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This is a huge embarrassment for Apple, because a team of unpaid volunteers are superior to the supposed talent you are shelling out multiples of six figures to
by mise_en_place 3y ago
This is a huge embarrassment for Apple, because a team of unpaid volunteers are superior to the supposed talent you are shelling out multiples of six figures to.
- geodel 3y agoOh yes, multiple six figures have always caught bug every single time at every other place than Apple.
- extrememacaroni 3y agoBricking your own devices with your own update is extremely amateurish and embarrassing. If Apple knew about shame that is.
- saagarjha 3y agoOk, let’s see your processes for shipping an update to a hundred million devices.
- cromka 3y agoThis wasn’t an issue in their rollout process, but in their QA that needs to test orders of magnitude less setups.
- saagarjha 3y agoPresumably they'd need to test more? Because I assume that whatever they tested passed QA and didn't include what Asahi is reporting.
- s3p 3y agoSemantics. Seems to me like OP was talking about the entire project of making and releasing the newest version. QA would most definitely be apart of that.
- azinman2 3y ago*billion
- saagarjha 3y agoDefinitely not that many Macs in use
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- troupo 3y agoNot do yearly release cycles.
- tambourine_man 3y agoIt’s not bricking.
- robocat 3y agoBy that definition, neither is bricking bricking. You can often use technical solutions (e.g. JTAG) to fix "bricked" devices.
- gary_0 3y agoIf you own a soldering iron, nothing is bricked until the magic smoke gets out!
- xnzakg 3y agoI would say it's soft-bricking, but not hard-bricking.
- icedchai 3y agoThe average user is going to have a heck of a time fixing it. They may not have a spare Mac, or a friend with enough tech know-how to help them. It is effectively bricked since they'd have to go to an Apple Store.
- tambourine_man 3y agoFrom the horse's mouth: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111337509620995637 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111337509620995637 There are often arguments about what is "bricking" when these things happen, so here's my take (having dealt with embedded device ecosystems for a decade+): "Bricking" is when a device is put into a state that can only be recovered from by using specialized repair/recovery tools, opening up the case (for non user-serviceable devices), or software not legitimately available to the public. Apple Silicon devices are mostly "unbrickable" because you can always recover using DFU mode. In fact they are probably the most unbrickable consumer computing devices in existence, due to how thoroughly a DFU wipe restores everything (not just all software, but even device calibration and settings get downloaded from a server). DFU wipe is documented, relatively user-friendly, and requires only publicly available software and another Mac, which makes these unbootable states not a "brick". In contrast, most PCs are brickable: just wipe or corrupt the BIOS Flash. Most of the time this isn't super easy to do, but it's rarely fully protected and there have been many instances of something as simple as setting UEFI variables wrong bricking x86 machines. The exception here is x86 motherboards with a "BIOS FlashBack" type low-level recovery feature, which is as close as you get to DFU mode in the x86 world. Most Android devices are brickable too, and very easily at that. Just deleting/corrupting the wrong partition on disk will make your device unrecoverable. While in principle they have DFU-like recovery modes, the tools to use them are almost never made available to the public (you need vendor-specific tools, fastboot won't work) nor are they intended for use by end-users, which makes this qualify as a "brick". There is also no mechanism to recover calibration data like Apple has. There is, however, a tangential aspect: data loss. Any mention of bootability issues should qualify whether the fix makes you lose all your data or not. For example, on Apple Silicon, deleting the first partition on the disk is a very quick way to end up with an unbootable device where the fix requires a full wipe and losing all your data, even though it's not a "brick". For this reason, I would say Apple Silicon is much better than x86 at system recoverability, but is worse than x86 at data recoverability.
- mitemte 3y agoSpeaking of bricking devices. One of Apple’s greatest shames was releasing Apple TV 4K, which lacks a USB port. This model could only be unbricked by Apple, until iOS 17 made it possible to do so via the iPhone recovery feature.
- gosub100 3y agoIf you were talking about the goof troop at Microsoft that is openly user-hostile, I'd agree. Their users are essentially captive. But Apple's fetish for design and user-harmony is what makes this so absurd.
