9 ms·

It really disappoints me just how easy it is to make macOS crash. USB and DisplayPort especially seem to trip it up. And now HDR in Safari. These are things tha

It really disappoints me just how easy it is to make macOS crash. USB and DisplayPort especially seem to trip it up. And now HDR in Safari. These are things that you'd expect from 90s era monolythic kernels. Not a 21st Century flagship OS for the most successful IT company on Earth.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Reliable OSs were a thing for quite a while by the 90s. Didn’t have to contend with the variety of input from today however.
- grishka 5y ago
  Didn't most of the mainstream 90s OSes lack memory protection AND use cooperative multitasking, which meant one bug in an app and the entire system crashes or freezes?
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Yep, to some degree at least. Even some more modern systems after that had some similar problems, where there was less or no direct interaction anymore and userspace and kernelspace was the 'best' boundary there was to offer. But the same problems still persisted within the space if the other one goes down. Imagine having a fully functional app but you still can't do anything because the service 'on the other side' doesn't work. It's better because it won't crash the entire system, but it's the same because you still can't do the work you intended to do...
  - p_l 5y ago
    No, that's pretty much MacOS Classic and classic windows line before 9x (9x added /some/ level of protection and preemption)
    - grishka 5y ago
      > (9x added /some/ level of protection and preemption) I do remember games freezing windows 9x so much that you had to reach for that reset button. Also when the system threw up a BSOD if you ejected a CD when you weren't supposed to.
      - p_l 5y ago
        The latter was due to lack in error messaging to userspace - so you ended up with the only way the kernel could raise the error involved. Games often did things that put the system out of whack, and while 9x had preemption for 32bit code (16bit was cooperative as separate thread, iirc) it wasn't impossible to break the OS state by simply putting bits of hw in weird state or by using a lot of resources.
        hnlmorg 5y ago
        There were user space errors when an application crashed[1]. Hardware operations run in the kernel space so if the hardware is in a weird space it doesn't matter how good your user space is coded, it's down to the kernel to capture that error handle it. In fact this was one of the big arguments in the 90s in favour of micro kernels vs monolithic kernels -- albeit history has now taught us that we can have monolithic kernels and protection against drivers and/or hardware failing. Any BSOD in Windows is a kernel panic. Most of the BSODs I recall were directly down Windows getting itself into a state that it couldn't recover from. Like IRQ errors, memory errors, etc. And it was often very easy for an application to force a BSOD. I remember this well as someone learning Win32 APIs "by experimentation". Also to say you "it wasn't impossible to break 9x by using a lot of resources" but that is a huge understatement. Even today tou can still break modern operating systems by using too many resources and they have far better protections (OOM killer, smarter paging and stored on media with orders of magnitude higher IOPS, multi-core CPUs that offer true parallelism of operations, etc). 9x, on the other hand, had very little to protect you in that regard. I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've hit ctrl+alt+del on Windows 9x, preying there is enough capacity for the OS to kick in the task manager[2], which back then would also suspend all operations of other applications, thus allowing me to manually terminate whatever processes were causing Windows to grind to a halt. As an aside, it was also possible for applications to hide themselves from task manager too. I had great fun playing around with writing a remote administration tool for college (sadly not for "official" purposes...) so figured out a number of tricks in 95 to work around user permissions, task management, and so on and so forth. Basically 9x was a playground where running applications could pretty much do whatever they wanted. [1] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/crash/m/strangetext.png https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras... [2] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/crash/m/mswordhang.png https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    If by mainstream you mean cheap? Yes. But if you wanted to spend money on reliability it was the original option.