? I stop buying hardware from the company when it becomes clear that it doesn't give a damn about what happens to the customer. Bose rolled out firmware to the QC35 that nerfed the ANC, and then pretended that nothing happened -- essentially gaslighting the customer. I never bought another pair of Bose ANC headphones after that (I had purchased 5 pairs in the year prior to that, as gifts and for myself). Google rolled out an Android upgrade (Oreo) that immediately sent my Nexus 6P into a Bootloop of Death upon installation, and then passed the buck to Huawei. I swore never again to buy a Google hardware product as a result. I just bought a MBP 13 a few days ago, because despite all of the BS that Apple has done, they have always turned out to support the customer in the end. But if their defense sounds anything like what you are suggesting -- that there is always some collateral damage when an upgrade is rolled out because QA is not a perfect process -- then I would rethink my purchase decisions in the future.
mattoxic 6y ago
With Apple, one can never quite tell if it's intentional.

p_l 6y ago

The same way that installer is broken for at least 5 or more years, hitting infinite loops resulting in users rebooting till finally upgrade or install passes through. Tight integration between OS and hw is mostly used to half-arse firmware interfaces, with huge amounts of "quirks" surfaced by hackintosh enthusiasts.

bgorman 6y ago

This type of problem has been around for a decade. Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. There is simply no direct business value to make sure the update works well on all devices. I have a 2020 Intel Macbook Air and I am going to be extremely conservative upgrading to Big Sur, and in fact may not do it at all since Apple seems to support security updates for years on older releases.

pmontra 6y ago
Maybe there is no direct business value but maybe indirectly some of the people hit by this problem could wonder if they should buy their next laptop from a different manufacturer or advise their friend to do so. By the way my HP laptop from 2014 did well with every single Ubuntu LTS from 12.04 (I bought at the beginning of the year) to 20.04.
- rubicon33 6y ago
  My Samsung Series 9 was bricked on it's first Ubuntu LTS update. Learned a hard lesson that day.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Something like this? https://www.anandtech.com/show/6713/samsung-laptops-bricked-by-booting-linux-using-uefi https://www.anandtech.com/show/6713/samsung-laptops-bricked-...
    - rubicon33 6y ago
      Wow. Yes. Just wish I had read this prior to updating. Lost everything back in 2013. Sucked.
      - pmontra 6y ago
        I always wait at least a few months before upgrading to a new version, to let Canonical and the community sort out bugs and be reasonably sure that nothing breaks or to have workarounds. By the way, did you ever recover the laptop or your data?
chongli 6y ago
There is always business value to support and backwards compatibility. Think of how much goodwill Microsoft has built up for their backwards compatibility. Heck, the story of the version of Doom that runs on DOS->Win3.1->Windows 10 hit the front page today! Now think of how little goodwill Google has, due to their pernicious habit of killing off popular products that don't meet their very high standards for revenue production. Why does Microsoft dominate the enterprise and not Google? I think the above has almost everything to do with it. Apple has kind of walked the middle road between Microsoft's extreme backward compatibility and Google's "kill off everything that doesn't earn at least a billion". They support old hardware a lot longer than Google, but they also break a lot of things with their OS updates. Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere.
- barnacled 6y ago
  >Apple also has a pretty legendary track record of successfully shifting CPU architectures without breaking popular apps at the time, something that's pretty much unheard of elsewhere Which other SW/HW companies have switched CPU architecture? I am not sure there is a point of comparison here, and there has only been 1 case so far, the M1 is upcoming and we don't know yet how well that will work. Linux works pretty well with client qemu specified as the architecture handler for non-native binaries too :)
  - chongli 6y ago
    Only one case so far? Apple has taken the Mac from Motorola 68000-series chips to PowerPC to Intel x86 and now to the ARM-based M1. That’s 4 different architecture in less than 4 decades.
    - barnacled 6y ago
      I mentioned M1 and specifically excluded it since it is unreleased. Is that fully released such that I can buy it right now? Apple site says 17th Nov. Can't know if it breaks things until it is released. I also said 'architecture change' so by your count that would be 2. But Rosetta was only for PowerPC to x86 wasn't it? There seems to have been emulation for the 68x chips but was it seamless without breaking anything? I mean any company could change architecture but rely on a customer using an emulator that isn't really not breaking things. So by my count, 1, but if I am wrong and the 68x translation was equally as seamless and breakless than 2. But to say it was unheard of you need to reference all the other companies that transitioned architecture and broke stuff. I can't think of another general computing supplier who did that but I might be wrong - can you give an example?
CharlesW 6y ago
> Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. This is the first time I've heard that, and I've never experienced it. If you have a compilation of "driver support disappears" issues, I'd like to read it. It's very common for folks to be using 5- and 6-year-old Macs with a recent version of macOS. macOS Big Sur supports 7-year-old Macs.
- alwillis 6y ago
  Once an Apple product is no longer produced, driver support completely falls by the wayside. I've done Mac IT for a long time and I've never seen this be the case. To be honest, I've experienced this a ton of times with Windows, where the only driver available was for an older version of Windows and not the one the customer has. I have a nearly 10-year old iMac and I never experienced what you're talking about.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    Apple as well as Windows dropped support for a few class compliant audio cards awhile back so I have a £200 sound card that is just dead weight
    - alwillis 6y ago
      Wonder if the Apple thing was the vendor not upgrading their drivers to be compatible with current operating systems. Apple has warned developers for several years that support for 32-bit apps (for example) was going away. Same thing with kernel extensions.
      - walshemj 6y ago
        This was a "class" compliant sound card we are talking about here.
- kefyras 6y ago
  Early 2008 MacBook4.1 with GMA X3100 originally shipped with 10.5 were only supported up to 10.7, and Lion was hot garbage.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

