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OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review

405 points by Braasch 12y ago

sxates 12y ago
What's missing here for me is some kind of performance evaluation. If I upgrade my 2011 MBA from Mavericks to Yosemite, should I expect any change in performance, for better or worse? Did the power management change in any significant way? Apple's mobile OSs have a way of obsoleting older hardware. I'm curious to know if their desktop OSs are trending that way as well, or if they're making performance gains instead.
- richbradshaw 12y ago
  Mavericks added performance and battery life, but as far as I'm aware there isn't a focus for that on Yosemite - the work having been done in Mavericks.
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    Apple has a pretty poor track record in recent years on perf. Especially with iOS updates. If Yosemite didn't focus on perf then it seems likely to have gone down and older machines will suffer. Thats not necessarily wrong but it is important to understand before you dive in.
    - acdha 12y ago
      > Apple has a pretty poor track record in recent years on perf Apple has a bigger problem where they're popular enough that every release has a ton of people who post subjective problem reports but rarely provide repeatable benchmarks or failures. They're definitely not perfect but if you see a report which doesn't have a specific test with the exact steps needed to duplicate it, it's wise to assume it's an urban legend.
      - forrestthewoods 12y ago
        I have experienced it first hand with both MacBooks and iPhones. That's enough to make me hesitate to click upgrade. It's certainly anecdotal but it's my anecdote that I would be a fool to not take under consideration. You should treat my story with more salt. Anecdotally a lot of people have experi need what I have and are also hesitant to update based on their own personal anecdotes. Take it as you will.
        acdha 12y ago
        The other thing people need to remember is that our perceived experience is notoriously suggestible if you don't take efforts to correct for it. If you expect a new OS release to be slower, you're more likely to experience it as slower – and that first reboot will likely "confirm" it because every persistent cache has been invalidated, one-time upgrade tasks are running, all of the app updates which blocked on a major OS version requirement are installing in the background, etc. Very few people will take the time to measure before and after multiple times to know whether there's something objectively different. It'd be educational if someone like Apple or Microsoft shipped an update which changed only the version number and then recorded feedback, particularly since there would be e.g. some percentage of people who had something like a recent hardware problem which they hadn't noticed and assumed was caused by the update.
    - syncsynchalt 12y ago
      I don't know that that's been the case on OSX though — since 10.0 the story has consistently been that each release is as fast or faster, albeit more memory hungry. I'm sure I'm missing one but I can't remember any OSX release being associated with performance complaints.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Mavericks is very buggy (locking w/ multiple monitors; finder bugs). I'd wait for at least update 2. Oh, and the .0 release will, if the pattern holds, have shit perf in some common situations. I presume because apple doesn't test for that.
- cvalentin 12y ago
  In using the beta, I haven't noticed any actual performance/battery difference between the two. Honestly, when I first installed it the first thing I noticed was the lack of sound when changing the volume.
  - zwily 12y ago
    Heh, me too - you can turn it back on in System Preferences though. It's a new sound effect.
    - dandruffhead 12y ago
      Do you know exactly where? I couldn't find it.
      - roryokane 12y ago
        I don’t have Yosemite, but in Mavericks, you can change it in System Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects, by checking the checkbox “Play feedback when volume is changed”.
  - cherry_su 12y ago
    It's still there, but now you hold shift+vol up/down to hear the feedback. This is in contrast to earlier OS X versions, where holding down shift will mute the audio feedback.
- terhechte 12y ago
  There might be a small battery time reduction because these new vibrancy effects will cause a bit more cpu consumption than Mavericks. It's probably negligible though.
  - qqz 12y ago
    Yosemite is completely unusable without Reduce Transparency on IMO.
    - azsromej 12y ago
      Unusable in terms of performance?
      - qqz 12y ago
        That's a very small part of it. I just hate the new look in some places, like the color-changing Safari toolbar, and it's just useless and annoying to me. Maybe 'completely unusable' was a bit of an exaggeration…YMMV.
- comex 12y ago
  I've had serious performance issues with Yosemite. For one, dragging around windows became extremely janky; this appears to be caused by the transparency (and the limitations of my first-generation Retina MBP), as the option to disable it fixes the jank. For another, opening a new tab in Safari started lagging about a full second before I could start typing in the address bar, which is a ridiculous amount of time compared to the previous version or competition. I was able to fix this by disabling Top Sites, but while I don't actually use Top Sites much, I never had to disable it before, and most users won't know to do that, making it a serious regression. (Chrome actually takes quite a while to load its equivalent - I don't know whether it's for the same reason or not - but it does it asynchronously, so I can start typing in the address bar almost immediately.) On top of that, there are serious performance issues with the built-in Japanese IME, although I'm not completely sure how much of this is new, and I experienced a bug where WindowServer would randomly start hogging CPU, which may or may not be related to said IME. Given all these problems, I'm surprised that the general consensus seems to be that the performance is good. But maybe I'm somehow a special case. (The Safari issue is the most egregious - is it that many OS X users don't use Safari in the first place?)
  - ChrisGaudreau 12y ago
    I've had some pretty bad performance with the demo, too. It seems to be much better (but not perfect) now with the official release. I'm not really sure why.
  - bdash 12y ago
    I'd love to try and get to the bottom of the Safari performance issues you're seeing. My email address is in my profile, please drop me a line if you wouldn't mind.
    - comex 12y ago
      Okay.
  - saturdaysaint 12y ago
    Did you just update last night? I was getting janky/bad performance and a lot of glitches immediately after updating, but it smoothed out (presumably due to Spotlight indexing).
- chaostheory 12y ago