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    Yeah, most of them did; especially most of the holdovers from the 80s. This was one of the big draws to pulling down "mainframe/workstation" systems like unix (or what MS did by hiring what IIRC was the VMS team to build NT) onto desktop machines. These mainframe systems actually had memory protection, and more generally, had been built to do what "pc OSes" hadn't been designed to do, which was running several programs at once, for long periods of time, and juggling resource contention between them. DOS machines, CP/M machines, Apples, Macs, Commodores, and several other early machines were pretty tactfully designed to avoid the (too heavy for their hardware) complexity of that by simply building themselves to run only one program at a time. There were hacks to let you run multiple programs (like the Multifinder in MacOS 6, which got mainlined into being a permanent thing in 7), but they were just that — hacks. They were fragile. As computers started taking on the burden of juggling tons of different simultaneous programs, this fragility really started to blow up on them, and these previously "seeming stable" systems started to crash all the time.
- bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
  I think you're a decade too soon there. Windows 95 & 98 would crash pretty frequently. Not as badly as win 3 though. NT 4.0 was no bastion of stability either. Windows didn't stabilize until well after Win2000 versions. MacOS 7 & 8 also not great. The first versions of OS X were also pretty flaky. In my experience dependable reliability of workstations and servers didn't happen until the mid-2000s where just software couldn't simply blue screen an OS, or lock it up forever. If I remember rightly it was about that time that MS got serious about driver reliability, which seemed to help a lot.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Maybe they're not talking about the currently surviving mainstream consumer OSes? There were other contenders that weren't for consumers or didn't survive MS's bullying, and on the other end there's probably a reason mainframes are still in use in places.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    No, not heard of mainframes or VMS? Unix? Next-gen NT 3.X was rock-solid (from memory).
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Just remembered OS/2 Warp.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      The context here is desktop systems, not mainframes. Though the interesting takeaway from your comparison is the fact that desktops these days run server kernels, which is a testament to the build quality of servers. Which segues nicely into a recap of my point: 90s desktop systems didn't have memory protection et al so one buggy application would cause the system to crash. Everything was carefully layered like a house of cards. The switch to NT and UNIX largely fixed most of those issues but later builds of macOS seem as buggy to me as Win 9x and MacOS 8 and 9 were.
      - 5y ago
- gommm 5y ago
  I'd say 2000s, 90s gave us windows 9x and ME which were far from being reliable. Same for Mac Os 7 & 8.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    No, VMS and Unix were robust by the late '70s. Mainframes earlier. 386BSD debuted in '92.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      NT 3.x, OS/2 for the enterprise folks.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      Most people weren't running VMS nor Unix as their desktop OS in the 90s. Post-90s we had OS X (Unix) and Windows 2000/XP (NT)...basically the servers became consumer desktop operating systems because Microsoft and Apple realised exactly your point (and desktop hardware became powerful enough to run it too). And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
        hnlmorg 5y ago
        > Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced. > Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it. > Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation. Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user. > NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D. As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with. This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  MacOS in the mid-90s would crash if you sneezed. It would crash if you tried to scan a photo, crash if the network got unplugged, every Mac on the local network would crash if one of them crashed, it would crash if you touched the mouse while burning a CD, it would crash if you just left it alone for too long.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Only with a lot of extensions, which I never did.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      All of those use cases I mentioned required extensions, though. CD-R, slide scanner, all that stuff usually wanted extensions.
- culopatin 5y ago
  I think your nostalgia is talking. 90s crashes are what got me in IT and the badge of “the cousin you call when your computer doesn’t work”. All because of windows 98 crashes. Then my Masters was Windows Me. That was the boss to beat.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Inexperience talking, thinking the entire industry revolved around Win98 because you used it. Answers are in sibling threads.
denimnerd42 5y ago
my not that old intel macbook air crashes randomly :( not fun my macbook pro did the same before it.