- emily-c 3y agoI hope this is a joke.
- TimTheTinker 3y agoThis unpaid team of volunteers is composed of some of the best and most productive hackers in the world.
- Cyph0n 3y agoIf there ever was a team of 10x OS devs, this would definitely be one of them.
- solardev 3y agoI look at some of this code and can't imagine even being a 0.1x OS dev. How do people learn this stuff? It's incredible. I'm just glad and grateful there's super smart people out there volunteering their time on worthwhile causes.
- viraptor 3y agoEvery specialisation is specialisation. It's just that more people are into (for example) web apps than OS development. If you spend some time in embedded dev land, things like that make sense. You just get better at thinking at hardware level / synchronising devices, etc. I mean, they're still super clever, but people learn that stuff by reading about it and practicing. You could go that way too, it's not black magic.
- omgmajk 3y ago> it's not black magic. Then why do I have "black magic" on my LinkedIn profile???
- robertlagrant 3y agoMy guess is you invented the ATEM Mini.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AceJohnny2 3y agoFor one thing, when you're paid, you don't really get to choose what you work on, unlike an unpaid volunteer. There are feature lists to check off, deadlines to hit, and you work on what needs to be done, which isn't even always what you're good at. In contrast, the volunteer can choose to spend as much time as they want digging into whatever topic they want. The results differ immensely, and neither approach are perfect.
- ziml77 3y agoThis is essentially what I was going to say. Being paid can actually reduce motivation because deadlines are stressful and there's plenty of work to get done that you won't find interesting or maybe will just get bored with after the initial excitement.
- sexy_seedbox 3y agoSo we should push for UBI, people can really do stuff that matters.
- seoulmetro 3y agoUBI doesn't eliminate the requirement for jobs...
- suprjami 3y agoIt eliminates the requirement to be homeless to pursue passion projects. It doesn't stop people fundraising through other means.
- seoulmetro 3y agoI don't think people are seeking to be housed (only) and working on passion projects. More people have passion in a comfortable lifestyle.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
- protastus 3y agoBig companies are pathologically inefficient and bureaucratic. A big part of the reason people are paid multiples of six figures is to put up with an unhealthy amount of stressful bullshit.
- wslh 3y agoSome incentives work better than money specially for white hat hackers.
- MagerValp 3y agoX
- s3p 3y agoThat logic doesn't make much sense. They didn't even announce a release date for the software until recently. Why not push it back for QA? It's not like they have to ship everything on time (AirPower, original HomePod come to mind)
- tux3 3y agoThat's pretty embarassing, customers may end up with a soft-brick if an organizational problem delays communication about a known issue of this severity by over two weeks Which it seems they did, since Apple's reaction comes after the Asahi publication of the bug There are better ways to communicate about a black screen bug on boot than leaving people with the fait accompli, one would naïvely think.
- yard2010 3y agoDid you mean twitter?
- hiretrw 3y agoI hired a dev from that team and he was asking for 7 figures. It was a steal.
- userbinator 3y agoThat's what you get when you hire people for who they are and not what they can do. It's been happening to all the big tech companies and the decline is obvious to see.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 3y agoOn the contrary, that is quite some money they are saving on work time for their own employees.
- kybernetikos 3y agoThis is what I thought when I first saw xbox media center, which was so much better than anything Microsoft had done in a similar line and fulfilling an obvious need. Not so much that it was embarrassing for the company but that any company that can reasonably hope to inspire people to do free work to make their product better is insane to try to put roadblocks in the way. Also that there are lots of things you could just leave to the community. Build a good api and let the community build the ui and glue.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoNearly everyone on this thread could pick off something Big Tech hasn’t built. Companies exist to make money. That means they naturally deprioritize a lot. Asahi is doing a pretty common pattern of the loud, young new comer. They tackle something that’s low hanging fruit. It’s typically a pretty small issue. Then make a lot of noise. Everyone focuses on the small problem they’ve solved while ignoring everything else that still doesn’t work.