  Without quantitative metrics, the responsiveness is just way better than Mavericks. With Mavericks I just felt like I was waiting for it all the time, even on a maxed out laptop with SSD. With Yosemite, even my 3 year old iMac is doing way better. Safari has always been slow for me until this release. The trade off is that I really hate the way Yosemite looks but I can live with the tradeoff. Note: all my machines have 12 GB or 16GB of ram
smutticus 12y ago
None of these reiews answer the one question I always want answered; will this cause my MBP to crash more often than 10.8.5? I have all the features I need, I want fewer GPU panics. I know these reviewers cannot answer this question, I just want to point out that it's the only relevant question for me. Given Apple's track record, this release will most likely cause my MBP to crash more often, but I want data on that. I want a review to actually explore this angle as opposed to simply talking about features that honestly mean nothing to me.
- scj 12y ago
  How often does your MBP crash?
  - radicalbyte 12y ago
    I'm not the OP, but my (new) MBP crashes twice a month when surfing or coding (Sublime, Typescript, Node). It crashes daily if I use Parallels and regularly when using Spotify.
    - WoodenChair 12y ago
      That's highly unusual. You should ask yourself what peripherals/kernel extensions/weird software you have installed that maybe contributing to this. And I would definitely bring it in to Apple for service if the answer is "none."
    - Watabou 12y ago
      That's not normal at all. Try and run a hardware diagnostic test, or try and see if you can find the logs in Console.app
    - x0x0 12y ago
      anything show up in kextstat | grep -iv apple
    - seany 12y ago
      I had an issue similar to this that was related to a hardware problem with the GPU. I took it into the apple store and they ended up replacing the logic board.
cdbattags 12y ago
I actually read this all the way through... Quality writing.
- toggle 12y ago
  I'll check it out, but in his past reviews, I've had the impression that the author really likes showing off his background knowledge of all things Apple. A lot of the text is irrelevant to the review, and therefore shouldn't be there. Also, the endless, endless links. He really needs to learn when something should be linked and when it shouldn't -- it really affects the reading experience on the web. You're constantly alternating between black and orange text, and being tempted to hover over them to see "what does this one go to?" His attention to detail is great, though, no doubt about that.
  - idlewords 12y ago
    The background knowledge of things Apple is one of the selling points of these reviews. Siracusa writes for people who really want to nerd out on arcana. My impression is that he sees these reviews as documenting Apple design history, and not just "should I upgrade" guides. It's fine not to like it, but it's a weird thing to criticize him for doing.
    - toggle 12y ago
      That's a really good way of putting it; I hadn't thought of it that way before. Fair enough! :)
  - arrrg 12y ago
    The links are rather the points, as is the background info. If that’s not for you that’s great, no problem, but really, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand why people like this.
  - philoushka 12y ago
    >background knowledge of all things Apple Not a Hypercritical or ATP listener, huh?
mlex 12y ago
"...If Retina desktop Macs still haven’t been announced by the time you read this, Apple had better hurry up." Near the bottom of page 3, just thought it was funny considering today's 5K iMac announcement.
vacri 12y ago
I can't wait for the 'flat' fad to be over.
- jackmoore 12y ago
  Even though it feels very fad-ish because it's been used as a buzzword/bandwagon, I don't feel like it's actually a fad. My view is that that digital design has matured to the point where designers no longer feel they have to wow users with lots of effects and visual flourishes, allowing for a more purpose driven design. My hope/opinion is that is here to stay.
  - ericd 12y ago
    A lot of those flourishes were actually design affordances, though, visually denoting certain functions and making things more intuitive. Not a fan of the super-flat design trend.
    - hrktb 12y ago
      As you say super flat might not be great, but all the designs preceding the current trend where extremely harsh on the visuals. From windows XP to 7, the windows default themes and colors where disturbingly flashy and "in your face". OSX was more bland but aqua was still kitch and unneedingly strippy. iOS6 app's ultra textured or "realistic" interfaces were the peak of that trend IMO. In the real world, not everyone likes kids playroom colors, nor grandma's 60s style wallpaper, nor steam punky design, nor green-blue metalic robot parts. Personally I like MUJI style clean and clear design, and I feel like it took that much time to have a core of people to value cleanness and simplicity in computer UI design as well.
      - ericd 12y ago
        Oh, I definitely agree, XP's playskool-esque design was way over the top, and OS X's excessive animations/reflections/etc. are obnoxious. It does seem to be getting better in that regard. I like most of Bootstrap's choices, and those seem to be diffusing out.
tlo 12y ago
If you want to do a fresh install, you can create a USB install drive: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/how-to-make-your-own-bootable-os-x-10-10-yosemite-usb-install-drive/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/how-to-make-your-own-bo...
dopamean 12y ago
The upgrade to Mavericks totally borked my Displaylink adapter that I use to plug an extra monitor in. After some updates its finally stable but still not great. I'm afraid to upgrade again because who knows what will happen.
- mmastrac 12y ago
  Was it the Displaylink<->Dual-DVI adapter? Ugh, that was broken for quite a few versions for 2011ish-era devices as soon as Mavericks came out. It took them a few versions to actually fix that up, almost as if they hadn't noticed it was broken. I'm tempted to try a test install separate from my regular install after getting burned on that last time.
  - dopamean 12y ago
    I recently bought a DVI to USB adapter so that I could plug a second monitor into my 2012 MBA. It wasnt until I actually set it up that I learned of all the trouble. I wouldnt say the set up I have now is perfect but it is workable. I'd hate to upgrade to Yosemite and have everything go to hell though. Is it possible to downgrade if I have problems?
    - acomjean 12y ago
      If your on Maverics you should be Ok not upgrading for a while. I used one of those adapter with snow leopard on a mac book up to this spring (upgrading compatability being questionable). It finally became clear that enough software needed a new OS that I got a newer machine. Mavericks beachballs on a way faster machine more often than it ever did on snow leopard. I miss that os.
  - cake 12y ago
    I have a Displayport<-->DVI adapter and that thing never works as intended. Sometimes it won't detect the screen, so I have to unplug and plug it back again. If the screen is off the Macbook thinks there's still a second screen... They really botched that thing.
hsshah 12y ago
Does anyone know if Mail app now supports "cloud" search for Gmail? i.e. you don't need to download ALL your Gmail to local machine to be able to search. My SSD is quickly getting filled up and this is becoming one huge pain point.