jb1991 5y ago
Ive been using macs for 11 years, probably half a dozen in that time. Ive never had a problem with crashing. And the usual uptime is months.
- grishka 5y ago
  High Sierra on my MBP 2012 was atrocious. Not only was the Nvidia GPU literally slower than integrated graphics, the driver would crash the kernel sometimes. They did fix this in Mojave which I'm still using right now.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Observation and experience over years has led me to avoid discrete video cards in laptops entirely. They seem to be the cause of a solid 50% of all major problems, across all vendors, including Apple. They were an endless headache on my Windows and Linux laptops of old. Sucks if you need one, though.
    - grishka 5y ago
      I didn't know any better when I was buying it. I do have an M1 Max on the way though. Apple sure can promptly fix issues with their own software running on their own hardware, can't they?
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  I only ever experienced that with Linux (uptime in months, current Linux workstation uptime: 37 days, probably was on vacation or something and turned it off before leaving). I'm not saying my Mac do crash as often as Windows 95 did "blue screen" but my new M1 certainly does totally lock up once every x days. I don't know yet what's causing it but we're not all seeing things.
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    FWIW I'm sitting at a Time since boot of 56 days 16:50 on a 2019 MBP on bigSUR.
tantalor 5y ago
Keep in mind Apple is a hardware company. The software is their moat (not core competency).
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  Apple is a (system) software company. While that includes procuring and integrating individual hardware components, they're not a hardware company. They've recently been branching out into designing their own hardware (or claiming to, it's not clear to me how much they've done in-house vs contracted out or off the shelf, but I digress) but they've been making software to put on other people's slightly-customized hardware for a much longer time.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  No. One could probably get away with saying that a decade ago, but not today. They're every bit a software company as they are a hardware company.
  - mcculley 5y ago
    Apple is a systems company. I would not bother with macOS for use on other hardware. I would not buy Apple laptops if not for macOS. For a given feature, the user might not know how much of the implementation was done in software versus hardware. Apple excels at integrating their software with their hardware. I was using Linux on laptops until 2004. When I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 and experienced WiFi, sound, and printing working reliably, I realized I could no longer bother with Linux on laptops. This reliability has suffered lately and I hope they can get it back.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      Perhaps it's time to give Linux on laptops another try? ;)
      - mcculley 5y ago
        Okay, I'll bite. Which distribution works on modern hardware and supports suspend/resume, WiFi, sound, external monitors, and printing without me digging into a config file at every different place I visit? Just to be clear, I have been using Linux since 1992. I am completely comfortable with Linux on the desktop and the server. What I found is that Linux does not deal well with configuration, and configuration on laptops changes daily (or more).
jaywalk 5y ago
> the most successful IT company on Earth By what measure?
- andrecarini 5y ago
  Brand value, probably.
- adoxyz 5y ago
  money?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Liquid cash and total valuation. Before the government asked them to start divesting, they had something like 200 billion dollars in liquid cash, sitting around doing nothing.
  - skuthus 5y ago
    you know that's bad, right?
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      Oh, for sure. The fact that a company with billions of dollars couldn't research a way to fit a 1080p webcam into their bezel is utterly hysterical, and it's pretty endemic of the pearls-before-swine attitude that the Apple Treasury takes.
      - nouveaux 5y ago
        This attitude is what caused Jony Ive's Apple in 2016. Thinner, lighter and less bezels is what made laptops worse. No thank you. I'd rather have a thicker laptop with ports and longer battery life. I would rather have a higher quality camera than having a smaller bezel.
        smoldesu 5y ago
aquanext 5y ago
Given the magnitude of the changes lately, I'm not surprised. I think these things will get sorted, though.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > I think these things will get sorted, though. I had been saying this for nearly the past decade. I'm done saying it. macOS is still much better than the alternatives, but the golden age of it being in another universe entirely is over.