It's not surprising that OS upgrades can fail on some machines. No amount of QA can ever guarantee 100% success. What I do find surprising though is that there is no bulletproof rollback mechanism.

DennisP 6y ago
All true but given that Apple makes all the hardware too, I'm really curious whether they keep one of every version of the hardware to test OS installs.
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  They could even automate those tests
fbelzile 6y ago
Apple's unique value proposition is that they control the hardware and software so that things "just work." It shouldn't be too far-fetched to imagine a room full of older hardware where it's the job of some poor intern to update each device during the alpha/beta phase. Bricking supported hardware on a software update goes directly against Apple's core business strategy and should have been top of mind for the QA team.
- danlugo92 6y ago
  The low amount of possible configurations in their hardware should make this doable.
totalZero 6y ago
> No amount of QA can ever guarantee 100% success. You're too quick to let them off the hook. Compared to the ecosystem of Windows-supported devices, Apple only has to serve updates to relatively few SKUs. If they can afford to buy back a hundred million dollars' worth of stock every year, they can afford to test upgrades on affected older devices before rolling them out. When an upgrade is supported on an Apple machine, then there should be 100% success -- or at least, as you suggest, a painless way to catch the upgrade failure and roll the device back. They sell the hardware and develop the software, so they have to own the problem. No mumbo-jumbo. No excuses. No passing of the buck to the customer who trusted them at the moment of downloading/installing the upgrade. If they can't guarantee success for an OS upgrade on a particular machine, then they shouldn't offer it for that SKU -- and they should lower the retail price of the MBP because it doesn't "just work." People who own these machines paid a premium for them over every other comparable laptop. I have a late-2013 MBP 13 (one of the potentially affected machines), on which I am currently running Mojave because Apple has been guilty of this kind of garbage so many times in the past. Think of how horrible it would be to put your daily driver laptop in the shop for a few days when you have important work to handle. That's the reason why Apple can't just mail it in when rolling out OS upgrades. I have had similar situations in the past, and you know what the result has always been? I stop buying hardware from the company when it becomes clear that it doesn't give a damn about what happens to the customer. Bose rolled out firmware to the QC35 that nerfed the ANC, and then pretended that nothing happened -- essentially gaslighting the customer. I never bought another pair of Bose ANC headphones after that (I had purchased 5 pairs in the year prior to that, as gifts and for myself). Google rolled out an Android upgrade (Oreo) that immediately sent my Nexus 6P into a Bootloop of Death upon installation, and then passed the buck to Huawei. I swore never again to buy a Google hardware product as a result. I just bought a MBP 13 a few days ago, because despite all of the BS that Apple has done, they have always turned out to support the customer in the end. But if their defense sounds anything like what you are suggesting -- that there is always some collateral damage when an upgrade is rolled out because QA is not a perfect process -- then I would rethink my purchase decisions in the future.

mattoxic 6y ago

With Apple, one can never quite tell if it's intentional.