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wiremine 12y ago
Off topic from the review but handy since people were talking about crashing: Learned a cool trick tonight: Yosemite was taking a while to install, so I did some googling and learned you can see the installer's log by typing CMD-L during the install process.
- tillinghast 12y ago
  I ran across the cmd-l tip earlier this afternoon in this article: "Faster Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite Upgrades for Developers" (https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/ https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/). If any of you are thinking of upgrading and use Homebrew, it sounds like it would be in your best interest to have a look. I'm holding off on upgrading until I see some early-adopter reports, but I'll certainly be following these steps when I'm ready to take the plunge.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    So I guess this is a coincidental validation of MacPorts' decision to install under /opt and leave /usr/local for manually-compiled stuff.
  - edrocks 12y ago
    Thanks for that. Mines been stuck saying "About a minute remaining" but sure enough cmd+L shows it's moving all my homebrew files.
- vph 12y ago
  protip: delete /usr/local/Cellars and posibbly LiveTex before upgrade OSX.
  - sfaruque 12y ago
    I'm curious, why should I delete /usr/local/Cellars?
    - vph 12y ago
jimeuxx 12y ago
I hope developers make good use of the changes to the title bar. It completely breaks the flow of the design of a lot of apps, and kills precious vertical space on my 13-inch MBP. A keyboard shortcut to toggle the menu bar would've been nice too. Neither of those would be big issues if it weren't for the slow, eye-melting, completely superfluous fullscreen animations though.
dutchbrit 12y ago
I really don't like the new design. The dock bar looks weird to name one thing, also the new buttons, bars and the window design is just ugly and plain (it feels like a Linux flavour trying to look like OS X designed by someone's neighbour's kid) - don't let me even mention the folder icons. Photoshop stalled once but that's the only quirck I've had in the past 2 weeks of using the beta so that's not too bad. Design wise however, I don't feel like this is a good replacement. Have to admit that iOS 7 did grow on me and I felt the same about that back then but I don't think the same will happen in this case.
- jmhain 12y ago
  Meanwhile several Linux desktops have actually incorporated design teams and are starting to look quite beautiful. Never thought I'd see the day where it's prettier than OS X, but today may be that day.
  - aruggirello 12y ago
    Current KDE is very nice. I've yet to see the incoming Plasma 5 - it'll be included in Kubuntu 14.10.
- senorgusto 12y ago
  I feel the exact same way about iOS 7 growing on me but Yosemite not. This is the first Apple upgrade for a while that I'm going to hold off on...
  - yaeger 12y ago
    I recently found this: # snow leopard theme for 10.9 Mavericks http://rhubarb-leaf.deviantart.com/art/SnowLeopard-theme-v2-462739866 http://rhubarb-leaf.deviantart.com/art/SnowLeopard-theme-v2-... I hope something like this is possible on Yosemite at some point in the future.
- TillE 12y ago
  The dock is more or less identical to the surprisingly ugly (especially on the iPad) dock on iOS 7/8. At least Yosemite offers the "dark" option, which is a considerable improvement.
locomoco 12y ago
Anyone know how to turn off the Macbook pro screen with the lid open while using external monitors? On Mavericks this worked just fine: http://gizmodo.com/5938452/a-trick-to-make-using-an-external-monitor-with-your-macbook-way-better http://gizmodo.com/5938452/a-trick-to-make-using-an-external... Now no dice... anyone know a way to keep the screen off with the lid open? To execute in Terminal: sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0" To undo in Terminal: sudo nvram -d boot-args Once you type it into terminal I believe you need to enter your password. I then restart my machine. Now the TRICK is to either restart your machine with the lid already closed (hit restart then slam the lid!) OR turn the machine on for the first time (then quickly slam the lid!) once you are past the login screen you can open the lid.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Can't you just turn the brightness down to zero?
  - locomoco 12y ago
    Yes, but it's not the same as turning the display off. The GPU is still outputting signal to the Macbook Pro screen.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      what the.. why? The screen is unusable without the backlight.
      - jevinskie 12y ago
        Perhaps latency? Suppose it takes 0.5-1 second to switch between "Off" and "Lowest brightness" when turning On/Off the GPU, that could create a bad experience when every other brightness change is instantaneous. Though it is a great power optimization idea, if the (unknown to me) downsides aren't too bad!
    - nkurz 12y ago
      Wow, I hadn't considered that. It might explain why I get terrible battery life when playing movies on a TV over HDMI with the screen "turned off" by dimming it down to zero. Thanks for the hint.
blisterpeanuts 12y ago
Upgrading now: 5.16 gigs. Hah! This is going to take all night. Looks like everyone's downloading it at the same time. I was quite impressed by 10.10 from the Keynote a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to experiencing some of that. No iPhone so can't enjoy that level of integration, but perhaps my iPad will be happier. Meanwhile I have a Nexus 5 on order, and I'm debugging problems with my Linux PC's new motherboard. Certainly Linux on a roll-your-own hardware platform is a different world from the slick, smooth Apple experience. I like both for what they can do but the Apple is becoming my go-to front end while the Linux machine is becoming more of a server and back-end tool.
- rojoca 12y ago
  I downloaded and installed in about 3 hours but the download kept "failing" and had to be manually resumed from the App Store.
- bjz_ 12y ago
  Took around half an hour to download for me a couple of hours ago. (I'm in Australia, and one of the few blessed with a 'decent' internet connection)
goeric 12y ago
My camera on my 2013 Retina Macbook Pro doesn't work post-upgrade, FYI.
dman 12y ago
On my 2013 Macbook pro the wifi seems to be exceptionally slow after upgrading to Yosemite. Seeing speeds < 600K after the upgrade. Usually see ~6 MBps.
tehabe 12y ago
I tried it yesterday and for the first time I downgraded my Mac back to the previous version. I think Yosemite wasn't made for my 2009 MacBook Pro. It works w/o a problem but the font is really hard to read, in the sense it is an exhausting experience. What is funny about Yosemite, many dialog boxes remind me of KDE.
72deluxe 12y ago