mixmastamyk 5y ago

Reliable OSs were a thing for quite a while by the 90s. Didn’t have to contend with the variety of input from today however.

grishka 5y ago
Didn't most of the mainstream 90s OSes lack memory protection AND use cooperative multitasking, which meant one bug in an app and the entire system crashes or freezes?
- oneplane 5y ago
  Yep, to some degree at least. Even some more modern systems after that had some similar problems, where there was less or no direct interaction anymore and userspace and kernelspace was the 'best' boundary there was to offer. But the same problems still persisted within the space if the other one goes down. Imagine having a fully functional app but you still can't do anything because the service 'on the other side' doesn't work. It's better because it won't crash the entire system, but it's the same because you still can't do the work you intended to do...
- p_l 5y ago
  No, that's pretty much MacOS Classic and classic windows line before 9x (9x added /some/ level of protection and preemption)
  - grishka 5y ago
    > (9x added /some/ level of protection and preemption) I do remember games freezing windows 9x so much that you had to reach for that reset button. Also when the system threw up a BSOD if you ejected a CD when you weren't supposed to.
    - p_l 5y ago
      The latter was due to lack in error messaging to userspace - so you ended up with the only way the kernel could raise the error involved. Games often did things that put the system out of whack, and while 9x had preemption for 32bit code (16bit was cooperative as separate thread, iirc) it wasn't impossible to break the OS state by simply putting bits of hw in weird state or by using a lot of resources.
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        There were user space errors when an application crashed[1]. Hardware operations run in the kernel space so if the hardware is in a weird space it doesn't matter how good your user space is coded, it's down to the kernel to capture that error handle it. In fact this was one of the big arguments in the 90s in favour of micro kernels vs monolithic kernels -- albeit history has now taught us that we can have monolithic kernels and protection against drivers and/or hardware failing. Any BSOD in Windows is a kernel panic. Most of the BSODs I recall were directly down Windows getting itself into a state that it couldn't recover from. Like IRQ errors, memory errors, etc. And it was often very easy for an application to force a BSOD. I remember this well as someone learning Win32 APIs "by experimentation". Also to say you "it wasn't impossible to break 9x by using a lot of resources" but that is a huge understatement. Even today tou can still break modern operating systems by using too many resources and they have far better protections (OOM killer, smarter paging and stored on media with orders of magnitude higher IOPS, multi-core CPUs that offer true parallelism of operations, etc). 9x, on the other hand, had very little to protect you in that regard. I couldn't even estimate the number of times I've hit ctrl+alt+del on Windows 9x, preying there is enough capacity for the OS to kick in the task manager[2], which back then would also suspend all operations of other applications, thus allowing me to manually terminate whatever processes were causing Windows to grind to a halt. As an aside, it was also possible for applications to hide themselves from task manager too. I had great fun playing around with writing a remote administration tool for college (sadly not for "official" purposes...) so figured out a number of tricks in 95 to work around user permissions, task management, and so on and so forth. Basically 9x was a playground where running applications could pretty much do whatever they wanted. [1] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/crash/m/strangetext.png https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras... [2] https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/crash/m/mswordhang.png https://telcontar.net/store/archive/CrashGallery/images/cras...
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  If by mainstream you mean cheap? Yes. But if you wanted to spend money on reliability it was the original option.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  Yeah, most of them did; especially most of the holdovers from the 80s. This was one of the big draws to pulling down "mainframe/workstation" systems like unix (or what MS did by hiring what IIRC was the VMS team to build NT) onto desktop machines. These mainframe systems actually had memory protection, and more generally, had been built to do what "pc OSes" hadn't been designed to do, which was running several programs at once, for long periods of time, and juggling resource contention between them. DOS machines, CP/M machines, Apples, Macs, Commodores, and several other early machines were pretty tactfully designed to avoid the (too heavy for their hardware) complexity of that by simply building themselves to run only one program at a time. There were hacks to let you run multiple programs (like the Multifinder in MacOS 6, which got mainlined into being a permanent thing in 7), but they were just that — hacks. They were fragile. As computers started taking on the burden of juggling tons of different simultaneous programs, this fragility really started to blow up on them, and these previously "seeming stable" systems started to crash all the time.
bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
I think you're a decade too soon there. Windows 95 & 98 would crash pretty frequently. Not as badly as win 3 though. NT 4.0 was no bastion of stability either. Windows didn't stabilize until well after Win2000 versions. MacOS 7 & 8 also not great. The first versions of OS X were also pretty flaky. In my experience dependable reliability of workstations and servers didn't happen until the mid-2000s where just software couldn't simply blue screen an OS, or lock it up forever. If I remember rightly it was about that time that MS got serious about driver reliability, which seemed to help a lot.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Maybe they're not talking about the currently surviving mainstream consumer OSes? There were other contenders that weren't for consumers or didn't survive MS's bullying, and on the other end there's probably a reason mainframes are still in use in places.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  No, not heard of mainframes or VMS? Unix? Next-gen NT 3.X was rock-solid (from memory).
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Just remembered OS/2 Warp.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    The context here is desktop systems, not mainframes. Though the interesting takeaway from your comparison is the fact that desktops these days run server kernels, which is a testament to the build quality of servers. Which segues nicely into a recap of my point: 90s desktop systems didn't have memory protection et al so one buggy application would cause the system to crash. Everything was carefully layered like a house of cards. The switch to NT and UNIX largely fixed most of those issues but later builds of macOS seem as buggy to me as Win 9x and MacOS 8 and 9 were.
    - 5y ago
gommm 5y ago
I'd say 2000s, 90s gave us windows 9x and ME which were far from being reliable. Same for Mac Os 7 & 8.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  No, VMS and Unix were robust by the late '70s. Mainframes earlier. 386BSD debuted in '92.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    NT 3.x, OS/2 for the enterprise folks.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    Most people weren't running VMS nor Unix as their desktop OS in the 90s. Post-90s we had OS X (Unix) and Windows 2000/XP (NT)...basically the servers became consumer desktop operating systems because Microsoft and Apple realised exactly your point (and desktop hardware became powerful enough to run it too). And that brings me back to my original point: recent versions macOS feels like a departure from the rock solid mainframe platforms and a return to the old monolithic kernels that would panic every few days.
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D.
      - hnlmorg 5y ago
        > Yes and no. My point was that reliability is old... older than the desktop. It was invented by the 70s and came to the desktop by the 90s, a few years after the 386 made it possible and the price was brought down to an extra thousand dollars or so. I don't know about you but I wasn't running Internet Explorer on 386BSD in the mid 90s. :P I do get your point -- I honestly do -- and it is a well formed one too. Unfortunately you're missing the context of the conversation by listing all these workstations. Instability of the main personal computing platforms was a real thing. Listing niche platforms and workstations doesn't change the everyday trauma that the majority of desktop users faced. > Also, there is nothing special about a "server operating systems," it's just another application. Reliability came from hardware and OS isolation, which costs more. You second sentence contradicts your first sentence. In fact your second sentence basically agrees with an earlier point I'm making despite it being prefixed by a sentence that reads like you're trying to disagree with it. > Too costly for end-users in the 80s, reasonable for those who cared by the mid-90s. Which is what my original comment said. I think you're overestimating the budget most households had in the mid-90s. And definitely overestimating the capabilities of most desktop users. In 1995 I wasn't even running an Intel CPU, instead having cheap knock off that lacked a number of features (it might have been Cyrix but I'm not 100% sure). Let alone a workstation. Your post is very typical of the "you could just..." meme on HN where a comment starts out making a claim that something is easy and then goes on to list something that is very much specialised tech and well outside the realm of "easy" for your average user. > NT, OS/2, 386BSD... all from the 90s, Q.E.D. As were BeOS, NeXT and plenty of others. And in fact I personally did run BeOS, Linux, (amongst others) in the late 90s -- when I eventually replaced the Intel-clone with a workstation class board (and it was a fantastic bit of hardware too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 ). But my point wasn't that no stable platforms existed -- obviously they did. The point was instability was a common pain for personal computing in the 90s. Even with BeOS and Linux installed I still found I needed to drop back to Windows regularly for specific tasks and I'm in the top 1% of technically capable users. So imagine what the other 99% were stuck with. This is where you're talking cross purposes. You're making a point nobody technically disagrees with but equally nobody was technically discussing either. You're making an academic point that doesn't contradict the spirit of the conversation.
jeffbee 5y ago
MacOS in the mid-90s would crash if you sneezed. It would crash if you tried to scan a photo, crash if the network got unplugged, every Mac on the local network would crash if one of them crashed, it would crash if you touched the mouse while burning a CD, it would crash if you just left it alone for too long.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Only with a lot of extensions, which I never did.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    All of those use cases I mentioned required extensions, though. CD-R, slide scanner, all that stuff usually wanted extensions.
culopatin 5y ago
I think your nostalgia is talking. 90s crashes are what got me in IT and the badge of “the cousin you call when your computer doesn’t work”. All because of windows 98 crashes. Then my Masters was Windows Me. That was the boss to beat.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Inexperience talking, thinking the entire industry revolved around Win98 because you used it. Answers are in sibling threads.