Very informative review, particularly the part regarding Swift towards the end, although I did feel like he was going over the changes in a perfunctory manner as opposed to the Mavericks review. Anyway, it did help me know what to expect in Yosemite so thanks John. I also discovered the "purple" full screen button from yesteryear - I much prefer that to the fullscreen arrows in Mavericks, and dislike the new default "FULLSCREEN" behaviour of the zoom button. Fullscreen makes the menubar and all that sits in it (MenuMeters, clock etc) useless. On a laptop, the indicator about the battery is kind of important to me, and I don't find the clock distracting or require it to be removed in order to help me read text on other parts of the screen. I think it is a foolish move.
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k_bx 12y ago
I really hope it has dark theme as I imagined it to be, since current light-grey really distracts me when programming in dark theme editor/terminal.
deepforg 12y ago
I can accept almost all of the UI changes but these horrible blue folders.
- TillE 12y ago
  As someone else suggested, they seriously look like something out of an old version of KDE.
  - switch007 12y ago
    Ouch, that's an insult. That blue is vile. But ooh, straighter lines and softer shadows - very noticable (!)
- wil421 12y ago
  The folders are almost blinding to look at with the brightness all the way up.
l33tfr4gg3r 12y ago
I'm on a 2013 MBP and I upgraded to Yosemite yesterday. It was a textbook upgrade for me - zero hassle and everything works just as it should (so far anyway). A couple of quirks I've noticed vs. Mavericks is that a) the animations seem to stutter sometimes - I almost never had that with Mavericks. Perhaps since this is 10.10.0 that's to be expected but hope they fix that to buttery smooth in the performance update down the road. The other thing is RAM usage seems to have gone up significantly. I used to average around 2-3 GB used out of 8GB and now I find 5GB used - I haven't installed any additional software or tweaked any configuration settings - this is purely a Mavericks --> Yosemite in-place upgrade. Its still early hours so I've yet to explore the system fully, but apart from these 2 things it seems fairly solid so far. Contrary to the other comments, I don't quite seem to mind the full screen mechanics, although I would not have minded a '+' button and more discernible buttons in general.
- dan1234 12y ago
  I find that Spotlight tends to do a complete reindex after an OS update, so that may be the cause of your increased resource usage.
  - l33tfr4gg3r 12y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I guess I'll monitor this over the next day or two.
  - saturdaysaint 12y ago
    I saw a lot of glitches immediately after updating, but am getting buttery smooth performance now, so this is worth keeping in mind.
- Stubb 12y ago
  Probably real smooth due to the widespread beta and Yosemite being almost entirely visual tweaks and better integration with iOS devices. Those things shouldn't cause trouble. Apple seems to have given up on core upgrades addressing performance, the ancient filesystem, and needs of power users after 10.6. And there’s still stuff that I could do on a NeXT in the early ‘90s that OS X can’t do.
Shivetya 12y ago
Just a personal note. I really don't need the grays/white/blacks of past operating systems. The initial setting for my quick bar just looks horrid, little icons on a dark gray background. Everything looks so 16bit. I understand it bleeds through the background color, I would just prefer to have no background on the dock and have the icons float
mohamedattahri 12y ago
Just installed it. It freed 7GB on my Macbook Air's flash drive. Nice!
Osmium 12y ago
Somebody asked in another thread about Yosemite's new Hypervisor: "Hypervisor (Hypervisor.framework). The Hypervisor framework allows virtualization vendors to build virtualization solutions on top of OS X without needing to deploy third-party kernel extensions (KEXTs). Included is a lightweight hypervisor that enables virtualization of the host CPUs." Any news on if anyone is actually using this yet? Stability matters a lot more to me than raw performance in VMs, so I'd be very keen to know if Parallels/Fusion/VirtualBox have adopted this--assuming that it would actually improve stability or, if not, what the pros/cons are for using Apple's own Hypervisor over a third party's. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_10.html https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...
- stephenr 12y ago
  I would love to see a basic solution built on this - my major use case is headless Debian machines so the constant development of windows features in parallels and VMware are pretty pointless for me. I would guess this is a way to allow a VM app to be distributed via the existing App Store rules
- jsz0 12y ago
  Not many details on this yet but there shouldn't be any major drawbacks since third party kexts can still be used to support legacy / multi-platform VMs or supplement Hypervisor.kext in other ways. I doubt Apple would have bothered doing this unless they had a mountain of OSX crash logs / power consumption data that suggested they could do better. It's clearly in their best interest to sell stable computers that get great battery life so I expect they will do a good job here. Users don't switch between VM platforms often enough to know which one offers the best stability / power efficiency so there's less of an incentive for companies like VMWare or Parallels to make them a top priority.
super_mario 12y ago
Absolutely ugly and tasteless design. Default theme is hideous black bold font on white background, large swaths of white everywhere. Dark theme is just inconsistent. Window titlebars are pale whitish, with black menu bar with white font on it. Dock, is 2d until you roll over it, then icons pop out of it and it looks like it is 3d. This is it, Apple is the new Microsoft. Frankly, and I can't believe I would ever be saying something like this but Windows 7 now looks better and more consistent.
blackkettle 12y ago
Mavericks is not an obscure surfing destination.
- armandososa 12y ago
  I, a guy from Mexico, never heard of it before. I did hear about Yosemite though.
- orbitur 12y ago
  Anyone who isn't a surfer and lives outside of CA likely hasn't heard of it. It's obscure.
ksk 12y ago
Have they improved the Mac App Store updates yet? It shocks the mind to think that forcing users to re-download entire apps rather than just the stuff that's changed is apparently a hard problem to solve for Apple.
matt-attack 12y ago
I find the new Spotlight to be quite painful. Apple again, makes design choices not based on improving the quality but just because they feel they need to keep changing things. They've done two things wrong with Spotlight. By moving it down from the top of the screen, that immediately reduces the number of results that can be seen. Then if that wasn't enough they further limit the quantity of visible results by not allowing results to flow to the bottom of the screen. A double whammy if you will. I can live with a slightly slower experience (yes, my indexing is done) but reducing the result count for absolutely no good reason is unacceptable. And yes, I know I can scroll down. Edit: Oh and while I'm complaining, please tell me which one is selected: http://i.imgur.com/Szj3Yag.png http://i.imgur.com/Szj3Yag.png