denimnerd42 5y ago

my not that old intel macbook air crashes randomly :( not fun my macbook pro did the same before it.

jb1991 5y ago

Ive been using macs for 11 years, probably half a dozen in that time. Ive never had a problem with crashing. And the usual uptime is months.

grishka 5y ago
High Sierra on my MBP 2012 was atrocious. Not only was the Nvidia GPU literally slower than integrated graphics, the driver would crash the kernel sometimes. They did fix this in Mojave which I'm still using right now.
- handrous 5y ago
  Observation and experience over years has led me to avoid discrete video cards in laptops entirely. They seem to be the cause of a solid 50% of all major problems, across all vendors, including Apple. They were an endless headache on my Windows and Linux laptops of old. Sucks if you need one, though.
  - grishka 5y ago
    I didn't know any better when I was buying it. I do have an M1 Max on the way though. Apple sure can promptly fix issues with their own software running on their own hardware, can't they?
TacticalCoder 5y ago
I only ever experienced that with Linux (uptime in months, current Linux workstation uptime: 37 days, probably was on vacation or something and turned it off before leaving). I'm not saying my Mac do crash as often as Windows 95 did "blue screen" but my new M1 certainly does totally lock up once every x days. I don't know yet what's causing it but we're not all seeing things.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  FWIW I'm sitting at a Time since boot of 56 days 16:50 on a 2019 MBP on bigSUR.

tantalor 5y ago

Keep in mind Apple is a hardware company. The software is their moat (not core competency).

jfrunyon 5y ago
Apple is a (system) software company. While that includes procuring and integrating individual hardware components, they're not a hardware company. They've recently been branching out into designing their own hardware (or claiming to, it's not clear to me how much they've done in-house vs contracted out or off the shelf, but I digress) but they've been making software to put on other people's slightly-customized hardware for a much longer time.
comeonseriously 5y ago
No. One could probably get away with saying that a decade ago, but not today. They're every bit a software company as they are a hardware company.
- mcculley 5y ago
  Apple is a systems company. I would not bother with macOS for use on other hardware. I would not buy Apple laptops if not for macOS. For a given feature, the user might not know how much of the implementation was done in software versus hardware. Apple excels at integrating their software with their hardware. I was using Linux on laptops until 2004. When I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 and experienced WiFi, sound, and printing working reliably, I realized I could no longer bother with Linux on laptops. This reliability has suffered lately and I hope they can get it back.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    Perhaps it's time to give Linux on laptops another try? ;)
    - mcculley 5y ago
      Okay, I'll bite. Which distribution works on modern hardware and supports suspend/resume, WiFi, sound, external monitors, and printing without me digging into a config file at every different place I visit? Just to be clear, I have been using Linux since 1992. I am completely comfortable with Linux on the desktop and the server. What I found is that Linux does not deal well with configuration, and configuration on laptops changes daily (or more).

jaywalk 5y ago

> the most successful IT company on Earth By what measure?

andrecarini 5y ago
Brand value, probably.
adoxyz 5y ago
money?
smoldesu 5y ago
Liquid cash and total valuation. Before the government asked them to start divesting, they had something like 200 billion dollars in liquid cash, sitting around doing nothing.
- skuthus 5y ago
  you know that's bad, right?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Oh, for sure. The fact that a company with billions of dollars couldn't research a way to fit a 1080p webcam into their bezel is utterly hysterical, and it's pretty endemic of the pearls-before-swine attitude that the Apple Treasury takes.
    - nouveaux 5y ago
      This attitude is what caused Jony Ive's Apple in 2016. Thinner, lighter and less bezels is what made laptops worse. No thank you. I'd rather have a thicker laptop with ports and longer battery life. I would rather have a higher quality camera than having a smaller bezel.
      - smoldesu 5y ago

aquanext 5y ago

Given the magnitude of the changes lately, I'm not surprised. I think these things will get sorted, though.

brandonmenc 5y ago
> I think these things will get sorted, though. I had been saying this for nearly the past decade. I'm done saying it. macOS is still much better than the alternatives, but the golden age of it being in another universe entirely is over.