405 points by Braasch 12y ago

What's missing here for me is some kind of performance evaluation. If I upgrade my 2011 MBA from Mavericks to Yosemite, should I expect any change in performance, for better or worse? Did the power management change in any significant way? Apple's mobile OSs have a way of obsoleting older hardware. I'm curious to know if their desktop OSs are trending that way as well, or if they're making performance gains instead.

richbradshaw 12y ago
Mavericks added performance and battery life, but as far as I'm aware there isn't a focus for that on Yosemite - the work having been done in Mavericks.
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  Apple has a pretty poor track record in recent years on perf. Especially with iOS updates. If Yosemite didn't focus on perf then it seems likely to have gone down and older machines will suffer. Thats not necessarily wrong but it is important to understand before you dive in.
  - acdha 12y ago
    > Apple has a pretty poor track record in recent years on perf Apple has a bigger problem where they're popular enough that every release has a ton of people who post subjective problem reports but rarely provide repeatable benchmarks or failures. They're definitely not perfect but if you see a report which doesn't have a specific test with the exact steps needed to duplicate it, it's wise to assume it's an urban legend.
    - forrestthewoods 12y ago
      I have experienced it first hand with both MacBooks and iPhones. That's enough to make me hesitate to click upgrade. It's certainly anecdotal but it's my anecdote that I would be a fool to not take under consideration. You should treat my story with more salt. Anecdotally a lot of people have experi need what I have and are also hesitant to update based on their own personal anecdotes. Take it as you will.
      - acdha 12y ago
        The other thing people need to remember is that our perceived experience is notoriously suggestible if you don't take efforts to correct for it. If you expect a new OS release to be slower, you're more likely to experience it as slower – and that first reboot will likely "confirm" it because every persistent cache has been invalidated, one-time upgrade tasks are running, all of the app updates which blocked on a major OS version requirement are installing in the background, etc. Very few people will take the time to measure before and after multiple times to know whether there's something objectively different. It'd be educational if someone like Apple or Microsoft shipped an update which changed only the version number and then recorded feedback, particularly since there would be e.g. some percentage of people who had something like a recent hardware problem which they hadn't noticed and assumed was caused by the update.
  - syncsynchalt 12y ago
    I don't know that that's been the case on OSX though — since 10.0 the story has consistently been that each release is as fast or faster, albeit more memory hungry. I'm sure I'm missing one but I can't remember any OSX release being associated with performance complaints.
x0x0 12y ago
Mavericks is very buggy (locking w/ multiple monitors; finder bugs). I'd wait for at least update 2. Oh, and the .0 release will, if the pattern holds, have shit perf in some common situations. I presume because apple doesn't test for that.
cvalentin 12y ago
In using the beta, I haven't noticed any actual performance/battery difference between the two. Honestly, when I first installed it the first thing I noticed was the lack of sound when changing the volume.
- zwily 12y ago
  Heh, me too - you can turn it back on in System Preferences though. It's a new sound effect.
  - dandruffhead 12y ago
    Do you know exactly where? I couldn't find it.
    - roryokane 12y ago
      I don’t have Yosemite, but in Mavericks, you can change it in System Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects, by checking the checkbox “Play feedback when volume is changed”.
- cherry_su 12y ago
  It's still there, but now you hold shift+vol up/down to hear the feedback. This is in contrast to earlier OS X versions, where holding down shift will mute the audio feedback.
terhechte 12y ago
There might be a small battery time reduction because these new vibrancy effects will cause a bit more cpu consumption than Mavericks. It's probably negligible though.
- qqz 12y ago
  Yosemite is completely unusable without Reduce Transparency on IMO.
  - azsromej 12y ago
    Unusable in terms of performance?
    - qqz 12y ago
      That's a very small part of it. I just hate the new look in some places, like the color-changing Safari toolbar, and it's just useless and annoying to me. Maybe 'completely unusable' was a bit of an exaggeration…YMMV.
comex 12y ago
I've had serious performance issues with Yosemite. For one, dragging around windows became extremely janky; this appears to be caused by the transparency (and the limitations of my first-generation Retina MBP), as the option to disable it fixes the jank. For another, opening a new tab in Safari started lagging about a full second before I could start typing in the address bar, which is a ridiculous amount of time compared to the previous version or competition. I was able to fix this by disabling Top Sites, but while I don't actually use Top Sites much, I never had to disable it before, and most users won't know to do that, making it a serious regression. (Chrome actually takes quite a while to load its equivalent - I don't know whether it's for the same reason or not - but it does it asynchronously, so I can start typing in the address bar almost immediately.) On top of that, there are serious performance issues with the built-in Japanese IME, although I'm not completely sure how much of this is new, and I experienced a bug where WindowServer would randomly start hogging CPU, which may or may not be related to said IME. Given all these problems, I'm surprised that the general consensus seems to be that the performance is good. But maybe I'm somehow a special case. (The Safari issue is the most egregious - is it that many OS X users don't use Safari in the first place?)
- ChrisGaudreau 12y ago
  I've had some pretty bad performance with the demo, too. It seems to be much better (but not perfect) now with the official release. I'm not really sure why.
- bdash 12y ago
  I'd love to try and get to the bottom of the Safari performance issues you're seeing. My email address is in my profile, please drop me a line if you wouldn't mind.
  - comex 12y ago
    Okay.
- saturdaysaint 12y ago
  Did you just update last night? I was getting janky/bad performance and a lot of glitches immediately after updating, but it smoothed out (presumably due to Spotlight indexing).
chaostheory 12y ago
Without quantitative metrics, the responsiveness is just way better than Mavericks. With Mavericks I just felt like I was waiting for it all the time, even on a maxed out laptop with SSD. With Yosemite, even my 3 year old iMac is doing way better. Safari has always been slow for me until this release. The trade off is that I really hate the way Yosemite looks but I can live with the tradeoff. Note: all my machines have 12 GB or 16GB of ram

smutticus 12y ago

None of these reiews answer the one question I always want answered; will this cause my MBP to crash more often than 10.8.5? I have all the features I need, I want fewer GPU panics. I know these reviewers cannot answer this question, I just want to point out that it's the only relevant question for me. Given Apple's track record, this release will most likely cause my MBP to crash more often, but I want data on that. I want a review to actually explore this angle as opposed to simply talking about features that honestly mean nothing to me.

scj 12y ago
How often does your MBP crash?
- radicalbyte 12y ago
  I'm not the OP, but my (new) MBP crashes twice a month when surfing or coding (Sublime, Typescript, Node). It crashes daily if I use Parallels and regularly when using Spotify.
  - WoodenChair 12y ago
    That's highly unusual. You should ask yourself what peripherals/kernel extensions/weird software you have installed that maybe contributing to this. And I would definitely bring it in to Apple for service if the answer is "none."
  - Watabou 12y ago
    That's not normal at all. Try and run a hardware diagnostic test, or try and see if you can find the logs in Console.app
  - x0x0 12y ago
    anything show up in kextstat | grep -iv apple
  - seany 12y ago
    I had an issue similar to this that was related to a hardware problem with the GPU. I took it into the apple store and they ended up replacing the logic board.

cdbattags 12y ago

I actually read this all the way through... Quality writing.

toggle 12y ago
I'll check it out, but in his past reviews, I've had the impression that the author really likes showing off his background knowledge of all things Apple. A lot of the text is irrelevant to the review, and therefore shouldn't be there. Also, the endless, endless links. He really needs to learn when something should be linked and when it shouldn't -- it really affects the reading experience on the web. You're constantly alternating between black and orange text, and being tempted to hover over them to see "what does this one go to?" His attention to detail is great, though, no doubt about that.
- idlewords 12y ago
  The background knowledge of things Apple is one of the selling points of these reviews. Siracusa writes for people who really want to nerd out on arcana. My impression is that he sees these reviews as documenting Apple design history, and not just "should I upgrade" guides. It's fine not to like it, but it's a weird thing to criticize him for doing.
  - toggle 12y ago
    That's a really good way of putting it; I hadn't thought of it that way before. Fair enough! :)
- arrrg 12y ago
  The links are rather the points, as is the background info. If that’s not for you that’s great, no problem, but really, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand why people like this.
- philoushka 12y ago
  >background knowledge of all things Apple Not a Hypercritical or ATP listener, huh?

mlex 12y ago

"...If Retina desktop Macs still haven’t been announced by the time you read this, Apple had better hurry up." Near the bottom of page 3, just thought it was funny considering today's 5K iMac announcement.

vacri 12y ago

I can't wait for the 'flat' fad to be over.

jackmoore 12y ago
Even though it feels very fad-ish because it's been used as a buzzword/bandwagon, I don't feel like it's actually a fad. My view is that that digital design has matured to the point where designers no longer feel they have to wow users with lots of effects and visual flourishes, allowing for a more purpose driven design. My hope/opinion is that is here to stay.
- ericd 12y ago
  A lot of those flourishes were actually design affordances, though, visually denoting certain functions and making things more intuitive. Not a fan of the super-flat design trend.
  - hrktb 12y ago
    As you say super flat might not be great, but all the designs preceding the current trend where extremely harsh on the visuals. From windows XP to 7, the windows default themes and colors where disturbingly flashy and "in your face". OSX was more bland but aqua was still kitch and unneedingly strippy. iOS6 app's ultra textured or "realistic" interfaces were the peak of that trend IMO. In the real world, not everyone likes kids playroom colors, nor grandma's 60s style wallpaper, nor steam punky design, nor green-blue metalic robot parts. Personally I like MUJI style clean and clear design, and I feel like it took that much time to have a core of people to value cleanness and simplicity in computer UI design as well.
    - ericd 12y ago
      Oh, I definitely agree, XP's playskool-esque design was way over the top, and OS X's excessive animations/reflections/etc. are obnoxious. It does seem to be getting better in that regard. I like most of Bootstrap's choices, and those seem to be diffusing out.

tlo 12y ago

If you want to do a fresh install, you can create a USB install drive: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/how-to-make-your-own-bootable-os-x-10-10-yosemite-usb-install-drive/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/how-to-make-your-own-bo...

dopamean 12y ago

The upgrade to Mavericks totally borked my Displaylink adapter that I use to plug an extra monitor in. After some updates its finally stable but still not great. I'm afraid to upgrade again because who knows what will happen.

mmastrac 12y ago
Was it the Displaylink<->Dual-DVI adapter? Ugh, that was broken for quite a few versions for 2011ish-era devices as soon as Mavericks came out. It took them a few versions to actually fix that up, almost as if they hadn't noticed it was broken. I'm tempted to try a test install separate from my regular install after getting burned on that last time.
- dopamean 12y ago
  I recently bought a DVI to USB adapter so that I could plug a second monitor into my 2012 MBA. It wasnt until I actually set it up that I learned of all the trouble. I wouldnt say the set up I have now is perfect but it is workable. I'd hate to upgrade to Yosemite and have everything go to hell though. Is it possible to downgrade if I have problems?
  - acomjean 12y ago
    If your on Maverics you should be Ok not upgrading for a while. I used one of those adapter with snow leopard on a mac book up to this spring (upgrading compatability being questionable). It finally became clear that enough software needed a new OS that I got a newer machine. Mavericks beachballs on a way faster machine more often than it ever did on snow leopard. I miss that os.
- cake 12y ago
  I have a Displayport<-->DVI adapter and that thing never works as intended. Sometimes it won't detect the screen, so I have to unplug and plug it back again. If the screen is off the Macbook thinks there's still a second screen... They really botched that thing.

hsshah 12y ago

Does anyone know if Mail app now supports "cloud" search for Gmail? i.e. you don't need to download ALL your Gmail to local machine to be able to search. My SSD is quickly getting filled up and this is becoming one huge pain point.

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wiremine 12y ago

Off topic from the review but handy since people were talking about crashing: Learned a cool trick tonight: Yosemite was taking a while to install, so I did some googling and learned you can see the installer's log by typing CMD-L during the install process.

tillinghast 12y ago
I ran across the cmd-l tip earlier this afternoon in this article: "Faster Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite Upgrades for Developers" (https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/ https://jimlindley.com/blog/yosemite-upgrade-homebrew-tips/). If any of you are thinking of upgrading and use Homebrew, it sounds like it would be in your best interest to have a look. I'm holding off on upgrading until I see some early-adopter reports, but I'll certainly be following these steps when I'm ready to take the plunge.
- wtallis 12y ago
  So I guess this is a coincidental validation of MacPorts' decision to install under /opt and leave /usr/local for manually-compiled stuff.
- edrocks 12y ago
  Thanks for that. Mines been stuck saying "About a minute remaining" but sure enough cmd+L shows it's moving all my homebrew files.
vph 12y ago
protip: delete /usr/local/Cellars and posibbly LiveTex before upgrade OSX.
- sfaruque 12y ago
  I'm curious, why should I delete /usr/local/Cellars?
  - vph 12y ago

jimeuxx 12y ago

I hope developers make good use of the changes to the title bar. It completely breaks the flow of the design of a lot of apps, and kills precious vertical space on my 13-inch MBP. A keyboard shortcut to toggle the menu bar would've been nice too. Neither of those would be big issues if it weren't for the slow, eye-melting, completely superfluous fullscreen animations though.

dutchbrit 12y ago

I really don't like the new design. The dock bar looks weird to name one thing, also the new buttons, bars and the window design is just ugly and plain (it feels like a Linux flavour trying to look like OS X designed by someone's neighbour's kid) - don't let me even mention the folder icons. Photoshop stalled once but that's the only quirck I've had in the past 2 weeks of using the beta so that's not too bad. Design wise however, I don't feel like this is a good replacement. Have to admit that iOS 7 did grow on me and I felt the same about that back then but I don't think the same will happen in this case.

jmhain 12y ago
Meanwhile several Linux desktops have actually incorporated design teams and are starting to look quite beautiful. Never thought I'd see the day where it's prettier than OS X, but today may be that day.
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Current KDE is very nice. I've yet to see the incoming Plasma 5 - it'll be included in Kubuntu 14.10.
senorgusto 12y ago
I feel the exact same way about iOS 7 growing on me but Yosemite not. This is the first Apple upgrade for a while that I'm going to hold off on...
- yaeger 12y ago
  I recently found this: # snow leopard theme for 10.9 Mavericks http://rhubarb-leaf.deviantart.com/art/SnowLeopard-theme-v2-462739866 http://rhubarb-leaf.deviantart.com/art/SnowLeopard-theme-v2-... I hope something like this is possible on Yosemite at some point in the future.
TillE 12y ago
The dock is more or less identical to the surprisingly ugly (especially on the iPad) dock on iOS 7/8. At least Yosemite offers the "dark" option, which is a considerable improvement.

locomoco 12y ago

Anyone know how to turn off the Macbook pro screen with the lid open while using external monitors? On Mavericks this worked just fine: http://gizmodo.com/5938452/a-trick-to-make-using-an-external-monitor-with-your-macbook-way-better http://gizmodo.com/5938452/a-trick-to-make-using-an-external... Now no dice... anyone know a way to keep the screen off with the lid open? To execute in Terminal: sudo nvram boot-args="iog=0x0" To undo in Terminal: sudo nvram -d boot-args Once you type it into terminal I believe you need to enter your password. I then restart my machine. Now the TRICK is to either restart your machine with the lid already closed (hit restart then slam the lid!) OR turn the machine on for the first time (then quickly slam the lid!) once you are past the login screen you can open the lid.

wodenokoto 12y ago
Can't you just turn the brightness down to zero?
- locomoco 12y ago
  Yes, but it's not the same as turning the display off. The GPU is still outputting signal to the Macbook Pro screen.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    what the.. why? The screen is unusable without the backlight.
    - jevinskie 12y ago
      Perhaps latency? Suppose it takes 0.5-1 second to switch between "Off" and "Lowest brightness" when turning On/Off the GPU, that could create a bad experience when every other brightness change is instantaneous. Though it is a great power optimization idea, if the (unknown to me) downsides aren't too bad!
  - nkurz 12y ago
    Wow, I hadn't considered that. It might explain why I get terrible battery life when playing movies on a TV over HDMI with the screen "turned off" by dimming it down to zero. Thanks for the hint.

blisterpeanuts 12y ago

Upgrading now: 5.16 gigs. Hah! This is going to take all night. Looks like everyone's downloading it at the same time. I was quite impressed by 10.10 from the Keynote a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to experiencing some of that. No iPhone so can't enjoy that level of integration, but perhaps my iPad will be happier. Meanwhile I have a Nexus 5 on order, and I'm debugging problems with my Linux PC's new motherboard. Certainly Linux on a roll-your-own hardware platform is a different world from the slick, smooth Apple experience. I like both for what they can do but the Apple is becoming my go-to front end while the Linux machine is becoming more of a server and back-end tool.

rojoca 12y ago
I downloaded and installed in about 3 hours but the download kept "failing" and had to be manually resumed from the App Store.
bjz_ 12y ago
Took around half an hour to download for me a couple of hours ago. (I'm in Australia, and one of the few blessed with a 'decent' internet connection)

goeric 12y ago

My camera on my 2013 Retina Macbook Pro doesn't work post-upgrade, FYI.

dman 12y ago

On my 2013 Macbook pro the wifi seems to be exceptionally slow after upgrading to Yosemite. Seeing speeds < 600K after the upgrade. Usually see ~6 MBps.

tehabe 12y ago

I tried it yesterday and for the first time I downgraded my Mac back to the previous version. I think Yosemite wasn't made for my 2009 MacBook Pro. It works w/o a problem but the font is really hard to read, in the sense it is an exhausting experience. What is funny about Yosemite, many dialog boxes remind me of KDE.

72deluxe 12y ago

Very informative review, particularly the part regarding Swift towards the end, although I did feel like he was going over the changes in a perfunctory manner as opposed to the Mavericks review. Anyway, it did help me know what to expect in Yosemite so thanks John. I also discovered the "purple" full screen button from yesteryear - I much prefer that to the fullscreen arrows in Mavericks, and dislike the new default "FULLSCREEN" behaviour of the zoom button. Fullscreen makes the menubar and all that sits in it (MenuMeters, clock etc) useless. On a laptop, the indicator about the battery is kind of important to me, and I don't find the clock distracting or require it to be removed in order to help me read text on other parts of the screen. I think it is a foolish move.

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k_bx 12y ago

I really hope it has dark theme as I imagined it to be, since current light-grey really distracts me when programming in dark theme editor/terminal.

deepforg 12y ago

I can accept almost all of the UI changes but these horrible blue folders.

TillE 12y ago
As someone else suggested, they seriously look like something out of an old version of KDE.
- switch007 12y ago
  Ouch, that's an insult. That blue is vile. But ooh, straighter lines and softer shadows - very noticable (!)
wil421 12y ago
The folders are almost blinding to look at with the brightness all the way up.

l33tfr4gg3r 12y ago

I'm on a 2013 MBP and I upgraded to Yosemite yesterday. It was a textbook upgrade for me - zero hassle and everything works just as it should (so far anyway). A couple of quirks I've noticed vs. Mavericks is that a) the animations seem to stutter sometimes - I almost never had that with Mavericks. Perhaps since this is 10.10.0 that's to be expected but hope they fix that to buttery smooth in the performance update down the road. The other thing is RAM usage seems to have gone up significantly. I used to average around 2-3 GB used out of 8GB and now I find 5GB used - I haven't installed any additional software or tweaked any configuration settings - this is purely a Mavericks --> Yosemite in-place upgrade. Its still early hours so I've yet to explore the system fully, but apart from these 2 things it seems fairly solid so far. Contrary to the other comments, I don't quite seem to mind the full screen mechanics, although I would not have minded a '+' button and more discernible buttons in general.

dan1234 12y ago
I find that Spotlight tends to do a complete reindex after an OS update, so that may be the cause of your increased resource usage.
- l33tfr4gg3r 12y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I guess I'll monitor this over the next day or two.
- saturdaysaint 12y ago
  I saw a lot of glitches immediately after updating, but am getting buttery smooth performance now, so this is worth keeping in mind.
Stubb 12y ago
Probably real smooth due to the widespread beta and Yosemite being almost entirely visual tweaks and better integration with iOS devices. Those things shouldn't cause trouble. Apple seems to have given up on core upgrades addressing performance, the ancient filesystem, and needs of power users after 10.6. And there’s still stuff that I could do on a NeXT in the early ‘90s that OS X can’t do.

Shivetya 12y ago

Just a personal note. I really don't need the grays/white/blacks of past operating systems. The initial setting for my quick bar just looks horrid, little icons on a dark gray background. Everything looks so 16bit. I understand it bleeds through the background color, I would just prefer to have no background on the dock and have the icons float

mohamedattahri 12y ago

Just installed it. It freed 7GB on my Macbook Air's flash drive. Nice!

Osmium 12y ago

Somebody asked in another thread about Yosemite's new Hypervisor: "Hypervisor (Hypervisor.framework). The Hypervisor framework allows virtualization vendors to build virtualization solutions on top of OS X without needing to deploy third-party kernel extensions (KEXTs). Included is a lightweight hypervisor that enables virtualization of the host CPUs." Any news on if anyone is actually using this yet? Stability matters a lot more to me than raw performance in VMs, so I'd be very keen to know if Parallels/Fusion/VirtualBox have adopted this--assuming that it would actually improve stability or, if not, what the pros/cons are for using Apple's own Hypervisor over a third party's. https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_10.html https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...

stephenr 12y ago
I would love to see a basic solution built on this - my major use case is headless Debian machines so the constant development of windows features in parallels and VMware are pretty pointless for me. I would guess this is a way to allow a VM app to be distributed via the existing App Store rules
jsz0 12y ago
Not many details on this yet but there shouldn't be any major drawbacks since third party kexts can still be used to support legacy / multi-platform VMs or supplement Hypervisor.kext in other ways. I doubt Apple would have bothered doing this unless they had a mountain of OSX crash logs / power consumption data that suggested they could do better. It's clearly in their best interest to sell stable computers that get great battery life so I expect they will do a good job here. Users don't switch between VM platforms often enough to know which one offers the best stability / power efficiency so there's less of an incentive for companies like VMWare or Parallels to make them a top priority.

super_mario 12y ago

Absolutely ugly and tasteless design. Default theme is hideous black bold font on white background, large swaths of white everywhere. Dark theme is just inconsistent. Window titlebars are pale whitish, with black menu bar with white font on it. Dock, is 2d until you roll over it, then icons pop out of it and it looks like it is 3d. This is it, Apple is the new Microsoft. Frankly, and I can't believe I would ever be saying something like this but Windows 7 now looks better and more consistent.

blackkettle 12y ago

Mavericks is not an obscure surfing destination.

armandososa 12y ago
I, a guy from Mexico, never heard of it before. I did hear about Yosemite though.
orbitur 12y ago
Anyone who isn't a surfer and lives outside of CA likely hasn't heard of it. It's obscure.

ksk 12y ago

Have they improved the Mac App Store updates yet? It shocks the mind to think that forcing users to re-download entire apps rather than just the stuff that's changed is apparently a hard problem to solve for Apple.

matt-attack 12y ago

I find the new Spotlight to be quite painful. Apple again, makes design choices not based on improving the quality but just because they feel they need to keep changing things. They've done two things wrong with Spotlight. By moving it down from the top of the screen, that immediately reduces the number of results that can be seen. Then if that wasn't enough they further limit the quantity of visible results by not allowing results to flow to the bottom of the screen. A double whammy if you will. I can live with a slightly slower experience (yes, my indexing is done) but reducing the result count for absolutely no good reason is unacceptable. And yes, I know I can scroll down. Edit: Oh and while I'm complaining, please tell me which one is selected: http://i.imgur.com/Szj3Yag.png http://i.imgur.com/Szj3Yag.png